The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  LATER, I’D UNDERSTAND that there was almost no risk of attacks on Somali dhows like the injured Al Medina, and that increased presence of naval warships in the Gulf had helped create a safe channel. Pirates make more frequent attempts on tankers in the narrow strait between Yemen and Djibouti, and on dhows sailing through the Gulf farther east. As reported to the International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Centre, 113 attempted attacks in the Gulf of Aden in 2009 fell to 13 by 2012. The year we sailed, the only three successful hijackings in those waters were on the route between Mukalla in Yemen and Bosaso in Somalia, more than two hundred miles off our course. I’m not sure I would’ve cared how close they came. I knew these men would sail anyway—they had to, and I wanted to be with them.

  I was unusually at peace. This was my sweet spot in the place between places. Everything I was seeking was ahead of me, and it was approaching, and restlessness abated in the way that hunger does when dinner is in the oven.

  Before daybreak, while the Somali watchman sailed without radar, someone had lowered the Yemeni flag and raised the Somalilanders’: red, white and green and bearing a black star and the Islamic credo, There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet.

  For the crew, a turn at the wheel is a chore, and Jirani was more than happy to trade me for it. Just like that, I was in charge of all the ship’s load: as it turned out, all we were carrying was a quarter-million pounds of chalky Abu Walad Sandwich Biscuits. I felt like I’d never been seasick in my whole life. No one looked nervous. The two officers and the cook were from India, and the remainder of the ten-man crew hailed from Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia. Abdulfaqih, a twenty-two-year-old from Hargeisa, had been working the job for eleven years on a $150 monthly wage, plus fifty or a hundred for full shipments.

  A friendly bunch gathered to hang out and watch me try and aim south. It was harder than I thought; an inch clockwise on the wheel could have a huge effect, or none at all, and the waves pushed us gently, irregularly, toward Djibouti.

  I plugged in portable speakers and put on bubbly soukous music from the D. R. Congo—it seemed like the closest thing I had to “local.” Soukous gained popularity as the African rumba in the 1960s. The style is still incredibly popular and influential across Africa, but I started to feel like I was trying too hard.

  Outside the cabin, the Tanzanian was playing Tupac’s “Po Nigga Blues” from his phone. He gave a big laugh. “I do not understand!” The beat lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “This is power,” he said.

  I changed my iPod to Tupac.

  Soon, the others let their preferences show. “Have any Michael Jackson?” Jirani asked. For the rest of my captainship, we jammed to MJ’s number ones and, on Hari’s urging, a solid hour of Bob Marley. It couldn’t be too loud, though, since one shift was always sleeping.

  But after winding myself so tight in Yemeni offices, I was barely able to sit and chill. I wanted to move. Sitting on the key-lime-green captain’s bench with my feet on the steering wheel, I felt the urge to nudge the throttle with the butt of my palm. We were only going seven knots. I can jog that fast.

  I nudged.

  Passing back through the wheelhouse, Hari noticed the gentle increase and tapped the throttle back. I shrugged innocently. The sea wasn’t glassy, he said. If we went any faster, the boat might pitch against the waves and crack apart at the seams.

  After all that could have been, that moment was the trip’s most perilous. Crossing Pirate Alley, the closest I came to real danger—and to killing everyone onboard—was at my own hands. I knew that to be a powerful lesson . . . about . . . not to . . . of . . .

  Who’s bad? MJ said from the speakers.

  “Who is bad? Who is nice?” answered the Tanzanian. He bubbled over with laughter. Berbera emerged just visible on the horizon.

  It is 140 nautical miles (160 miles) due south from Aden to the shores of Somaliland, and sailing gingerly, we made it in twenty-two hours. The Ogo highlands sloped back from the coast, lion’s yellow under a winter’s haze. Farther away it was green. At the eastern end of the port of Berbera, hulking shipwrecks and rusting half-sunken ships clumped together like car parts in Camden.

  “Welcome!” Hari beamed.

  CHAPTER 13

  |

  SOMALIA

  IS THERE PEACE?

  “War ! mel ‘absileh ina gei,

  take us to a dangerous place.”

  —EXAMPLE FROM A SOMALI-ENGLISH DICTIONARY, 1897

  THE CONTINENT GREETED ME easily. For a fee, the Oriental Hotel in Hargeisa had sent a driver to meet me two hours away at the sea, and he was waving before the boatmen had secured the moorings. We followed foot traffic between the stacks of containers marked with Asian script until we found the two-room immigration building. My papers were cross-checked by a man in a beret who seemed only mildly caught off guard.

  While I waited, I leaned against the threshold of the outer room where a group of kids pored over Jason Statham on Dubai’s MBC Action channel on satellite TV. They saw the American watching over their shoulders. “Isn’t it dangerous?” they asked about my home. All they saw was Jason Statham and his explosions and the bank robberies and the drive-by shootings on sunny American city streets.

  My questing stresses had faded, replaced with a heavy solidity like the lull after Thanksgiving dinner. So much of my motivation for getting to Somaliland had been, in my gut, to get to Somaliland. The beret cashed my visa receipt for an inky blue passport stamp.

  I saw Berbera only from the backseat of an old car. A heavy tinting sticker was peeling from the window, and through it I could glimpse the crescent beaches between low-slung houses and the shops on the way out of town.

  The road from Berbera to the capital is exactly one hundred miles southwest and tilted upward. Hargeisa is forty-four hundred feet above sea level on the Ogo plateau. When the long road was empty, the driver often preferred spending long stretches in the oncoming traffic lane. This was a common trait I’d noticed in other places, too—perhaps it kept the drivers alert. They always had simple justifications, like The road is smoother. And yet, driving in the other direction, it isn’t. But I didn’t need Bataille or a twelve-year-old to explain that draw of the forbidden and the excitement of fear.

  I bought a SIM card for two dollars and charged it for one while the man in the passenger seat, gray haired and skinny in camouflage fatigues, got out to buy soda. He was the soldier escort required by law to accompany tourists traveling between cities. He pushed his rifle down between his knees like it was bothering him.

  My eagerness grew as east Africa blured into orange and purple. Perfectly flat scrubland stretched out to rough mountains.

  Just north of the highway outside Hargeisa, there are two small conical hills named Naasa Hablood: “Girl’s Breasts.” But the country revealed itself to me modestly—the hills were hidden in the dark as we rumbled into town.

  I WIPED SLEEPY DROOL from the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand and rubbed my eyes with the front of it. Then I stepped out for the first time in the big city.

  “Beautiful man!”

  A woman was glaring into my eyes with such intensity that I almost got back in the car. She, in flowing black cloth; me, in something dirty. It was the most aggressively nice thing I had ever experienced, there in the middle of a lumpy dirt road outside the Oriental Hotel.

  I smiled back, and she disappeared.

  My light skin was a rare coloring in Hargeisa. I had let my hair grow over the thirteen months since my cousin had buzzed it in Jerusalem, and it was curly and sea swept.

  I entered the Oriental Hotel emboldened, feeling welcome in my differences, but knowing I would never be able to hide my foreignness here, or delay its discovery, as I had been able to do almost everywhere else. This for me was the first feature of Somaliland.

  HARGEISA HAS ALWAYS BEEN a market town. According to one popular etymology, the name means “the place where you take animal skins.” For centuries, pelt merchant
s from Africa bartered with traders from the Arabian Gulf for sugar and dates.

  Since 1953, the two-story Oriental Hotel has been hosting travelers in the very heart of the city. Outside, the facade is a flat, white box sticking out over the goldsmiths’ shops and the travel agency below. Inside, rooms open out onto a wide atrium and plants cascade lobbyward from the mezzanine. There is wifi from the comfy chairs under umbrellas where breakfast is served with a pot of Somali tea. All of this for fifteen dollars per night.

  But even that was too much, said the earlier generations. An older Somalilander told me that locals critiqued the idea of monetizing hospitality. “They were saying, ‘You shouldn’t rent a space to a guest! You should give him a space. Free! You know, in your house or something, haa.’ ”

  That word—haa, “yes”—functions even more in Somali like a capital on a column, like “indeed” or “exactly” at the end of a sentence or as a weighty reaction. It was the opposite in my America-bound text messages—haa was a clue to read more lightly—but here, the old man was extra adamant: this was why the hotel was called oriental, because it was built on such faraway concepts. (Maybe he knew about the $189 the port pickup had added to the hotel bill, as if that wasn’t most of the nation’s GDP per capita.)

  I made my way back outside to the corner. At ten o’clock, vendors were still out on the street, selling things from behind a grooved, knee-high barrier. When I got closer, I realized that there was no barrier at all—only the goods to be traded. On pallets piled five bricks high and five bricks deep, blue Somaliland shillings took in the night air.

  The price was simple and non-negotiable: six thousand shillings for one U.S. dollar, and only in that direction. But the most common note in circulation was the five hundred, and so, for twenty dollars, I returned to the hotel with two rubber-banded stacks that bulged in my pockets like contraband. There are pink thousand-shilling notes and green five thousands, too, convenient but harder to come by. They are clean and crisp and unhandled, unlike the faded one hundreds, and papery fifties worth less than a penny, promising to dissolve in your pocket.

  This was the second feature of Somaliland, the money bought practically by volume as if we were again trading skins for sugar.

  In Hargeisa, the money sits on the street, unafraid—there are no armed robberies or drive-bys: these ramparts built of banknotes are safe. This was what made the boys who watched MBC Action ask, Isn’t America dangerous, when bags of money are snatched at gunpoint in broad daylight?

  FLUSH WITH SHILLINGS, I found a restaurant still open and learned to eat pasta with my hands. I went back every day. An olive-skinned man rushed to bring me baasto tossed in sauce and vegetables, and orange juice watered down and sweetened to the point of addiction.

  By my second plate, I was learning to flip spaghetti back and forth over my hand—as everyone else did at the long tables—until the strands were folded enough to handle as a ball, which, with practice, could be rolled over the finger tips and popped into the mouth.

  “I’m Hussein. My mother is Layla. My father, Mahdi,” said the olive-skinned man. Hussein brought me a pink juice, too, called cano Vimto, a mixture of the fruity, purple British soft drink Vimto and milk. It made me feel like a baby discovering ice cream.

  We spoke in Arabic, his like the French spoken in West Africa—clear, light. At the end of every month he sent his wife and mother in Mogadishu fractions of his pittance through the omnipresent funds transfer service Dahabshiil. Other forms of communication were more difficult. “I don’t have a telephone,” he said. He had his eye on a 150-dollar plane ticket home to the Somali capital. “God, I’m sad. God, I want to travel.”

  How could I respond, standing there, traveling right in his face? His young man’s wrinkles and wide eyes were fixed in a permanent smile, but transparently lacquered that way. He asked how long I would stay in Somaliland. “How many years? How many months?” For a week, I said, after visiting Yemen. “How many years, how many months?” he asked again.

  “Dubai, did you see it? How many years?”

  A period better measured in months than in years, I didn’t say—I flit through these places like subway stops. Hussein thought in longer units.

  Hussein didn’t have protection in the north, or connections—what the Arab world called wasta. His skin color was perhaps the only thing he liked about himself, and even that caused trouble. “I’m not well here,” he said. “Every night I don’t sleep. I have too many thoughts, haa.” Mostly, they were about going home to Mogadishu.

  “In Hargeisa they say ‘iska warran,’ ” literally, give news of yourself. “In Mogadishu: ‘nabad miyaa.’ ” In the south, the greeting addresses the environment, not the individual. Nabad miyaa means “Is there peace?”

  He said he’d call when he left. Or when I did. He mimed the entire conversation: “I’ll call you when you leave, Hey, my friend, how’s it going? How’s your mother, how’s your father?” The idea made him happy.

  The bill: fourteen thousand shillings (two dollars). I unfolded dozens of blue notes from my stack.

  I COULD NEVER FORGET who I was in Hargeisa. I wandered the streets in the morning, noticing how the city colorized the higher I looked—beige at my feet, faded red in the throng of roadside umbrellas at the mouth of the market, always blue overhead. Stores were often painted with bright murals depicting glamorized versions of the items sold inside—cellphones, CDs, sandwiches. At first, I did my best to be unremarkable.

  “Hey, Irishman!”

  This was the city’s way of telling me “Good morning.”

  “White man! Your name? Hey, Italian man!” In my first days, I smiled back. That was the extent of most conversations.

  Sometimes when I was walking, I slowed near a shop called Adam Electronics. That way, if anyone happened to shout Hey Irishman! Your name! I could just point behind me. Sometimes I said it was my shop.

  It was a lesson quickly learned that eyes would follow me through Somaliland. Not all of them—not even most—but enough to feel the heat on my back. Once, when I sat on a stoop near the market and the shack titled “Business Royals,” and the red building painted with the Coca-Cola logo, a young Somalilander offered explanation. In a perfectly white thobe, he looked down from under a brimless white cap, often known as a kufi in Africa, or as the Islamic taqiyah.

  “They think you’re a spy,” he said. “When you take pictures, small pictures, they think you are collecting data.”

  It didn’t seem unfair, in a region freshly familiar with colonization and suppression by foreigners and by their own government, that the alien would be suspicious. I was upset that my presence alone could be the source of stress for women on their way home from the butcher’s, but I couldn’t help smiling at the image of my sinister spreadsheet—the one with cells for the pattern of the flowing garbasaar that framed their faces and extended below the knee, for the style of their gait, for the color of the long khimar headscarf if they were styling something more traditionally Islamic. Every molecule of Hargeisa was a potential data point.

  The young man might have caught me smiling. “If they don’t understand, they think there is some secret.”

  Yet for every chary reservation, there is another curiosity unreserved. Over pasta the night before, I had met a high-schooler named Ahmed who delighted in practicing his English with me. As a former British colony, Somaliland does a fair job of teaching English in high schools, at least in the regions where there are high schools. I practiced my Somali.

  Ahmed rushed me into shops at random.

  “Tell them!”

  “Habeen wanaagsan,” I’d try. Good evening. The men in the restaurant or working around the sewing machine would explode laughing. Where’d you find this guy?

  There, my secret was assumed less suspicious and more absurd. I was just a guy, galumphing in the evening, telling people to have a nice one. Another Hargeisan appeared to have vetted me for them, and this was almost always enough.

 
; THERE WAS ALWAYS a light on in the back of my mind: I had books to deliver for Yusuf Gabobe at Haatuf News. This was the objective I used to justify my footfalls. I was tricking myself, and I knew it, but still it worked. The next morning, though, I traded this goal for one so concrete it didn’t need tricks: the Neolithic cave paintings in Laas Geel, dated to seven thousand years old or so, give or take a couple millennia.

  I bought a second SIM card from another of Somaliland’s major communications companies—Somtel and Telesom numbers do not connect to each other—and called Ahmed as he’d asked from the noisy taxi yard. No answer.

  I negotiated for the drive northwest into the plains with a hoard of drivers who had fenced me inside a firm semicircle. I called Ahmed again. “Stay there,” he said.

  Ahmed’s somewhat older friend had cars, he said, and we could go with him. The Oriental offered its own morning sightseeing package for the price of 120 plates of pasta but this way I could rely on the kindness of new friends. Soon, we were navigating through potholed streets in the cab of the friend’s enormous flatbed truck, looking to find something more appropriate at one of his family’s stores. But as we continued to make large figure eights through the capital, I began to lose my fragile faith.

  “Do you care if it’s a big car or a small car?” he asked.

  “What? No. No, anything.”

  “Don’t worry okay?” said Ahmed. “Why are you worried? Don’t worry.” I felt like a bad traveler when I didn’t trust him—it seemed like a good MO to put trust in strangers in strange places—but I didn’t trust him. That is, I didn’t trust he would help do the thing I wanted to do. I started to miss the taxi drivers.