IN TRIPOLI I LIVED for almost a month in the Somali district. All of us Somali and Ethiopian tahrib waiting to embark for Italy occupied about a dozen buildings crowded together in the same neighborhood east of the city. An ugly, dirty area fit for illegals and sewer rats like us. Yet from the very first moment my arrival in Tripoli was a liberation. I never wanted to see the desert again for the rest of my life; that much I was sure of.
There was nothing I hated more than the desert. When you spend months there, the desert gets into your bones, your blood, your saliva; you can’t ever get it out of you. You carry the dust everywhere; even if you wash with running water it stays with you forever. But the worst thing is that the desert extinguishes your soul, it obliterates your thoughts. You have to close your eyes and imagine things that aren’t there. Months and months of stretches of sand. Wherever you turn, at whatever time of day or night. Only sand and nothing but sand. It drives you insane.
Once I got to Tripoli, I realized that it was a miracle that I’d survived. It was only thanks to those yellowed letters and to the Olympics that I’d come through sane and not stark, raving mad. It’s only when you see the light after being in the dark a long time that you remember the color of things.
That’s what happened to me. I remembered what the world was like. And I loved it.
We lived in cramped rooms. Thirty or forty people in each apartment. I was with forty women from all over Africa: All the illegal emigrants meet up in Tripoli. There were Nigerians, Congolese, Somalis, Ethiopians, Sudanese, women from Namibia, Ghana, Togo, the Ivory Coast, Biafra, Liberia. Adults, adolescents, young women, little girls, old ladies. All together and finally safe.
We felt safe. We were in a city; there was everything we needed to live: water, fruit, food. It was all there and no one would snatch it away from us or beat us. I would have stayed in Tripoli for a lifetime, as many thought they’d do once they got there, if it hadn’t been for the fact that we were tahrib and the police had it in for us as a result of agreements made between the Libyan and Italian governments. If caught, we were to be sent back to our own countries. We knew that.
Nevertheless, we weren’t interested in living undercover in those days. If we’d made it that far— some in two months, some in two years, some, like me, in five months— if we had overcome the Sahara, if we were survivors, all we could think of at that point was reaching our destination. Only the destination. Everything else was eclipsed. For us tahrib in Tripoli there was only that one goal. Tripoli for us was a transit point, a faint breath of wind, the rustling of a leaf, the blink of an eye.
Then too, in Tripoli there’s the sea. The city, like Mogadishu, is awash with the scent of the sea. That’s why my energy returned, the desire to live and take pleasure in life. But there too, as in Mogadishu, I could not go to the sea; if they caught me I would be arrested. I would have to wait; I would just have to wait to get to Italy.
And so, along with food, the urge for companionship came back, to eat together, tell one another our stories, take turns planning our future. And talking. Words are lifesavers. And the words uttered by far the most, by each in his own distorted accent, were “Italy” and “Lampedusa.”
Never in my life have I loved talking as much as I did during the long period I spent in Tripoli. We formed teams according to nationality and challenged one another at cards: Each taught the others their own ways of playing, and then we argued over the rules. We taught one another words in our respective languages. We talked about our families, our homes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our sweethearts. Our favorite dishes. We wondered how awful the food would be in Europe. We wondered what the people would be like. We imagined the houses we would have. The kitchens. The bathrooms with a tub and shower. Carpeting on the floor, or parquet. And what we would do, our work. I would be an athlete. There were some who dreamed of being lawyers, some teachers, others nurses or pediatricians. Some just wanted a family. We passed the time together, talking about our respective plans. And we also thought about practical things. Like how we would leave. For the last time.
The routine for crossing the sea was the usual. You arrange for the money for the voyage; then you wait. You wait for them to come and call you and tell you, with no time to prepare, you’re leaving in an hour.
You know that anything can happen at sea, but you don’t think about it. All you think about is the destination. If all goes well, in two days, two and a half at most, you’ll be in Lampedusa. But anything can happen. The sea is a bigger obstacle than the Sahara; the traffickers tell you that when you contact them.
I went with two other Somali girls.
“Prepare for the worst,” they tell you. “What you’ve faced so far is nothing. By comparison, the Sahara is a cakewalk,” they tell you. And you don’t believe it. It can’t be true. What I had faced up to that point was hell, nothing could be worse. Besides, the sea, my sea, couldn’t hurt me. We’d had a rendezvous planned for nearly twenty years now. I knew it and the sea knew it. In Italy, at last, we would meet up. One of the first things I’d do was plunge into it and enjoy that vast, welcoming immensity.
The boats are old pieces of junk that should be used only for scrap iron. The sea’s power is capable of engulfing them at any moment. For us tahrib, however, they were pure gold, luxurious cruise yachts. In addition to engine failures, the trafficker might get lost; the damn GPS could fail or make a mistake. Or we might even run out of gas; it seems impossible but it happens: Sometimes they miscalculate the amount of fuel they need, or they unintentionally extend the route and are left empty. You know that anything can happen but you don’t think about it; what you think about is the destination.
There you are, waiting for that moment for weeks or months, and when it comes you’re caught unprepared. Every time. There’s no way to prepare; I don’t know anyone who was ever prepared. Not in terms of what you need to bring with you: There are only two or three things and they are always with you. No, prepared in your head. Prepared for the fact that it’s the end of the Journey.
You don’t know if it will be morning, afternoon, or night. It’s usually at night, but you can never tell; it depends on the trafficker’s strategy. There are some who decide on midnight, so they can be offshore before the light. Some opt for the afternoon, so they can already be far out to sea by daybreak. Others instead choose the early morning, so they can cover a long distance and be far away from Africa when darkness falls, and therefore less visible.
I was hoping my voyage would be in the afternoon; it seemed like a quieter time to start out.
I was jittery; Hodan had told me that she would promptly send the money I needed, twelve hundred dollars, to the address I had given her. I couldn’t wait.
It didn’t even take a month. I don’t know how Hodan came up with the money, but I didn’t care; it was one of the things I’d ask her once I got there.
My turn came a few days later, on January 12, 2012. It wasn’t in the afternoon. It was in the morning, at 4:00 a.m. I was awakened and told to leave.
But my trip lasted only three hours. That’s how short-lived my joy at being at sea was. We hardly had time to board— seventy of us in a rubber dinghy that was too small— when we had to turn back. The air that morning was electric; the sun wouldn’t rise until two hours later and the excitement among us was so tense you could cut it with a knife. We settled into our places in silence, some on the outside, some in the middle. I ended up at the stern on the outside next to the traffickers; because I was skinny I squeezed in between two hefty Nigerian guys whose arms were as big as my legs.
But it was a fiasco.
A doomed attempt: The dinghy began to take on water almost immediately. The traffickers swore in Arabic and for a while they kept going anyway. Then they stopped. “We’re turning back,” they told us. The end of the line, the end of our dreams and hopes.
“We were lucky to notice it early on, still close to the coast,” they said. “If we were midway there we’d have
sunk. We’d have all drowned.” That’s what they told us.
Only three hours.
Then back to Tripoli.
And nobody gives you your money back.
CHAPTER 29
NOW HERE I AM IN TRIPOLI, waiting; it’s been two and a half months since we turned back. It’s March 31, 2012. Only four months till the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and I know that I can still make it.
Three days after I returned to the apartment in the eastern outskirts of the city, a new girl arrived: Nigist, an Ethiopian. She was nervous, like all newcomers, but also elated: She had conquered the monster of the Sahara; she hadn’t let it scare her. We became friends. She’s like me: She’s my same age and has the same build. If you ask me, we look alike, even though she says I’m prettier than she is. It’s not true; I think she’s prettier. I found her a place next to my mat. I didn’t want her to end up in the clutches of some mean woman whose heart had been hardened by the Journey.
I went over my story a number of times with Nigist. She recognized me. She had seen me on TV nearly four years ago, at the China Olympics, and since then, she says, she’s never forgotten my face: my gentle, radiant smile, she says.
At first, like Abdullahi, she couldn’t believe it was me. That I was there, like her, a tahrib like everyone else. A needy refugee. The second day she asked me. And I’ve never been more grateful to anyone. Nigist brought me back to life; that’s why I decided to protect her. If she hadn’t recognized me, I wouldn’t have remembered who I was. It had been too long since I last looked in the mirror. The truth is that was something I didn’t want to do. Whenever I happened to come near a reflective surface, I would avert my gaze. I hadn’t seen my face in eight and a half months, except through the reactions of others when they looked at me.
That is why I will be forever grateful to Nigist. And why I like to tell her my story, again and again, almost every day. We must have had the same conversation— how many times? Twenty, thirty? Maybe more. Each time she asks me the same questions, or asks me new ones, and we find ourselves laughing at the same incidents. When Alì stole the candies that Aabe had saved for the feast of Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan, and as punishment Aabe made him eat them all, causing him to get diarrhea. When I ran in the stadium at night and imitated the noise of the crowd by taking a big breath and roaring: aaaaarrghhhh. When Alì fell into the big pool of excrement at the first race I won. When I told a reporter after the race in Beijing that I would have been happier if people had applauded me because I finished first and not last, and he’d burst out laughing in front of the TV camera. When Abdi actually thought that the aquarium in China was magical, and I confirmed it, and he fell for it. Then too the eucalyptus. When Alì climbed to the top and stayed there until he was weak from hunger. Like a monkey.
Another three months here in Tripoli without being able to leave the house for fear of being hounded by the police results in a lot of talking. There was a brief time, during the clashes and then right after the death of dictator Gadhafi at the end of 2011, when the situation was calmer. An absence of government means an absence of law. And without law even we tahrib were less tahrib. No one thought about us then because nobody was hunting us anymore. The traffickers were without work and a passage to Italy was cheap.
But now they’ve regrouped.
Worse than before. They say that if you, a tahrib, are found on the street, they’ll send you straight back to the Sahara.
After I came back to Tripoli, I had to call Hodan and Hooyo again. But this would be the last money I’d ask for. This time, finally, I was going to make it.
I paid again, and here I am with Nigist, waiting for them to call and tell me it’s time to leave. After you pay it’s best to stay put in the house, because they could come at any time.
But now I’ve been told I’ll leave tonight. This time they gave me a little advance notice, three hours, because the boat is big, they said, and there are a lot of us. My last three hours as a tahrib.
I’m used to departures: In eight months I’ve left at least six or seven times. I don’t even have any bags to pack. Always the same three things: Aabe’s headband, Hooyo’s handkerchief with the seashell, the photo of Mo Farah.
Nigist and I will say good-bye when the time comes. Not before. During the Journey you don’t do anything before you have to. There’s no time for the past, there’s no time for the future; only living in the present moment helps us survive, to stay alive. Practical things like good-byes don’t fall into that category, so they are done only when the time comes.
Besides, we’ll meet again later on; we’ve already talked about it.
Like me, Nigist too will come to live in Helsinki; we want to build a community of women from the Horn of Africa. Reproduce the colors of our countries in that distant, cold place.
I am very fond of Nigist; I’ll miss her very much until we meet again.
Last night I spoke with Hodan via Skype, and with Mannaar as well. She’s almost four years old, and by now it’s clear that she looks exactly like me. There is a period, during the first two or three years as a child grows, when her appearance might take on any semblance whatsoever: She’s not yet defined; she’s just a sketch. By four years of age, however, she is what she was intended to be; she is already what she will be. Mannaar looks exactly like her aunt Samia. She resembles me more than she does her mother.
Hodan enrolled her at the gym a year ago.
She’s been running for more than ten months now. Hodan was right about her; evidently mothers really do understand everything about their children, even before they are born. Mannaar has a flair for running; she’s the fastest in her group. She has already won her first two races. And with those short little legs too. She’s already so fast.
I’m her idol, that’s what Hodan told me. One of the first words Mannaar uttered was “Tie Amia,” Auntie Samia. She keeps my photograph— a newspaper clipping from the time of Beijing— next to her bed, as I did with Mo Farah’s.
Each time I see her on Skype, I’m struck by how alike we are. Physically, two peas in a pod. But not only that. When she moves and talks, I feel like I’m seeing myself in miniature.
“Come soon,” Mannaar told me last night. “Auntie Samia …” She paused. “Don’t let the monsters come…. Don’t say you’re afraid.”
Hodan and I both burst out laughing.
“No, little Mannaar, I’m not afraid. Ever,” I told her.
Tonight I’m leaving at last.
It’s time to leave; it’s time to finally get there. I’m tired of this waiting. And tonight my aunt Mariam will also leave with me: She’s one of Aabe’s older sisters, whom I ran into by chance here in Tripoli when I went out to get the cans of water one day. She’d been living in an apartment nearby for nearly a month, and I didn’t even know it.
She too was arrested three times during the Journey; she too is weary and needs a place where there’s no war, a place from which you don’t have to flee.
Tonight we leave and soon we’ll find peace.
We’ll find peace.
CHAPTER 30
THE BOAT IS BIG, much bigger than I had imagined. It’s an actual boat; the other one was a dinghy.
There are a great many of us, men, women, and children, from infants to the elderly; once more we seem like a crowd of excited, hopeful ghosts. There is no fear in our eyes; our gaze is focused far ahead, already looking beyond the sea.
We met at the port around eleven o’clock at night.
Aunt Mariam was there too. She’s exhausted. She came with a woman friend with whom she made the Journey from Mogadishu. On the boat she found a place inside; I preferred to stay out on deck, to breathe in the smell of the sea, like a foretaste of the smell of freedom, the smell of Italy, of Europe.
The sea, the sea at last! It’s the second time I’m seeing it up close like this. It’s heaving slowly, gently, awaiting us.
There are about three hundred of us in all. Truly a great many.
We make an impressive sight. Silent ghosts. The tremor in our bodies is a mixture of anxiety and hope. No one talks about it, because to talk about it would be to name one or the other. And naming things makes them real, so for tonight better not to. Better to keep anxiety locked up inside us and let hope grow, slowly perhaps, during the journey. Only then, only at the end, will we be able to rejoice, and do so all together. We’ll weep and laugh together, and it will be wonderful. Like when we were in the trailer with the sacks of corn flour.
Not now, though; now is a time for silence. And prayer.
When they told us to board, we boarded.
Then we set off.
This time it’s longer than the earlier three hours in the dinghy.
The voyage is smooth sailing, swift and steady. The sea is docile; our hull easily plows through it. Some sleep, others don’t. I don’t. I stay at the prow as long as I can to catch the breeze, until the cold becomes too intense and the night too dark. I stay there enjoying the wind and looking north, awaiting the land of freedom.
Then the first day is over.
We don’t have much to eat, except for a little angero and moffa, a grain and corn flour mush. As usual, they haven’t let us bring anything on board, because of weight. Not even water.
In fact, the water is all used up after a day and a half. A few try to say something; others even start shouting at the traffickers, but it’s just to be doing something; it serves no purpose other than to mark time, going through the necessary motions that someone has to make.
After two days we’re forced to drink water from the bottom of the boat’s barrels. I would never have done it after the fever I caught in Khartoum, but I see that others are drinking it and not getting sick, so I drink it too. It’s disgusting; it tastes of iron and urine. I find a small container and bring a little to Aunt Mariam, who must be thirsty.
“It’s horrible,” I tell her. “But it’s all there is.”
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