However, conflict and violence can became the fodder that feeds writers' creativity.

A character in Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah's novel, Links, remarks that "in civil wars, both those violated and the violators suffer from a huge lack - the inability to remain in touch with their inner selves".

In an essay on Farah's writings, Fatima Fiona Moolla notes that this inability manifests itself pathologically as schizophrenia or madness - "psychological responses to a society self-destructing".

The "collective insanity" of a country such as Somalia that has been destroyed by civil war, Moolla adds, needs to be understood as "the betrayal of one Somali by another" (...)

[Read Ransa Warah's full article pusblished in the Daily Nation]