Nuruddin Farah - Links

Seamus took it from there: “Surely StrongmanSouth’s armed youths who shot at the Americans, and killed many UN Blue Helmets of other nationalities, were not the emaciated babies with whom the Marines had those heart-wrenching pictures taken in front of the cameras? Surely the spokesman of the UN military was mistakenly equating the small group of armed militias who fought against them with the whole of the Somali nation?”

“Don’t Somalis take the part and mistake it for the whole too?” Jeebleh knew he was in a distancing mode, apart from “them.”

“I agree,” Bile said. “We too mistook the small group of senior officers and the military on duty here for the whole of America. You’d have thought from listening to the ranting of a supporter of StrongmanSouth that America had gone to war against the whole of the Somali nation, which of course it hadn’t. When one takes the part for the whole, one seldom bothers to distinguish between the uncouth soldiers with whom we’ve become acquainted and other, well-meaning Americans. I am sure there are millions of Americans who are good people, and millions of Somalis who wouldn’t hurt an American fly. When you think of it, the Americans, by their actions, made a hero out of StrongmanSouth, and this prolonged the civil war. After all, it was after their hasty departure that he nominated himself president. I’d say the American-in-Charge met his equal and Faustian counterpart in StrongmanSouth.”

“What of the Belgians, the Italians, or the Canadians?” Seamus asked. “They didn’t act less uppity or more humanely toward the Somalis, did they?”

Shanta now addressed Jeebleh: “Did you know that in everyday Somali, the term amerikaan means ‘weird’? Why do you think that is so?”

“I know too that the term amxaar, the Somali word for ‘Ethiopian,’ means ‘unkind,’ ‘brutal,’” Seamus said. “And I can tell you why.”

“The coinage of amerikaan to mean ‘weird,’ I should point out, precedes the Somali people’s recent encounter with Americans in the shape of the Marines and Rangers who shot the daylights out of them,” Jeebleh said. “Maybe it came about as a result of the Hollywood movies we’ve seen?”

“I think it’s in the nature of the strong and the weak to define each other in ways that make sense only to one of them, not necessarily to both,” said Seamus. “To the Somali, the Amerikaan is weird, to the American GI, the Somali is an ingrate and a skinny.”

“And I would hate it if a GI Joe not worth a quid of chewed tobacco were to make up our minds for us about America!” Jeebleh replied. “Moreover, let’s ask ourselves a question: Can we blame them? Is a whole country responsible for a crime committed by one of its citizens? Can all of America be held responsible for the gaffes made by one of its nationals, however high-ranking, or however representative of the power invested in him?”

It was then that Bile reminded them of how the rotors of one U.S. helicopter had blown a baby girl, barely a year old, out of her mother’s arms and up into the dust-filled heavens. They all fell silent, affected by the unimaginable horror. Jeebleh wanted to know if Bile had ever met her.

“She was brought to my clinic,” he offered.

Jeebleh remembered Dajaal’s mentioning that his granddaughter had been blown away in a helicopter’s uprush of air.

“Dajaal came along to the clinic with the girl and her mother.”

“I’ve been meaning to see her,” Jeebleh said. “Perhaps Dajaal can take me to her.”

Shanta was the first to yawn, and the yawning became contagious, everyone agreeing that it was time to turn in. Bile reminded Jeebleh that just to be on the safe side, he would take him to the lab first thing in the morning.

Shanta overheard and worriedly wondered if all was well with Jeebleh.

“Just a checkup,” he reassured her. “I’d also like to go to the barber for a haircut,” he told Bile.

“I’ll ask Dajaal to drive you. And maybe on your way to or from the barber’s you can make a detour and visit his granddaughter and her mother.”

Shanta said, “Good night, then!”

Instead of saying good night, Seamus left Jeebleh with an admonition: “Let no madness hurt you into bearing a gun!”

Not rising to it, Jeebleh said, “Good night!”

“Night-night!”

“Night-night!”

“WHICH DO YOU PREFER, WALKING OR TAKING THE CAR?” DAJAAL ASKED, when he and Jeebleh, back from the lab, met the following morning.

“Are the two places far apart?” Jeebleh paused, feeling awkward, after taking a step. He put on the sarong he had brought from New York, and borrowed a conical cap and a shawl from Bile, wanting to look like a local when he went to the barber’s, and to visit Dajaal’s granddaughter and her mother.

Dajaal replied, “At most, it’s half an hour’s walk from my daughter-in-law’s to the barbershop. I’ve arranged for Qasiir to meet us there.”

Jeebleh had had a slight fever during the night and had been awake almost until dawn, tossing and turning, at times deciding to pack his bags and leave, then changing his mind and persuading himself to stay the course. Now his swollen glands were causing him discomfort, and several of his joints were burning from pain. Bile wouldn’t commit himself to a diagnosis until he had heard from the lab technician, who had promised to get back to them before the end of the day, tomorrow at the latest. If anything, Bile said, Jeebleh was lucky that he had a constitution as strong as a horse’s; Bile felt he was in no danger of imminent collapse.

“Let’s walk,” Jeebleh said.

“Are you sure?”

“Walking will do me good.”

The memory of what he had gone through hit him afresh with agony and anger. He felt an upsurge of masochism within, like a river rising in the Sahara. He told himself to withstand the pain with unprecedented stoicism, but not to forget what had been done to him, so that he might link yesterday’s agony and anger to those of yesteryear, and to what had happened to him as a child.

“Let’s walk and talk!” he said.

DAJAAL LED THE WAY AND JEEBLEH WALKED ALONGSIDE, CLUTCHING THE candies he had brought for Dajaal’s granddaughter. Death was no longer in every shadow cast by every wall. When he first arrived, he feared being ambushed by an unexpected death, and worried that he might die anonymously, killed by someone who did not know him and had no idea why he was administering death to him. Since then, he had wised up, coming around to the view that in the Mogadiscio of these days, death was seldom anonymous: it had a face and a name, and you were more likely to be killed by someone supposedly close to you or related to you. It was becoming rarer for total strangers to kill one another for no reason. Gone were the days of random killings. Lately, murderers were more calculating, factoring in their possible political and financial gains before killing you. Was it Osip Mandelstam who had said that only your own kind would kill you? To elude death of that sort, Jeebleh had fled south, where he was supposed to be an other, and where — here was the irony — he felt safer.

Dajaal interrupted his thoughts. “Are you happy in America?”

“America is home to me, but I doubt that I would use the word ‘happy’ to describe my state of mind there,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “I’m comfortable in America. I love my wife and daughters. I love them in New York, where we live. I can’t help comparing your question with one that I asked myself when I got here: Do I love Somalia? I found it difficult to answer.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I love Somalia.”

“What about as a Somali in America?”