“Yes, but everything else, too. You cannot sign a rent contract, for example. The landlord will not sign. So you have nowhere to live.”
“What if one of them wins the lottery and has ten million dollars?” I ask.
“You can have as much money as you like; you will not be allowed to buy a home. Nobody will employ you or sell you anything or buy anything from you. There are places for these people: shelters, food kitchens. They make sure that you do not starve to death, but that is all.”
I say nothing. It seems churlish to quibble. In time, his picture of America will no doubt change. But for now what he sees are the terms of a grand contract. He lives in a country where everything he ever does leaves a trace, and every trace is judged. If he abides by the rules, America will care for him. If he does not, it will ruin him.
Whether he has asked himself if America will honor its side of the deal I am not sure. At this early stage, it is probably not a helpful question to ask.
The idea of this contract has freed him, he says. It has filled him with confidence. And with confidence, he has found work. It is only parking cars at a rental agency, but it pays $8.50 an hour, enough to pay the rent and feed and clothe his family; enough to stand back and ask what he is going to do next.
His idea is to drive a truck or, even better, to use his share of the royalties for this book as a down payment for a truck of his own. He has already taken the first of several exams to get a commercial permit.
“This is a good place,” he says. “The future is close. If I reach out with my arm, I can almost touch it.”
We are on our way home now, walking again across the pretty square park where he used to take his children. I do not think that his immigrant’s zeal is illusory. He is an immensely competent man. His capacity to read a place for ways it might secrete money is now hardwired into his being. If it is possible for a stranger with no formal education to earn a good living here, he will do it.
And then what? As soon as he is able, he says, he will go to Somaliland and find his two lost children. He will bring them here.
“And Foosiya?” I ask.
“She is their mother. I will offer to find a way for her to come, too.”
“What if she is married to another man and has children with him?”
“They must all come.”
We walk on in silence, but he can hear my skepticism in the sound of my gait.
“Brother,” he says, “I cannot know the details. I cannot plan the whole thing from A to Z. I can only deal with each problem as it comes to me.”
Perhaps it is the heat: walking beside him, my thoughts about Asad take on a corporeal form. From his neck to his midriff, I see extending before him a translucent bubble, visible only when the light hits it from the right angle. It is here that he lives most fiercely, not in his flesh and bones. He is a paterfamilias. He is gathering the children he has spawned around his new American life. It is a long, slow project. It may take forever.
—
During my time in Kansas City, I make myself useful. Asad works eight or nine hours a day. While he is gone, Musharaf needs to be fetched from school, Rahma to attend doctors’ appointments, Sadicya to shop. Public transportation in this city is patchy, and Sadicya does not drive. So I come each morning, and Asad and I take our daily walk. Then he leaves for work and I stay and ferry various family members to wherever they need to go.
His departure is always difficult for it draws from Rahma the most terrible grief. She sees the signs of his leaving early—a change of shirt, a search for shoes—and she sits herself down on the living room floor and wails. When he closes the door behind him, her crying gives way to screeching and I feel her rage and her lostness in my bones. She does not stop, sometimes for more than an hour.
She is two years and five months old, and she speaks neither Somali nor English, but her own invented language. On the first day, Asad puts an arm around me, pokes a finger into my chest, and says, “This is Jonny.”
She looks me over skeptically, from head to toe.
“In twenty minutes,” Asad says, “she will have her own name for you.”
And so she does. Later in the day, she begins calling me “Guffer,” and that is what I remain. Her brother, Musharaf, is “Mick,” her bed is “misser,” to sleep is to “ssssshz,” a car is a “bleeper.”
She and Asad have long conversations, he in Somali, she in her gobbledygook. They are always eye to eye when they talk; she stands on her father’s thighs and holds his face, feeling for the vibrations of his voice in his jaws.
She will not take her eyes off him, will not stop touching him. When he is walking around the house, she is wrapped around his back. When he is talking to me, she is curled up in his lap. When we eat a meal, she sits on his knee and eats from his plate.
Once, on a trip to the supermarket with the two of them, I turn into an aisle and come upon the oddest scene. She is sitting on the floor weeping, her legs stretched out in front of her. He has crouched down very low, his mouth over her ear. He is whispering to her. His eyes are downcast, his face full of care, full of love. As I walk past them, I am, momentarily, close enough to hear: “Sorry,” he says, over and over again. “I am so, so sorry.”
In the car, I ask what has upset her.
“She pooed in her pants,” he replies mildly. “It is her worst experience. It humiliates her.”
—
On my third day in Kansas City, Rahma has a doctor’s appointment half an hour before Asad starts work; time is tight. He bundles her and Sadicya into his car, and I follow to the hospital. It is only once we are there that I see how little Sadicya can do. Asad must find the doctor’s room, for Sadicya could never do so on her own. He must answer the nurse’s simple questions—Rahma’s age, the family’s address, their Medicaid details—for Sadicya cannot. Asad is now late for work. I rush out with him so that we can swap Rahma’s baby seat from his car to mine. He disappears into the traffic, and I walk slowly back inside.
I hear Rahma screaming from a hundred yards away. By the time I reach the doctor’s waiting room, it is deafening. She is lying on her back howling for all she’s worth. Asad has been gone twenty minutes now, and still, she is enraged. A group of three ladies, all of them elderly and large, have gathered around her. They are charming and lovely, and they are trying to cheer her up.
“Any minute now, you’re gonna set me to cryin’, child,” one them says. “You’re gonna set me to cryin’ and that ain’t something you want to see. No, ma’am, you do not wanna set me to cryin’.”
Sadicya is on the couch next to Rahma. Her body is turned from her daughter, her chin is lifted, and her gaze is fixed on something in another world. She is here but not here. The howls that fill the room are background noise.
I saw Sadicya so often in Cape Town, but I did not know her at all. We shared almost no language. She expressed no desire to communicate with me. And, besides, Asad and I sat always in my car, and she was thus forever out of sight.
It is only now that I see the extent of her disability and thus the full weight of Asad’s burden. It is for him to earn a living, to see that Musharaf attends the after-school programs necessary for him to catch up, that he has the right equipment for baseball and soccer, that Rahma sees the doctor, that there are linens on the beds and food in the fridge.
And it is for him to love the children.
Perhaps I misinterpreted his irritation when I arrived late. Moving his family from one day to the next is a multipronged campaign requiring more limbs than he has. The tasks that stack up waiting for Tuesday, his precious day off, must be longer than his arm. To set aside the day to see me is already a sacrifice; I had not appreciated what it might mean for me to come three hours late.
During my time in Kansas City, I meet Somali women who drive cars, who work in offices, who run their households. I meet Somali women who play with their children. When Asad came across Sadicya and Musharaf in the wake of the violence, the mother hun
ched over a gas burner, the child looking lost, his judgment had been right. They would have died without his help; Sadicya was no longer able to make her way in the world.
When I ask Asad about it, he is philosophical.
“You cannot change a person’s nature,” he says quietly.
“And if she never learns to drive?” I ask. “If she is never able to shop for food or talk to a doctor about her daughter’s illness?”
“Brother, I hope she gets to learn these things,” he says.
He is far more concerned by something else. Of Kansas City’s small Somali population, more than half are Ogadeni. People have been giving him trouble about Sadicya. With contempt in their voices, they ask why he stooped to marry a Galgale.
“I tell them that who I marry is my business. ‘No,’ they say. ‘When you stoop, we all stoop. When you bury your face in shit, our faces stink too.’ ”
“There were many Ogadeni in Cape Town,” I say. “Did they not say things like that?”
“In Cape Town,” he replies, “you fight people who insult you. Here, if you fight, you go to jail and you lose your Social Security. One of the problems of living in this country is that people can say what they like to your face.”
There is a hint of irony in his voice, as if the whole matter can be brushed aside with a little humor. But his face is dark and furrowed. He is not telling me the full story, I think. He is holding in reserve some of the pain that throbs from the stigmata on his skin.
“When I told you the story about Sadicya,” he asks, “and you went away and read about the people they call the Galgale, what did you learn?”
I tell him that they have no place in Somali genealogy; they are not among the six great clans that constitute the Somali nation and are thus found in Somali history only as negatives, as people who are not.
“What do you mean, they cannot be found in Somali history?” he asks. “They are nothing but Somali. They were always there. How can you say that they were there, but they were also not there? Who has the right to tell them: ‘My forebears were there; yours were not’? Whoever says that is an idiot.”
He is speaking in no more than a murmur. We are in his sitting room, Sadicya is in the kitchen, and he does not want her to overhear. But even in these quiet tones I sense the force of his rage.
He may be an immensely competent man, I think to myself, but the violence in his past still hobbles him. It has taken corporeal form—it is the burden of Sadicya and Musharaf. He was reeling when he met them. The pogroms had slashed at the flesh of his being. He had become half man, half child. It was only by taking these scorned people under his wing that he could escape their fate and become an adult again. They are the scars of his past and price of his restoration.
—
On my fourth day in Kansas City, a sudden burst of communication from Sadicya.
“I must find work,” she says. “It is a very big something. That I get money.”
She is sitting in the backseat of my car with her daughters. I have just taken her to an appointment at the other end of the city. We are almost home. I eye her in the rearview mirror.
“Why?” I ask.
“My grandmother. She in refugee camp in Kenya. I must bring her. My sister. My sister in Kismayo. She suffer. I must bring her.”
“What work will you do?” I ask.
“Any work. Any. Whatever. Cleaning. Whatever.”
Neither of us says anything more. We get home, and I watch her and her children make their way indoors. She turns and waves from the front door, her cheeks bulging from under her head scarf. I have glanced for no more than an instant through a tiny crack in the door to her world. That is enough to have learned a great deal. It will cost Asad all his worth to track down his children, to bring them here, to settle them. It may take him the rest of his life. Her family, I surmise, is far from his thoughts. She is powerless to enforce her will upon this world. Between her and Asad lies a chasm.
—
“Why are you unable to read the book?” I ask.
He glances at me briefly, on his face a look of apology, I think. I am not sure.
It is early evening. Although the whole family is home there is a stillness about the house. He is staring out of the window. Rahma has fallen asleep in his lap, and he cups her head in his open palm.
“I am not demanding that you read it,” I continue. “If it is too upsetting, then of course you mustn’t. But I worry. What if I’ve said things that will hurt you or offend you? What if I’ve said things that are just wrong?”
“When you said a book,” he begins, “I thought you would ask ten questions and then go and write. I never thought…” He throws his head back and laughs. “You came back and back and back. You went deeper and deeper and deeper.”
“I went to Ethiopia—”
“That was fine. I was happy for you to go there, to see for yourself. But when you said you want to come here to Kansas City and it was for more book. Man!”
I smile to myself. Right at the beginning, a few weeks after I began interviewing him, he asked to see a book I had written about South Africa’s prison gangs. He had just spent a weekend in the cells of a police station, and had had his first rude encounter with the fearsome 28s. He had wanted to know more.
I gave him the book, and when we saw each other next he told me that he’d spent several days dipping in and out of it. From then on, during the sessions in my car, I thought I detected a change in the way he told stories. He was much more attentive to the particular; he was straining, I thought, to capture the woof of his childhood days. He froze moments and described them with care; he began speaking of objects, of things. I was so appreciative. From his reading, I imagined, he had imbibed what it meant to fashion a book from a conversation. He was helping me in my task.
It is amazing how we—I—listen for what we most want to hear. For months I had walked around with this idea of a collaboration between us, one we both fully understood. I try to remember when I started doubting this story. I do not recall.
“What is it that upsets you when you read it?” I ask.
“It is two things,” he says crisply. “The one is the loss, loss, loss. First I lose my mother. Then I lose my home. Then I lose Yindy. Then the AliYusuf in Nairobi. Then I lose Yindy’s family in Wardheer. Then Rooda. Then I lose my uncle, then my cousin, then Foosiya and my children. Everywhere, it is loss, loss, loss.”
His raised voice has woken Rahma. She crawls out of the fetal position in which she had been sleeping and lies on her back. She is watchful, her eyes on her father’s face.
I am on the brink of telling him that he did in fact lose all these things, but I check myself. The import of what he has conveyed is so obvious that there is nothing to say.
I have spent the last couple of years memorializing his life. But there is no intrinsic value in remembering. He has in fact just told me that he cannot afford to take in the sweep of his life. To remember in this way is crippling. It is better for him, I think, to see his past as a series of sparks or flashes, a selection of moments when he was the one who decided what would happen next. That is what he must see in his past in order to craft a future.
This book is for me and for those who read it. It is of no value to him but for the money that will come his way. He will buy a truck with that money, or a part of a truck. From this book he will fashion another moment when he is the one who decides.
“What is the second thing that upset you?” I ask.
“The business with her,” he says, pointing his chin at the kitchen, where Sadicya is preparing dinner. “I think of Abdullahi people reading this book and feeling shameful. They will be angry.”
He stares out of the window. I stare at him.
“Are you asking me to take Sadicya’s origins out of the book?” I ask eventually.
“No,” he says quietly. “It is shameful for them to feel shameful. I don’t care.”
I could push the point, but it is in my int
erests to hold my tongue. I cast an eye into the future and see a time when he regrets having answered my question thus.
Rahma has crawled up in his lap again. Her thumb is in her mouth, her nose pressed up against his side. From the kitchen comes the smell of chicken and the crackling of meat in a pan. Sadicya is calling Musharaf to the table. We will eat in a moment. And after dinner I will say good-bye.
Acknowledgments
First thanks go to Pearlie Joubert, who introduced me to Asad Abdullahi and vouched for my trustworthiness. I am enormously grateful.
When I began working with Asad in September 2010 I was a senior researcher at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (Huma) at the University of Cape Town. In exchange for a monthly salary, I was obliged only to research and write what I liked, an inordinately privileged position. Many thanks to my former colleagues Deborah Posel, Shamil Jeppie, Natasha Distiller, and Heather Maytham.
Halfway through this project, I moved to the African Studies Centre at Oxford University. The formidable cohort of doctoral students who ran the Horn of Africa Seminar gave me the induction I needed to the politics of Somalia and Ethiopia. I am especially indebted to Emma Lochery who so generously shared both her deep knowledge and her circle of Ethiopian friends.
Many thanks to Hiruy Gossaye, who helped me get inside Bole Mikhael.
I was blessed to visit Dire Dawa and Harar in the company of Khalid Yousuph who, with grace and without inhibition, showed me so much of his own life.
I am also immensely grateful to Mohamed Mohamud, without whom I would not have discovered the life histories of Asad’s parents.
Many thanks to David Godwin, Jeremy Boraine, and Dan Franklin. Special thanks to Dan Frank and Betsy Sallee, with whom it has been such a pleasure to work.
I am grateful, as ever, to Mark Gevisser for his shrewd eye, and to Tony Hamburger who helped me better to understand Asad’s relationship with Sadicya.
Thank you, again, to Lomin Saayman, for more than I can possibly say here. And to Carol Steinberg and David Jammy, my bedrock.
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