Nuruddin Farah, Sweet and Sour Milk

F. Fiona Moolla (University of the Western Cape)

Ed. by Helen Rachel Cousins, Newman University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.2.3: Anglophone African Writing and Culture: Subsaharan.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester), Alex Nelungo Wanjala (University of Nairobi)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1979

Places

Somalia (Country of Origin)
United Kingdom (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Sweet and Sour Milk was Somali writer Nuruddin Farah’s third Anglophone published novel, and the first novel of the Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy. Sardines (1981) and Close Sesame (1983) are the two novels that complete this trilogy. Sweet and Sour Milk is also the first African novel that takes as its central theme the question of postcolonial dictatorship, a genre that is very well known in the Latin-American context, and that has become well-established in African literature also through writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ahmadou Kourouma, Maaza Mengiste and Hisham Matar, to name just a few. The trilogy of which Sweet and …

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1582 words

Citation: Moolla, F. Fiona. "Sweet and Sour Milk". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 March 2020 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=30485, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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