by J. L. Powers
‘I am an artist,’ she said. ‘I admit that. I won’t lie. And this is an example of the type of art I create. Is this a problem?’ She looked at the imam for an answer. ‘You would arrest me for creating this?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘No, of course not.’
‘So art itself is not a problem?’ Ayeeyo asked.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Islam has always had artists.’
‘You were going to let these men take her and kill her, because she makes the flag of Islam?’ Keinan asked, disbelief in his voice.
The imam furrowed his brow. He looked frustrated, a little angry – whether at one of the people in the room or at the situation, it was impossible to say. He opened his mouth but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a piercing scream.
Amina dropped the mosaic and ran into her mother’s bedroom.
Hooyo squatted on the ground, sweating profusely, her clothes pooling around her ankles. Rahmo held her hand, murmuring, ‘Push, Khadija. You can do this. Push.’ Hooyo looked up, startled to see Amina. Shaking her head, she muttered, ‘As long as you’re here, come and help me, daughter.’
Amina ran and knelt beside Hooyo.
‘Put your hand on her back,’ Rahmo instructed. She watched where Amina placed her hand. ‘Lower. Lower.’ She nodded when Amina was in the right spot. ‘Now press hard.’
Amina pushed as Hooyo moaned. Hooyo guided her hand through the layers of cloth until Amina felt something spongy and wet. She yanked her hand back. ‘What was that?’
‘That’s the baby’s head,’ Rahmo said.
Ayeeyo hurried into the room and noticed the baby’s head crowning. ‘She’s almost here, Khadija! You can do it. Your baby is almost here!’
Suddenly, the baby seemed very real. Hooyo groaned and fell backwards onto the mat, unconscious for a few seconds. She opened her eyes, held her hands out – one to Ayeeyo, one to Rahmo – and stood, squatting down again, eyes closed.
‘Would you like to catch the baby, Amina?’ Rahmo asked.
Her heart beat rapidly but she crouched down, glancing back at the nurse for reassurance, putting her hands out like she was going to catch a ball. Hooyo groaned and strained and suddenly Amina was gripping something slippery like a fish, covered with a thin layer of white muck.
‘Oh …’ she cried, and clutched it close. ‘Oh!’
Rahmo took the baby from Amina. ‘It’s a girl! You have a beautiful daughter, Khadija, just beautiful! A little flower!’
The baby was tiny, so tiny, and, underneath the layer of white stuff, her skin was greyish-blue. Amina looked away, afraid.
‘Is she going to make it?’ Hooyo propped herself up on her elbows to peer at the baby in Rahmo’s arms.
Rahmo rubbed the baby’s chest and belly, patted her bottom, and blew into her mouth until she started to bawl. Ayeeyo brought her a basin of warm water and she gently washed the baby until her skin was a beautiful nut brown. She brought her to the bed and gently laid her in Hooyo’s arms.
‘She’ll be fine,’ Rahmo said. ‘And so will you.’ Then she looked at Amina and burst out laughing. ‘But your other daughter looks like she’s about to faint. Amina, sit down before you fall over.’
Amina sat beside her mother. ‘She’s beautiful,’ she whispered. And despite the baby’s flat nose and funny, cone-shaped head, she was beautiful. Perfectly.
The front room was empty when Amina emerged a few minutes later. Ayeeyo had gone to the kitchen to boil water so she could clean the room and offer Rahmo a cup of tea.
She went into the yard, wondering where the imam, the stranger and Keinan and his father had gone. She had forgotten all about them during the birth and now she wondered if they would be back.
She found Keinan sitting on a rock near the fence. He was alone. He stood quickly as Amina approached, glancing anxiously at the house. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘My mother is fine,’ she said. ‘The baby is fine. But she’s so little – little and brown, like a tiny nut.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I’m glad everything is fine.’
They stared at each other. Amina’s heart pounded. ‘Where did they go?’ she asked, to fill the silence. ‘Are they coming back?’
He shook his head. ‘I think you shamed them.’
‘Because of my Islamic flag?’ I should be more careful, she thought. ‘They might come back.’
‘Maybe. But everything’s changing in Mogadishu. Maybe they’ll leave you alone.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I have a secret to tell you,’ he said.
She waited.
He twisted the sleeve of his tunic, then kicked the rock gently with his foot. ‘I’ve sold some of your artwork at Bakaara,’ he said. ‘The smaller pieces you made, like that mosaic.’
‘What?’ A rush of anger flowed through Amina. ‘That was you? You took my work and sold it without asking me?’
‘I didn’t do it for me,’ he said. ‘I did it for you. For your father. For Roble. I saved all the money. I don’t want a single shilling from the sales. I just need to fetch the money from my house and I’ll bring it all to you.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I wanted to help you somehow but I didn’t have a chance to tell you. You were so mad …’
Amina sighed. Her anger was already gone. He had meant it as a kindness. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Not everybody would understand why she wanted her work to be visible to all, and not kept for private use, but she had to at least try to explain this to Keinan. ‘I don’t do that work for money,’ she said. ‘I do it for the people of Somalia. I want everybody to be able to see it. That’s why I leave it where people will find it.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘But a little money never hurt anybody. It hasn’t hurt me.’ His jaunty grin was lopsided.
‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘Well, I’d better get back to Hooyo and the baby.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t you agree? You think having a little money has hurt me?’
She smirked. ‘I’ll see you soon, Keinan.’
He shook his head. ‘See you soon, Amina.’ As she headed back into the house, he called after her, ‘I could sell that flag of Islam you made. Get back to me about it, all right?’
She fluttered a hand in goodbye. She’d think about it. After all, they would need money in the coming months.
After Rahmo left, Amina went back into the bedroom to see Hooyo. She was awake, holding the baby, wrapped tightly in an orange blanket, only her face poking out.
Amina knelt down by the mat. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Didn’t you have a name picked out for a little sister?’
‘Jamilah.’
Hooyo smiled sleepily. ‘Sounds just right to me.’ She closed her eyes.
Amina touched Jamilah’s soft, curly hair. She caressed the baby’s ears – so little! – and touched her squishy nose, too big for her tiny face. Jamilah opened her eyes and stared up at her, unblinking. Her eyes moved left and right, left and right, alert for just a few seconds. Then she yawned.
‘Hey, little flower,’ Amina crooned.
Soon Jamilah and Hooyo were sleeping, little snores erupting from Hooyo’s mouth, a tiny bubble forming on the baby’s lips. The bubble got bigger then smaller with each breath Jamilah took, but it never popped.
Amina couldn’t help giggling. She took a blanket and covered them. She’d never seen Hooyo look so exhausted – or so content. Time to leave her mother and baby sister to sleep in peace.
The scent of goat meat cooking with onions, potatoes and tomatoes drifted into the room. She tiptoed out and went to help Ayeeyo cook a very late dinner.
Chapter 14
Amina used a stick of charcoal to scratch a drawing of the map of Somalia on the wall of an abandoned shop near Bakaara Market. She drew the line of mountains to the north and created a curvy line, like ocean waves, for the sea. She drew an ocean liner and a Somali pirate ship lingering in the moonl
it waters. She created the star from the Somalia flag above the ocean, and then a half-moon near the star, but not encircling it, in the way that symbolised the Islamic crescent.
Below her drawing, in big block letters, she wrote:
Peace for Somali Nomads, Wherever We Are.
It had been months since Aabbe was arrested, since al-Shabaab had kidnapped Roble and then been driven out of the city by African Union soldiers. So those nomads included the boys who had fought with al-Shabaab, some who were now returning to the city from various parts of the country where they had fought. Would the boys be able to go to school, find jobs, start businesses? And the girls, too, the ones who had served as wives to the soldiers? What would happen to them now? Would they be able to get an education, find husbands, have children? Would the people forget that they had been wives to al-Shabaab soldiers and let them live normal lives – or were their lives ruined? Amina hoped they would be welcomed back, as she would want to be welcomed back.
As the trickle of young men and women returned to their neighbourhoods, Amina couldn’t prevent a desperate hope flooding her heart – that Roble would come back, too, one of these days. She didn’t care if he was missing every limb on his body, which happened both to resisters and those who fought loyally for al-Shabaab. But it was impossible to say whether he would – or could – come back. She hoped for the best.
Keinan was busy these days. Despite the fallout with his father, which had been considerable, he still lived with his family. He had stopped going to school and had joined his father in opening a restaurant near Bakaara Market. They hoped tourists would soon return to Somalia.
He came by sometimes to see Amina and Hooyo and Ayeeyo. He would squat in the front room and play with Jamilah. Jamilah would coo at him and smile brightly, giggling at his loud voice and silly antics. Keinan was still Keinan.
Amina sometimes wondered what his visits meant, if their friendship would become something more than that. Certainly, Hooyo and Ayeeyo had come to see him as an extension of the family, a substitute son. Maybe they saw him as Amina’s future husband. It was possible. Yet Amina wondered how she would fare with Abdullahi Hassan as a father-in-law. Mostly, she was too busy to think about it.
She had taken over Aabbe’s studio as her own and nobody had argued with her. Now, she used his art supplies, including the blank canvases. She sometimes sold pieces at Bakaara Market, though now that Hooyo had gone back to her old job as a nurse at a private non-profit health clinic, there was less need for the money. The profits allowed her to buy new art supplies, when she wasn’t making or finding her own, like she’d learned to do when she had no choice.
She had started creating a large collage with the odds and ends she’d been collecting on the street. A homage to Mogadishu, a tribute to the things they’d lost in the war. She planned to mount it high on their wall – where people could see it – now that she could practise openly as the Artist.
Life in Mogadishu was changing – slowly. The streets buzzed with the sounds of activity. Construction companies were hard at work making new buildings or restoring old ones. A shop and restaurant had popped up on the next street over. Vans and cars bearing the names of NGOs occasionally drove past the house, busy going here and there restoring the country. Amina’s uncle in Norway was even talking about moving back to Somalia with his family.
It wasn’t perfect. Squatters – and their goats – had moved into the ruins of the post office down the street. Al-Shabaab had detonated a bomb recently, killing several and wounding others – all part of an attempt to destroy Mogadishu’s fragile peace.
‘That’s to be expected,’ Hooyo had said. ‘Did you think we’d suddenly be a brand-new Somalia?’
But they were all grateful for the return to peace and a normal life. There was even talk of elections later that year.
Who knew what the future would bring?
‘I think I’d like to become an architect,’ Amina told Hooyo one day after school.
It was afternoon. Sunlight filtered into the front room and fell in dappled patterns across Jamilah’s face. The alcove window cast a bluish hue over Ayeeyo, who was nodding off in the corner.
Hooyo’s fingers gently caressed the baby’s face and head. She had the look of a woman in love.
Even though the two of them still clashed, Amina had seen fleeting glimpses of that exact look when Hooyo looked at her, too. Maybe, Amina admitted to herself, Hooyo loves me just as much as she always loved Roble.
‘Somalia needs good architects,’ Hooyo agreed. ‘That’s a good career choice for an artist. A good career choice that will help our country rebuild.’
Amina kissed Jamilah on the head, traced two fingers across Hooyo’s arm, and left. She had plans to work that day.
She had started to go further afield to find canvases for her work. Today, she found an unoccupied house missing doors and windows five or six blocks away. She wrote her latest poem on the walls facing the street, so that people would see it as they passed by.
She painted a large white square, then wrote in clear block print:
In my box of memories, I will put
a bag of Aabbe’s paintbrushes,
edges tipped in white and green and grey,
like the ocean he was painting
when they came and took him.
I will put his warm brown eyes,
a lock of my brother’s curly hair,
Ayeeyo’s smile and even Hooyo’s pretend grumpiness.
I will put the breeze off the ocean, the swaying trees,
bananas and spicy food.
All the people I love, this country that I love,
the maze of streets,
the destroyed buildings.
I will put all the good and some of the bad
because even the bad is worth remembering.
When this country is reborn,
we will need
all of our memories.
A.
Author’s note
I first encountered Somali refugees in Kenya in 1993, when I was working with street children in Nairobi during a summer break from college. Although the majority of the street children were native Kenyans, some of these children were Somali, having fled the violence in their countries with their families.
Working with street children in Kenya turned out to be life changing for me, as it redirected my interests toward the continent of Africa. I went on to receive two masters degrees in African history and now I focus much of my writing on the continent. Although my speciality is in southern Africa, during the course of writing Amina I found that Somali Africans are like Africans all over the continent: deeply hospitable. Many Somalis opened their homes and lives to me, despite the fact that I was a stranger. Their warmth, laughter, kindness and willingness to share their experiences both inside Somalia and now in the US touched my life in a way that I will never forget.
Somalia endured a civil war from 1991 to 2012. During that time, the government made many attempts to create a stable, effective system for ruling the country, but failed.
This book is set in 2011, in the waning days of a militant rebel group’s control of the city. In 2008, al-Shabaab, a fundamentalist Islamist group with ties to al-Qaeda, managed to take control of approximately a third of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. They ruled the city with brutality – banning music, games and women’s bras, all of which they considered un-Islamic. People could be arrested for even talking about soccer.
Somalia experienced widespread famine in 2011, as the entire region suffered through a severe drought for the second year in a row. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled the country during the famine, made worse because al-Shabaab barred international aid organisations from delivering help in the regions it controlled.
A coalition of soldiers from around Africa, known as the African Union Mission in Somalia, began retaking Mogadishu in May 2011. When al-Shabaab abruptly quit the city in August 2011, fleeing south, war lords immediately began re-
establishing themselves in the neighbourhoods that al-Shabaab had abandoned.
Despite this ongoing instability and the continuing problem of bombs and suicide attacks, Somalia experienced a real renaissance in 2012. In September 2012, with relative peace established across the country, academic and civic activist Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was elected president of Somalia in the country’s first elections since 1967.
Al-Shabaab believed that art was haram for Muslims and they made creating art illegal during their rule over Mogadishu. During those years, artists either gave up their art or painted in secret. Many of them received death threats. Abdulkadir Yahya Ali, a prominent peace activist, founder of Mogadishu’s Centre for Research and Dialogue and patron of the arts, was killed by suspected al-Shabaab soldiers in his own home. Since the return of stability and the ejection of al-Shabaab from the city (and much of the country), many of these artists have started to create art openly again. Mogadishu’s Centre for Research and Dialogue, the centre that Ali created, has founded a project that displays paintings in public places in order to create dialogue about Somalia’s past and its future. As of January 2013, they had mounted over twenty paintings in public places.
Timeline
1960 Former Italian and British colonies in Somalia become the independent United Republic of Somalia.
1969 Major General Mohamed Siad Barre stages coup, establishes Somali Democratic Republic and assumes presidency.
1974–5 Severe drought causes widespread starvation.
1977–8 Ethiopian–Somali War: Somalia invades the predominantly Somali-inhabited Ogaden region, seeking to incorporate the area into Greater Somalia.
1980s Opposition grows to Barre’s military dictatorship due to government corruption, poor economic performance and persecution allegations. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of Somalis killed, hundreds of thousands become refugees as militia groups rebel.