'Links' by Nuruddin Farah

Jeebleh is a Somalian who returns from the comfort of New York to his homeland of Somalia after an absence of more than 20 years. He has returned to his birthplace to mourn the death of his recently deceased mother. He has left his anxious family behind, and arrives in Mogadiscio as foreigner with a Somali passport. His distance, his separation, from his nuclear family, is a metaphor for the similar distance between the reality of Somalia and his/our notions of family. His journey into his unfamiliar homeland is about the discovery that family is not nuclear, it is clan, and this requires a re-learning of the language that circumscribes our definitions of self.