No one gave me credit for all the words I taught myself, not even my parents. Learning Arabic or reading the Koran was the only thing they wanted me to do. But I had my brother at my back, himself inspired by movies. We found joy in talking about movies, English, actors, singers. We practiced English more than we practiced Arabic. We didn’t have enough vocabulary to say much, our grammar was not perfect, but we got better. We collected English words from old worn-out magazines that had probably ended up on Mogadishu streets after libraries and schools were looted in 1991. My parents used these magazines to start cooking fires, or as napkins, but I used them as textbooks, underlining phrases and words I thought were good. I noticed they used many prepositions such as “over,” “down,” and “up,” and we were confused about when to use them. So Hassan and I practiced, building our own sentences. “Down here, over your head, get over to Mom.” She came to check our room every day to see if we had smuggled in posters again. In the madrassa I was frisked every morning. It was embarrassing; no other student was inspected. Macalin Basbaas always said that the devil dwelled in me, but I didn’t care.
Every night after Dad listened to the BBC Somali service, Hassan and I would tune in to the six o’clock English-learning program by the Voice of America called New Dynamic English. The show featured two characters, Max and Kathy, who talked about American culture, U.S. cities, and how to speak American English. The shortwave broadcast had a lot of static, and the lessons were hard to understand sometimes, but we listened carefully anyway. When Mom or Dad found out, they would snatch the radio from us and tell us, “Go say the evening prayers. Go to the mosque.”
We went to the movies instead. Hassan and I held hands walking in the dark to the movies and back. We would get home after nine; by then our dad was the only person awake, reciting his regular prayers, or sitting in a corner of the house in the dark with his head leaning against his hand, looking up in despair and boredom. Mom and Nima were deep asleep after a long day of washing dishes and clothes, cooking, and cleaning. We would tiptoe into our room from the window and quietly spread our sleeping mat. Other times Dad would be with Dhuha’s family in their own house in the front of the courtyard, and then Hassan and I could come through the latched wooden door, which we learned how to open by reaching through the cracks and pulling the latch.
Friday was the weekend in Somalia, the only day off from the madrassa. In the morning heat of the city my madrassa mates and I gathered under the shade of neem trees. Often we played mancala, a type of sowing game using stones and small holes in the dirt, played in the West as a board game. We had to stop the game at noon, when the mosques of Mogadishu all rang the call for the important Friday prayers, called Qudbah. Before going into the mosque, Hassan and I had to clean our arms, legs, head, and ears. Huge crowds of mosque goers filled up the streets, except the militiamen, who sat in the beds of their technicals ignoring the call to prayer. The rest of us had to sit through an hour-long lecture by the imam before we stood up for the prayers. In the lecture, the imam talked about how sinful it was to watch movies, how non-Muslim nations were planning to eliminate Islam by trying to spread their languages including English, their culture through movies and songs, and soccer. Hundreds of men in the mosque all nodded, my brother and I as well.
Macalin Basbaas was always seated in the front row very close to the imam, an exalted position. He never missed one Friday. He even arrived five hours ahead of time. One day he took the microphone and mentioned many names of his students who go to movies, and he asked for the hundreds of men to pray so that the sinful students would return to the Islamic culture and stop watching movies. My name, of course, was among the ones mentioned. When the prayer ended and men started pouring out of the mosque, an imam took the mic and asked for those whose names had been mentioned to stay behind. I did, along with two other friends and several other students I didn’t know from other neighborhoods. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, a time when the heat of the day radiates through the walls of the mosque and turns it into an oven. We sat on the floor, sinful sweating boys. Six men, short and thin, their beards almost touching their chests and with fierce eyes, surrounded us and started their harangue.
“It is the devil, the devil is taking advantage of your weakness!” one yelled, so loudly that his spit was almost landing on my face. “You are all weak! That’s what the devil likes! Now you are serving the devil against Allah! You go to movies, the devils smile and Allah frowns. You need to quit now! Start coming to the mosque for the five daily prayers. We will also provide lectures on how to defeat the devil. Come to the mosque!” His eyes were like they had caught on fire, he threw up his hands as if he were talking to the devil himself. He was so threatening we couldn’t say no. We all agreed. But the next day I never showed up. Outside the mosque, the imams had no power. Not yet.
Anyway, I was more afraid of my mom and Macalin Basbaas than of the imams at the mosque, but I kept going to the movies. We also played with our dangerous slings, shooting at birds, cats, dogs, anything that was not human. And we played soccer. We could not afford a real soccer ball, so we made our own from old clothes, rubbish, and shredded plastic, all tied together to look like a ball. Our goalposts were made of sticks. We had no cleats of course; we played barefoot, tackling each other and scoring wild goals to the cheers of our teammates and the boos of our opponents. There were many places in Mogadishu where we could play soccer, but we had to hide from our parents and madrassa teachers, so we played near the beach by the airport, away from their sight, and away from the militias. When Mom asked where I was, I always told her I was at the mosque reading the Koran. I made sure to clean the dust off my feet but leave a spot of dirt on my forehead, which indicated I had been bowing and praying. She looked at my forehead, sighed, and smiled.
Nights were always good for several reasons. Macalin Basbaas never came out of his house at night, and the wandering sheikhs stayed in the mosque. It was a good time for my English practice at the movies. Liberated for a few hours from the Islamic surveillance, I sat on the dirt in front of the TV screen, savoring the freedom. My friends would come find me, now appreciating my basic English skills. They sat close to me because it was my job to tell them what the actors were saying. My translating got pretty accurate; people knew this because events in the movie happened the way I predicted, based on the dialogue. “They are planning to kidnap the little girl!” I would shout. And the girl gets kidnapped. My friends would applaud, not because the kidnapping happened, but because I said so. I became known at the movie shack as the translator. Little did I know that someday I would be working as a paid interpreter in Maine.
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Outside the movie shack, life went on at the madrassa. Children graduate as soon as they have memorized the entire Koran because that is the only point of instruction, so I was motivated to study hard. We had to completely memorize over six thousand verses, and we had to know which verse is next to which without looking at the book. I was surprised to find myself able to memorize easily, just like I was memorizing English, and do the recitation with Macalin Basbaas. My parents were so proud of this, and they waited eagerly for the day I finished madrassa, because they had plans for me. They wanted me to follow in the footsteps of Macalin Basbaas and all the other fashionable long-beards in the city who carried Korans, not guns, and gathered around mosques every day. In a city where people die every day from guns and diseases, I would be prepared for it by being sinless. This meant no movies, no women in bikinis, nothing but the glorious Koran.
But I had other plans. Falis had started letting me into the movies free of charge—without having to sweep the floor—because I could attract a crowd who were enthusiastic to hear my translations. They encouraged me to learn more and listen. It was fun to have a crowd all leaning their heads toward me when I shouted out in Somali what the actors were saying. Unlike at the mosque or the madrassa, in the video shack we could talk, shout,
play, or even just move around. But as soon as the movie ended, we ran home because we had to be up at six in the morning to go to madrassa, and first we had to memorize the lesson for the next day, which of course we had not done while watching the movie.
Learning English and American culture started as something for fun, an escape from the miseries of our life. But soon it became more than entertainment. I was discovering the world beyond Somalia and learning that I could make my own decisions about my life. I discovered that the American accent is not like the British, and I could tell the difference from the way Americans talked in movies and the British announcers spoke on BBC Radio. I learned from movies that no one is above the law, not even leaders. That people are held responsible for their actions. In movies the police would chase thugs and arrest them, something that never happened in Somalia. I learned the freedom of women doing things men can do. In some movies I could see kids going to school in buses the color of Falis’s turmeric makeup; I wanted to go to a real school in a turmeric bus and learn things besides the Koran. I learned that not all Americans are white, there are black people there who stand shoulder to shoulder with the whites. In Somalia there was no black and white, only black. We don’t even look like the Arabs who many Somalis claim to be. There were no laws, and even if there were, the militias would have been above them. I realized we had fallen behind the rest of the world, but I had no idea when Somalia would catch up to the way life was in the movies.
When I asked my parents why Somalia was behind and in a total mess, they always replied that it was Allah’s will. He put us in this mess, he is the only one who can get us out of this. How can you argue with that? But somewhere in my head I told myself, “Allah is not responsible for this mess, why would he do that?” Somali militias were the ones who bombed our house, killed my uncle, and shot at us while we went to fetch water. It was not Allah.
The learning continued for me. I learned that all white people are not the same, they don’t speak the same language, they don’t use the same money, they don’t live in one country, they don’t even have the same religion. Some even don’t eat pork.
“Mom, there are some white people who don’t eat pork,” I said one day.
“Shut up!” she said.
“And, Mom, America is not next to Somalia.”
“I said shut up!”
One night as we lay on our backs on a mat looking up at the stars, I told Mom, “The moving stars are not lucky stars; some of them are satellites.”
“What is a satellite?” she asked.
“They are moving machines or ships crossing the skies.”
“You are being misinformed, Abdi, shut up!”
“Mom, there are nine planets among the stars too.”
“The Koran tells us there are seven,” she said. “Shut up and don’t try to say anything about that.” I went quiet and kept listening to Mom’s stories of how the blinking stars are our ancestors trying to communicate. But this time I did not believe her.
Today I communicate with my mom on a cell phone connected to a satellite. I wire her money every month thanks to other technology. Hopefully, she does not look at the stars the same way now.
I don’t blame my parents; they had been trying to make me be a good man, even though being good can take many forms. Whenever I started arguing with my mom about things like satellites, she blamed the movies. “Those evil movies that you go to are making you very stupid!” she would say. “You have let the devil take over you!” She was especially mad that the movies were distracting me from becoming her dream son, a sheikh.
Even though my mom despised my movie habit, I earned a new privilege: because I was near graduating from the madrassa, I was now allowed to bring my friends to our house. In my room we talked endlessly about stories in the movies. They listened as I spoke English and tried to teach them. “How are you, how are you doing, how is it going…these are all the same,” I told them. “They all mean the same.” Mom occasionally walked in and angrily told us to talk about the Koran or go to the mosque. We would leave, walk in the direction of the mosque until out of sight, and then do something else.
Sometimes we went to the Sufi mosque, where they didn’t even care if we spoke English. The Sufis were not so strict; they just minded to their chants and ceremonies without telling people what to do. Macalin Basbaas never went to that mosque, he cursed the Sufis as evil, but Hassan and I liked to sneak in and listen to the chanting. It was so peaceful and mysterious. I fell in love with those gentle people. Later the radical Islamists destroyed their tombs and erased their culture from most of southern Somalia.
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By 1996, the video shack was no longer the only entertainment in Mogadishu. The warlords still fought and shot their guns constantly, but some culture and normal life were returning to Mogadishu. One big change was public transportation. Some men who returned to the city had converted Toyota pickup trucks into buses by putting seats in the back, charging a few coins for rides. These buses, called xaajiyo khamsiin, meant we could explore parts of the city beyond our neighborhood. The drivers risked their lives every single day, negotiating through roadblocks manned by dangerous militias. Some went as far as the border of Kenya.
At first my favorite place was the grounds of the former presidential palace, which was now a playground for kids. I walked from the palace to the Parliament building, which had become a camp for displaced people because there was no Parliament, then on to the beautiful Catholic cathedral. The bishop of Mogadishu, an Italian, had been killed by militias while he was saying Mass in 1989; the church itself was later destroyed by Islamic radicals in 2008. But in the 1990s you could still go in and walk around, listening to the echo of your footsteps in the great hall.
Outside the cathedral was the famous Via Roma, named because it had many fine buildings with arches and terraces and tall shady trees. On one side, in front of the skeleton of the former central bank of Somalia, tall coconut palms swayed in the breeze from the Indian Ocean. I walked up the road toward the beach, past convenience stories that had opened in renovated buildings. Owners were standing at the doors calling out to passersby. On the walls they had painted pictures of popular snacks like bur (sweet doughnut holes), bajiyas (savory doughnuts made from crushed and skinned black-eyed peas with onion, garlic, and tomatoes), and especially samosas, the fried meat-filled pastries that al-Shabaab would later ban because the triangular shape was considered Christian, I guess like the Holy Trinity.
I loved to go to a candy store on Via Roma called Xalwo Shakata. One day, after stuffing my face with sweets, I heard strange music blasting out of the entrance of the building next door. A small wooden sign, written in chalk, read, “Al-Faghi Studio and Stereo.” On the wall were photos of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and someone had written their names in Anglicized Somali: “Maaykal Jaksan,” “Stiif Wandhar.” The wooden door shook with some kind of loud music; a crowd of people were practicing wild dance moves in front of the building. Some people walking by covered their ears with their hands. The music was not Motown or soul, which I had heard before in movies and on tapes. I just stood there in awe. I tried to go inside, but the DJ wouldn’t let me; I guess it wasn’t for kids. But I could hear the music outside and twist my body like other people on the sidewalk. A crowd had built up, everyone dancing and laughing, and someone told me the music was American and called hip-hop and rap, and also some music from Jamaica called reggae.
This was the beginning of my new life. Al-Faghi became my favorite place to go every day, practicing how to dance with the crowd on the sidewalk. When I got home, I practiced by myself. Tupac Shakur and Bob Marley became my favorite artists after Michael Jackson. I decided if I was going to talk like an American, I should also dance like one.
I got myself a cheap boom box and some tapes. Soon I felt ready to show my dance skills in my neighborhood. Mom would find me
on the streets dancing with the boom box and scowl. “Stupid boy!” she said. I had to sneak the boom box into our room through the window and hide it by digging the dirt and burying it under the mat so that when Mom came in she would not see it.
The hip-hop culture was spreading fast into Mogadishu. All the young people who weren’t trying to become sheikhs started wearing hip-hop fashion that we saw on television and posters. The people who ran Al-Faghi were young men who had just returned from Yemen and came with some cash to establish a music store. Similarly, the Bakara market was booming with small clothing businesses. The clothes were brought in from Kenya, Yemen, and Ethiopia, worn and old but not torn. For just a few shillings I was able to buy a black baseball cap that said “Titanic” and baggy denim jeans. I found a few plastic bracelets to wear on my hands and a bandanna for a do-rag head scarf. With my cap twisted sideways and my pants sagging below my waist, I practiced walking with a ghetto swagger; my friends Bashi and Bocow did the same thing, and we called ourselves a posse. This was all good timing, because I was starting to get interested in girls, and by now in Mogadishu girls were falling only for boys who could dance and who dressed in jeans.
The new hip-hop culture disgusted the Somali elders, who started calling us saqajaan—idiots—but we weren’t trying to impress them. My dance skills and ability to speak English made me popular with all the young people in the neighborhood. Soon people were coming to my house asking my mom, “Is Abdi American here?” She was so mad when she learned I was the one they call American. To her American meant Christian. She would definitely want me to be called Abdi Saudi Arabian. My friends Bocow, Bashi, and Mohammed now regretted not paying as much attention when we all sat at the shack watching movies. They were still just regular Somalis on the street, while I was becoming the neighborhood star.
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Call Me American Page 11
