Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  One day our mom had the idea that we should fetch water at night, when the snipers were unable to see us and there would be no line at the pump. The gates of Madinah Hospital were closed, no one was allowed to enter after dark, but Hassan and I found a spot around the back of the hospital where a rocket had destroyed part of the wall. Through that hole we were able to creep in quietly with our jerry can. The hospital militiamen who tolerated water gathering in the daytime would likely not be so kind to children sneaking in at night. Being careful not to speak, we filled up the can while hoping the sound of the crickets covered the squeak of the pump handle. We could not roll the full jerry can on the hospital grounds, it was too noisy, so Hassan and I lifted it a few feet at a time, resting our arms in between, until we reached the hole in the wall. On the road home we could hear the snipers cursing in the windows of the ministry; they could hear the can rolling down the road, but they could not spot us.

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  One morning we woke to the usual sound of gunfire but also to the voice of a man in the house. He wasn’t yelling like a fighter. Who was this male visitor in the city of women and children? We rose and saw to our dismay that it was Macalin Basbaas, the neighborhood Koranic scholar. The Angel of Punishment was back from the bush and ready to reopen his madrassa. Our mom and Khadija kept asking him, how did he survive? His answer was simple: “Alhamdulilah!” Praise be to Allah!

  He was wearing a long white clerical kanzu, and he carried a bundle of hard sticks in his hands—the switches he used on his students, which he apparently never traveled without. Mom and Khadija were nodding at his words. They talked a lot about the war, though for a few minutes they argued about the day of the week. (No one knew for sure.) Then he led us all in a long prayer. I remember the words: “May Allah save the children to grow to be religious leaders for this country.” Then we raised our right hands up and said, “Amen!” With that prayer, Hassan and I as well as Khadija’s kids had been signed up for the madrassa. War or no war, learning the Koran must go on. Even the gunmen who tormented us had studied at madrassas and could recite the holy words. Lessons would start immediately, and we left with Macalin Basbaas for his mud-walled school.

  There were only ten students including us at the school, all of us sitting on the dirt with our wooden writing boards on our laps. From that day on, Hassan and I as well as Khadija’s kids bore, besides war, thirst, and hunger, the daily beating of Macalin Basbaas and his hard sticks. Any mistake in our lessons, which consisted entirely of memorizing the Koran in Arabic, rather than our native tongue, was an excuse for a beating. Each day I memorized several verses of the Koran by heart. The first few chapters are short, and they are mostly verses I had learned at home from Mom. But each day that passed they grew longer and harder to memorize, and the flogging doubled each time we made a mistake. I felt I needed magic to carry them all in my head.

  The Angel of Punishment sent us home every evening bleeding from our wounds. Hassan was not big enough to carry me as I got weaker and weaker from the daily beatings, but he would at least hold me up as I sat during lessons. The teacher’s cruelty was not unusual or personal; all madrassas relied on corporal punishment. In fact, parents expected it as part of a rigorous education. When we got home, sometimes I could not open my mouth to describe my pain, but all Mom could see was that her sons were learning all 114 chapters of the Koran. We had missed so much school because of the war, and now was our chance to catch up on memorizing God’s holy word, to learn discipline and mental strength. She did not care about the beating, she cared about the three verses of the Koran I had memorized for the day. I was angry and felt betrayed, but the madrassa was the only type of education available to us, and children who excelled at the Koran could someday become clerics, a position of high status in Somalia. In that culture, in those terrible times, this was her way of looking out for us. Anyway the wounds from the beatings would heal, and if they didn’t, better to die memorizing the Koran than from a sniper’s bullet. Because on days when there was no madrassa—praise be to Allah!—we still had to kick that can of water past the snipers.

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  In early 1992 the Four-Month War ended in a stalemate. Exhausted militiamen, still holding guns, sat in the beds of their technicals, chewing qat, on every corner of the city. Most of these rebels were loyal to Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who was much respected by the majority of his tribe on the south side of Mogadishu, where I lived. Aidid’s rebel organization, the USC, controlled twelve of the sixteen districts of Mogadishu. The rest, mainly in the north of the city, were controlled by the warlord Ali Mahdi. Between Mahdi’s forces and Aidid’s forces, “green lines” were established that divided the city. Meanwhile, Aidid moved deep into inland Somalia with his soldiers, grabbing land and killing anyone armed who was not on his side. One of the places Aidid seized was Baidoa. When Aidid and his militias entered the town, they met the dying and starving faces of the Rahanweyn; the drought had hit hard in this area. Aidid’s militias remained in town for the next two years until the locals armed themselves and pushed back against them.

  The famine drove many from Baidoa and other areas into Mogadishu. They arrived by foot, thousands every day. The streets were filled with women and children begging and dying, very thin and ill. Many headed straight to Madinah Hospital for water. The queues at the single pump got longer and longer, hundreds of people.

  Meanwhile, the stalemate did not mean the fighting stopped, it just became sporadic and unpredictable. Usually the opposing sides would send up their rockets and shells at night, exploding in neighborhoods as we cowered in our beds, hoping we would not be among the unlucky ones who got hit. By day the rebels who had been shelling us all night hung around our streets, laughing and chewing qat.

  I could recognize some of the faces among the newly returned, people I had known in the city before the war. I saw the same kids who used to bully me, jealous that my simple Rahanweyn dad was a basketball star; now they were back with their uncles in the militias. Now they bullied all of us. Hassan, who once put them in their place, now had to stand there and take it as they punched him in the face. If we fought them, we would surely be killed by their uncles. So we were bullied every single day. This was the new order of Mogadishu. Families harassed other families. Guns ruled the city. Even kids carried around pistols and shot people. Hassan and I were more scared of teenagers than of older militiamen. There were no laws, no rules, justice did not exist. Somalia had become a failed state.

  Our Rahanweyn clan had always been stigmatized by the more powerful Hawiye, but now in the lawless city we were threatened every day. Clan became the only thing people talked about. Hassan and I learned to speak only in the Mogadishu accent, to disguise what tribe we belonged to. When someone asked us for our tribe, we even lied and said we were Hawiye. Our mom and Aseey had used the same tactic to save our lives during the flight from Mogadishu. So we were learning from them how to survive. But they were nomads from the bush. Hassan and I were born in Mogadishu, and we felt like guests in our own city. People who had never set foot in Mogadishu before the war were ruling the streets.

  When we weren’t carrying water or attending the madrassa, Hassan and I roamed the streets in search of food for our family. Everyone in Mogadishu said the same thing: “Eat anything that does not eat you.” The struggle was to survive another scorching day, and every day the chances were slim. It felt like all the curses of the universe had descended upon us. First war, then natural disaster, then disease. There were no working hospitals, no clinics or drugs to treat malaria, typhoid, dysentery, and cholera. All became things you just had to live with, or die from. Mogadishu had become a city of walking skeletons, not unlike pictures of Holocaust survivors in World War II. Somalis called it Caga Bararki, “the time of swollen feet.” Everybody’s feet had blown up like balloons due to severe malnourishment and fluid retention. It became hard to walk, but w
e had to walk to get water. So our mom used cactus thorns to pierce and drain our feet.

  In this way Hassan, Nima, and I were able to stand on our feet and also run, but our newborn sister, Sadia, was not even able to sit up. She was so tiny and thin, just skin stretched over bones, and struggling to breathe. Hassan and I watched every day as Mom let Sadia suckle on her breasts that could not even produce a drop of milk. We watched as Mom lifted up Sadia’s tiny body, trying to make her comfortable. We watched as she bathed Sadia with warm water, putting drops in her mouth. Nothing helped. Khadija was often in the room with Mom, discussing what they could do to save the baby. Finally there was only prayer. Mom had tears in her eyes as she whispered into Sadia’s face, “Please, Malakul Maut, Angel of Death, take Sadia with you. There is nothing more I can do.”

  Many times Sadia went quiet and we thought she was gone, but then she came back breathing again. Finally, one Friday morning, Malakul Maut visited our house and decided to take Sadia. When Sadia started rolling her eyes, Hassan and I avoided watching and started digging the grave for her in the front yard of Khadija’s house.

  Makeshift mass graves had popped up everywhere in Mogadishu. To earn money, men would dig graves seven feet deep, then guard the hole with shovels and wait for people to come with their dead, charging a few coins to accept the bodies. Hassan and I watched as the men with spades and the families of corpses argued over the price of burial. The men were saying they buried the bodies properly, it was hard work, and they wanted money in return. Hassan and I discussed how we would handle this if our mom died. Definitely we would not have money to pay the men for a proper burial. We knew we would only be able to cover her with a little sand, like everyone else with no money did, leaving her body exposed to the dogs.

  So we tried to dig as deep as two little boys could for baby Sadia. We had to be careful because Khadija had other bodies including her own son buried in the same spot. Right away our shovel hit the foot of a dead person; we kept moving around until we found a small space unoccupied to bury Sadia.

  By the time the grave was ready, Sadia was dead. I looked at my baby sister and kissed her on the forehead. We wrapped her in a small white scarf and laid her in her tiny grave before sunset, when the dogs would start roaming the streets. Mom cried tears of sadness but also tears of joy because she knew Malakul Maut had carried Sadia’s soul up to heaven, and in Islam a child’s death means protection for the mom from hell. Then we poured sand all over her until we could no longer see her. No one came for condolences. Hassan and I shared the death of our sister with friends and people in the neighborhood, but no one expressed sorrow or even cared. Death was everywhere; it was not a big deal. It was nothing to talk about. After a few prayers we got on with our own survival. In a few days Sadia’s grave disappeared into the dust; she did not have a grave marker, just sand.

  Lucky for our sister she had left the cruel world of guns and bloodshed. She was now in heaven eating sweet ripe fruit and floating on a river of milk and honey guarded by the angels. The rest of us trudged on with our daily struggles. Every morning we got up and made sure everyone was still breathing and alive. Mom prayed and read the Koran for another day of survival.

  The stories Mom told us about heaven, life after death, and the privilege of being a Muslim child encouraged us to not fear the end. Mom talked about the rivers of milk and honey, the beautiful endless good life in heaven. No wars, no bullying. It made us feel guilty for living in the hell on earth, like we had done something bad to deserve it. Another thing our mom told us that made us strong and kept us going: “Allah is watching us.” She said all our struggles and difficult days were tests from Allah, and the strongest and most faithful would be rewarded in heaven. So every morning Mom reminded us to pray to Allah, and Hassan and I spent five minutes praying.

  It turned out that unlike the citizens of Mogadishu religion was surviving the war very well. With all the people returning from the bush, small mosques were popping up on every corner. The madrassas were now packed with students. Macalin Basbaas stood in his school, under a thick roof of sticks, and supervised our daily Arabic reading of the Koran. On school days Hassan and I walked down to the madrassa with a container of black ink, our adrenaline pumping as we got near the entrance. Macalin Basbaas was always torturing a student for minor mistakes. If you were one minute late for school, you would get twenty minutes of beating. If you had not memorized the lesson of the day, you could be hung by your wrists for hours.

  The morning after Sadia died, Hassan and I thought we would be forgiven for being a little late, but Macalin Basbaas did not care. That day he beat us so bad that I thought of quitting the madrassa, but I knew it could never happen, because Mom would disown me and anyway Macalin Basbaas would come down the street and find me and drag me back to school, with another beating for sure. There was no escape. In Somalia, madrassa teachers are second in rank after dads. What they say cannot be rejected even by the parents. Still, even the Angel of Punishment allowed students to leave early and find water and food for their families. The end of the class in the afternoon was always a happy moment for us, but the next morning the beatings would resume.

  5

  Arabic to English

  By late 1992 some rain had finally come to Somalia, and people were selling food on the street—small piles of tomatoes, bundles of sugarcane, ears of corn—which they had brought in from the countryside. We desperately needed coins to buy some of this food, so Hassan and I hatched a plan to make some money. We tried hawking on the streets, selling anything we could find. First we collected firewood from near the airport, where the drought had killed so many trees, leaving piles of dead sticks. We collected them and ran after people, begging them to buy our firewood. But no one would buy. People had so little money and could collect firewood themselves. So we came up with a different plan: selling water. At this point we had two twenty-liter jerry cans, so Hassan and I would split up. He would get water for families in the city too afraid to risk their lives crossing by the snipers and willing to pay a few shillings for the chore. With the second can, I would get water for our family. Hassan learned he could move faster, and earn more money, by carrying his water can on his back, lashing it around his forehead with a scarf. But eventually this caused him so much back and shoulder pain that he screamed in agony every night. We needed another plan.

  The militiamen were all addicted to qat, which they chewed constantly and which energized them to fight. The qat came into Mogadishu by boat and by land, a lot of it from Kenya. I remembered my dad chewing qat before the government collapsed; he was always happy when he was chewing. That’s when he took me to restaurants and bought me things. I knew some of the militiamen might also be in a happy mood while chewing, so Hassan and I would sneak behind them and pick up the leaves they dropped, which we could then resell. We joined a group of other kids who roamed the streets day and night collecting loose qat leaves that militiamen would drop or that had been left behind at the stands where women hawked their bundles of leaves.

  Eventually, we grew bolder. When the fresh qat entered the city escorted by trucks full of militiamen, we ran after the trucks, jumping on and stealing leaves from the rebels while they were not watching. Many times the butt of a gun would hit me and send me tumbling off the moving truck empty-handed. But other times I ended up with some fresh leaves that I could sell on the streets. Many times my stash was later taken at gunpoint or with a knife on my neck. But sometimes I was lucky to get some cash.

  Of course there was no government to print currency, so before long the paper shilling notes still in circulation had become torn and tattered. When the rebels did give us money for loose qat, they always paid with the filthiest, shredded five-hundred-shilling bills they had—basically money they felt was useless. The market ladies selling food would not accept these bills, so Hassan and I devised a plan. We learned from our mom, wise woman of plants, about a plant called the
apple of Sodom whose leaves and twigs contained a milky sap like glue. We collected these leaves and squeezed out enough sap to carefully glue the shredded bills together. Then we waited to do our shopping until dusk, when it would be harder for the ladies to see the money. This usually worked.

  It felt like bringing a medal home as we walked into the house with maize, milk, and fruits for our family. Mom cooked the maize, put it in a bowl, and added milk. Hassan, Nima, and I sat in a circle surrounding the bowl. Mom would not eat until we were full. She always ate just the little bit that stuck to the bottom of the pot, scraping every last bit of it out.

  Nima had sunk further into what seemed like insanity. She mostly spent her days outside the house, digging ditches in the sand with her hands, as if she wanted to make her own grave and get in it. Sometimes she sat right on top of Sadia’s grave with her cheek on the sand, like she was communicating with our dead sister. When Hassan and I arrived home, Nima would run and hug us. In the conservative Somali culture, girls never associate with men, even their own brothers, but Hassan and I refused to accept that and always allowed our sister around us when we were home. She was not going to the madrassa, but Hassan and I taught her the basics of the Koran by reading to her in Arabic, and she picked up some verses, even though she had almost no energy left.

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