Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  Meanwhile, I hated growing older—not because I was afraid of getting old, but because each year added to my potential to end up in trouble. I had watched boys turn into feared militia fighters when they became teenagers, killing people and chewing qat. Once you enter that life, there is no going back. The choices were so narrow. You could become a sheikh and call the mosque your home, or you could carry a gun. To me, either was going down a dark path to a world I did not want to live in. My mom did her best. She woke up early every morning and forced me to get up and pray. My prayers took two minutes; hers lasted two hours. Even though she could not read the Koran, she prayed in Somali. On and on. She prayed for our family, for food on our table, for farms and livestock in Baidoa. None were answered. “Allah has plans for us,” she always said. Meanwhile, Hassan was making his own plans.

  * * *

  —

  My brother had returned to the streets after his malaria bout, and he had been hanging out more often at Zobe Square with the men. I would walk down Zobe Street and see him and his friend Hussein sitting against a wall, hiding from the baking sun. I would sit next to them and talk about life.

  “I want to leave Somalia,” Hassan told me one day.

  “You have been saying that for years,” I said. “You are still dreaming.”

  “Now it’s for real,” he said. “Now I will do it. I have the buufis.”

  Buufis. That was a word meaning “temptation to leave,” and it was being used by young Somalis who had seen all the money coming in from abroad and wanted to get their own life away from Mogadishu. Hassan was still dreaming, but his dream was growing bigger.

  “Where would you go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Kenya, Djibouti. But I want to leave Somalia.” Young men his age were leaving for Yemen, Kenya, Dubai, Saudi Arabia. These places were by now dealing with so many Somali refugees that it had become a crisis, and they were putting people in refugee camps. Hassan told me that if he left Somalia, he would earn money and send us some, fifty or a hundred dollars a month; that would help our family stay together. These things Hassan told me sounded good, but I did not want him to leave us; we would miss him, but also we would be worried for him, because in Mogadishu there was no communication system. If he left, how would we ever find out about him?

  Nearby, a crowd of elderly men were engaged in the regular fadhi kudirir debate, a Somali custom where men (never women) gather over tea and talk about clans, politics, animals, and other important topics. They were talking about how great the refugee camps were in Kenya and Yemen. They said the camps were a gateway to America. Some of them had sons and daughters who had made it to the United States, Europe, or Canada. One bragged that his son was a taxi driver in Seattle, sending hundreds of dollars back home, then another described how his own son worked as a truck driver in Minnesota and was paid thousands of dollars every day. Many were sure they would soon be going to America through something called family sponsorship. But first you had to go through the refugee camps.

  “Everyone who is sending money from America had been through those camps,” said Hassan. “Once in the camps it is easy to go to America. It only takes something like three months, and while you wait you get food from the United Nations. It’s heaven!”

  But without money for transport, Hassan was stuck in Mogadishu. He looked out over the Indian Ocean and asked Allah for wings to fly across it to America. I told him that beyond the blue waters of the Indian Ocean was heaven, that’s where the dead end up. The ocean divided the dead and the living. He laughed at me. “No, Abdi,” he said. “There is life beyond the ocean.”

  I told Hassan how much I missed him at the house, how our family had survived through the wars and the famine, and how we now barely saw each other during the day. How we were all taking separate ways, including our dad. Hassan didn’t say much, but I could tell he was also sad.

  One morning I went to see him at the wall. Hassan was listening to the elders engage in a heated debate about the new American war in Afghanistan. The men had been cursing the United States and praising Osama bin Laden. They were organizing protests against the war, and against America. “This is a war between Muslims and non-Muslims,” said an elder, throwing one hand in the air as if he wanted to go fight the war himself while holding a cup of tea in his other hand. The crowd nodded and all said, “Yes!”

  I placed one hand on Hassan’s shoulder. “Come home, brother,” I said.

  He did not protest. We walked home together. When I reached out for his hand, he held mine tightly.

  Back home, Hassan didn’t say much, but I could tell he was thinking of a better way we could all live. “There is life outside Somalia,” he finally said. “We can do something. People who are sending dollars from abroad are just like us. They left Somalia and now they have jobs.”

  Mom looked at him and said, “I wish you were abroad.”

  “Mom, I will leave,” he said. “I need your blessings. We are now grown up, Abdi and me. We can either carry guns and kill people or leave and send money back to our mom and sister.”

  He was right. If I was not enjoying movies and soccer and dancing at weddings, I would be as bored as Hassan and also recruited by the militias. It was then I realized how wrong my parents and Macalin Basbaas had been in trying to stop me from going to movies, learning English, or dancing. I knew that movies and music had saved my life.

  Hassan asked for Mom’s prayers. I remember her looking him in the eyes and saying, “I would like to see you leave. May Allah be with you.”

  That’s all Hassan needed, Mom’s prayers. That, and money to get a ride to the border. So we started selling the pigeons. I sat on the side of the street with a boxful of birds, selling them for a few cents each. After two weeks almost all of our pigeons were sold. We got a total of ten dollars for the birds and two dollars for some wooden scooters that we had built with our hands.

  At dawn on a Sunday morning in September 2004, Hassan walked out the door with twelve dollars and a plastic bag containing a blanket to sleep on.

  “Be strong,” said Mom. “You will make it.”

  I walked with him and his friend Hussein to Bakara market, to see him off. Again Hassan and I held hands the same way we had done as children when we walked up the hill to Madinah Hospital, dodging sniper bullets and rolling jerry cans of water back down. This day we held tighter; I felt like I did not want to let go of my brother, but I knew I could not let him stay. He felt the same way. I saw tears in his eyes for the first time in years. Hassan had been strong enough to sleep on the streets of Mogadishu, go a whole day without eating, but it was hard for him to imagine living far away from Mom, Nima, and me. He would not be flying home at night like the pigeons. He was on his way out from our family, maybe forever, and we all knew it.

  We walked deep inside the dusty market. Then, through the shouting of the hawkers, we heard our mom’s voice coming from behind.

  “Hassan! Wait!”

  She could not stay home; she decided to come say good-bye to her son.

  When Hassan saw Mom, tears soaked his face. I watched as my brave mom and brave brother hugged and cried.

  “Do you want to change your mind?” she said.

  For a minute I thought Hassan would decide to stay, but finally he released Mom and said, “Let’s keep walking.”

  Soon we spotted the car that would take Hassan to the border of Kenya. It was a green Mercedes, parked in a narrow alley, but it was hard to tell it apart from the surrounding market stalls: its roof was piled with hay, bags of corn, and luggage all tied together. The front passenger seat was loaded with baskets of fruits. A live goat was bleating under the hatchback, its legs tied together. The driver’s door was missing and the hood was gone; it seemed like a car in a Hollywood movie crash scene. I couldn’t believe it would actually move, much less travel hundreds of miles on potholed roads. So
there was a gamble: it was the cheapest ride Hassan could find, but if it broke down in the bush, there would be no refund, and he would probably die of thirst in the desert.

  Two women in the rear seat looked angrily at Hassan. “We don’t want him in here, put him in the back!” one of them yelled at the driver, who was standing at a nearby stall, eating bread and drinking tea. He was missing one arm, probably from a gunshot, and he barely had any teeth in his mouth. He lit a cigarette using his one hand and laughed through his qat-stained tongue and cracked lips. He did not care who sat where as long as he got his money.

  The driver opened the hatchback and indicated that Hassan should climb in with the goat. The two women in the backseat smiled. They would not have to share their space with a man, which was sinful. So Hassan squeezed into the hatchback and curled up with the goat. There was goat shit everywhere. And of course this car had no air-conditioning, so it would be an oven under that hatchback window across the bush. But Hassan didn’t care. He was finally escaping Somalia, the place he called “a roofless prison,” under the airless hatchback window of a ruined Mercedes-Benz, with a goat.

  When the market lady who ran the tea stand started bothering the driver to pay his bill, as well as his breakfast bill for the last three days, he stubbed out his cigarette and said, “Let’s go.” But the engine of the car would not start, the battery was completely dead. It took five guys pushing to kick the motor into life, spewing a cloud of black exhaust. The breakfast lady ran alongside the car demanding money from the driver, who argued with her. “Next time!” he shouted.

  I hugged Mom as we watched the car trundle through the crowd of porters and shoppers, past the pyramids of tomatoes and peppers, the driver honking nonstop. The car turned from the market alley in to the busy main road. Under the hatchback, Hassan stretched his hand out from behind the goat to high-five us. Then my brother disappeared.

  8

  Wedding Vows

  A burning-hot day in March 2004, me and my friends Bocow and Bashi high up in the branches of a neem tree. We were looking out across the city for smoke. Where there was smoke, there was food, and we were so hungry. Then we saw it, a big fire, lots of people. Probably an arranged wedding. We climbed down, grabbed our boom box, and crashed that party. Time for some food and dancing!

  With more money and more men in the city, weddings were happening almost every week in Mogadishu. For less than three hundred dollars you could put up a nice wedding, providing lots of cow meat, camel milk, fruits, and dance music. Except for very strict Muslims (who had not yet taken over the city), a wedding without dancing is considered incomplete for Somalis—like eating maize without camel milk. But most of the traditional Somali musicians had been killed or had fled during the fighting, so there was no live music; you had to use a boom box, preferably with fresh batteries so you could play it really loud. There was nothing on the radio, only cassette tapes, and people with a lot of cassette tapes were in demand for weddings, especially if they also knew how to dance and could get the party going.

  By this time I had my boom box and some tapes, and everywhere I went I was twisting my body, gliding and moonwalking to the music. About once a week I would get hailed on the street to perform at a wedding. People yelled my new name, Abdi American, at every corner of my neighborhood when I passed. I would show up with my group of dancers and play music for the crowd.

  One day I received a request to dance at a big wedding in the neighborhood. The groom was living in the United States. He called the girl’s family and told them that he would sponsor her to come to the United States after the wedding. The family was so excited that they put together an amazing wedding—five cows, two sacks of rice. There was a space for me and my two friends Bocow and Bashi to dance on the floor that evening. I was relieved it took place at night because by then the madrassa would be closed and Macalin Basbaas would be back in his house. I walked in with my boom box, two tapes in my hand. As the music started and my friends and I began dancing, some people walked out of the room disgusted by our sinful moves, but others were cheering and clapping. The bride was sitting in a corner; she had a smile on her face. She definitely liked the music and dancing, but I’m sure she was mostly happy to be moving with her new husband to Minnesota. “She is lucky,” I thought.

  After that wedding the bride’s dad gave me a few American dollars, the first I had ever held in my hand. It was enough to buy maize and camel milk for our family. Not everyone could pay me to dance, and usually I did it for free. Most important, I got a reputation. Girls would come to my house, walking past Mom and Dhuha into my room just to chat and flirt with me. When I was out, Mom told me girls she didn’t even know were coming to our house asking for me. One girl left a message in Arabic at our door, written in charcoal on a wooden board. It said “I love you.” And wherever I went to dance, girls came, watched, and clapped. When I walked on the streets, girls shouted, “Abdi American!” I just waved and moved on.

  * * *

  —

  Of course the girls always looked their best at weddings, wearing traditional Somali printed diracs but also modern Western garments of different colors. They braided their hair, painted henna tattoos on their hands, put on makeup and perfume, and showed off bracelets and other jewelry. Most of them were shy and had never danced at all, much less with men, which their parents would usually forbid. They would mostly just sit and watch us dance, ululating and applauding.

  One afternoon we walked into a wedding celebration, dressed in our usual California street gang attire of head wraps, plastic bracelets, baggy jeans, and hats. I set up my boom box and played my latest tape, brand new to Mogadishu: “In da Club” by 50 Cent. The ululations and shouts from the women were so loud, they loved this new song. Then a beautiful young woman stepped onto the dance floor. She had a big smile, and her dark brown braided hair flowed down her neck from under her head scarf. She was wearing an orange dirac in a maqbal pattern of brilliant flowers. The dress fit perfectly around every curve of her body. She coyly swayed her body sideways, covering her face with her colorfully painted hands. This girl obviously did not know how to dance, but I thought she was so brave to be the first to try. Some of the wedding guests cheered her, but others booed. Another girl in the crowd yelled, “Stupid girl, sit down!”

  I moved closer to encourage her. The music was loud. She leaned in to my ear to say something.

  “I can’t dance,” she said.

  “I can teach you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Faisa.”

  Of course I could not touch Faisa’s body, because people were watching. This was Somalia, not the movies I had seen where men and women dance while holding tight. But I could smell her perfume from where she stood. I can still smell that perfume. Then the girl who had been scolding her jumped onto the dance floor, grabbed Faisa by the hand, and dragged her outside the building, yelling at her. “I will tell Dad, I will tell Dad!” she screamed.

  So there was a good sister and a bad sister. Their dad was Sheikh Omar, an important cleric in the Waberi neighborhood. You could see him everywhere, he wore a long beard dyed bright orange with henna. He led the five daily prayers at the mosque, and also the important Friday prayers. Sheikh Omar was also a judge mediating divorce, marriage, and child support cases according to the Koran, which he knew not just in Arabic but also in Somali. He had ten children from four different wives. Faisa’s half brothers ran mosques and madrassas; another brother lived in the United States and sent money to the family. Sheikh Omar also coordinated the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Fortunately, he was too busy to pay much attention to his daughters, which is how Faisa and her sister were able to dress up and go to weddings where dance music was played. But listening was one thing. Dancing was another.

  I watched the door for a while. When Faisa never came back, I went out to look for her. I found her sitting by herself, fanning her face against
the late afternoon heat.

  “Asalaamu aleikum,” I greeted her. Peace be upon you.

  “Wa’aleikum salaam,” she replied. And unto you, peace.

  She stood up, smiled, and said she was happy to see me. Sweat was running down my head to my back, partly from dancing but also because I was so nervous. She told me she had to go home before sunset, and it was already five o’clock.

  “I want to see you again,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, offering to meet up the next day and adding that she hoped I could teach her to dance.

  “Could you come to Aargada Arch tomorrow at four o’clock?” I asked.

  I knew I would not be able to teach her to dance, because we had no private place to hang out. She would never come to our house, because her dad would never allow it, and Omar would certainly not invite me to their house. And in Mogadishu, even what happens inside is not private, everything can be heard behind tin or mud walls. A boy and a girl cannot date; only marriage is allowed. So what Faisa and I wanted to do was strange. Still we could try.

  The next day at four o’clock I was standing under the Aargada Arch in my new denim jeans, a new T-shirt with an American flag, and a new taper-fade haircut inspired by the U.S. Marines in Mogadishu back in 1993. The arch, at the KM4 circle, was built by the Italians during their colonial occupation of Somalia. Surrounding the circle were once landmarks such as the Cinema Ecuatore, the former embassy of Egypt, and the Naasa Hablood hotel. Now most had been destroyed, but the arch remained. Faisa appeared walking down Maka al-Mukarama Street with a smile, looking happy to see me.

  We walked together enjoying a cool breeze from the sea. Of course we could not hold hands, we just walked side by side. I could not take her to a tea shop or a restaurant; all I could do was take her to Hamarweyne for a walk through the old part of Mogadishu, down the streets with coconut trees on each side and the Indian Ocean beyond. I talked to her about my dad’s basketball games, how life had been good for us before the war. She talked about how they survived during the mass displacement in 1991 by fleeing to Jigjiga in Ethiopia, then returning six years later. Now she was curious about the music of 50 Cent I had played at the wedding. “How did they create such a sweet thing?” she asked. “Where do those people live?”