Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  Dad spent most of his time away from home, training with the basketball squad. Usually he returned on Thursday for two days (Friday being the holy day), still wearing his red Somali team shirt and bringing gifts of clothes and toys for us, sometimes jewelry for Mom.

  Our neighbor Siciid visited often when Dad was at home. They sat under the neem tree in the evening chewing qat leaves and talking late into the night. Mom was exiled to the house while the men talked, but from time to time she brought them tea. Siciid looked short and fat compared to Dad, a smile constantly fixed to his round face. Like Mom he told many stories and also jokes, and he provoked Dad into arguments, just for the fun of it. Siciid was a professional driver who earned his living delivering food and oil for the government. He came home after work smelling of fruit or oil or whatever he had been transporting that day.

  Sometimes Dad took me to watch him train at the Horseed Stadium in downtown Mogadishu. Mom dressed me up with a nice clean vest and shorts. The court was behind a thick concrete wall; police with dogs patrolled around, fending off people who tried to sneak in to watch the players. Some of the fans would climb up a tall tree to get a view over the wall. They sat there for hours watching as my dad and his teammates, the best in Somalia, played basketball all afternoon. I had the honor to walk into the building with my dad holding my tiny hand in his big hairy one. People greeted him like a star and also gave me a gentle touch on the head. The police and soldiers saluted him like he was a general. Dad played for hours, and eventually I would fall asleep on the stairs, only waking on his shoulders as he carried me home.

  The training ground was one kilometer from our house, and we walked home in the evening past the big KM4 traffic island, the Cinema Ecuatore, and shops and restaurants bursting with laughter, music, and discussion. People talked about concerts and plays at the theaters. The famous Waberi entertainment club presented great shows on Friday that would make people laugh a lot. There were famous comedians like Aw Kuku, Aw Kombe, and Aw Daango. Most would be killed or displaced soon, during the civil war.

  In the old part of town, above the ruins of the medieval sultanates’ castles, rose the white spires of the ancient Arba’a Rukun mosque and the Catholic cathedral, which had been built by the Italians. We could see the ocean beyond the Almara lighthouse, built of stone in the fifteenth century when Mogadishu was a major African port, and we felt the power of the sea breeze against our faces. “Mogadishu is a great city,” I thought, “maybe the greatest in the world.” The White Pearl of the Indian Ocean, they called it. I felt so lucky.

  * * *

  —

  My earliest memories of Mogadishu always include my brother, Hassan. He was a hero to me, only one year older but always my protector from the other boys in the neighborhood who tried to bully me. Hassan was without fear and would fight with boys older than himself; sometimes he would fight with three at the same time, returning home with cuts to his body and dust on his clothes. On one occasion I was attacked by two boys who threw me to the ground, then punched and kicked me. I didn’t tell my mom, but I did tell Hassan, who went after them and beat them. Even though I was smaller than Hassan, I ate more than he could, and I snatched food from his hands. Still he did not chase me. But we played fun games like hide-and-seek, gariir (a type of marbles game using rocks), and blindman’s bluff.

  Hassan went to the madrassa, where he learned the Koran with eighty other boys sitting on the sand in a shack. There was no paper; the students wrote on long wooden boards, using ink made from coal. They wrote a passage from the Koran in Arabic, memorized and repeated it, then washed off the ink and wrote the next passage. All day they did this. Mistakes were severely punished by the teacher, a scowling bearded man named Macalin Basbaas, roughly translated as “the teacher who uses hot pepper and scorpions to bite on wounds.” Never was someone better named, though later we nicknamed him the Angel of Punishment. Hassan returned home bleeding from the beatings he got.

  The madrassas were the only kind of school in Mogadishu, and there was nothing to learn there except the Koran. So my mom became my greatest teacher. She could cook, bake, and sing like any good Somali mom is supposed to, but what I loved most about her were the tales she told us about her nomadic youth. She would sit cross-legged under the neem tree with Hassan and me while our baby sister, Nima, perhaps a little more than a year old, slept with her thumb in her mouth. Mom would talk of her time as a herdswoman in the desert scrub, protecting the goats and the camels from lions and hyenas.

  She told us about the day when a hyena suddenly appeared, growling and gnashing teeth. She chased it with her stick through the scrub before returning to the herd, knowing she should get the animals to the corral near her parents before darkness, when the hyenas would be at their most dangerous. But the pack had already scattered the herd. Without fear she chased them, for Somalis value their goats and camels as much as their own lives. A hyena leaped at her, pinning her to the ground, its sharp claws cutting into her neck. Luckily, her uncle arrived and started striking the hyena with a stick. Three days later, still in great pain, she was sent out again by her parents to mind the herd.

  My head rested on her lap, looking up at the hyena scar on her neck. She still wore the necklace she had on when she met my dad—black beads made from hard, polished wenge wood, the sort worn by women in the bush but rarely seen in the city. I wondered how my quiet mom, who hid in the house when men visited, could chase hyenas.

  The scariest story she told was about the night when a lion entered the hut where a relative was sleeping with his children. This hut was made of discarded plastic and paper. A paper house is no match for a hungry lion, and that big cat dragged the man out into the bush screaming and crying while his children slept. Mom was one of the people who came out of the huts armed with spears, but when they reached him, he was almost dead. “There was a whistling sound coming from his neck where the teeth had sunk in,” she said. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see dead people.

  The story of the lion haunted me and gave me nightmares. I sometimes asked myself, “What if I was born a nomad?” Surely I would be killed by a lion. I hated death. I just wanted to live a good life like the one we had and hang on my dad’s shoulders walking around town being cheered. Mom told us these stories not to scare us but to help us understand life in the bush, to appreciate it and remember the details. Her goal was to keep us from becoming city boys who know little about nomad life. She wanted us to not mock other nomads who came to the city but respect them and listen to their stories. We were also able to learn and speak the nomadic Rahanweyn dialect because Mom told all her stories in Maay. She trained us in the house and courtyard on how to fight, climb trees, and jump. Hassan and I could jump higher than most of the boys in the neighborhood.

  One morning when I was around six, I woke up to see feathers covering the mat under the neem tree; a bird had been killed by someone’s cat, Mom said, but all I could think of was a lion. “There are no lions in the city,” she said, but I wasn’t sure.

  I asked Mom how the birds can be protected. “These birds are our guests,” I said. “How come we can’t save them?” She had no answer. After dark I went out to the tree and said to the birds, “I can’t protect you from the lion tonight; may Allah be with you.”

  * * *

  —

  It was around that same time when Dad told our family that the basketball was finished and he would be staying at home now. I didn’t know how basketball could be finished. There was always another game, on another day. Could there be no more days? Soon I began to notice people were tense and there were lots of changes in our routines. Siciid was now with us most of the time, returning to his own house only to sleep and spending long hours with Dad listening to the radio. His wife and children had left Mogadishu and gone to stay with relatives in the north of Somalia. Like Dad, he had stopped going to work.

  Dad and Siciid talke
d about politics. Since the end of the bloody Ogaden War with Ethiopia in 1978, Somalia’s economy was limping. Inflation was so high you needed baskets of paper money just to buy a kilo of Italian pasta (Mogadishans learned to love spaghetti from their colonizers), when you could even find it. People were angry at President Siad Barre, especially the people around Mogadishu who were mainly from the Hawiye clan. Siad Barre came from the rival Darod clan up north. There were five major clans in Somalia, but since independence the Hawiye and the Darod had nominated themselves as the only people who could be president or prime minister; members of other clans could only be members of the Parliament or the cabinet. Soon, instead of presidents and prime ministers, the Hawiye and the Darod would give us brutal warlords.

  Before the Ogaden War, when he was still popular, Siad Barre managed to keep the Hawiye people under control, and he watched them carefully. One of their leaders, an army general named Mohamed Farrah Aidid, had been jailed for a time. Now he was free again and ready to fight his Darod rival, thanks to weapons and money he was getting from Ethiopia, which also hated Siad Barre because of the war. Aidid had whipped up the Hawiye of the rural areas, and that’s where the fighting was going on, like a bunch of lions and hyenas in the bush. But how long could this fight stay out in the bush?

  Of course I was too young to understand any of this, I didn’t even understand that spaghetti came from a place called Italy or that no spaghetti would soon be the least of our problems. I just wanted to go to the snack bar. I begged Dad to take me, but for the first time ever I saw that his face was not happy. In his eyes I saw fear; I could feel it like the way I felt when boys in the neighborhood bullied me. This was a new thing to see in my dad, and while I understood it as part of something larger beginning, all I could think of was that everything I knew was ending.

  He did not want to take me to the snack bar, he said.

  2

  The First Bullets

  I wake up in Maine a grown man, but in my nightmares I am still a boy in Mogadishu after the basketball finished. What happened after the basketball is never in the past, it lives again every night in my sleep, and sometimes when I am awake.

  * * *

  —

  Finally one day the fighters arrive, looting the shops and firing the first bullets of the bloody civil war. At night I hear bullets hitting the neem tree and the birds flying off in all directions. The next morning I wake up to see mattresses, beds, food, basketballs, and Dad’s basketball trophies all packed outside. Dad is carrying the most important things in a gunnysack with one hand and a mattress in the other hand. Left behind are the jiimbaar and the wooden shelves that Mom uses to keep Dad’s clothes clean and pressed. Sacks of flour, rice, and corn must be abandoned. Mom carries our clothes, our sister’s formula, milk, and a few cooking utensils, plus Nima on her back, wrapped in a big scarf the African way. She is also pregnant with her fourth child. Hassan and I are trailing behind our parents on a dusty, scorching day with bullets and smoke all over the city.

  After we walk just a few yards, I start crying to be carried. Mom ignores me, reciting verses from the Koran, looking on both sides of the streets before we cross. I can hear gun and rocket fire in the distance; what I can see is looting and destruction. As we walk, I see huge padlocks on the gates of houses I know in the neighborhood; people have already fled. The locks mean they are hoping to return; maybe this will all blow over in a few weeks. Everywhere I see moms holding the hands of other kids my age, standing on the side of the road in shock. I hear screams and crying children. The small restaurant where I used to go with Dad, named for its owner, Hashi, is being looted. The food goes quickly; then two thin ragged men try to take the iron gate for their own house. Hashi belongs to the tribe of President Siad Barre, who has been ousted by these rebels, and Mom is worried about his whereabouts. There is a crowd gathered a short distance from the restaurant where a dead body is lying facedown—the first corpse I would see. It turned out to be Hashi’s body. Rebels in civilian dress are laughing and throwing their arms in the air in triumph, smashing the windows of shops with their rifle butts before racing each other to collect the most valuable pickings. Most of them wear a macawis, which is worn mainly in the bush. That’s how we know the rebels are not city people; they have come into town from the outlands and are probably seeing shops and restaurants for the first time, just as my parents had several years before.

  When there is nothing left to loot from the shops, I see people being robbed at gunpoint. On every street, buildings are on fire. A rebel in a pickup truck is passing guns to a group of teenagers. One fires off his gun by accident, causing his comrades to scatter into porches and behind cars. They are spilling out of Toyota Land Cruisers with the roofs sawed off. The drivers honk and wave in victory as soldiers in the open cab shake their rifles in the air and dance. Some jump out and run after us, holding a gun in one hand while holding up their loose pants and macawis. Apparently, they have not yet looted belts. All of them are very black-skinned, much darker and thinner than the Mogadishans who have skin more the color of the supermodel Iman, also from Mogadishu. They call themselves nicknames based on their features, like gangsters I would see in Hollywood movies. Names I can hear are Daga Weyne (Long-Eared), Afdheere (Long Mouth), Ileey (One-Eyed), Gacmeey (One-Handed). The pro Siad Barre slogans on the streets are gone. Now the signs call him “Big Mouth” and “The Brutal One.” The word Jaalle has been changed to Faqash, which means “Killer.” The Hawiye militias are killing anyone who says Jaalle. You better say Faqash. Dad and Mom practice the new word and are ready to say it.

  “They are giving guns out like sweets!” Dad says. “Who is in charge of these people?”

  With the civil war spreading into the city, some people manage to escape by boats, airplanes, ships, and even cars crossing into neighboring countries. Most of these people who escape worked for the government. Some of my dad’s own teammates got helped by their tribal affiliation to get to America, Canada, or the United Kingdom. No one has even contacted my dad. The country is divided by clans and tribes, and people help only people they are related to by those groups. My dad’s Rahanweyn clan are the farmers and nomads who cannot help him escape. So my parents must use their nomad skills to try to save us. What nomads do is walk. We will walk to safety.

  And so we embark on a walk that I will never forget. For years we called it the walk of death.

  Seven miles of walking and we arrive at the house of our relative Mumin, who is a general in the Somali army. Mumin is my dad’s cousin, he’s the only man in our extended family to be in the army’s highest ranks. He is educated, having studied at Lafoole University in Mogadishu before deciding to join the army. His house is behind a wall with a gate. Mumin appears at the gate not in his usual uniform but in a red T-shirt and black trousers, his hands nervously scratching at his mustache. The blue Somali flag is still flying over his house. “There’s no one who can stop the fighting,” he says. “No one is talking to anyone else, just fighting.” He looks at the flag and shakes his head. He mentions that the government is still holding on to the airport, but President Siad Barre has already fled. The rebels seem unstoppable, and a general would be a certain target. “I must leave with my family because it’s everyone for himself,” he says. “I hope that you will be safe here.” He wipes his fingers on my face and Hassan’s, but our tears run harder.

  “We’ll be all right here,” Dad tells Mumin. “We’ll stay the night and move on in the morning.”

  So we are to sleep in the home of a general in the defeated army, while rebels shoot their way across the city looking for government officials to slaughter. It does not seem very safe. The rooms of the house are all packed with neighbors and Rahanweyn from all over the city, mostly women and children, so we must sleep outside. We lay our mattresses on the grass in the courtyard while Dad remains near the gate. I can hear the Rahanweyn dialect. People are scared; men like my dad ar
e pacing back and forth thinking of what to do. He puts his hairy hands in his pockets searching for the last remnant of qat leaves to chew. My dad believes his thinking is better while he chews qat. No one is interested in him, no one is paying attention to the popular Nur Dhere, the handsome and famous basketball player. People are too worried for their lives.

  It is an uncomfortable night of blasts and mosquito bites. The back side of Mumin’s house borders on the largest Somali hospital, Madinah Hospital. Same name as Mom. That night the militias are busy looting the hospital, grabbing anything valuable to sell. We can hear the looting and shouting; they kick down doors and break glass, even tearing off the roof. We rise early to find bullet holes in the gate of Mumin’s house, and we slip away quietly.

  * * *

  —

  The road south runs along the sea. Out on the waves, white ships like whales move slowly in the distance. Later I find out these ships are evacuating government officials. On the land, cows, donkeys, stray dogs, and chickens move aimlessly through the crowds of people. A thin man is painting the letters USC—United Somali Congress, the main militia group of Aidid—in white on every wall. Someone else draws a rough face with a big mouth and labels it “Siad Barre.”