Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  Then I am aware of the driver on the ground, pleading that he is of the Darod clan like them and is taking sick people to Mogadishu. He is offering the gunmen money. I am aware of harsh, merciless faces looking at him, aware of the dirt and smell of their faces but not seeing any shape to them. You can’t know what clan or tribe someone belongs to just by looking at them. You can tell only by their speech, so people learn how to fake accents. Maybe the driver is pretending to be Darod, I don’t know. But my mom could fake any accent, she is prepared for anything.

  I realize that the vehicle is moving again and that it has turned off the road to follow rough tracks where there would be, we hoped, no more checkpoints or militias. But then, less than twelve miles from Mogadishu, a bullet shatters the side window and explodes in the driver’s head. The truck veers wildly off the road, then shudders into a ditch and finally stops at an angle. Everyone panics and stumbles out of the truck, people pushing and shoving. A woman throws me off the truck and I land on the ground. Mom struggles to keep us together, holding Nima tight. I take one last look at the truck and the driver who moments earlier was kicking bodies off the road, now himself dead. Mom knows we too might die any minute, from a random gunshot, and she is thinking our dad is dead by now, but she says she will die herself before she leaves our bodies to rot on the road. The rebels who shot the driver are running toward the truck. Mom takes our hands, me and Hassan, Nima on her back, and we walk again into the blazing bush. We are four, going on five, and we cast our feet and our fate forward into the breeze that rises from the sea, toward the White Pearl of the Indian Ocean. With our brave mom by our side, we will live or die in Mogadishu.

  4

  City of Women and Children

  Mogadishu had become a city of women and children, a city of graves. The streets were littered with bullet casings and unexploded bombs. Exhausted militiamen roamed the empty neighborhoods, roofs and doors gone, carrying the goods they looted going from house to house, leaving nothing behind. The great capital city of the nation had become the valley of death. It was hard for my mom to see the ruin of this city where she had arrived a few years earlier to find a better life. We stood there—Hassan, me, my pregnant mom with Nima on her back, and no dad, all of us dazed. We could not believe what guns could do to a whole city. And the smell. Blood has a smell, metallic and musty like the smell of coins in a dirty pocket, and you can smell it when it covers the streets and turns rusty in the dust. That and the rank odor of smoldering buildings. The smell of death.

  With my brother and me trailing behind Mom, we passed the bombed-out Cinema Ecuatore, the ruins of restaurants and clubs. There were no more signs touting the shows of local comedians. There was nothing to laugh about. We finally got to our house. It was a ruin. Rockets had pierced jagged holes in all sides of our rooms. Gone was the furniture my parents had proudly bought with Dad’s basketball earnings. Gone were the wooden window shutters, or any windows you might shut. Gone were the shelves. Rebel soldiers had been using what was left of the rooms as an outhouse, there were stinking piles of shit swarming with flies everywhere. The neem tree was still standing, covered in dust. Underneath it was the shattered frame of the jiimbaar bed on which I had been born, littered with birds’ nests and branches.

  Hassan and I were so glad to be home we did not care about the mess. But Mom said no. “We cannot stay here,” she said. She knew whoever was using our house as a toilet would kill us when they came back. A gunman in the distance was already signaling us to move on, his weapon pointed at us. I could see his mouth open; I could not hear what he was saying, but his gestures were enough to convince us he was about to shoot. Mom told us to keep walking. Hassan and I lingered, but after a few minutes we finally walked on.

  Mom kept noticing landmarks that had disappeared. “Look!” she said. “Ahmed Gurey is gone!” Ahmed Gurey was a sixteenth-century imam and general, a national hero. His bronze equestrian statue, brandishing a sword, in the middle of the KM4 circle was gone, probably melted down for the metal. Mom, the nomad girl who once thought statues were real people, now shook her head in disbelief that a statue could disappear.

  Our walk was interrupted by a gun battle as two groups of rebels in pickup trucks met suddenly in the road. We ducked behind the chassis of a burned truck. After five minutes the gunfire stopped, and we came out to find bodies on the ground. One of the men wasn’t dead but badly injured, bleeding and crying for help. A truck with gunmen sitting in the bed drove by fast and finished him off with a hail of bullets. Dust blew off the ground where the bullets ricocheted. Mom could tell by their speech that these opposing gunmen were all from the same tribe. The entire skirmish, the blood and the agonizing death, was probably caused by someone refusing to share a cigarette. We fled.

  Our bare feet were bleeding from running on the rough ground in the baking sun. In our search for a place to stay that night, all we could see were people ducking from gunfire as they crossed the streets. Sometimes we would catch up with another confused family, a mom and kids like us, never any men, and together we would sit on the side of the road. It felt so good to sit after a long walk. Hassan removed tiny stones from my feet as I lay on my back. The awrodhaye plants that Mom used to treat my wounds don’t grow in the city, so we had to bear the pain. My sister, Nima, was lucky to be on Mom’s back mostly.

  Many Somalis made it to North America and Europe, where they found a better life and watched the carnage in Somalia from afar. One of them was a boy my age named Barkhad Abdi, who escaped with his family to Yemen and then to Minneapolis. He went to college in Minnesota, then was working in a cell phone store in a mall when he auditioned for a part as a Somali pirate in the film Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks. Now he is a famous actor and lives in Hollywood. He had very good luck.

  And then there were people like us, mostly women and children, returning to Mogadishu because we had no other place to go. We were trapped.

  Soon it was dark. With no electricity the city became pitch-black. Gunshots rang from all corners and dogs fought over dead bodies. Mom was still trying to find us a place to spend the night. She had one place in mind: under the KM4 bridge, a place where a road tunneled under the main artery. It was a few miles’ walk, but when we got there, Mom was right: it seemed quieter in the dark tunnel. We heard only the distant gunshots and the soft wind of the night. Mom spread her scarf on the dusty road. We were all so tired. Hassan and I rested our heads on the scarf; Mom cuddled Nima. The waves of the ocean, the cool breeze, and the chirping crickets sent me into a deep sleep.

  But that tunnel turned out to be not so quiet. Our sleep was interrupted by dogs that growled as they scavenged. Finally, at dawn, when there was a little light over the horizon, I opened my eyes to see Mom and Hassan standing in the tunnel crying, “Lailaha ilallah!” There is no god but Allah. They were standing on top of a graveyard. We had not noticed at night, but now we saw the place we had slept was where bodies had been hastily buried by people on the run. The bodies were fresh, not yet rotting, still in clothes that could be seen just under the thin layer of dirt covering them. One woman’s body was half exposed. Dogs tugged at her feet. There was flesh everywhere. It looked like roadkill on U.S. highways. We fled again, retching from the scene.

  For weeks we slept on the streets with the dead. Mom would sing the lullaby “Huwaaya Huwaa” in her weak voice, but with our empty bellies the song was not sending us to sleep. With a few hours of napping we continued every morning, only to expect to join the dead. We got used to the corpses, but we could not get used to our painfully empty stomachs. After days of no food or water, I would try to piss and couldn’t, only blood came out. We ate whatever we could chew—unripe neem tree fruit that tasted like bitter olives, lizards we could catch. Nothing was too disgusting, even dead skin we peeled off our feet. We were sick with dysentery and dehydration, and we were not alone. As many people were dying from disease as from bullets. Mom tried to comfo
rt us, telling us stories of her nomad life as we rested on her scarf at different places every night, but I could not pay attention to her stories. When Nima cried for milk, Mom tried to breast-feed her, but no milk came out. Our little sister was shrinking from malnourishment.

  Meanwhile, Mom’s belly was growing big with her baby. Her lips were cracked dry. The bugs sucked blood from her skin, and she scratched every second. The old wounds from her fights with hyenas opened up and began to seep blood from her neck, hands, and legs. The baby would come soon. Bad timing—our newest sibling was on the way to hell on earth. No one expected this baby to make it. Mom was scared for the labor.

  * * *

  —

  Khadija Ahmed was the only neighbor we could recognize still remaining in the city. Her family was brave and decided not to leave Mogadishu, but her husband had been killed in their house just a few days earlier; the family was in mourning when we arrived. We met Khadija as she was clearing some rubble on the street. Mom and Khadija hugged, surprised to see each other alive. Khadija had three living kids, a boy named Abdikadir, who was almost my age, and two older daughters, Fatuma and Fardowsa. Another son, Kaafi, about a year older than my brother, Hassan, had been killed by a sniper on the street. Fatuma and Fardowsa, both in their teens, helped their mom fetch water and clean the house.

  Khadija decided to take us in. She had given us some water and porridge, but none of us could swallow the food, we were too dehydrated. My soul wanted the food but my body could not. It was a big relief to finally be able to sleep in a room, even if the roof was pierced with bullet holes. The walls were made of cardboard, but at least the dry dust off the streets was no longer hitting our faces and we were not sleeping on graves. Every night before we went to bed, we sat quietly in a circle under the dark sky of Mogadishu with the stars blinking. Sometimes they would disappear in the bright flare of the tracer bullets and bombs, only to blink on again when the light of the gunfire dimmed. Fatuma, the elder daughter of Khadija, helped us forget the pain with her riddles. Some were religious, about the Prophet Muhammad or his wives. Others were problems of logic.

  “A man wishes to cross a river with a goat, a bundle of hay, and a leopard,” she said. “There is one small boat that can fit only one thing at a time. If he carries the hay first, the leopard will eat the goat; if he carries the leopard first, then the goat will eat the hay. If he carries the goat first, he will have the same problem on the other side when he brings either the leopard or the hay. How does he do it?”

  I thought about that riddle for what seemed like hours, gazing up at the stars. Somalis believe each star represents a person who died. I looked at the brightest star and imagined my dad winking at me from heaven.

  “He takes the goat first!” said Fatuma, snapping me back into the circle. “Then he goes back and gets the leopard.”

  “But the leopard will eat the goat on the other side!” said Hassan.

  “Ah, no,” said Fatuma, “because now he brings the goat back with him! He leaves the goat on the first side and takes the hay, then goes back and gets the goat.”

  “No!” said her sister, Fardowsa.

  “Yes!” said Fatuma, very seriously. “It’s true.”

  * * *

  —

  When the militias of the Hawiye clan entered Mogadishu and deposed President Siad Barre, they were united in that cause. But in late 1991, once Siad Barre had been defeated and the government destroyed, the Hawiye splintered into two tribes, the Abgaal and the Habargidir, and they began fighting each other for control of the city. This was the second phase of the civil war, known as the Four-Month War. This fight would turn out to be even worse, because by now there were so many weapons in Mogadishu. It would end in the total destruction of the city, and it began just as we arrived at Khadija’s house.

  Mom and Khadija were out every day clearing bodies from the streets, trying to bury them properly. This was for both respect and sanitation. Hassan and I slowly recovered from our dehydration and were able to eat a little porridge. I became good friends with Abdikadir. We played war games, making AK-47 rifles out of tree branches and shooting at each other. We could make very realistic gun sounds with our mouths, because we were hearing real guns every day. We cut the top off a three-liter jerry can and made it into a model of a “technical” weapon truck, using flip-flop soles for tires. We set it on fire, pretending it was hit by a rocket. We cheered. In this way we coped with our deep and constant fear and insecurity. Together with Hassan and Khadija’s girls we also played hide-and-seek in the empty houses surrounding us, jumping from window to window, hiding behind debris. Whenever a house was blasted, we would run to it and hope to find new hiding spots.

  But the porridge soon ran out, and we had to scavenge in the streets for any food. We became so weak that we spoke in whispers, unable to vocalize. I looked at Hassan and realized his eyes were sinking into his head, his skeleton was clearly visible. Every evening, Mom and Khadija would return with so much worry on their faces. By now the militias were fighting into every corner of the city, trying to take control block by block. They had rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic machine guns that almost deafened us. The war sometimes got so close to our house that we could hear fighters cheering and sometimes wailing when they were hit, the bullets zipping past our room. Abdikadir and I looked through the bullet holes in our walls, watching the action.

  Sometimes the war moved into other quarters of the city, giving us a moment to peek our heads out and see what the streets looked like. We slowly stepped outside, peering in wonder through the smoke and dust. All we could smell was gunpowder and blood. Our only toys were the bullet casings that littered the street. We learned how to count using those shells, and we learned which guns had fired them. “This is AK-47; this is Dabajeex,” which is the Somali name for the Russian PK machine gun. We could name every bullet and weapon. We even made up our own nicknames for weapons, calling unexploded hand grenades anuni (durian) because they looked like that spiky fruit. These anuni would often explode, killing or maiming people. Today on the streets of Mogadishu you can see many people with limbs missing from anuni explosions.

  The war continued, leveling what remained of the crumbled city. Soon came a new misery: Mogadishu and all of Somalia faced their first drought since the one in 1977 that forced my parents out of the nomad life and into the city. The 1992 drought was even worse. All my grandparents survived the drought of 1977 but could not survive this one. Only later did we learn that they died, all four of them, after all their remaining animals were wiped out and they could not find water or food. Their wealth, their bravery, and their pride were gone. The Iftin family that once boasted of hundreds of animals had vanished from the earth as if in an apocalypse. No one ever found my grandparents’ graveyards. They died like they were born, in unknown places. Everything in between was herding animals.

  * * *

  —

  Khadija called us orphans because we had no dad. Now we had another orphan in our family. My new baby sister was born during the Four-Month War. Khadija helped Mom deliver in the middle of the night using a flashlight, while Hassan and I waited outside the room, curious. Amazingly, the baby came out breathing and healthy. Unlike when I was born, Mom did not have people visit, or bring herbs, food, and clothes. There was no rest for forty days. The day after Sadia was born, Mom was forced to go out and find food for us.

  She was getting weaker. I could see that our mom had swollen feet, her skin was darker than ever, and she was no longer the beautiful nomad girl whom my dad had fallen for. Hunger, sleepless nights with the baby, and constant worry had beaten her down. Madinah Ibrahim Moalim, brave daughter of her brave parents, was giving up the fight. She could no longer care for us.

  At least Hassan and I had friends. Nima was all by herself. Girls in Somalia don’t usually play outside with other girls. They stay in with their moms learning ho
w to cook so they can be married when they become teenagers. Now, with my mom so weak and no food to cook anyway, Nima would sit outside by herself in a daze, eating sand to fill her empty stomach. My brother and I, now eight and seven, knew that if our family was to have water and food, we would need to get it ourselves. Our mom had kept us alive this far; now we needed to keep our sisters and her alive. This was not anything we discussed or planned. When your belly aches from hunger and your lips crack from thirst, there is nothing to say. You just do what you need to for survival. And so we put aside our games of hide-and-seek and our bullet-casing toys and got to work.

  The only place to get water in our quarter of Mogadishu was the well pump at Madinah Hospital, three miles distant along a road lined with sniper posts. This was the same hospital next to Mumin’s house where we had spent the night when the civil war broke out. Now it was a ruin, the roof gone and the main operating room being used as a militia meeting hall. Much of the grounds had become a graveyard like everywhere else in Mogadishu, though at least here the dead were buried properly. This was where Hassan and I had to walk with our twenty-liter jerry can. When we arrived, the line for the water tap was hours long, in the glaring sun. The rebels that controlled Madinah were themselves former hospital workers from the Hawiye tribe, and they were not as bad as the street militias. They minded their own business while we filled up our cans. We would put the can in the line and then try to sit in the shade of a tree or building, keeping a close eye on that can or someone would cut ahead of us. It felt so good when our turn came and we finally had freshwater. The can weighed forty-four pounds full, but it was round, so we could roll it home, especially since the road that way was downhill. But there were snipers sitting in the windows of the old Ministry of Planning, shooting at people for practice. They did not distinguish between kids, women, and old people. Hassan and I kicked and rolled that jerry can and ran along the edge of the ministry wall, crouching to avoid being seen by the snipers. The bullets that hit the wall above our heads sent dust into our ears. As we moved out of range of the snipers, Hassan would stop and search me for bullet wounds, then I would do the same to him. Even when we were that young, we knew that sometimes you don’t feel a bullet until you see the blood.