Ahl can see that Taxliil is nervous. He has the temperament of someone with an impulse to barrel up the stairway and run for it, or to blurt out something incriminating. Ahl volunteers, “He is my stepson,” and leaves it at that.
Taxliil says, “No way will I return to Bosaso.”
As with toothpaste out of the tube, no attempt to put it back in will work, despite Ahl’s attempt to dismiss the disclosure as no more than a teenager’s gaffe. When Ahl tries to explain, Taxliil won’t let him, speaking petulantly and saying, “Leave me alone.” The immigration officer takes his unrushed time to study the passports some more and to scrutinize the forms several times more. He doesn’t say anything to either of them. He picks up the telephone and whispers a mere two words into the mouthpiece, in French.
Another officer, senior to the one at the desk, arrives inside a minute. He, too, peruses the passports and takes in Ahl and Taxliil’s faces, as if searching for a clue. He makes a one-word phone call. A third officer, senior to both, joins them.
Ahl and Taxliil are escorted to a cubicle within the airport structure. They are put in separate rooms and are asked questions about their identities, where they were born, where they have come from, and about their final destination. New forms. New questions. Their addresses, home phone numbers, relationship, and workplace or name of school in Minneapolis. They are provided with new forms to fill in. Same questions, different officers, their conversations taped, and their fingerprints taken.
Just before nightfall, two minivans arrive to drive them out of the airport grounds to a police station a kilometer away, where they will separately undergo a longer and more detailed interrogation, first by the Djibouti authorities and then—but then, Ahl can’t tell what will happen after that, can he?
Xalan has kept tabs on Ahl and Taxliil’s movements from the moment they boarded their flight until their arrival in Djibouti. Her friend the Djiboutian radio journalist confirms to her that they are in the hands of the state security and, according to an immigration officer who has confided in him and has told him of the procedures the two have been made to go through, that the two have been taken in separate minivans to an unknown destination.
Xalan asks the journalist how he knows all this.
“The officer is my mate and we chew together,” he replies.
Cambara shares the latest news about Malik, who is still in no state to speak, much less comprehend what is going on, with Bile, who relays it to Xalan, so that she may pass it along eventually to Yusur. Xalan, for her part, tells Bile what she knows about Ahl and Taxliil so far and all that she has learned from the radio journalist in Djibouti. Cambara shares the latest news about Ahl with Jeebleh, who met her flight in Nairobi and took them by the waiting ambulance to the clinic, where Malik is now recovering after surgery.
Cambara says, “But what will Djibouti do with them?”
“They won’t slit their throats,” Jeebleh says. “Whereas Shabaab would if they got a hold of either of them.”
Cambara says, “That’s a relief.”
“That’s the bright side.”
“But what’s their status, in Djibouti?”
Jeebleh, the student of Dante, describes Ahl and Taxliil’s status as “purgatorial”—an in-between state, in which they are afforded the opportunity to gain a spiritually more satisfactory cleansing than what they would expect if they had stayed on in Somalia and been taken by Shabaab.
Cambara says, “I think I know what purgation is: the discharge of waste matter from the body, isn’t that right?”
Jeebleh answers, “Yes, the discharge of waste matter in a ceremonial or ritual manner. And because Ahl and Taxliil are kept separately, each will rid himself of all defilement—especially Taxliil. Their situation is ‘purgatorial’ in that they may now view Bosaso as being akin to their idea of an inferno. Taxliil has his private hell to confront: a human bomber chickening out at the last minute is no easy matter for the mind to process.”
Cambara asks, “Where does Djibouti come in—I mean purgatorially speaking?”
“I am convinced they are in less of a hell than the one they would be in if they had fallen straight into the hands of Shabaab, the FBI, or Homeland Security in the U.S.,” Jeebleh says.
“You’re saying they are in ‘friendlier’ custody there?”
Jeebleh says, “Djibouti will be empathic to a young Somali teenager in Taxliil’s situation, caught in the politics of self-murder. The state may enter into a government-to-government deal during the extradition process. While waiting for their condition to be clarified, they will not be tortured or humiliated.”
Cambara calls Bile to tell him all this, and to report on Malik’s condition. The doctors in Nairobi do not consider Malik out of danger yet, but they have deemed him “lucky to be alive.” His feet are up in a cast, and tubes are running into almost every orifice. His head is in a cast, too, wrapped so tight it would be uncomfortable for him to smile, even if he wanted to. He can’t breathe without help: his lungs are punctured.
Journalists living in Nairobi have been coming in droves to the hospital, though. Some have even autographed Malik’s cast, noting the dates and places where they worked with him on assignment and inscribing get-well messages in Dutch, French, Arabic, and English. A British female journalist and a Canadian male reporter bring flowers and keep vigil in the corridor of the clinic, waiting and chatting.
But Cambara cannot speak any longer. “Good-bye for now,” she says. “Malik is waking.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction, set against the background of actual events whose retelling I’ve layered with a membrane of my own invention, and all the characters populating its pages have their origins in my imagination.
In writing it, I’ve borrowed from numerous sources and on occasion relied on interviews I conducted in Puntland and in Mogadiscio between the end of December 2008 and the end of February 2011. Among the many texts I’ve read, consulted, or borrowed from are “Nine Journalists Killed in Somalia” (Africa News, 2009); “Somali Canadian Journalist Killed” (CBS News, August 11, 2007); “Even in Exile Somali Journalists Face Death” (The Christian Science Monitor, August 12, 2007); “Somalia Journalist: ‘I Saw My Boss Dead’” (BBC, June 19, 2009); “Gunmen Assassinate Prominent Somali Journalist” (CNN, February 4, 2009); “Fifth Journalist Killed This Year” (Committee to Protect Journalists, June 8, 2009); Eric Schmitt and Jeffery Gettleman’s “U.S. Says Strike Kills Leader of a Somali Militia Suspected of Ties to Al Qaeda” (The New York Times, May 2, 2008); “Recruited for Jihad” (Newsweek, January 24, 2009); Richard Matthew’s “Recruited for Jihad? What Happened to Mustafa Ali?” (Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 9, 2009); Abdisaid M. Ali’s “The Al-Shabaab Al-Mujahidiin: A profile of the First Somali Terrorist Organization” (Institut für Stategie- Politik- Sicherheits- und Wirtschaftsberatung, Berlin, 2008); Steve Bloomfield’s “Anger at U.S. ‘Rendition’ of Refugees Who Fled Somalia” (The Independent, March 23, 2007); Muslim Human Rights Forum’s Horn of Terror: Report of U.S.-Led Mass Extraordinary Renditions from Kenya to Somalia and Ethiopia and Guantánamo Bay—January to June 2007—Presented to the National Commission on Human Rights on July 2007; Talal Asad On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press, 2007); Somali Customary Law and Traditional Economy: Cross-Sectional, Pastoral, Frankincense and Marine Norms (Puntland Development Research Centre, 2003); Nigel Cawthorne’s Pirates of the 21st Century: How Modern-Day Buccaneers Are Terrorising the World’s Oceans (John Blake, 2009); David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag (Random House, 1996); Abdirahman Jama Kulmiye’s “Militia vs Trawlers: Who Is the Villain?” (The East African, 2001); “Speedboats v Warships: Why Piracy Works” (The Sydney Morning Herald, November 19, 2008); Michael Scott Moore’s “What Are Those Ships Doing off the Coast of Somalia” (Miller-McCune, November 18, 2009); Clive Schofield’s “Who’s Plundering Who?” (Conservengland, November 23, 2008); Clive Schofield’s Plundered Waters: Somalia’s Maritime Resource Insecur
ity in Crucible of Survival, edited by Timothy Doyle and Melissa Risely (Rutgers University Press, 2008); “Somali Piracy Began in Response to Illegal Fishing and Toxic Dumping by Western Ships off the Somali Coast” (DemocracyNow.org, April 14, 2009); Andrew Harding’s “Postcard from Somali Pirate Capital” (BBC, June 16, 2009); Mary Harper’s “Life in Somalia’s Piracy Town” (BBC, September 18, 2008); Najad Abdullah’s “Toxic Waste Behind Somali Piracy” (Al Jazeera, October 11, 2008); Mohamed Adow’s “Somalia’s Trafficking Boomtown” (BBC, April 28, 2004); Robyn Hunter’s “Somali Pirates Living the High Life” (BBC, October 28, 2008) and “How Do You Pay a Pirate’s Ransom” (BBC, December 3, 2008); “Pirate ‘Washes Ashore with Cash’” (BBC, January 12, 2009); Daniel Heller-Roazen’s The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (Zone Books, 2009); Mary Harper’s “Chasing the Somali Piracy Money Trail” (BBC, May 24, 2009); “This Is London—The Capital of Somali Pirates’ Secret Intelligence Operation” (The Guardian, unsigned, May 11, 2009); Chris Green’s “Mystery of ‘Hijacked’ Cargo Ship Deepens” (The Independent, August 18, 2009); Cahal Milmo’s “Insurance Firms Plan Private Navy to Take On Somali Pirates” (The Independent, September 28, 2010); Daniel Howden’s “The Jailed Pirates That Nobody Wants” (The Independent, April 14, 2009).
I am grateful to many people, who, playing host to me or serving as guides or bodyguards, facilitated my travels in Somalia so that I could do my research in a secure, friendly environment. My special thanks go to the director of the Growe Puntland Development and Research Center, Abdurhman A. Shuke and his staff; to Said Farah Mahmoud and his wife, Faduma; to Hussein H. M. Boqor in Bosaso; to Hawa Aden in Galkayo; to Hussein Koronto in Eyl. In Newcastle, where I held a Leverhulme Professorship in the 2010 spring term, my thanks go to Linda Anderson, the director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. Lastly, my thanks and love go to Anna and William Colaiace, Lois Vossen and Jay Bryon, Paula Rabinowitz, and David Bernstein.
Need I add that I alone am responsible for the opinions expressed in this novel and for any infelicities or misinterpretations?
Nuruddin Farah
March 2011
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