“I do this and that. I go to the vegetable, meat, and fish market with a group of young women and men and we buy provisions for the hotel. Mostly, that keeps me busy.”
He asks, “And where do you stay?”
“I share a house with a lovely female coworker.”
“On the grounds of the hotel or away in the city?”
Waliya mentions the area of the city where she lives. “Not that you know the city, having never been here yourself. But we’re a few hundred meters away from the former Tamarind Market.”
“Is the mobile number you are using the best one I can reach you on, Mum?” he asks. When she says yes, he asks for the hotel switchboard number as well, in the event she does not answer her mobile phone.
Naciim presses the redial button a moment after she rings off, with the purpose of checking if his mother’s number works. It doesn’t. A week later, his mother telephones again, using a new number. When he asks her about these numbers, his mother is cagey, unprepared to tell him where she is, or why her numbers keep changing. Rather than give him a satisfactory answer, she changes the conversation altogether and then hangs up.
Worried, his mother’s behavior reminding him of similar incidents in their past, Naciim shares his troubling discovery with Grandpa Mugdi.
The old man asks, “But why are you in such a state about it?”
“Because my stepdad used to change his numbers often too.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction, set against the background of actual events, whose retelling I have layered with a membrane of my own manufacture. Many of the characters populating its pages, with the exception of a few—these include Anders Behring Breivik, a hard right progressive politician, and a couple of radical Islamists—have their beginnings in my own imagination.
In writing it, I’ve benefited from speaking to a great many people in Norway, Nairobi, and Mogadiscio and from reading hundreds of documents, periodicals, and books. On occasion, I’ve relied on interviews I conducted in Oslo, Nairobi, and Mogadiscio from the beginning of 2015 and the end of 2017.
The epigram is from Concerto al-Quds by the Syrian poet Adonis (translated into English by Khaled Mattawa and published by Yale Press [2017]).
Among the texts I’ve read, consulted, or borrowed from are: O. E. Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1924); Asne Seirstad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway; Aage Borchgrovink’s A Norwegian Tragedy (2013); Sindre Bangstad’s Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (2014); Unni Turrattini’s The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer: Anders Breivik (2015); Solveig Temple’s In Their Own Voices: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants (1991); Ingrid Semmingsen’s Norway to America: A History of the Migration, translated into English by Einar Haugen (1980); Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006); Ben Doherty’s “Hate-filled Narratives Target Minorities Globally, Says Amnesty International” (The Guardian, February 22, 2018); Raekha Prasad and Khalil Dawoud’s “Cairo Writer Threatened with Divorce” (The Guardian, June 17, 2001). The other texts that I’ve read and borrowed from are too numerous to list here. However, I am grateful to every single one of them.
Foremost among the people to whom I owe a debt is Hodan Gedi Mohamoud, mother to Mona Abdinur, one of two young Somali-Norwegian victims killed by Breivik; she was eighteen when Breivik brutally cut her life short. (In this novel, I’ve changed Mona’s name to Mouna, short for Maimouna, and have also changed her mother Hodan’s name to Himmo, the better to suit my storyline.) Hodan was very kind and generous to me: she answered my stupid questions with exemplary patience and clarity, as she spoke about her life and Mona’s—may the Heavens bless her! Hodan, in any event, had no idea what I would make of the stories she told me, and to be honest nor had I. I did not know what shape I would give those moving stories, whether I would fashion them into a single article for a newspaper or work them into one of my fictions. As it happens, it has taken me a long time to work Hodan’s stories into the new novel and I can only hope that she and her family will approve of the “clean-limbed” reworkings I’ve given them.
I am also thankful to my friend Lul Hassan Kulmiye, who facilitated my encounters with Hodan whenever I visited Oslo.
Mette Cecille Newth, a very dear friend whom I’ve known since the mid-1970s, has served as a most reliable springboard on all matters Norwegian from the get-go. Generous with her time, she has answered my questions and introduced me to a lawyer, who answered what the law says about rape in Norway and has even read an early, messy draft. My thanks and love to Mette.
The novel has also benefited from Maya Jaggi’s suggestions after she read a very early draft. Her perceptive comments on the manuscript have made the task of rewriting the two subsequent drafts a lot easier and more manageable, and I heartily thank her for her insightful input.
The last person in order of mention, but by no means least in importance, is Umar Abdi Affey, a Somali-Norwegian who has gone out of his way and volunteered to do research for me and who, on occasion, has had to translate Norwegian texts for me so I could gain a full understanding of the intricacies governing asylum seeking and refugee statuses in Norway.
Need I add that I alone am responsible for the opinions expressed in this novel and for any errors or misinterpretations?
Nuruddin Farah
Cape Town
February 2018
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nuruddin Farah is the author of eleven previous novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages and won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
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North of Dawn Page 31
