Somali writers... over the years
The emergence of a new Somali writers' voice
The last post for 2022 coming to you from Silicon valley, California. It certainly has been an interesting year for so many reasons, and I am glad to share with you that, in general, it was very productive. However, as they say at reviews, there is always a room for improvement, and that is the plan for 2023. Many of you wrote and requested postings about books, some of you expressed more interest on reviews of articles about Somalia. I will try my best and your feedback, comments are welcome.
As mentioned in earlier post (see below), during 2022 my focus was mainly to present the thoughts and experience of Hussein Mahmoud the former Somali diplomat on issues related to policies on Somalia’s foreign and diplomatic affairs. I am pleased to mention those articles have been expanded, currently revised and will be published as a book in 2023.
When I was thinking of the end of the year wrap up, many topics about reading and books came to my mind. However, since our focus is on Somalia and Somalis, I called a few of my Somali bookish friends and two of them send me this Universal Resource Locator (URL), https://becomeawritertoday.com/best-somali-authors/. While others also send me this URL, https://nasher-news.com/four-somali-authors-you-should-know/. In fact the second link covers five Somali writers and I would recommend both as a starting point for the general readers interested in Somali writers. However, I found both links very superficial and am sure there are other, more in depth and serious articles about Somali writers and their work for those inclined into academia. But first let me set the scene with the following two paragraphs, followed by some personal light notes on books I would like to share with you. After all it is the end of the year and time to relax and enjoy a bit of trivia.
In his 1996 book, A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel described a tenth-century Persian potentate who reportedly traveled with his 117,000-book collection loaded on the backs of "four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order." Manguel also wrote about the public readers hired by Cuban cigar factories in the late nineteenth century to read aloud to workers. And about the father of one of his boyhood teachers, a scholar who knew many of the classics by heart and who volunteered to serve as a library for his fellow inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen. He was able to recite entire passages aloud-much like the book lovers in Fahrenheit 451, who keep knowledge alive through their memorization of books.
Why do we love books so much?
These magical brick-sized objects-made of paper, ink, glue, thread, cardboard, fabric, or leather-are actually tiny time machines that can transport us back to the past to learn the lessons of history, and forward to idealized or dystopian futures. Books can transport us to distant parts of the globe and even more distant planets and universes. They give us the stories of men and women we will never meet in person, illuminate the discoveries made by great minds, and allow us access to the wisdom of earlier generations. They can teach us about astronomy, physics, botany, and chemistry; explicate the dynamics of space flight and climate change; introduce us to beliefs, ideas, and literatures different from our own. And they can whisk us off to fictional realms like Oz and Middle-earth, Narnia and Wonderland, and the place where Max becomes king of the wild things.
So globally there seems to be an extensive history about books and reading. In fact as I travel a bit, I always make sure I visit bookshops and where possible libraries and lately even stay in hotels with book themes. This gives me an idea about the place, the people and its culture. Unfortunately, when I visit our homeland, Somalia, bookshops are rare and libraries rarer. What does that tell about us? about our history and culture?. We have a lot of work ahead to inspire our youth into this fascinating world of books.
I am glad to share with you that there is a new voice emerging among the Somali diaspora. There are many talented young writers who I hope, will sometime soon help in establishing bookshops and libraries in Somalia. I have always been an optimist and my interaction with many of these young writers, poets, film makers and story tellers fill me with hope. However there are challenges we must solve, i.e. giving our Somali people access to the world of books (see box below) that are available to many others in the world.
Somali writers over the years used different mechanisms to publish and engage their audience. There has always been the medium, i.e. the language our writers use. It seems many write in foreign languages and only a handful write in Somali language. A few years ago when researching this area, I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of Somali writers who write in Arabic. This encouraged me to setup what in the tech world called An internationalized domain name ( IDN) during my days when I was involved in the Somali ICT sector. In brief, this was a mechanism to enable Somalis writing in Arabic to present their work on a Somali domain site in Arabic (i.e., .soomaal, in Arabic). If there is interest on this, I will write another post in the future. Perhaps the Somali government officers in this field can also enlighten those interested, develop that initiative further. However, it is really the Somali universities who should push this kind of idea forward.
This is the last week of the year, and I am in the US, and I am actually writing this post in the last few hours of 2022 in Silicon Valley. This takes me to the last issue I want write about and share with you. I spent a great deal of time in the tech industry as a practitioner, and lately from different perspective, i.e. academia. So here is one of the reasons I am spending a week in the tech nirvana, silicon valley.
Enter ChatGPT… but first, a bit of trivia; recently I used this tool casually in a social media site with unintended consequence, see https://tinyurl.com/3ab7kp6n. So if you plan to use it, please beware of its limitation. I will write more about this in a future post.
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer ) took the internet by storm as 1 million users tried out the technology in its first five days. It took Instagram 2 1/2 months to reach 1 million users, 10 months for Facebook, 24 months for Twitter and 41 months for Netflix. OpenAI is a Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence research laboratory and the way it uses language has shown how creative machines can be. It is a neural network machine learning model trained using internet data to generate any type of text.
This will revolutionise research and writing in general. Academia is naturally concerned about the impact of this tool on research and intellectual properties. But for programmers and code-cutters this will help them tremendously by saving them time that is consumed in debugging and minor typos, etc. My personal interest is to make this AI enabled research algorithms available in Somali language. Perhaps some of you reading this might be interested or know others who are interested in this… ping, I am in.
I was following this disruptive and innovative technology for sometime. Just to give you an example relevant to this post, I asked ChatGPT the following: create a markdown table with two columns: "Somali Writer" and "books written" with respect to all Somali writers. As you can see the answers given each time vary. Why? because ChatGPT is not using real time data, i.e. it not getting the latest information from the Internet, unlike Google search. However, this is just a function of time, I have no doubt it will outperform all other search engines in the near future.
As you can see it priduces a reasonable result. However, I will encourage you to try it but certainly not for academic research, as it can cause problems in the quality of the research and the authenticity, originality of your work.
The last word… since I am in the US, let me surprise you.
Postscript:
I enjoyed my brief holiday in California, enjoyed lake Tahoe, Silicon valley, San Jose and the warm welcome from Muslim community in San Jose, more on this in future posts. See https://tinyurl.com/4k2jutta and https://tinyurl.com/2rv3em5b. For those interested to read about my adventures during 2022, I have my yearly The year That Was (TYTW) letter to close friends and family member, which from now onwards be available to anyone, to my expanding global community, who are interested, just drop me a line, mi@ayuub.org.
It is just after 10 pm, some of you have already ushered in 2023, and I will now join my friends to celebrate. Happy new year, and may 2023 bring happiness, and peace to all.