by J. L. Powers
Amina had returned to school and Basra was sharing her food. Amina had noticed that Basra was packing larger amounts of food than she used to. She didn’t comment – she just let Basra know she was thankful.
Amina was grateful to the people who were watching out for them. But it was never enough. Amina, who had always been thin, now felt fragile, skeletal.
On the days she went to school, Amina would make quick side-trips while walking home. Everything and anything was a canvas. A partially crumbling alley wall. A shopkeeper’s signpost. The interior or exterior of an abandoned building. A stray rock.
On the weekends, she waited until Ayeeyo had lain down for a nap. Then she sneaked out, guilty and furtive but grateful for the freedom.
Ayeeyo never questioned where she went or why. Either she didn’t know or she had realised the futility of scolding her granddaughter.
Amina started collecting bits and pieces on her excursions and bringing them back to the house – a piece of coloured glass, a bullet casing, an empty glasses frame, a trigger that had broken off from a gun, pieces of fabric. She left the detritus in her father’s studio. Each time she returned with something new, she stared at the odds and ends, wondering what artwork she could make with them.
She returned to the abandoned building where she had first shown Keinan her work and found that the mud sculpture and mosaic were gone. She had thought she might take the mosaic to Bakaara and try to sell it.
Her drawing of the boys playing soccer was still intact, which startled her. Even more surprising, graffiti was scrawled across the wall. She wondered why, until she started reading the messages people had left.
Somali soccer forever!
You can break the body but not the spirit.
Hey A! Come to our neighbourhood (Hodan)
and draw us playing soccer.
We have the best soccer players in all Mogadishu.
We will have a normal life again, insha’ Allah.
Our boys will play soccer again.
Hope, peace, love.
Amina smiled, a soft glow spreading through her entire body. She had done something worth paying attention to. Something of the spirit of freedom and peace had seeped through her work.
But now she looked at it with a critical eye. The perspective was off, and the boys’ torsos were too long. She was tempted for just a minute to do something to fix it, but then she shook off the feeling.
Don’t look back, she thought, reminding herself of the words Aabbe had told her so long ago – just a few short months, really, but it felt like years. Don’t get stuck in the here and now. Just look ahead.
One picture she drew whenever and wherever she could – a picture of her father, with the message she had initially written underneath it:
Samatar Khalid, taken from his home in Mogadishu.
One of many.
Poems flowed from her hand. She etched them on walls everywhere.
For the city of Mogadishu,
the city of sand and ocean and guns,
salt in the air, trees shaking in the wind, dirt alleys
and a maze of streets going this way and that.
Let Allah’s peace and love settle on us
coating everything like dust in the rubble.
She signed everything with her signature A. and the Somali star. Would anybody ever see her poems? Maybe. But it didn’t matter. She did this because Allah had given her the vision to do it, because of the itch in her fingertips, because she had things in her heart that needed to be expressed – not because somebody might see them. Allah saw them and perhaps that was all that mattered – to convey the message of love and peace through her artwork.
They were her prayers for the city of her birth.
Still, though she kept working, whenever and however she could, she had begun to feel uneasy. She’d gone back to a few of her original sites and found work missing – the smaller pieces she did, like the cloth or glass mosaics.
Maybe she should stop. If she didn’t, she might end up with a similar fate as her father.
One day, while squatting inside an abandoned building and sketching a poem on its interior walls, she caught a glimpse of something moving in the corner of her eyes. She stood swiftly and scanned the street just in time to spot Keinan slipping behind a freestanding wall to hide.
The glow she felt from working was quickly eaten up by fear. She’d decided to trust Keinan the day she’d gone to the market with Ayeeyo, but maybe she had been too hasty. Why was he following her?
She never should have told him about her work. Was he spying on her for his father? Would al-Shabaab come and take her away too?
She ran home, determined to be more careful the next time she worked.
Because there would always be a next time, now.
Chapter 11
‘We have to take one of your father’s paintings and try again,’ Ayeeyo said one day. ‘Allah has blessed us with food that someone has generously given but now we must do what we can to take care of ourselves.’
Her words hit Amina like a grenade, a hot, searing light exploding inside her.
‘Now we know how to find the Bakaara Market and now we know what to expect,’ Ayeeyo said. ‘We must forgive the one who did us wrong but that doesn’t mean we have to trust people.’
Amina nodded, quietly agreeing. She had lost nearly everything that day but the worst thing of all was that she’d nearly lost herself. Now that she was working again – painting or writing almost every day – she realised she was most herself when she was working on her art. And she’d nearly given it up for good.
‘You’re right, Ayeeyo,’ Amina said. ‘I will enter the market like a lion.’
She felt like a lion. A lion recovering from a battle that had left her bruised and shaken, but not beaten.
She went to her father’s studio. She looked through the stack of paintings he had finished, wishing with all her heart that she could keep them. But she had to let go. She just hoped that it didn’t feel like she was letting go of Aabbe too.
It’s not the same, it’s not, she told herself. I have to go. If I wasn’t doing this, Aabbe would be doing it or Roble. One way or the other, Aabbe’s paintings would have ended up in other people’s hands.
She selected her least favourite painting, the one of Bakaara Market. If she had to part with one, she’d part with the one she liked the least. She’d keep doing that until, well, until she had no more paintings left to sell.
By then, perhaps her own work would be good enough that she could start selling it. She wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that – she wanted her work to be accessible to everybody. But the family needed to survive somehow. And she’d rather sell her work than continue to steal.
Tucking the painting under her jalbaab, she went inside to say goodbye to Ayeeyo and Hooyo.
‘I should go with you,’ Ayeeyo said.
‘No,’ Amina said. ‘Remember last time, how you got sunstroke? And now you are even weaker, with even less food in your belly.’ She didn’t mention the arthritis that kept Ayeeyo awake at night and made her steps slow and painful. ‘I will go alone and I will succeed this time.’
She spoke bravely but her stomach ached, though not with hunger. The hunger pains no longer bothered her because they were constant. This ache was fear.
Amina retraced the path they had taken when they followed Keinan and his father to Bakaara, then headed straight to the place where she had been swindled the last time. She pretended to be confident, but she hoped she wouldn’t see Dalmar. She wanted to believe she would be brave and shout thief if she saw him, but she knew she would just slink away and go home instead, failing to sell the painting and facing Ayeeyo’s disappointment.
She walked down the street, passing the red, blue and orange umbrellas, the African Union soldiers in fatigues, tables piled high with limes and carrots and capsicums.
She could practically taste the relief when she arrived and saw the fat man sitting at t
he table with a woman, probably his wife. No Dalmar in sight. Relief tasted strangely like blood until Amina realised she was so stressed that she had bitten her tongue.
‘I have another Samatar Khalid,’ Amina said. ‘Are you interested?’
The fat man acknowledged her with his chin. ‘I’ll buy it,’ he said. ‘I can always sell Samatar Khalids. Let me see it.’
Amina pulled out Aabbe’s painting of Bakaara Market, with its dual images of the massive mosque and the men trading gigantic guns.
The fat man coughed. ‘Hide that, quick,’ he said.
Amina immediately sheathed it beneath the fabric of her jalbaab. ‘Don’t you like it?’ she asked.
‘Oh, it’s good,’ he said. ‘But it’s dangerous, at least around here. There are still some secret al-Shabaab operatives who work here.’ He shook his head.
‘Buy it. It’ll sell,’ his wife said.
He named a price similar to the one he had suggested for the last painting that Amina had brought him. She agreed quickly. He lifted a hand and crooked his index finger. Within a few seconds, a young man wandered over to him. He leaned close and the fat man spoke quietly into his ear. Curious, the young man glanced at Amina, then left.
‘Let me tell you what’s become really popular the last few weeks,’ the fat man said. ‘We’ve sold a couple of pieces by someone we’ve started calling the “Artist”. If you can get your hands on one of his pieces of art—’
‘Who’s the Artist?’ Amina asked. She was curious, of course, but getting her hands on another artist’s work was beyond her. It was all she could do to sell her father’s paintings.
‘Nobody knows,’ he said.
‘He doesn’t have a name?’
‘He’s a street artist; some people might call what he does very good graffiti. He signs his work with the letter A. and the Somali star. Everybody’s talking about him. I could sell one of his works in five minutes.’
Amina’s face got very hot, so hot she was sure he could see the panic on it. ‘How do you know it’s a boy?’ she managed to ask.
The man’s wife shook her head, the look on her face half admiring and half disapproving. ‘A girl wouldn’t take such risks. He’s in trouble, that one.’
‘The Artist?’
‘Yes. Al-Shabaab is very angry, I hear.’
‘But the African Union ran al-Shabaab out of the city.’
‘Don’t be fooled,’ the man said. ‘They still control some neighbourhoods. And they’re still here. They might be walking around the market in disguise, looking just like you and me. They’re just waiting to wreak havoc. We haven’t heard the last of them, you’ll see.’
‘Why don’t they like the Artist’s work?’ Amina spoke quickly. She knew she shouldn’t ask but she had to know. Then she could decide exactly how scared she should be.
‘Oh, they say he is working against Allah’s will for Somalia.’ He shrugged. ‘They think his work is un-Islamic.’
‘They probably think all artwork is un-Islamic,’ Amina said.
‘Yes. They are extremists.’
‘And you? What do you think?’
‘Me? I don’t care about art. I just want to make money.’
At least he was honest. ‘So if he is a street artist, how do you sell his work?’ she asked.
‘The Artist does other work, not just graffiti on buildings.’ He laughed. ‘We’ve seen mosaics, paintings, work made with things you could just find in the street … cast-off materials like strips of cloth or coloured glass.’
Amina felt a jolt of anger. So that was where her smaller pieces had gone when they’d disappeared. Even though she had been considering selling her own work, she still wasn’t sure she wanted her work to be bought and displayed in people’s homes. She wanted it to be available for everybody in Somalia, at least to anybody who discovered it where she had left it. And if somebody else brought her artwork in and sold it, that meant they were making money – while she and her family went hungry.
‘People sometimes bring his work in and sell it to us. Some have even brought in imitations, but you can tell the difference,’ the woman said.
‘The Artist isn’t trained,’ the man said. ‘His work is good, not great. But it’s distinct.’
His wife spoke up. ‘It’s sincere. It’s real. People need that. Somalia needs it.’
‘Why?’ Amina asked.
‘It’s the spirit behind the work,’ the woman explained. ‘People gravitate towards it. It’s so—innocent. And idealistic. All the works that I’ve seen have this hope in them, a belief that we can change.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t be selling them,’ she said. ‘Maybe people should just leave the Artist’s work where they find it. That way, more people will see it.’
The man snorted. ‘Idealism and money don’t make good company, girl.’
‘Maybe it’s not about money,’ she said.
He waved his hand, dismissing her. ‘What would you know about it?’
The young man had returned with a pouch. The fat man reached under his table and pulled out a large black plastic bag. ‘Here, hide the Samatar Khalid in that.’
Amina fumbled to put the painting into the plastic bag and handed it to the man as he gave her the pouch containing money. Amina counted it, noting that it was all there, just as he promised.
‘You see, I am honest, not like that man you dealt with last time.’
‘Dalmar.’
‘Yes, Dalmar. Bakaara Market is full of con artists.’ He searched her face for something. ‘Your father is quite an artist,’ he said. ‘And a brave man. Brave or stupid. What about you?’
‘Are you asking if I’m brave or stupid?’ Amina asked.
He sniggered, his belly jiggling. ‘Clearly, you are both brave and stupid or you wouldn’t be here. Last time, you told me you paint sometimes. Are you an artist? Are you following in your father’s footsteps?’
Amina stifled her immediate response, a shouted, Yes!
What could she say that would be the truth but would not reveal her identity as the elusive ‘Artist’ he had just been praising? She was an artist, at least she wanted to believe she was and his comments about the reputation of the Artist confirmed it. He hadn’t been overly complimentary about her style or skill, but he had recognised the spirit in her work, and that made her proud.
Still, her work was nothing like Aabbe’s.
‘No,’ she said finally. ‘I’m not following in my father’s footsteps.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Too bad. Somalia needs another Samatar Khalid. Well, perhaps you have a brother who will follow in his father’s footsteps.’
She hid the pouch under the jalbaab, taking out just enough money to buy some food. She found a few bananas, some rice, tomatoes, potatoes, an onion and some goat meat. The meat was expensive, but worth it. She imagined Hooyo eating it and growing strong and healthy, and the baby too.
She did some sums in her head. Should she walk home and risk getting robbed? Or should she shell out precious money for a taxi?
The sun was low on the horizon. The last thing she wanted was to walk home in the dark, when anything could happen.
She joined a group getting into the taxi, a white minibus, squeezing in tight between two large women, grateful for once that she was thin. One of the women carried a chicken on her lap. A few men climbed on top and sat on the roof rack.
The taxi driver honked his horn impatiently at another taxi, then jerked out into traffic, swerving through intersections and hurtling down side alleys, narrowly avoiding small cars and trucks racing towards them. Amina wondered how the men sitting on top were managing to hold on.
The taxi shuddered to a stop one block from Amina’s house. She jostled her way to the front to get off.
Dusk was falling. The sky seared crimson as the sun set on the horizon. Clouds trailed out over the ocean’s edge. The sunset reflected off houses and walls, basking the entire neighbourhood in a warm, pink glow.
She felt pr
actically giddy, dancing up the stone steps and into the house, ready to shout that everything would be all right now. She had food, lots of it, and money, lots of it, too. The family would survive and grow. Hooyo could eat like a queen for the rest of her pregnancy.
She skidded to a stop in the front room. Something smelled terrible – a heavy, thick odour.
Hooyo’s bedroom door was closed. She heard a low, keening moan coming from behind it.
She tiptoed towards the room and opened the door.
Ayeeyo was hovering between the bedside and a pan of pink water. Hooyo sat straight up in bed, partially clothed, her eyes wide and bright with fear, her bloody hands uselessly trying to staunch the flow seeping from below her abdomen.
Chapter 12
‘Go away!’ Hooyo sobbed when she saw Amina. ‘Go away.’ She was so weak, her attempts to push Amina away felt like gentle pats, a bird’s wing fluttering against her.
As she backed away, Amina’s eyes met Ayeeyo’s. Amina nodded, to let her know the trip had been successful, and she saw Ayeeyo’s shoulders droop in grateful relief.
Amina shut the door gently behind her, lingering, ear close to the door. She could only hear Ayeeyo’s quiet murmur and Hooyo’s whimpered ‘No, no, no,’ in response.
Night fell quickly, the darkness heavy and suffocating. She couldn’t stay there, listening to Hooyo’s cries. She had to get out.
She climbed the crumbling stairs to the second floor, standing close to the edge, where part of the wall still remained. She leaned against it, looking out at the deep black horizon, the ocean at night. Stars were all that revealed where the ocean ended and the sky began. She took off her headscarf and the warm, salty breeze blew through her hair. Somebody was playing music nearby and the heavy doof-doof combined with the sounds of cars revving and the loud voices of two men walking past.
Amina fingered the money pouch clutched in her hands, trying hard not to think about the bloodstained sheets or the way Hooyo’s fists were pressing hard to try to keep the blood back or maybe to keep the baby from coming too soon. Amina wasn’t sure which.