For a writer who has made such a profound impact upon the world literature scene as Saida Herzi, there is notoriously little information readily available for fans, critics, students, scholars or just some randomly typing letters into a search engine. Just how relatively obscure and off the grid is Herzi? She does not even have that fundamental bottom line of recognition in the age of information: no official Wikipedia entry.
Of course, part of this mysterious aspect of Herzi is directly related to the fact that she is a Somali writer. Anyone thinking that it is not an immediate obstruction to fame need only be asked to name another Somali writer. Still, a story as closely scrutinized, studied, parsed, analyzed, and read as Herzi’s “Against the Pleasure Principle” would seem to warrant more than is available to the average person. The claim to fame which Herzi can rightly claim rests primarily upon that story which, while obviously not immediately relatable in subject matter to anyone, is nevertheless immediately relatable to any reader with a sense of empathy, compassion, and outrage. It is a story about what is no longer one of the African continent’s dirty little secrets, but a widely known procedure of pure patriarchal evil: female genital mutilation.
It is almost as difficult to track down a copy of the story as it is information about its writer. One readily available source for reading "Against the Pleasure Principle" is the Index on Censorship which strives to bring stories to a global audience from around the world which have been censored by ruling regimes. The September 1990 edition features this story in its entirety, but it is quite notable that the entirety of its author bio section consists of just one line: “Saidi Herzi is a Somali writer.”
Those trying to track down ‘Government by Magic Spell” are advised to hunt for the 1992 edition of the Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories. This story delves into the longstanding climate of political corruption in Somalia within the context of juxtaposition with ancient superstitious rites and rituals. To severely reduce its much broader implications, the “magic spell” makes this an entry into stories about genies or, as the text would translate more accurately, djinns or jinnis.
“The Barren Stick” is the another of the “other stories” and was published after those previously mentioned in 2002 in Crossing the Border: Voices of Refugee and Exiled Women. In this story, the author once again treads dangerously into the forbidden world of criticizing Somalian patriarchal systems, grounding the tale in a first-person accounting of a woman struggling to produce a child across the expanse of two marriages. Once again, the subject of her story reveals a severe disenfranchisement of females in her homeland that moves well beyond mere discrimination and the sphere of abject abasement and dehumanization.
That information about Herzi is limited and difficult will come as no surprise to anyone who reads these stories. If—and, of course, this is mere conjecture—but if political suppression is the working engine behind the limited information available about this writer whose talent belies her fame, it could hardly come as a surprise. Her stories are about brutal oppression so one can quite literally do not much more than imagine that perhaps that is the story of her life as well.
Note: In a study of Herzi’s three stories, author Helmi Ben Meriem includes the following footnote in the appendix to his scholarly paper: “Through a careful evaluation of limited biographical material, the author of this article believes that Saida Hagi Dirie Herzi is the daughter of Hagi Dirie Hirsi (1905-1976), a prominent Somali businessman, nationalist and member of the Somali Youth League (SYL) (1943-1969)”
