@article{Medungo_2020, title={ Dante in Mogadishu: The Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah’s Links}, volume={57}, url={https://letterkunde.africa/article/view/8060}, DOI={10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.57i1.8060}, abstractNote={<p>This article aims to explore the complex network of intra-textual and intertextual references to Dante’s <em>The Divine Comedy</em> in Nuruddin Farah’s novel <em>Links</em> (2005). By analyzing the quotations from the poem, this essay wishes to show how the <em>Comedy</em> informs the novel at various levels, from the paratext (since Dante’s tercets from <em>Inferno</em> are chosen as an epigraph) to the text itself (since <em>Inferno </em>appears to be deeply constitutive of <em>Links</em>). The analysis then suggests that, on the one hand, Farah employs Dante’s poem to address, represent and understand the civil-war context of Somalia from the protagonist’s point of view. On the other, he subverts and re-contextualizes <em>Inferno </em>to create new meanings and to distance his novel from Dante’s literary antecedent. Therefore, by analyzing the practices of intertextuality between the two texts, this essay aims to investigate both the converging and conflicting strategies enabled in the novel.</p>}, number={1}, journal={Tydskrif vir Letterkunde}, author={Medungo, Marco}, year={2020}, month={Apr.}, pages={45–55} }