Nuruddin Farah - Maps

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”.