The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  I finished watching the movie and decided to probe for my guards’ version of events.

  “Farhaan,” I said, “why? Americans came to Somalia, why?”

  “Oil!” Bashko shouted from the doorway.

  “Yes, oil,” said Farhaan, in a deeper, more sober-sounding voice.

  “Iraq war, same-same!” cried Bashko.

  “Hang on,” I said, to clarify. “America wanted oil from Somalia in 1993?”

  “Yes! Yes!” said Bashko.

  “Yes,” declared Farhaan.

  “Oh, boy,” I mumbled.

  XI

  I woke up on the first morning of Ramadan in July 2013, and two guards, Farhaan and a young pirate named Xalane,* watched me disappear into the bathroom without stirring themselves to make beans. Someone had lit a cooking fire on the patio, and eventually Farhaan brought a thermos of tea, which he set near my mattress with elaborate and gentle courtesy. But no sign of food.

  “Digir?” I said, and Farhaan explained, in a hushed deep voice—thick with pious correctitude, as if he expected me to understand—that I was in a Muslim place.

  “Michael, no digir this morning.”

  Xalane watched us from the corner with fervent eyes. “Ramadan!” he said, in a voice gone whispery with outrage. It offended him that an infidel should even ask his friends to cook after dawn during the holy month. Fired by an equal and opposite outrage, I resorted to the loud conversational voice the pirates preferred for me to avoid. “Somali bullshit!” I said, and Farhaan made a calming motion with his hand—“Okay, okay.”

  I kept complaining. “I refuse to starve because you’re being Muslim,” I said in irritated English, oblivious to whether he understood. “If it’s a problem for you, then you can fucking well set me free.”

  “Ramadan!” answered Xalane.

  I declared a hunger strike. If I had to go hungry, I would do it as an act of will. I’d learned to convert any skipped meal into a protest: “Michael no chum-chum,” I shouted, “Michael no chum-chum!” which was not just a refrain of mine but also a koan for the guards to ponder: If Michael doesn’t eat, Michael won’t eat!

  They understood it very well. Farhaan hurried out of the room.

  Xalane stared with his hurt, puppyish, adolescent eyes. He was a teenager, and he’d taken lessons from Madobe in treating me like a herd animal. “Ramadan!” he hissed again after a while, with the same passionate wounded pride.

  Muslims are supposed to show kindness during Ramadan to the poor and unfortunate. The fast forbids indulgent consumption between dawn and dusk—food, sex, cigarettes, drink—to cleanse the body and nudge the believer toward God. Handling food, or sitting in the same room as an infidel having a meal, is objectionable but not strictly forbidden. A subtle Muslim can work around the contradiction. Waiters and cooks show up for work during Ramadan; Muslim office workers have been known to attend lunch meetings. But divine consciousness was hardly the point for my pirates. Islam, for them, was a group activity, a set of rules they adhered to through pious observance of ritual. Islam, like all the major monotheisms, had spread as an antidote to tribalism, a transcendent solution to the warring profusion of local polytheisms in the ancient and medieval Middle East; but Islam, for my pirates, was a clan of its own.

  Dhuxul had a fat young relative named Abdirashid, a plush-lipped pirate princeling who strutted around in military gear and sometimes lounged in a yellow sarong, irritating the other guards with his air of privilege. Abdirashid was no more religious than Dhuxul; in fact both men had a taste for gin.

  But Abdirashid knew how to cook, and that was how they worked it out. On Dhuxul’s orders, during the long, fast-somnolent Ramadan afternoons, Rashid cooked me decent meals. He carved chunks of mutton and served them in a thin pool of spiced gravy, and when I said I liked hot food, he ground the spices freely, using a wooden mortar and pestle. The other guards watched with a mixture of wariness and amusement and hunger. They couldn’t even chew khat while the sun shone, so they acted uneasy around Rashid’s delicious-smelling meals, and they laughed when the heat of the chili made me sweat.

  After a few days of this new meal, I added Rashid’s recipe to my collection:

  Garlic

  Ginger

  Dates

  Onion

  Tomato

  Small red chili

  Chop, sauté in stock, and mash.

  Serve with meat.

  It represented a gesture of Ramadan mercy from Dhuxul, who also ordered his TV moved into my room. For months I’d asked for a shortwave radio so I could listen to the BBC, and I liked handheld radios because you could switch them on and off. But a TV was a massive, blaring complication. As soon as Dhuxul’s gift blinked on, five pirates filed into my room and settled in the far corner with their clanking weapons. Abdinuur, Farrah, Madobe, Hashi, and Xalane sat gazing at the screen like kindergartners. The satellite package at Dhuxul’s had programming in Arabic and Pakistani; for news in English, there was only Press TV, the Iranian propaganda channel. I could tolerate about five minutes of Press TV each day, to glean headlines, but once the screen came on in the morning my guards would watch the news, or anything else, for hours. So Ramadan became a daily negotiation of TV rights, a constant (armed) struggle for the remote.

  The channel I liked best was FTV India, a subcontinental edit of FashionTV. The sight of women startled me; I hadn’t seen any in fourteen months. Now, on TV, I could watch a parade of graceful, refined, bloodless, long-legged women wearing outlandish clothes. As a free man I never followed fashion, but I had gone all these months without contemplating creative work of any kind, so I paid attention, not just to the alien beauty of each model, but also to the cut of each skirt and dress, to the thumping music and colors, the whole spectacle. The pirates found it uproarious. Bashko mocked the stiff way the women had to strut. (He wasn’t used to seeing high heels.) Part of me would have laughed with him, but these glass menageries in Paris and Milan now felt impossibly fragile, a delicate counterweight to my stinking underworld, and I couldn’t believe they existed. They belonged to the old civilized hypocrisy, the glitter and sexual froth of Western cities, which I missed.

  “Shut up,” I said. “This is fucking great.”

  XII

  Islam imposed some limits on my pirates’ cruelty. I find that sentence hard to write. Unbelieving bosses like Dhuxul may have manipulated their foot soldiers by spreading the story that infidel hostages ate pig, which was true but an excuse to dehumanize us; but individual guards could be kind. Bashko and Hashi and Abdinasser the Sahib listened to my requests. They replaced notebooks and pens. Whenever they felt chipper, I could ask for sambusi, and they called the runner and ordered a batch from the mysterious Indian or Pakistani shop in Galkayo. I never forgot that each pirate was here to steal my money, but there were limits to the horror in the sense that none of them wanted to torture, or kill, the infidel.

  The guards appeared to waver between Sufism and Wahhabism. They listened to sermons recorded on their phones and scoured the Koran to see who was right about what. Pirate gangs and al-Shabaab represented separate, lucrative, highly taboo career opportunities for young Somali men. Both groups had established corporate-like structures in a country with almost no jobs. A gunman who joined a pirate or terrorist network could earn a salary, make friends across clan lines, distinguish himself with basic military training, and move up in rank. Very few Somali enterprises offered so much opportunity, and I sometimes had the feeling that my guards thought and debated about the religious doctrines dividing pirates from terrorists while they sat around in these barren rooms. One afternoon Bashko felt so bitter about news of an American air strike somewhere in the world that he threatened to join al-Shabaab. “America, fucking!” he said.

  The Wahhabi challenge in Somalia was modern, oddly, the way Protestantism had once been modern in the Christian world. Wahhabist fundamentalism dated from the eighteenth century and urged Muslims toward a literal analysis of the Koran, motiva
ted by a desire to keep Islam pure from corruption. Its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, took the razor of rational skepticism to certain traditions, including the idea that Sufi ancestor saints might intercede, like ghosts, in the fates of living men.

  He never took a razor to the woolly notion that the Koran might be anything besides the direct and immutable word of God. This belief has frozen in stone the most violent verses of a scripture completed in about 632. The word “Muslim” means “one who submits to God,” just as “Islam” means “submission,” and from that point of view it’s undeniable, even to dull believers like my guards, that a non-Muslim has failed to see the light of a single, all-knowing, and universal power.

  Even more universal than the word “God,” though, is the image of light itself, which started to seem curious to me in Somalia. The ancient Jewish levels of the soul (nefesh, ruach, and neshamah) that underlie the Christian model have near-exact parallels in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and even the Platonism of Plutarch. In every instance the higher levels are associated, somehow obviously, with light and joy. The most evanescent level of the self in certain branches of Buddhism and Hinduism goes by the name “body of delight,” a level of consciousness that you might think would be incomprehensible to a dirty, wretched piece of human filth stuffed into the dim corner of concrete prison house.

  People have a natural religious instinct, an intuition of forces greater than themselves, a need to appease and understand. I doubt any religion has clarified the forces of human fate except in shadows. In Somalia I could apprehend these forces as something terrible but merciful, a fantastic punishment for my ignorance that stopped short of murder. I was still alive, though not because of my own wit—and I was susceptible to unexpected moments of joy. There were mornings in Somalia that felt so brilliant and warm, so limpid, that my emotions rose to the occasion. In King Solomon’s language I had lived in the house of mourning for a year and a half; I had quit working for mirth.* But mirth came and went on its own. Which told me that human creatures had the power to thrive in foul circumstances precisely because of the consciousness bubbling up from our limpid core. I had nothing else. Of course I had to keep that idea near the front of my mind, it wasn’t always clear. But the only source of strength in my hot and desolate prison houses was internal. If I’d focused on circumstance, I wouldn’t have lasted long.

  The fierce American thinker and satirist Richard Mitchell once made a point in an essay about language and the limits of words:

  We can usefully say of “hatred” and of “love” and countless other intangibles as well, exactly what Augustine said of Time: We know exactly what they are, except when someone asks us to explain what they are. This is not a defect in our language any more than the failure to indicate relative humidity is a failure in a clock. Countless such words stand as markers at the boundaries of vast mysteries pointing back over their shoulders and saying no more.

  Words, like religions, just point and suggest. They’re markers at the boundary, not vessels of absolute truth. To focus on the words and not the mystery in the distance is a form of idolatry—a mode of worship supposedly rejected by Muslims—although some fundamentalists indulge in it to the point of murder. Literalism is a common but fatal error that even Sufis can make, apparently, and it was miserable for me to sit around in a prison house where the word of a religion felt all-important, and my own language so useless. It didn’t help that I had no pride to fall back on. Boodiin was right when he said, “You have made a mistake.” But “Mistakes are human” was no consolation. I thought about suicide every day.

  Death would have been easy in Somalia. AK-47s lay around like junk. In Galkayo, the notion of grabbing a rifle to shoot a few pirates, and then myself, started to seem not just desirable but moral, because it would have saved a lot of people a great deal of trouble. It would have spared any SEAL team the dizzying risk of a mission. I knew that my family and colleagues were working to get me out, but thinking about so much money and trouble devoted to the cause of my freedom brought me close to violence. It still haunted me that “Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh,” the pirate we’d interviewed in Hobyo, may have been present at Rolly’s ankle-hanging. It haunted me that Rolly had been abused after my leap from the ship, that Digsi might have turned on Gerlach to arrange my kidnapping, that Digsi and “Mustaf” may have planned everything from the start. Other journalists had made similar runs from Galkayo to Hobyo without getting nabbed. God knows I’d screwed up; God knows I shouldn’t have come. Now I had a long time to stew over my mistakes, the way a prisoner has years to consider his crimes.

  But still. Why me?

  “A suicide is always a bankrupt, always a human being in a blind alley,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, marveling at the number of Soviet prisoners who did not commit suicide. “If these millions of helpless and pitiful vermin still did not put an end to themselves—this meant some kind of invincible feeling was alive inside them. Some very powerful idea.”

  I steered around the question of suicide on some days only by cold logic. An adult who committed suicide “did not obviously love you”—I returned to this idea more than once while I brooded about my dad. I understood the corollary, sometimes with gritted teeth. Killing myself would have meant defeat for everyone I loved.

  I remembered the flaming monks in Vietnam, the discipline and detachment that expressed itself in fire. I remembered what I’d read in the Bible—the Book of Job, the Gospels—and I remembered my Stoicism, not straight from the philosophers but from an essay about Epictetus, also by Richard Mitchell. In one chapter of his book The Gift of Fire, Mitchell revived the ancient but surprising idea that a victim suffers only by his own consent. Whining and self-pity do nothing but screw up the pain. “To be sick, or to suffer, is inevitable,” wrote Mitchell, “but to become bitter and vindictive in sickness and suffering, and to surrender to irrationality, supposing yourself the innocent and virtuous victim of the evil intentions of the world, is not inevitable. The appropriate answer to the question, Why me? is the other question, Why not me?”

  This idea helped in Somalia. A sense of victimhood and self-pity in those prison houses was as easy to contract as a contagious disease. But remembering Epictetus, however secondhand, boiled a good deal of neurosis away.

  XIII

  By August, I hadn’t spoken to my mother in more than seven months, and in the poisonous environment of those pirate houses I couldn’t tell the difference between punishment and brutal caprice. It occurred to me, with a sense of horror, that my mother might die while I languished in a concrete room. A lot of people might die. Relatives, friends, presidents, popes. The pirates offered me scraps of information about the world outside, but the hot, anonymous days had smeared the distinction between life and death, fact and lie, punishment and ordinary suffering. When I asked Bashko for a shortwave radio, he said, “Okay!” but nothing happened. Scabies developed on my thighs. Abdinuur brought some kind of salve, but the condition never cleared up. Nothing connected, nothing made sense. Even though I made hesitant friendships with two or three guards, I could never expect a pirate to tell me the truth, and a diet of lies can wear you down like a diet of Big Macs.

  Late in August, we returned to the Pirate Villa, where I learned that the phone-call blackout was in fact a very specific punishment. “We are trying to pressure your mother,” Abdurrahman said with an easygoing smile, as if sense and logic were on his side.

  One afternoon in September, Dhuxul and Yoonis turned up at the Pirate Villa. I had never seen Dhuxul there before, so for most of the morning I felt jittery. He lay sideways in the entry hall, wooden prosthetic leaning behind him, and chewed khat with his men where I could see him. I thought, He’s here for a reason, and sure enough, we piled into Land Cruisers late in the morning for a long trip to the bush.

  “We will make a video,” Yoonis explained. “But this time the men will have to beat you up. Then you will finally go free.”

  “Oh, sure,�
�� I mumbled.

  We drove for an hour. The tediousness of these excursions into the Somali waste was interrupted only by Dhuxul’s cruel imagination. We stopped near a stand of bushes and thorn trees, and the men wrapped their heads in keffiyehs, walked me around to a particular branch, and forced me to squat so they could tie my hands in a stress position behind my back. Madobe looped the rope around the branch and shoved his bare foot into the base of my spine to tighten it. I shouted. Abdurrahman aimed his digital camera.

  “You people are insane,” I told him.

  No one looked me in the eye. Yoonis interrogated me: “What is your full name?” “What is your father’s name?” and so on. When they released me, I quivered with rage. We sat for a while in the autumn sun and waited for the sky to darken. Dhuxul told me, through Yoonis, that my mother was in the last stages of negotiation. She’d flown to Europe, he said; she was waiting there now. “It will not be long before your suffering is over.” I thought about it all the way back to Galkayo, where we settled in Dhuxul’s house, and I decided they wouldn’t have placed me in a stress position to make a dramatic video if they were so confident of a ransom.

  Therefore, I wasn’t on the verge of liberty.

  So.

  Why did Mom fly to Europe?

  Assuming Dhuxul hadn’t lied, I could think of two reasons. One would be a wedding. My cousin in Cologne must have postponed her marriage to her longtime boyfriend because I had vanished in Somalia. Maybe she’d quit waiting; maybe Mom had traveled to Germany for the reunion and the champagne.

  The other reason would be a funeral. Oma was eighty-nine.

  I spent several days having a slow emotional breakdown, because I couldn’t tell whether I should mourn my grandmother or not. I studied the men with fierce mistrust, the way a child might focus on sometimes friendly adults who also flog him. I looked for omens in the yard. I studied a spool of razor wire installed on Dhuxul’s compound wall and watched the planes rumbling across the cobalt sky for clues to whether Oma was alive or dead. The trade-off between a book about these cruel and ridiculous people and a few more hours or days with my grandmother felt like an ashen contract with the devil, a stupid thing to entertain, and the panicked unawareness of whether I had any more time, or whether that sweet woman was already gone, racked my heart. I hadn’t loved her enough. I hadn’t loved anyone enough. I couldn’t come close to repaying the lifetime of love I’d received, and what could I do about it now? Hurl myself through Dhuxul’s razor wire? Murder pirates? Howl? I wanted to howl, and just recovering from an evil video in the bush on a grim, sweat-sodden mattress felt insufficient. I raged in silence. I had a core of burning hay. The sorrow tensed the fibers of my skinny muscles and I was unable to sleep for hours, until I just passed out.