The next plane to Dubai was in a few days. I still wanted to come home to Masha—I told her I would—but how could I so empty-handed? In the back of my mind, an infinite loop of destinations raced past like a split-flap display in a train station: Was there anywhere I could run where I wouldn’t be stuck?
My mom was worried about the wrong thing. My trying-to-scare-myself addiction wasn’t working, and I was feeling the onset of withdrawal. I didn’t feel immortal, I felt I was dying.
Yes, I melodramatized in the soft chairs orbited by pots of shaah hawash that always seemed to hold more tea than I expected. I had to—mundanity was filling the space danger left. If life was traction on the planet, I saw lostness as a kind of death—and a bad one, like starvation or thirst or exposure.
I was still uncertain, still angry. Yes, the humanity and connections had been real, but what could I take home? What could I have faith in? I was more afraid than ever, with a fear that audacity could no longer mask.
MUHAMMAD THE COOK took me to pick half bundles of chat from the women at the painted stalls. The drawings made the bundles look like small trees or heads of bok choy. Above, the owner’s name is often printed in bold letters. One stand said simply, TAWAKAL: “Trust in God.”
These were the men, inside the dark room just off the main street, craving autonomy from the cares of the world—at least hiding from them—with their bare feet outstretched toward the pile of shoes and slippers collecting on the floor. While Yemeni gat-chewing rooms are often rooms with a view, in Hargeisa there are none, no windows. Instead, the cement housing is luxuriant in its coolness, shade from the equatorial sun.
We slouched back on woven mats against our stretch of wall. “The goats are eating this every day,” said Muhammad. I imagined goats charging the border, wide-eyed and humping each other, gnashing their teeth and bleating bloody murder.
At first there were wide eyes trained on me, certainly the most goat-colored of the afternoon chewers, but they relaxed quickly.
“What are they saying?” I asked Muhammad, drinking his Mountain Dew.
“He say, ‘He is chewing chat?’ I say yes. He say, ‘He like the chat?’ I say, ‘That’s why he’s chewing!’ He say, ‘Okaaay!’ ”
Despite my unusual arrival, I was joining the ranks of the chewers: Somaliland’s 95 percent. And it was only as I prepared to leave, with one foot off the continent, that I could feel this kind of belonging, that I could feel we understood each other well enough. Maybe that was the only place I belonged: in constant flight with a warm perch for the afternoon.
We were chewing the chibis strand, fresh and powerful. The bushels were dry, more like eating paper and dust than Yemen, but consumed with a style more relaxed and elegant. You could hardly notice the bulges building in our cheeks. After this, my fourth session in two weeks, I stayed up all night feeling my thoughts swirling around at the top of my head. They whirled so fast I felt my crown might lift off at the ears like a toy helicopter. Sure, chat made me trust in God—but I thought the god was me.
If the pudgy man had threatened me again with a rock, I would have ordered him to throw it at me before tackling him to the ground and demanding he cook me dinner. I could have punched through walls. I could have made Djiboutian breakfasts. I glared into mirrors and at the ceiling, raging at all the empty space.
AFTER THE KINDLY BANK AGENT e-mailed me in Yemen to say that I was deep in the red, I left Asia with what cash I had. Almost as soon as I saw Africa, I relied on my oldest connections. It took two infusions from friends and family to settle my accounts.
For better or worse, Somaliland is built for this. According to estimates by the United Nations Development Programme, Somaliland receives up to $700 million per year in remittances. This constitutes one-quarter of household income. I joined the throngs in the downtown Dahabshiil to sign for Neal’s funds from Abu Dhabi.
My father transferred funds from the Western Union by the produce section of our local supermarket. Hargeisa’s single branch is a few minutes outside of town, a ten-dollar round trip in a taxi running on empty. To claim cash, you answer a secret question.
“Question answer,” said the man.
“What?”
“Question answer.”
“Yes . . . ?”
“Question. Answer.”
“What’s the question?”
A moment. “Yes.”
“What’s the question?”
“This is.”
“What is? I can’t see your screen.”
He bent forward ever so slightly to read. If this was the question—if it even was a question—it didn’t sound like one my father would have composed. “Chocolate. Name.”
A goat bleated just outside. I paused. He waited a moment, and then spoke. “Sunrise,” he said.
We looked at each other for a moment. He gave me two hundred dollars. I questioned my assumptions about the universe.
I PAID LITTLE ATTENTION to a newscast on the TV in the back corner of the ceiling of my usual pasta place. A new tablemate joined me with a smile in the noodle-eating position: slightly hunched, left arm folded in front of the plate, right arm resting on the elbow and holding a supple wrist.
Flip, flip, flip, pop. I was amazed at how suited human hands could be for gripping slippery spaghetti, how one simple technique could make the difference between highchair etiquette and a business lunch. I didn’t mind the saucy fingers. I knew the sink would be there when we’d finished, and I had nothing else to handle while I thought only of food.
A ball, popped into my mouth. Another. A swig of pink cano Vimto with the left hand, a brief scan of the lively cafeteria. I was grinning now. Another burst of perfect noodles: and then.
And then . . .
“. . . ?” I thought.
And then it cracked. Maybe it was all the sugar from the soda milkshake. Maybe it was some rare vitamin in the pasta sauce, or the way the Question-Answer Man did away with a world that ran on logic. With my mouth full in that dusty corner of Somalia or Somaliland, at the intersection of the restaurant street and the qaad market in the shadow of the Oriental Hotel, something that had always been half-chewed erupted in my gut.
I didn’t need more answers—not to satisfy the questions I had been asking. The questions had all been wrong: Do you hate me? Will you kill me? Am I free here or here or here? Are you “off-limits”?
The real fears—they were gone. Or—they were all unmasked as terrible decoys. The simple geographic prejudice against this part of the world had been like a pile of shit my half generation stepped in, and I had washed it quickly from my soles: it didn’t take more than seven seconds in Afghanistan to see it was different than on TV, just like it didn’t take more than a taste to realize that I was okay with early dinners of small Persian sharks. So why had my discomfort only deepened?
Discomfort came before its reasons did: finding something for it to stick to followed. I felt, I am not okay, and then thought, maybe this is why. I was unsettled for all the reasons any growing thing would be, but instead of recognizing my own teenage obsession with being understood, I convinced myself that I was anxious only because I did not understand the world. I needed to believe that—that there was always something else, something out there responsible for my unsteadiness. There was no seven-second answer that would have felt like justice.
The trouble was not so much that I didn’t know my place in a changing world, but that I didn’t know how to change in a world that was still spinning in ancient orbit.
And the way I looked for answers had made real understanding impossible. It was as if I’d set out on twenty-five thousand miles of blind dates, asking, “Are you awful?” at first blush. Even the answers that could have meant something sounded like total bullshit.
THIS CRESCENDOING DANGER, this quest to raise the bar higher and higher—to find my limits—this wasn’t my quest at all. Plane flights into fear and back out, tickets booked with giddy pride: each “next trip” held within it the
very preconceptions I’d been fighting all along. Syria embattled more than Lebanon, Afghanistan more tense than Syria—Pakistan, more terrorized. Then Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia.
This was not the way to grade the world, along the axis of perceived terror.
If I survived the place, I thought, it couldn’t be considered off-limits—it might even be added to the tally of hospitable territory. The greater the expected danger (according to my gut and to travel advisories and to the guts I heard rumbling on the news), the more I valued the discovery of safety. One fun Somalia was worth 17 fun Egypts, and 146 safe Kuwaits.
I charted dangers on a scale bounded by absolutes: absolute freedom on one end, absolute death on the other. Because I hoped for freedom, I assumed that it prevailed until threatened by guaranteed death or imprisonment. At rare moments, those guarantees were there: in earshot of Taliban checkpoints in Afghanistan, at the uncertain border crossing from Kurdistan into Iraq, at the shoreline of the Iranian mainland, on the new Al-Qaeda highways in southeastern Yemen. Every time I did strike one of those hard boundaries, it was an affront to my defense of the region, of humanity, of everything I believed in. Could it be true, that my freedoms really weren’t limitless?
My tactics of avoidance were automatic: I could still be infinitely free, I said, even if a few boundaries were true. To continue without letting go of my absolutes, I reframed the limit as just one closed edge on an open space that expanded in infinite directions. Sure I can’t go there, but I can go countless other places. I felt, in my every fiber as an American, as an adolescent, that I needed to prove it.
As it always is with binary frameworks, to be one thing is to be not another. Safe meant not dangerous, good meant not bad. To be truly free, I believed, must mean to live in a world with no walls.
I treated myself like an experiment, in a series of trials kept mostly random by deliberate ignorance, to test the hypothesis that had been worded for me on September 11: you can’t go there.
All of this to preclude Decision Making. With thinking like this, there are no shoulds and maybes; there are no responsibilities of choice.
I had not accepted my responsibilities as a man, to choose, who to be, where to go—and then to protect that choice, to work for it—because I had not accepted my most basic responsibilities as a human. What more primal choice could there be than the choice to live?—to refuse to become a rolled die by a random hand?
I held on to the comfort of the absolute authority of fear by fighting it, and by calling the fight absolute freedom. I kept the fight alive in the teenage way, screaming, “You can’t tell me nothing!” when I wanted more than anything to be told what to do.
If I took control of my own life—if I made choices to make them, and not to unmake their opposites—all of the absolutes would crumble. The gods of Do and Don’t would be swallowed up in the kingdom of real men.
I could have looked at the spaghetti and seen an exhibit for my case against Somali inhumanity.
Instead, I tasted noodles.
For the first long moment in five hundred days of short moments, I saw this room only as a room full of men and food. That was simple enough to understand, and so, I felt understood. The feedback faded. In my head there was a photo album for these pictures that, for once, did not share pages with an eleven-year-old September Tuesday.
I looked happily at my one hand caked in the tiny skins of grilled vegetables. This was it: messy and full of life and possibility. The full catastrophe.
A weight lifted.
IN HARGEISA, without reservations or demands to be elsewhere, there was no part of me shouting Do this! You can’t leave without that! I wasn’t squeezing every moment for my benefit anymore, or feeling trapped by waiting. So often, time pressed for “efficiency” ends up worthless, like a pressed penny.
I teetered downstairs in the morning, had tea, walked-and-talked, ate Ethiopian food or something new, took a nap maybe, wandered more, drank more tea, returned to the Somaliland Restaurant and ate plate after plate of pasta or something else. Try this, Hussein would say.
It was amazing that in a place at first so unfamiliar—and it continued to be—that I would become so fast a regular. People still shouted “Man or woman?!” every so often, but I hardly heard it. It was all becoming regular to me, too. That was the amazing part: feeling fully me in a new place. I was connected, and I was outside of it all, and I was grounded, and I was unleashed.
I bought my ticket to Dubai. When I left the travel agency next to Khayriyada Square, I patted my pockets with a familiar anxiety. Every time my apartment door closed behind me, this same alarm rang: I imagined myself back behind the lock scanning for anything I might have forgotten. There never was perfect closure; only the feeling that I had remembered enough to go on.
To:
MRS. H. VALEN
71 RIVERSIDE DRIVE
APARTMENT 5F
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
From:
Cpl. HERB VALEN 32997723
SIGNAL DIVISION, SHAEF
APO 757
Somewhere in England
12 September 1944
I WANT TO BROADEN OUT, SEE THE WHOLE SKY, NOT JUST THE PART . . . ABOVE THE VALLEY . . . I DON’T KNOW IF I AM ACTUALLY SAYING ANYTHING. MORE OR LESS JUST FEELING MY WAY ALONG.
I FEEL, THOUGH, I HAVE A WONDERFUL START. A SOLID FOUNDATION ON WHICH TO BUILD EVERYTHING ELSE.
—V-mail from my grandfather to my grandmother
OUTRO
THERE WAS NO DEPARTURES screen for the day’s single flight. We waited for the long-necked African Express plane to come up and down from Kampala to Nairobi to Mogadishu to Berbera, before it would take us on to Mukalla and Dubai. By the time it would land in the Emirates, the Ugandan crowd had had their ears popped like bubble wrap in a day care.
Before I paid the thirty-three dollar fee to exit Somaliland, I waited with the baggage handlers in a circle of lawn chairs out front under a knobbly tree. One of them, Muhammad, offered a seat and translated from Somali.
“He said, ‘He came by foot?’ I said, ‘He came by boat from Yemen.’ ‘It’s incredible!’ ”
I felt a flash of guilt. I’d spent two hundred dollars on that boat for curiosity’s sake, and through their eyes, I thought, I looked cavalier with the fragile history of the region. I defended myself first on more unobjectionable grounds.
“It’s really expensive for flights,” I said.
“It’s too expensive!” said Muhammad. He smiled big and often. He sat back in his green chair, in a white shirt with slanting green stripes.
“And also . . .” I ventured, “the boat is an experience. It’s nice.”
“It’s an experience,” he affirmed, as though we had decided something momentous.
We spoke in French. Muhammad’s mother was a Somalilander but he was from Djibouti, Somalia’s forty-year-old neighbor formerly run from France. His wife and two children lived in Hargeisa, and every two weeks he took the African Express shuttle home to visit them. He spoke of his friends who had left Africa. He spoke excitedly about how to do it.
“Yes! They left here by foot, they took a car.” Those who had made it from his circle were minor legends. “By telephone he told me, haa, ‘I’m in Oslo now!’ ” Muhammad gave a hearty laugh. It was less a memory than a set of instructions, a fantasy that we could live out by hearing it aloud.
“You leave here to Ethiopia by car, from Ethiopia until the Sudan border. You go into Sudan. You go until Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. When you get there, you take a car. You go by the Sahara, the desert. You go until Libya, and from Libya you take a boat.”
He told me this twice. The price: a thousand dollars for the grueling escape by land, and another similar sum for the ferry, sometimes merely an inflatable dinghy, unprotected and unstocked. On these boats, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis joined the ranks of west African refugees and victims of political uprising.
“How long at sea?” I asked.
“The
y tell me less than sixteen hours.” Indeed, successful trips often take exactly that long to the Italian island of Lampedusa, hardly halfway from Africa to the mainland. In 2011, when the Tunisian and Libyan rebellions forced many to flee, the UNHCR estimated, two thousand of fifty thousand escapees across the Mediterranean drowned. In 2014, when ISIS coalesced as a regional threat, the number of crossings quadrupled.
A few degrees off course and the boats could strike Malta, where detention can last as long as a year and half before a decision is made. From Lampedusa, the hope is, refugees are shuttled more swiftly to Sicily, or through the UNHCR (Muhammad pronounced these letters in English) to the Netherlands or Scandinavia.
Muhammad was aware of the dangers. He had heard a pregnant woman had recently died. But all this was simply part of the no-regrets Gospel of the Refugees, both history and prescription, both legends and lessons for action.
“Why don’t they send you back?” I asked.
Muhammad was practiced. “We don’t want to go back to Libya because they’re going to kill us. There are people who will kill me there. ‘Go kill me.’ ” He said his lines to the imaginary immigration police. “ ‘You’re okay that they kill me?’ No no no, come on. ‘Okay, I’ll go.’ No no no, stop, stop.”
As a Djiboutian, Muhammad and his friends could not claim refugee status. Instead, they destroyed their passports before making landfall. In order to pass off as stateless refugees, they became them.
“They say where did you come from. ‘I came from the sky.’ ” Je suis venu du ciel. He repeated this. Ciel can also mean “heaven.”
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 33