Ubah Cristina Ali Farah
Poet, novelist, playwright, librettist, Somalia, Italy
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali Italian poet, novelist, playwright, librettist and oral performer. She has published three novels and collections of short stories Her rewriting of Antigone was performed in Palermo in 2018 and 2021 and she developed a libretto on the basis of stories found in the Italian city of Matera. Currently she is working on the Rwandan opera La fille de l’homme qui prévoyait pour le future, co-created by Dorcy Rugamba, James Bonas e Grégoire Point.
The dance of the oryx
Shaqlan, a warrior, one of the most feared on the field, the major character of the story, is a woman. Setting stories of today in the past, drawing on the folklore of my father’s land, Somalia, and the saturated beauty of its nature, my wish was to compose a timeless fairy tale. The oryx dance tries to tell the epic story of a double emancipation: that of a woman forced twice to find her place in the world and the bitter story of a migration, a new finding, a mutation.