The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  “I have to know,” said Yusuf, who was a part of the same sub-sub-clan as the owner of the Oriental. “Ishaq, Habr Awal, Sa‘ad Muse, Gedi.” Ishaq was the family, Habr Awal the clan, Sa‘ad Muse the subclan, Gedi the sub-sub-clan. “Gedi—it’s the common ancestor we have, my eight ancestral grandfather.” Habar Awal, the clan eponym, he said, was twenty-four to twenty-five links of male lineage ago.

  “I don’t know some of my great-grandparents’ names,” I said.

  “Good and bad,” said Yusuf. “Many people would rather die if they don’t know,” he laughed.

  The system is not without its benefits: names function like addresses. In a nomadic lifestyle, lineage systems have already mapped out potential bed-and-breakfasts, available watering holes, friends. This was why some Somalis said, “We are like the Jews of Africa!” (“With no paperwork you can just trust me,” said a new Somali friend, about meeting new Somali friends.)

  In times of trouble, compulsory donations also lift the burden on the individual. “It’s a kind of insurance,” said Yusuf. “So if somebody from the tribe inflicts injury or kills somebody, you have to pay dear. Blood money. It’s collected.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred camels for a person. And then you have to change that—” his phone rang, and, with every politeness, he took his leave for some pressing business in Ethiopia.

  He would have said that you have to tweak that figure—the Sharia rule for blood money in the school of Islamic jurisprudence honored by Somalis—according to the heer, the interclan contracts. Heer covered everything, and when it didn’t, the clans inked more. Tribal treaties, a Somali scholar noted in 1959, became “a source of law” in the British Protectorate. (The repercussions are obvious: When the colonizers left, Somaliland did not fall into an anarchic vacuum the way their Italian-run cousins did to the south.) Based on Sharia but not beholden to it, the interclan contracts remain flexible. Killing a really good guy or disturbing a long-standing peace between trusting clans, for example—that could raise the hundred-per-man, fifty-per-woman minimums.

  The money to be paid is called mag, or diya, in Arabic, and is generally paid in cash at the local market value of the camels—about three to four hundred dollars each in Somalia. (In Saudi Arabia, rising camel values induced legislation in 2011 that capped the penalty for murder at just over one hundred thousand dollars.) The weight falls on the mag-paying group: four to eight generations, totaling somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand men. This group is perhaps the most important single category for a Somali man.

  The woman’s half-value is not as much sexist itself as it is an unsavory product of sexism: Women are not a part of the mag-paying groups. As they do not contribute, they do not collect equally. Women are swept up in these systems like an afterthought.

  Marriages are most common within the clan between spouses of different subclans. Next most likely is interfamily marriages—that is, close is good, but really different is better than just a bit different. As a Philadelphian Pennsylvanian American, for example, I’d likely pair with a Pittsburger Pennsylvanian American. After that, I’d rather any Canadian over an Iowan or New Yorker or Dakotan. Mostly, exogamous marriage is alliance building, a diplomatic tool and an expansion of protective bonds.

  The word for clan, tol, is also the word for “to sew, bind together.” Weak clans very literally became unbound. When they were out of place, locals could call them qaldan: “wrong.” The Somali refugees landing by the thousands every year in Yemen, the families I saw sleeping on cardboard in Aden alleyways—these were almost always escapees from weak clans, those who found themselves qaldan everywhere.

  IN THE BLACK HAWK DOWN DAYS, America went to war against the dictator who had ousted the dictator who had marshalled young Somalia into bloody unity. The poorly planned objectives—to facilitate and protect humanitarian efforts in Somalia, and later to capture the dictator—were failures.

  “The helicopter used to come at night. You can’t sleep,” I heard from a Somali friend who said he used to play on the Black Hawk wreckage on his way to market. “Dooh dooh doooh dooh. BOOM! Throwing things, bombs, firing from the sky.”

  Somalis were trapped between a militant dictator and foreigners infringing on their freedom. “The Americans have no clue,” he said, as they patrolled and confiscated weapons blindly across tribal lines. “They tried to make a peace-making. You don’t make a peace with people you don’t even know.”

  For a moment, the subclans of Mogadishu united against the outsiders. And when the outsiders left, the boundaries reappeared like glow-in-the-dark ink.

  IN THIS WAY, Somalis were not the Jews of Africa. Jews have all but forgotten the tribes of ancient Israel—ten of the twelve are accepted as “lost.” The clan base is expanded, in part because there is a long tradition of troubles imposed from outside.

  I could probably guess my tribe from my last name, but it would be useless. I don’t, like the Ishaq or Dir or Darod or Hawiye, have prearranged grazing territory for my herd. And I don’t have a hundred relatives to call when I’m in a bind. I have AAA. I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

  The mag process, in its eye-for-an-eye formation, can cut both ways. I would know that there were a few hundred to a few thousand men who would vouch their eyes for mine. When I wandered in the desert, I would know that I had the might of those thousands behind me. But . . . the individual is no longer responsible for homicide. My kin’s relationships, their grudges, must become my own.

  My objections to Somali communalism came from the me-first ego of the American Dream and my first-person destinies made manifest in the bank accounts I shared with no one. Tribes, clans, serious crime resolved by traditional law—this was not the structure of my childhood. The idea that my worth was not a fully individual accomplishment offended the aspirations of all American boys: I would never be a man entirely of my own making. And yet . . .

  “Qolomaad tahay?” What is your clan?

  A checkpoint.

  Ishaq.

  A passport flashed.

  When I moved, I declared my clan again and again, too. Traveling to some countries, I’d paid 4.5 times the visa price of Chinese and Japanese tourists because their countries had stronger economic ties with our host. In Europe, my Americanness affords me ninety days of visitors’ rights for free. In Yemen I had to watch my ass, but the government had an interest in keeping me safe. These are my heer. These are my contracts.

  I saw the smaller elements (of people to trust without question) and said, “It’s too big! Too unstable!” I saw the larger elements (the families bound by contract) and said, “It’s too small! Too arbitrary!” as if the world’s borders weren’t silly enough. There’s a reason that map in the classroom is called a political map. But nomadic Somali polities have never conformed perfectly to this system.

  The Somali sultanates have gone; the most influential units today are subgroups of respected men. The upper house of the Somaliland parliament is called the House of Elders. But unless he’s a hunchback, clan identity is probably the first known fact about a president and, unsurprisingly, his particular networks reap inegalitarian benefits.

  Kahin, whose “defamation” put Yusuf in jail, had been in office for five years, the first minority clan president in Somaliland. Haatuf’s reporting could have been a tribal issue—Yusuf and his Ishaq clan against the upstart—but it wasn’t: the only difference between the new president and the former dictator Siad Barre, Yusuf told a reporter from prison, was that Barre “was a dictator whom we did not know, but Dahir Riyale is an enemy from within our community and we unknowingly trusted him thinking he is one of us.” It was transcendent in its way: the ruler despised not for clan but for performance.

  So long as the political clings to the ancestral in Somalia, it will seem an unprecedented loss of autonomy for those without footholds at the top. One Mogadishan told me what happens when a clan loses supremacy, in a Somali adage addressed to a piece of meat: Ago ko�
��one a mako areyye. “Either I eat you or I throw you in the sand.” That’s why, among other reasons, there are still Somalis saying, “We need another Siad Barre”: only a totalitarian can override the system.

  I LEFT THE ORIENTAL. I walked uptown past the bus station to the packed dirt street named after Abdirahman Ahmed Ali “Tuur,” Somaliland’s first president. His nickname means “hunchback.” I ducked through the walk-in-refrigerator-style curtains and the inquiring glances at a restaurant I hadn’t tried. I felt a little guilty every time I didn’t visit my pasta place, but this one was bigger. They had dry, dense goat meat. They had rice.

  I ordered a shared plate of rice and pasta. It’s a dish that claims a certain status because it can be served only in restaurants—a family would never cook the two for the same meal, but a restaurant has both on hand. It is called, aptly, “Federation.” Normally it is served with a banana.

  It was cool and dark, and the glances faded. Inside, I was just a messy eater in the lunch crowd, but outside through the plastic curtains . . .

  “White boy! Arab! Hey man! Where from! What’s your name!”

  “How are you fine! How are you!” The foreigner’s salutations shouted like accusations, as if I hadn’t forgotten how strange I looked.

  “Man or woman!” jumpy men offered from storefronts. My hair was longer than theirs by all of it, blatantly frizzing in the sun. “Are you a man?” asked a fast walker as he passed. I answered in the affirmative. “If Allah says,” he said. It was a slightly meaner refrain to the young Yemenis’ “Boy or girl!” greeting. Maybe it was completely playful. Anyway, I had no allegiance to my lack of haircut either.

  If I returned scowls with scowls, pressure built instantly. We’d steal fugitive glances and, if we caught the other staring, we’d raise and drop eyebrows until we were dizzy. If I smiled when they stared, they stopped scowling sometimes and smiled back. Or their brows shifted from a stare-at-something-suspicious to a stare-at-something-silly.

  I never thought I was thin-skinned to teasing. I accept that I’ve got a nose that could sink a thousand ships. But teasing is certainly funniest when it’s original, and this was getting old fast.

  “Man or woman!” It came again from behind me. Fuck it, I thought. What happens when I do this. I put on my sternest face—Whadjusaytome?!—and whipped around. When I did, I saw a short, pudgy chunk of a man grinning odiously.

  I had energy to burn, from the sugar with tea or the Federation or the too-short city blocks, and aggression seemed like the only kind of defense that wasn’t passive.

  He found my eyes, saw the macho posturing in them. His grin fell. He picked up a rock, and wound it back. We saw each other.

  I could feel the street’s attention click, the onlookers squeezing in on us. When push came to shove came to rock, I had no support system—I was clanless. That could have been why I was so easy to shout at: these jabs would see no retaliation from clan politics. I could be a release valve for man’s natural urge to mock.

  The division between clans can be great—they may not offer each other assistance, they could find each other on opposite sides of a severe dispute—but a foreigner has no place in this system at all. I was blank. I was a default human for those with history to respond to at will. In a world where ancestry is everything, we shared nothing. The shouts of “Irishman!” and “Italian man!” hoped to hit home—to make my presence explicable and to find a way to connect me to lineage—but when they didn’t, I was purely a visitor again. Guests do have a place in the framework, though.

  I turned back around, half-expecting to be knocked out anyway. I heard the rock fall into the sand.

  THESE WERE THE WAYS the town got used to me, or I got used to it—sparring partners testing our distance with light jabs. Another day, I asked a man for directions to Somali fast food—small preprepared sandwiches of unidentifiable meat and lettuce on soft bread that is unfailingly delicious. He led me to a popular joint.

  “Did you get your money back?” the man asked. He knew that I had sought compensation from the auto mechanic’s son. Everyone knew everything. I’d recouped ten bucks, I told him, and he gave a satisfied nod.

  For moments in the small town of a million plus, I felt I was part of it. And as soon as I did, I saw that I was qaldan. I walked through the street eating my mystery sandwiches.

  “Don’t you feel shame to eat outside?” A crinkled face appeared from nowhere. “There are some places where they will attack you just for that bit. You are eating when they have nothing to eat. You must feel shame!” I told him I didn’t—but I did. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, or forewarning me. I was starting to get defensive.

  “My name is Willie. I speak Swedish also,” he said. And then he was gone.

  He left me in a moment riddled with guilt, feeling embarrassed and raw and so, so visible.

  It was inescapable; with or without cameras or sandwiches or fat stacks of cash, the tribeless and foreign were lodestones for the curious and confrontational.

  At the mouth of the market, a cluster of children—four girls and a tiny boy—hung about in bright robes that hardly covered unwashed shirts. They beamed when I lifted my camera, and relaxed even more when they saw that it didn’t shoot lasers. The girl at the center, swathed in orange, embraced the boy’s head and turned him toward me. She was radiant—and everyone hated her.

  A small mob assembled to investigate the objects of my attention. It was exasperating to them, it seemed, that I could care even for a moment.

  “These people, Oromo people. Not from Somaliland,” a man said. “When you are writing your article, do not write that these people are from Somaliland. They are immigrants.” I’d never said anything about writing, but why else would I be there, he thought. Or he had seen me before with a pen. Or someone had told him about me.

  Oromo is generally translated to mean “The People.” But while they make up the largest ethnic bloc in Ethiopia, the state continues to marginalize them with policy and shocking antiopposition violence. Emigrants to Somaliland (a territory that was largely Oromo a few hundred years ago) are even more starkly without a support structure, or clan connections, or opportunities. They are like the Somalis who flee to Yemen, leaving little behind and finding less.

  I took pictures of them, as if the JPEGs would travel with me and take them away from this place.

  Another man in Muslim garb put his face in mine. “I am Somaliland, you are Somaliland. They are not Somaliland.”

  “I am not Somaliland,” I said.

  “In your face, you don’t like something,” said the first man.

  “They are not from here and neither am I,” I said, getting ruffled. I became more indignant, less diplomatic in hiding my utter distaste with their attitudes, no longer playing along so they would take me further into their perspective.

  If I read about places before visiting them, I might have quoted an old Somali poem:

  Woman, the man who comes from next door,

  Is not your equal,

  He who travels through danger,

  And desolate country, like a lion,

  Is your equal!

  Instead, I seized the opportunity that I’d been waiting a lifetime of action movies for: “If you have a problem with them, you have a problem with me,” I said, actually. I’d never imagined these would be the circumstances.

  These children had traveled as much as I had, through countries far more desolate. Were they not our equals? Were they not people? But no one reacted, and the mob dissolved into the road’s shady fringes. They gave me nothing more to fight, and I took heavy steps away on the packed dirt.

  Later, one of the onlookers ran into me on the street. He was an old man, and he looked at me like I wasn’t there. “I think you don’t like yourself,” he said.

  What a crazy thing to say. I blinked to make sure he was real—that dehydration and anger hadn’t put my own voice into his mouth. But he was there, and I could feel my eye sockets unclench from ho
lding my squinting rage in place, and the anger drained into sadness.

  Still I seethed. This was not an all good place. This was not an all hospitable place, and I let myself hate everything about everything for a moment before, sullen, I confessed that I didn’t believe that either. I was tangled in an angry cycle: I didn’t like that I didn’t like these people for disliking other people. As I disliked them, I disliked me more, too.

  The man was right, though. Shutting folks out is generally a bad response to prejudice. The anger faded some, taking with it some of the energy in my calves, and the old man disappeared into the twilight rabble.

  IN THE LATE MORNING, I cast short shadows on the lobby of the Oriental. I asked Muhammad, the Djiboutian cook, if he might show me how to make local breakfast.

  “No, no,” he said. Why would the cook cook when he didn’t have to cook? Wait, he said, and then we’ll go chew qat, or qaad, as the stimulant leaf is known in Somaliland, or chat, as they call it in Ethiopia where the good stuff comes from.

  While he finished his omelets, I flicked through e-mails from my parents. I had let my travel plans slip accidentally in a forwarded message. It was the first time they knew where I really was since I’d flown to Beirut. I would try to explain after I’d come home—Afghanistan was lovely, mom, honest! If there were a chairwoman for the unconvinced, it was my mother.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said, among other e-mailed prescriptions for Somalia. She was extremely worried. “You’re NOT immortal or even invulnerable.” No one in town would even call this Somalia, I said. I wasn’t in danger. If anything, I was bored.

  Bored because I didn’t know how to spend time anymore. Bored because my head felt like an empty laboratory now that all the instruments I used to use had been cleared away. If I responded to boredom with my friends here, I might sidle into the chat rooms to chew until I felt like a god. And then there I’d be with all the power in the world and no idea where to spend it. I could think of no more audacious trips to take into the void, to insist to my friends and to myself that I had no fear.