“And what will happen to those who do not flee the Ogaden?”
“For example, the Ethiopians poison their wells, rape their women and conscript their children into the Ethiopian army or the police force. They compel them to learn Amharic, force them to adopt the ‘Amharic’ culture and dispossess them of their land.”
There was a pause. I took mouthfuls of the minestrone Uncle had dished out for me, having added salt, pepper and lime. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back unsupported, and I suspected the strain was affecting his lumbago. He touched his spine as though it were cold and he were rubbing blood into its circulatory system.
I asked, “Are there any parallel situations you can think of anywhere?”
“How do you mean?” he said.
“Can you think of any other country where a person bom in another may assume its nationality on the strength of ethnic origin?” I asked.
“Yes. An ethnic German is, by right, a national of the Federal Republic of Germany Anyone bom in East Germany after its creation is also a bona fide national of West Germany”
He looked exhausted—and talked tiredly too—becoming long-winded as he spoke. I wondered if it was pain in his back causing strain on his nerves. I suggested he sit on a proper chair. He did. I? I felt weak—almost as weak as Misra when she aborted. I remembered her lying in bed for days. The loss of the Ogaden was greater, of course. But I could only view it as a personal loss so as to understand its dimensions. It was as if my whole blood had been drained out of me—that was how weak I felt. To me, that was how tremendous the loss had been.
“But they’re not coming here, are they?” I said.
“They? They who?”
“The Ethiopians? They’re not coming to Mogadiscio?” I said.
Uncle Hilaal reflected for a while, then, “Menelik, the Emperor that gave the country its name, once claimed the boundaries of his country to include the whole of Somalia, parts of present-day Tanzania, a greater part of Kenya and Uganda including Lake Victoria and parts of the Sudan up to and including Khartoum because he was wanting to claim the Nile. He was after a littoral territory for a landlocked Abyssinia. Emperor Haile Selassie made similar access-to-the-sea claims as recently as 1953. In the end, Haile Selassie gave up his claim because Eritrea, which has access to the sea, was given him by the United Nations to administer. He annexed Eritrea.”
I said, “We won’t allow it. Mogadiscio is ours.”
“We won’t,” he said. “Now eat.”
After a pause, I said, “I like Mogadiscio a lot.”
I accepted Mogadiscio as a provisional measure, loving its sandy beaches, swimming in its sea, disliking its mid-day heat but liking its enormous spaces and its reddish-brown earth in which my ideas flowered. It was understood that, come one day, I would leave it but perhaps to love it more. I had a job to do, as Armadio used to say I had a home to return to and re-liberate, a mother to be reunited with. “But before you leave …,” I can hear Uncle Hilaal say; “But before you leave us,” I can hear Salaado begin—I know! I knew I would’ve had to study harder, put in more hours of study, read more than the boys or the girls who didn’t have the same sort of responsibilities as I, who didn’t have a job to do, as 1.1 would sit with Hilaal or Salaado and things would be explained to me in great illustrated detail. Maps were shown to me; the psychology of warfare; why the Cubans dared not enter directly into war with the South African army in Angola; why they withdrew whenever the army of apartheid made belligerent incursions into the country in which twenty thousand of their soldiers were stationed. In the company of Salaado and Hilaal, the universe altered perspective, it shrunk into a tiny chessboard where the Africans weren’t the kings. the queens, the bishops and not even the pawns—where we were part of the reserve; our land was nothing but a playfield; our wars were turned into weekend affairs, during which the Russians borrowed a West-German-manufactured tank code-named Leopard and sold it to Libya. The idea was to test if this sophisticated article of German warfare would stand the conditions and climate of the Ogaden. After the weekend job, Leopard was flown to Odessa and dismantled, according to western intelligence reports quoted by Reuters and other agencies. A rat race faster than the arms race—and we’re starving!
Mogadiscio—whose sand was white as the smoke of a fire just built. Mogadiscio—the most ancient city south of the Sahara, a city bombed by the Portuguese, looted by the Arabs, colonized by the Ottoman Turks, subdued by the Italians and bought, at the turn of the century, by a Zanzibar! who paid for it a little more than Bombay had cost Britain or Manhattan the Dutch. The Sultan of Zanzibar sublet the territory to the Italians. I love its centre which sports a multiracial, multicultural heritage. I love it because it doesn’t make me feel small looking up at very tall skyscrapers.
Mogadiscio—a place with dry laundry. This was how I saw it when I first entered it. I saw flags of clean clothes on washing-lines outside people’s homes and in their courtyards. I saw flags of them waving welcoming messages to a frightened boy, me. And the first two things I noticed when I entered what became “home”—shoes on a rack in the corridor and mirrors, many mirrors on the walls. It was explained to me later that Uncle Hilaal has to own many pairs because he walks a lot and his feet wear them out faster than anyone anybody has seen. His shoelaces break, the heels come off, he discards most pairs in a month, maximum two, Salaado had said. I noticed they were not of the best quality—not half as good as Uncle Qorrax’s, I decided.
What else did I notice when I first got here? That it takes longer to become a grown-up person. It takes years before one is readily convinced that one is to acquire a wife if you are a man, or a husband if you are a woman. I remembered many girls getting married before their fifteenth birthday, and many boys before they were twenty. Not so in Mogadiscio. And girls and boys didn’t look forward to getting married and having children, no. They dreamt of going abroad. Was it the smell of the sea that put this into their heads? Or the aromas of foreign foods in the air, foods suggesting other worlds, other cultures—Indian, Persian, Arab, Italian, Egyptian. In Mogadiscio, I thought I could read in people’s faces the wish of remaining young and beautiful and slim forever, and middle-aged men and middle-aged women behaved as though they were in their early twenties.
No river rises in Mogadiscio, the sea does. It begins here, the sea. It feels as if it does. Blue as it is on the map in front of me, the sea is veined with noble waves, as alive as they are deadly; it is veined with tides which give one the time of day or night, tides which tell one if it is fall moon or half moon. The sea has its drifts, moods and deceits; it gives gifts, it robs one of life, shows one where one’s weaknesses are and the body where its pores are. The sea is the skirt the ships-with-goods wear, it is the necklace the gold lovers put on, it is the untaxed merchandise the smuggler brings into the land. The sea is a map: it tells those who are literate in its language where they are, it reveals, to those who are able to uncover secrets, where the treasures are. Haven’t all the daters employed it, as they employed their intelligence and their map-reading facilities, their writing capabilities—haven’t they crossed it to conquer, to subjugate, to colonize? “Somalia’s misfortune,” Uncle Hilaal once suggested, “is that the ‘two colonizing powers’—I use this inadequate phrase for lack of a better one—who stand in the way of the Ogaden, join the Republic. Yes, these two ‘nations’ are themselves non-European and neither has crossed oceans. Both are Somalia’s neighbours. In other words, it is easier ridding yourself of a colonialist from beyond the seas than it is to oust an African one. Western Sahara is finding it tough going; Eritrea, in a very similar position, finds itself isolated and often friendless. Namibia is different. Whether we like it or not, the question of colour plays a significant role in today’s politics—and Namibia has the advantage of being colonized, if that’s the right word, by a ‘power’ from beyond the seas.”
Mogadiscio! Salaado once asked Hilaal, “What’s it about Mogadiscio that seduces the visitor
? Why, no one leaves it once they come.”
Uncle Hilaal explained the nature of neo-colonial governments and how these develop a couple of cities, leaving the hinterland to its own disastrous destiny.
“Yes, yes, but why?”
“Cities with obscure histories have no charming qualities about them. Mogadiscio’s history is illumined like a manuscript. There are historical monuments that date from the ninth century; there are mosques, tombs which mark with bones the histories they illustrate. Maybe these keep them here?.”
Mogadiscio—for me, you are a temporary haven. I will leave you but will always love you.
As predicted, Mogadiscio’s seams broke with the influx of refugees a few months later. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing them in the streets, dusty and famished-looking as the earth they left behind. Those who had relations wealthy enough to put them up and feed them did so discreetly. But many had no one to go to. Or had relations who themselves couldn’t manage on the little they had, considering the inflationary prices the war had brought about, for it was a very expensive war, claiming lots of lives and properties. After the war, the Somali shilling had to be devalued. Everything, except hunger, corruption and poverty, became scarce. People began to be unkind to one another and kindness became one of those rare commodities. Generosity met the same fate and was fed on by suspicion everyone harboured for everyone else. We, too, had numerous relations who came to stay for a while. Uncle Hilaal and Salaado filled their bellies with food and their fists with travel money and hoped they went on their own journeys of exploration. Some of these eventually added their names and histories to the statistics and headaches of UN-run relief agencies.
Then two things happened, more or less simultaneously. I cannot remember which took place first. Uncle Hilaal reported that his friend at the Anagrafo del Municipio—where every Somali national who is at school, seeking employ or wishes to join the civil service is registered—said the Mayor had signed my papers. These papers identified me as a dependant of Uncle Hilaal and Salaado. Also, I think it was during the same week, or maybe a couple of days earlier or later, that Salaado brought home the news that she had found Cusmaan. I am not sure about the dates. Cusmaan was a relation of hers and was a student at the National University of Somalia in an area related to sociolinguistics. If I remember correctly, his long essay was titled something like, “The Mispronouncing of Non-native Speakers of Somali”. Although the title might or could've been “The Misgendering of Non-native Speakers”. For non-native speakers of Somali have difficulties similar to those most foreign learners face when they learn German.
They were enjoying themselves, Hilaal and Salaado, I could see, although I didn’t quite know why Cusmaan’s tutor was himself apparently a “Misgenderer”: a term indicating where the genders are confounded, the masculine third-person singular wrongly replaced or displaced by the female third-person singular. “Cusmaan’s is an ideal situation, having as his tutor someone who is one’s best subject for study,” said Salaado.
They didn’t like Cusmaan’s tutor, apparently He was a Somali from somewhere in East Africa, maybe Tanzania. He had a way of attaching himself to you, linking arms with you as though you were his female companion. I saw him from close quarters, I watched him when he came to our house once and helped himself to whatever was in the fridge without asking if he might, oblivious of the existence of others. He was said to be a traitor, he was said to have betrayed his friends and many people spoke ill of him. But he was respected greatly by foreigners. When this man lapsed into Somali, he reminded me of the Ethiopian soldiers whom I heard speaking Somali at the marketplace, confounding their sexes, addressing the men as “she”, and the women as “he”.
“For example,” said Uncle Hilaal in a voice which suggested two things—that the subject had been slightly changed, and that he was intending to make an original statement. “In Wolof,” he said, “did you know there is hardly any indicator of gender. A man who otherwise speaks faultless French might, when speaking about his wife who is right in front of you, and whom you can see display all her gender’s paraphernalia, refer to her as ‘he’. Likewise, the wife might refer to her husband as ‘she’.”
Unbelieving, I asked, “Is that true, Uncle?”
“Ask any Wolof speaker,” he said.
Salaado said, “How shocking!”
Her voice said that we had exhausted the subject and perhaps it was time we moved on to other areas of common interest. Somehow, we couldn’t help returning to the question of my identity papers. When would I get them? What psychological effect might they have on me? Would I consider settling in the Republic permanently? What were my chances of returning to the Ogaden or joining the Liberation Movement? In short, what did all this mean? And then I surprised even myself, asking: “Is there any room for Misra in my identity papers?”
Hilaal said, his voice anaemic, so to speak, “How do you mean?”
“You remember you've shown me yours,” I said—and then I saw how unhappy he looked and I thought I knew why, but I continued speaking nonetheless, this time with my look averted—“and I see that in identity papers there is space allotted to biological parents and to guardians but none to somebody like Misra, who is neither a biological parent nor a guardian at present.”
All he said was, “Of course,” but I bet he didn’t know what he was talking about.
I was about to add that Misra meant a lot more to me than anyone else when Salaado excused herself and left the living-room altogether. We looked away from each other, Uncle Hilaal and I, and each waited for the other to say something. I sensed each knew what thought buzzed in the other’s head, thoughts which were imprisoned in our heads like bees caught inside a bottle out of which they know not how to emerge. I had never seen him looking so sad, nor have I ever seen him appear so dejected, save on the other occasion, when there was an eclipse of the sun, but we’ll come to that later. Suffice it to say, I resolved right there and then that I would never raise the subject again; that I wouldn’t make references to my parents, to Misra and to Uncle Hilaal and Salaado in the same breath. Naturally, I remembered how evasive he had been when I asked him once to give me the salient points in my mother’s journal. In those days, ugly thoughts often crossed my mind: that Uncle Qorrax had raped my mother and I was his son. From then on, my mother’s journal didn’t exist, except in so far as one entry proved that she died after I was bom, an entry contradicting the view held by Misra—or am I confusing things? After a long, long silence, I said, “The truth of the matter is, Misra, being Oromo as you’ve explained to me once, belongs to a peripheral people. Nor would anyone believe that the Oromo form over sixty per cent of Ethiopia’s population, despite their occupying only a marginal position. And as such, the Oromo have either to assume Somali or Amhara identity Thank God, my ethnic origin matches the papers with which I shall be issued,” I concluded.
I forget what he said, or whether he said anything. I remember him looking sort of relieved that we had come to the end of that round. So please keep this in mind if, during the course of this narrative, I make no overt or indirect references to my mother’s journal or related topics.
III
A couple of days after this discussion, Uncle Hilaal entered the living-room where Salaado was helping me practise my writing. He walked in exalted, like a man who has discovered a most coveted treasure all by himself. Somehow, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, or that I might even get an unexpected gift. I sat where I was and let Salaado talk to him, let her find out what had so pleased him.
Salaado asked, “What is it?”
He said, in a matter-of-fact way, “Here it is.”
And he pulled out of his pocket a paper whose green, I thought, had faded a little, a paper with some writing on it, a paper folded up and, from what I could gather, cheaply printed, produced inexpensively and rather hurriedly, with my own photograph pasted on its top right-hand side and its spine bent unevenly.
He said,
“I said, take it,” and it was only then that I saw, as though for the first time, that he was looking at me. The thought that it was I and not somebody else that he was addressing and to whom he would give something did cross my mind, but I didn’t speak it. I got to my feet in awe and extended out both my hands to receive it.
“It is your carta d'identitá” he declared.
From the way he gave it to me, you would've thought he was entrusting to me a brand-new “life”. Here you are, he seemed to say, with another life all your own, one that you must take good care of, since it is of paper, produced by the hand of man, according to the laws of man. I held it tenderly but also firmly, the way you hold a sickly infant. While I was looking at it, Uncle Hilaal engaged Salaado in a solemn conversation, as if she were to be a witness at my being wed to myself.
“Open it,” he said. “Come on. It won’t break.”
I did as told.
“Read it,” he said.
I chose to read it to myself. I held it open before me as one would a book, and felt its uneven spine as one would a person with a hurt disc in the vertebral column. The paper gave my particulars—name, father’s name and grandfather’s, as well as mother’s. There was a hyphen, I noticed, conveniently placed between my father’s actual name and the nickname he had acquired by going to the Ogaden from a Xamar base. I was to commit to memory the number of the identity card and was not to lose it. Otherwise, the school wouldn’t accept me. After all, I was not a refugee! Didn’t Salaado say that I would need the card to be with them? Anyway, looking at the photograph and, under it, like a caption, my name, I began to see myself in images carved out of the letters which my name comprised. It meant that I had a foglio famiglia and that I wasn’t just a refugee from the Ogaden. It is unfair, I thought to myself, that Misra wasn’t even given a mention on my identity card. Now I discarded my earlier belief that this was because she was Oromo and I, Somali. Perhaps, I concluded, it was because our relationship dates back to before my coming to Mogadiscio and before—goes back to before I myself acquired the Somali identity in written form. I reminded myself that Misra belonged to my “non-literate” past—by which I mean that she belonged to a past in which I spoke, but did not write or read in, Somali.
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