Amina

by J. L. Powers

  As they stood in the street, waiting, Amina wondered if Keinan’s family felt safer with a guard. She remembered visiting Aabbe’s colleague, and fellow artist, Ibrahim Abdi. He also had a man guarding his front gate and electric wires strung across the top of the wall surrounding his house. Amina had felt vulnerable the entire time they were there, as though all that security made them even more of a target, like rats trapped in a beautiful, gilded cage. She was glad when they left. Paradoxically, she felt safer on the streets, where anything might happen.

  Sometimes Amina felt homesick for a city she’d never known, a city that had died before she was even born.

  Because Hooyo was a nurse and Aabbe an artist, and formerly a professor at one of Mogadishu’s universities, there had been opportunities for them to leave Somalia and work elsewhere. But each time, Hooyo would say, ‘If everybody who has an education or a good heart leaves, what will be left? No, this is our home and we will stay here and make our country a better place, insha’Allah, God willing.’ After a few minutes, she might add, ‘It is a big risk, yes, but we trust Allah will take care of us.’

  Many people had left. People joked about how Somalis had been nomads since the beginning of time and now they were nomads in every nation of the world. ‘No matter where you go, you will find Somalis there,’ Aabbe liked to say.

  What would Amina’s life be like if her parents had made the choice to leave? Like every girl her age in Mogadishu, she had family somewhere else. Amina had many relatives in the cold parts of the world. Hooyo’s youngest sister had made it to Canada and married a Somali immigrant there. Aabbe’s eldest brother had fled with his wife and children to Norway. Her cousins tramped to school in the snow. Snow! Her uncle had said that when the wind blew, the snow looked like dirt swirling across the ground during a dust storm. But instead of the hot, stinging sand gritting across your face, snow was cold and wet and melted when it touched you.

  Because they had stayed, Amina had seen just about everything – from her school’s flooding after a grenade burst the water pipes to a classmate’s sudden disappearance into the fiery explosion created when he stepped on a hidden landmine. Sometimes she had nightmares, but she knew better than to complain. What could Hooyo and Aabbe do about it? It was life in Mogadishu.

  Still, sometimes she was jealous of her cousins’ easy lives in Norway or Canada. They would never again face a truckload of men with guns. They no longer ran from danger – down alleys, through back ways, across chunks of asphalt where the street had buckled from an explosion. The sun beating down, sweat running in rivers down her arms and legs underneath her long, black dress. The worst they could complain about, living in those cold northern countries, was frostbite. Whatever that was.

  ‘Roble!’ Keinan banged the gate open. He bumped fists with Roble, his warm, dark eyes flashing a greeting to Amina.

  She pretended to look at the street, knowing that her eyes would betray her true feelings and that she probably wasn’t behaving like a proper Muslim girl. But some days, she didn’t worry about being a proper Muslim girl, as long as she looked proper, saying her prayers, wearing her headscarf, and reciting the Quran at dugsi, the religious classes where they memorised the holy book.

  Keinan’s handsome father poked his head out of the gate. He acknowledged Roble and Amina with a nod. ‘Be careful out there,’ he said. ‘Don’t wander far.’ His voice was deep and gravelly. Keinan looked like his father and Amina wondered if some day he would sound like him as well.

  ‘Yes, Aabbe,’ Keinan said.

  ‘Greet your father for me, children,’ he told Roble and Amina as he closed the gate.

  ‘Yes, adeer,’ they said, addressing him with the polite term they were supposed to use when speaking to elder men.

  Like always, Keinan was dressed well, in slick ironed pants and a green tunic. His clothing always showed that his father made money. Amina tried not to be jealous. Her family never had enough money. It sometimes seemed as though Aabbe would sell a painting only to turn around and use all the profit for paints for his next big project.

  She had heard her father say that Abdullahi Hassan, Keinan’s father, could turn a mountain of sand into a pile of gold. And it seemed he had done exactly that. He had even made a small fortune selling Aabbe’s paintings. Hooyo sometimes complained that Abdullahi made more money off Aabbe’s hard work than Aabbe himself – but then Aabbe would gently remind her that he was just grateful his art brought in enough money that they could survive. ‘Abdullahi takes all the risk,’ he’d say. ‘Therefore, he should enjoy more of the profit.’

  Amina walked down the street with Roble and Keinan, towards the corner where an old woman sold wilted vegetables out of a small plastic container. Roble haggled with her while Amina stared longingly across the street at a bombed-out building long since abandoned.

  As they waited, Keinan whistled a tune Amina didn’t recognise. She ignored him, as any good Muslim girl would. But she was aware of him. Her skin tingled at his closeness. She was pretty sure that feeling wasn’t proper.

  ‘I’m going to be a professional soccer player some day,’ he suddenly announced.

  ‘Yes,’ Amina agreed, astonished. Keinan was the fastest, the sleekest, the most coordinated soccer player in the streets whenever they played.

  She was always secretly eager to watch him. His skin was maariin, rich and coffee-coloured, glittering in the sun. He was thin and wiry, not muscular like Roble, but she didn’t care. When he played soccer, he was fast. He could dart between several players, ghosting the ball right past them and kicking it through the goalposts.

  Still, she was surprised that he had addressed her directly. ‘Will you leave Somalia then?’ Her heart skipped in beat with her hesitant words.

  ‘Leave Somalia? Why?’

  ‘To play soccer.’

  ‘No. Everything I want is here.’

  ‘But al-Shabaab has outlawed soccer.’

  Keinan shook his head, scornful. He spoke loudly, as if he didn’t care who might hear him. ‘My father says they won’t always be in power.’ That was the boastful voice of privilege.

  ‘How does your father know?’ Amina’s words sounded like a challenge, even though she didn’t mean them that way.

  ‘My father knows people,’ Keinan said.

  Amina glanced at him quickly. Of course, Keinan’s father knew people. Because of his business, he knew members of the Transitional Federal Government, foreign diplomats, rich Saudis, members of the former Islamic Courts Union, leading imams, war lords. Naturally, he would know important members of al-Shabaab as well. So what did he have to fear? His powerful allies could always help him and his family. Keinan would never get into trouble for playing soccer – but Roble, the son of a political artist with no connections to powerful people, except perhaps Keinan’s father, surely would. If they were ever caught.

  She turned her eyes to the building opposite them, then down the streets. She could just dart across the road, draw something on one of the walls, and be back before Roble was even done bartering with the old woman.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Keinan asked.

  ‘That building across the street,’ she said.

  Without windows, the building looked like it was missing its eyes, hollow scars where the glass used to be. Amina had seen a man with his eyes gouged out last year. Al-Shabaab soldiers had dragged the body through the streets, then cut off the man’s head, dumping it outside the door to his house as a warning to the family.

  ‘It’s empty, isn’t it?’ Keinan asked. He looked puzzled.

  Amina smiled at him. She knew she was pretty in her scarf, with her light brown eyes, dark maariin skin and white teeth. She thought it was likely that Keinan had noticed and she felt mischief stirring inside her. What if she let him in on her secret?

  He smiled back at her. Something warm and intense welled up in her chest. She would show him just how talented she was. Let him see she was different from the other girls, special.


  ‘Would you like to find out?’ she dared him.

  ‘Yes.’ He seemed uncertain now, but was still willing to follow along.

  When Roble had turned back towards them with a tomato and bunch of carrots in his hand, Amina ran towards the building, looking left and right to be certain nobody was watching. The boys followed, and they all darted inside the building, hiding behind one of the crumbling walls.

  ‘We don’t have time for this, Amina!’ Roble said.

  Roble knew all about Amina’s secret art projects. He was her ally. Without him, she wouldn’t be able to accomplish much since she wasn’t supposed to leave the house alone.

  Amina ignored Roble and started searching for the piece she had created several weeks ago. She found the mud sculpture where she’d placed it, as well as the mosaic she’d carefully arranged using broken tiles and coloured glass that she’d gathered over weeks as she went to and from school. It was a complicated design, one she’d dreamed up at night, thinking about the variety of colours and patterns she had collected – blue and green glass interspersed in a centrical pattern with black-and-white tiles scattering away from it like the rays of a sun. She wanted the broken glass to symbolise Somalian society – and for the complex pattern she had created to reveal the way that even a broken society could be put back together and made beautiful again. She had secretly borrowed Aabbe’s glue to piece it together before she brought it here and left it for somebody to find.

  Maybe she should take it back to Aabbe to see what he thought – she could surprise him with the work she was doing now. But she’d rather leave it here for strangers to discover – to think about, to enjoy.

  She felt in her skirt for the charcoal. With a quick hand, she started sketching on the wall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Keinan asked.

  ‘I’m drawing a picture.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to do that! That’s graffiti.’

  ‘Try and stop her,’ Roble said. He sounded both exasperated and fond – the way Hooyo sometimes expressed her frustration over Aabbe’s single-minded pursuit of a painting when he was absorbed in a project.

  ‘This building is abandoned, so nobody will care,’ Amina said.

  Keinan fell silent but his eyes followed Amina’s hand as it whizzed up and across the wall.

  She was drawing the boys playing soccer in the street. Though she had never played soccer with them, she had watched it so often from the rooftop that she felt like she was there, her feet flying, cheering as the ball went sailing through the air.

  Soccer was just a game to most people but to Amina it was more than that. It was freedom. It was joy. It was the way life should be – kids playing without fear, playing despite the chaos all around them. That was the emotion she wanted to convey in the drawing.

  ‘You’re really good.’

  She jumped when Keinan spoke, startled by the way his voice echoed loudly against the concrete walls.

  Amina started to say thank you but she was cut off by Roble’s sudden, flat statement. ‘She’s good, but she’s going to get killed doing it,’ he said. ‘You know al-Shabaab says you’re not supposed to depict the living form in art.’

  ‘How will they ever find out about me?’ Amina said.

  ‘It’s not just al-Shabaab,’ Roble said. ‘A lot of people say it’s against Islam.’

  ‘Not Aabbe,’ Amina said.

  Something crunched on the gravel just outside the room.

  ‘What was that?’ Keinan whispered.

  Roble peered through the empty window. ‘Al-Shabaab!’ he hissed. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  Like cats, disturbed easily and used to leaping from danger, Amina and Keinan sprang up and followed Roble through the abandoned building, ducking down and crawling through a window at basement level to reach the street.

  Partway through the window, Amina turned her head and glimpsed a boy about Roble’s age running towards her, shouting. He wore army fatigues, his face draped in a red-and-white chequered keffiyeh, the headdress revealing only his eyes. They were light brown, beautiful and earth coloured.

  She scurried the rest of the way through the window and hurried after the boys as they ran through the weeds in the yard, then down a dirt alley and around the corner to Keinan’s gate. He’d already reached it and the guard was opening it in response to his loud banging.

  They disappeared inside and leaned against the wall, still silent, though Amina’s heart was racing, faster even than when she had smiled at Keinan earlier, willing him to like her as much as she liked him.

  The guard scrambled up a ladder to watch over the wall. Feet pounded against the dirt road as several men ran past.

  The three teenagers peeked through the cracks in the gate. Amina relaxed only when she saw the men disappearing down the road, holding their AK-47s high.

  Keinan was the first to speak, as if he were no longer afraid. ‘Yeah, just try and come in here,’ he yelled, though the soldiers were long gone. ‘You’ll see what I do if you come back here.’

  ‘Do you have guns hidden somewhere that I haven’t seen?’ Roble asked. ‘Or does the guard give you extra confidence?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Amina wasn’t sure if that was a twinkle in Keinan’s eyes – or defiance.

  Roble turned to Amina next. ‘What were you thinking?’ There was anger in his voice.

  ‘I wanted to draw.’ Amina kept her voice low, hoping he wouldn’t scold her too harshly in front of Keinan. Her cheeks burned.

  ‘You shouldn’t take risks like that,’ he said. ‘You’re putting all our lives in danger.’

  ‘You do the same when you play soccer,’ Amina shot back. ‘Our lives are always in danger, but nothing will happen to us unless Allah wills it.’ She had heard Ayeeyo say that and, though she wasn’t certain, she tried to believe it too. ‘And if that’s true then what’s the point in being careful? In being scared?’

  ‘Oh, what do you know?’ Roble spat on the ground.

  Amina turned around, her back to the boys. She gazed at Keinan’s house without seeing it. She regretted that her decision to draw on the walls of an abandoned building had led them into danger, but nobody could have predicted al-Shabaab soldiers would show up exactly when they had.

  ‘Have you looked at her drawings, Roble?’ Keinan asked. ‘She’s really good.’ He pumped his fists in the air. ‘Almost as good as I am at playing soccer.’

  Amina found herself smiling at him with abandon. Nobody could resist Keinan, not even Hooyo – even when he was being cheeky.

  Still, she’d never smile at him like that if her parents or Ayeeyo were around.

  ‘You’re such a liar, man,’ Roble said, laughing. ‘And you know I’m better than you any day.’

  The two jostled each other.

  ‘Anyway, so what if she’s good?’ Roble asked, suddenly sober. ‘Is it worth our lives? Do you want to die, just because Amina likes to draw?’

  ‘You don’t keep a gift like that to yourself,’ Keinan argued. ‘It would be a crime, just like it’s a crime not to admit I’m the best soccer player.’ He grinned again, and added, ‘Amina, I hope you keep drawing.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Amina whispered, afraid she might start crying if she spoke in her regular voice.

  ‘Come on, Amina. Let’s go home,’ Roble said. He looked disappointed. Was it because Keinan had encouraged her to keep drawing? Or was it because Amina liked to break the rules?

  As she followed him out of Keinan’s yard and into the dusty street, she resolved to be better in the future. She could be more careful. And she could make smaller pieces in her own yard, then leave them where somebody might find them. She used to think she created street art because that was the only avenue open to her. Now she knew she craved that public expression, the possibility that when people saw her work, it might change how they thought about the world.

  Roble and Amina looked left and right at the now empty street and hurried to their own gate, just a few doo
rs away.

  Roble closed the gate behind them and secured it with the heavy metal lock Aabbe had added for more security. It clanked into place.

  Locked in. She was safe and secure. Nobody could get in but neither could Amina leave, unless somebody – usually Roble or Aabbe – accompanied her.

  Her shoulders sagged.

  Chapter 3

  Like always, Roble was waiting for Amina outside school beside a squat mango tree bursting with oval fruit still waiting to ripen.

  Hooyo and Aabbe insisted that they go to school unless a battle was raging. Then nobody went anywhere and they’d crouch on the floor as bullets whizzed overhead. On normal days, school started early in the morning and ended at noon. Afterwards, they went to dugsi, to memorise the Quran and learn what they needed to know to be a good Muslim.

  ‘Will we see you later?’ Filad called after Amina as she started to run to join Roble and Keinan. ‘After dugsi we’ll get together with all the girls and have a showdown.’

  Sometimes at school the girls ignored her, but they were always nice to her when they wanted her to come to a competition. She was a good poet. Her team always won.

  ‘If Ayeeyo lets me, I’ll come,’ Amina said.

  ‘We’ll fetch you,’ Basra said. ‘Then she won’t say no.’

  ‘After dugsi, then,’ Amina said.

  ‘What took you so long?’ Roble grumbled. ‘We can’t be late or the teacher will beat us.’

  She ignored him and greeted them the proper way. ‘Asalaam alaykum, peace be upon you,’ she said, glancing at Keinan from beneath her eyelashes, pulse racing when she saw how he stared at her.

  ‘Wa ’alaykum asalaam, and peace be upon you as well,’ Keinan said.

  ‘The teacher will probably beat you anyway,’ Amina told Roble. ‘Have you memorised the Quran yet?’

  ‘I have it memorised,’ Keinan interrupted.

  ‘All right, hotshot, then why do you still go to dugsi?’ Roble asked.

  Keinan shrugged. ‘For fun.’