Regimes of motion and the politics of exile: A kinopolitical reading of Nuruddin Farah's Dictatorship trilogy

This paper offers a kinopolitical interpretation of Nuruddin Farah’s Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy—Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame (1983)—set against the backdrop of postcolonial Somalia to examine how authoritarian regimes regulate motion, silence voices, and expel dissidents, while simultaneously enabling new forms of resistance. Drawing on Thomas Nail’s theory of ‘kinopolitics’, which reconceptualises societies as regimes of motion, the study argues that Farah’s fiction situates the Somali migrant not as a marginal victim but as a central political and epistemic agent. Farah’s exilic consciousness, informed by his own forced displacement, illuminates how dictatorship permeates both familial and state structures to immobilize bodies, memories, and discourse, yet also reveals how counter-flows emerge through exile, feminist defiance, and memory-work. By foregrounding exile as both rupture and resource, the paper demonstrates how Farah’s trilogy envisions movement itself as the enduring condition of identity, critique, and survival in the Somali context.