by Igiaba Scego
The memory of her friend Howa Rosario had accompanied Maryam in that epoch of memories and stories, but now the woman felt she had enough strength to run by herself. There were no falcons in the Roman skies. She couldn’t see the stars very well at night. Rome was dark and sometimes terrifying. But her daughter, Zuhra, would be there to illuminate her universe. Even without her friend of a time long since past, Maryam Laamane knew that she would be okay.
THE FATHER
Everyone wanted to know about Majid and Bushra.
“Where did Majid go?”
“Did he come back to Bushra?”
“Did they ever make love?”
“Did they die in the end?”
“The end, how did it end?”
Dear Zuhra, perhaps you wanted me to tell my story. You may have wanted to know what your father did, which places he visited, how many people he met, what routes he traveled. I know I told you another story. I couldn’t help it. I was a failure. A designer of nothing. I was incapable of properly loving the women who loved me. I was incapable of sharing my days with you, my daughters. I regret the lost time, though I don’t regret putting you two in this world. I wanted to show you that your story as a woman is tied to a more ancient story. I don’t know if it will be useful to you. Something in me hopes it will be. I digressed, I know. I’ve never been good at telling stories. I can’t do anything, really. But I love you, daughter of mine.
Bushra, Majid, Elias. One story. My own. Yours, too, my daughter. Everyone’s story. Memory.
“Only lice are treated that way. You squash them and forget them.”
Bushra was speaking with a cousin who lived in Italy. She was old and wrinkled then, my Bushra, not the energetic woman you’ve heard of to this point. She was in a puny public telephone booth. Majid still hadn’t come back to her. It was 1990. She hadn’t heard from her cousin in years. Yet in those twilight days, as she waited for civil war, Bushra tried talking to her relatives abroad. Everyone, no exceptions. She wanted to prepare her family who had gotten out for something devastating. Not even she was adequately prepared. Her cousin was very worried.
“On the BBC they say a civil war is about to blow up. Oh god, abbayo, how will they do it?” The cousin’s lament filled the small booth with anguish. Bushra didn’t think she could bare it for a minute more. That insufferable woman pushed too hard and, despite Bushra’s weight, she made herself small and invisible. She had to end the phone call. She had to find an excuse. She said goodbye to her cousin in a rush, “Bad signal…a bad signal.” Myriad justifications, the line, groceries to get, fear.
When she left, she saw eyes watching her suspiciously. All the eyes in Mogadishu were like that then. No one trusted the stranger next to them anymore. You glimpsed tomorrow’s enemy in each person’s face. Itching for revenge. Leery eyes. Once, like everyone else, Bushra enjoyed going to public places. There were phone booths that connected the world, lines that let you feel like part of a complex universe. You could speak with the entire world at the post office. Moscow, New York, Kuala Lumpur, Bamako, Rome. You could send big packages and pick them up from the post office too. The trafficking of dreams. She picked up Elias’s fabrics, mine, and the cassettes Maryam had recorded. That place made her feel alive. And like most people, Bushra didn’t have a telephone in the house. She wasn’t rich. What did she need one for? No one would’ve called her. Majid least of all. He had vanished long ago, a man in pursuit of his own destiny. Bushra wasn’t resentful. Rather, she waited. Sooner or later they would meet again. When she needed to call someone, she went to the post office and spent her pretty shillings, but there was nothing else to say except, “Thanks be unto God, Alhamdulillah.” What did she need her own telephone for? She had thousands at her disposal. She was never short a phone line and the globe stretched out at her feet. What more did she need?
Then things changed.
Elias didn’t send her fabrics anymore. Maryam stopped recording her voice on cassettes, her lovely voice telling Bushra how strange Italy was, how they treated Somalis, how the fruit of her loins, Zuhra, was turning out. Oh, how she missed the voice of that madwoman Maryam Laamane. The girl recounted many things on her cassettes. She did it for her, Bushra, who didn’t know how to read or write. She would’ve liked reading and writing. Listening to Maryam was a little like being at the cinema. The stories chased one another drunkenly. And she drank of the life Maryam Laamane had tasted with her own lips.
Then one day, no more cassettes from Maryam. No more cinema. Nothing, eber. Maryam was abandoned by Elias. The standard script. The son following in the father’s footsteps. The son abandoning a woman as his father had done. The son with a pain too great to share, like his father. Farewell, wife. Farewell, marriage vows. Farewell, life. Maryam Laamane alone in Rome, Bushra alone in Mogadishu. No more fabrics from Elias. No dreams from Maryam. At first Bushra wondered: “Is my son dead?” The speculation hardly convinced her. Elias, she felt, would die after her. He couldn’t precede her. He was a good boy, Elias, but not an angel, and only angels precede their parents in death. God loves them too much to leave them suffering in this immense ocean of pain. When she didn’t get Maryam’s cassettes anymore, she knew the girl was suffering. She doesn’t have my nerves, Bushra thought.
Once these absences were solidified, she only used the post office for sporadic telephone calls, a useless refill of words. The post changed radically for Mogadishans too, not only for Bushra. It wasn’t a benign place anymore, but the back end of a taxing wait. You spoke with foreigners because, while everyone else watched, hope led people to pack their suitcases and leave Somalia, potentially forever. The post office regurgitated people every day. That day, though, more than most. There wasn’t much time, not much time at all until war. The eve, the countdown to upheaval. Everyone stood in line in front of those tiny booths. Everyone was strung out and alienated. Those were the last days of peace and, in the days preceding the chaos, the most perceptive people sought an escape route from a horror no one wanted to imagine. The watchwords were tickets, visa, plane, life. Everyone was hooked up to a telephone, trying to contact a relative abroad who might somehow fix the situation for them.
“Lice, we’re only lice,” Bushra said to her cousin and hung up.
The Mogadishans’ movements, Bushra thought, had become distillated frenzy. They all ran toward a possible salvation. They tried saving their own skin. Bushra, despite the torment dogging her heart, was the only one not to have changed her stride. She was old and walked slowly toward the threshold to her home. Mogadishu floundered around her. The people’s discordant steps upset her delicate stomach. Only she, an elderly woman, kept her stride as before. A peaceful gait. Bushra looked like a cripple. She may well have been. She shouldered her way forward, as though wanting to challenge life, but maybe she was too well-behaved to do so. She hid, dancing as she did. When she walked, Bushra did one of the city folk’s tribal dances. She pushed against the wind. Her shoulder thrusts took her places. Still, shutting the door behind her was always a relief.
The city, that haughty phoenix on the sea, had been in this state for a few months. Barre had tugged the rope of power too hard. He had risked more than he should have. No one warned him that the Berlin Wall was in shambles, the Soviet Union had dissolved, the needle was no longer tipped in favor of the black world, and that soon someone would give it to him in the ass, the whole thing and without vaseline. Barre slumbered in his villa, deluding himself into thinking that he was still somebody. Only the Italians still paid their respects. There was still food to be scavenged by collaborating and, as you know, some Italians really like eating. Big Mouth and his ilk didn’t know that they were already fucked. Barre didn’t want to know that Somalis hadn’t been afraid for some time.
On the day the Manifesto was signed, all cards were laid on the table. The Manifesto. Their Manifesto. The one all Somalis had in their hearts.
Bushra saw that sheet of paper for the first time one afternoon in May 1990. A
thorny-haired boy named Juje chucked it by the garees. Bushra knew the boy well. He was from the same laf, from her same tribe, the same blood and bones. Bread of her same qabila. She’d seen his parents marry and then argue. She’d seen him crawl and then walk.
The paper the boy was waving in the wind with rabid pride was the Manifesto, a document written in Italian by 114 of Barre’s opponents, who were requesting that the government step down to pave the way for democracy’s return. The Manifesto. Their Manifesto. No clan, only nonviolent struggle, hope. The country’s intellectuals shouted, the great elders, some of whom had worked for the nation’s independence and were active in the SYL. Among the signatories were sultans, qabila leaders, imam, businessmen, and yes, some soon-to-be looters.
Bushra looked at the boy. She didn’t know what to say. The people were tired of bowing their heads. War was seconds away. The boy had large, watery eyes. They contained vistas of pride. It was from watching, for the first time, so much rage in such a tiny body that Bushra knew banishing Barre would be easy. Getting them all to agree, however, was a titanic enterprise.
In July, the boy died in the stadium massacre. He’d gone like many young people to watch the start of the football championships. This was a time when inquiring eyes, the damned jawasees, regime spies, had invaded the city. Juje was the first in a long list of the dead. He’d gone to see his friends play football. Many young people, a lot of testosterone. More whistling than necessary. Mixed mutterings. Barely whispered slogans. They didn’t yet have the strength to say the word liberty.
Bushra remembered the stadium massacre. She’d supported the head of that boy’s mother. It spun without end, oh it spun, the poor mother’s head. She shouted, “Allah, my child! Allah, my boy!” There is nothing that can match the strength of a woman who wants to stop the powerful stride of death. At first they thought it was a celebration. They had seen colors in the sky and heard noise in the background. The little children at home thought it was fireworks. Only the boys’ mothers understood. Only the mothers cried. The boys’ whistles and dissent in the stadium were heard throughout the city. But only the mothers knew they wouldn’t come back again.
Was it you, Juje, who interrupted the president’s speech? Was it you? Yes, maybe it was. You’d read the Manifesto. You believed in it. You couldn’t listen to Big Mouth spew his lies anymore. You couldn’t take it anymore, could you, Juje? Was it you who hooted at the president? You’d read the Manifesto. You believed in a better Somalia. His minions shook with anger. Their fingers on the triggers shook too. The Red Berets brought fire down on those boys. Aim, shoot, bang. And another: aim, shoot, bang. Again: aim, shoot, bang. Brain fragments on the bleachers. Blood on the walkway.
How many died with you, Juje? How many? The bodies were taken away. No one knew the exact count of the massacre of innocents. The first, not the last. Then the people who wrote the Manifesto were targeted, one by one, their sympathizers too. And those who had only crossed their paths. In July, Ismail Jumaale Ossoble died. He’d created the Manifesto. His friends cried loudly. They surrounded the airport. “We mustn’t let them kidnap the corpse,” they shouted. “They won’t stop us from attending his funeral.” All of Mogadishu wanted to be there. They defended the corpse. The Red Berets could’ve kidnapped it and thrown it to the warthogs of the Savannah. Bushra remembered going to the funeral. She saw heads to the horizon. She sobbed.
Three days later, she went to pick up Maryam Laamane from the airport. Maryam had alerted Shukri, a neighbor with a phone, that she would be arriving. Bushra wasn’t surprised. “She wants to stop suffering.” Maryam had strange signs on her face, lines of premature old age. Bushra didn’t say anything to her. She caressed her head. She was pleased by her company. “Mogadishu has changed,” was what she told her goddaughter.
Mogadishu was blind. There was an evening curfew. The regime’s minions had the city in thrall. The rest of the terrors were thought to be bandits and ghosts.
At the end of the year, Bushra began hearing the hyenas plot.
She was sitting on a gember, shut in her house with people from her laf. She was sitting next to Maryam, who was on the prayer mat rattling off fatiha for everyone.
“Tomorrow, the hyenas descend upon the country,” she said.
No one heard her. She’d spoken in a low voice.
The hyenas…she hadn’t heard their strident calls since childhood. As a young girl, when she was bored, she listened to their conversations carried by the wind. She’d learned everything about their plans. In the densest forest, knowledge of the scoundrels’ language was a gift from Allah. You could save the livestock and yourself. You slept calmly and contentedly. Every night Bushra heard the agitated words of those lowly beasts. Every night she would misdirect their cruelty. She’d warn her father and the others in the qabila. She’d lived in dense woodland since she was small. The hyenas were the bane of her daily existence. When the hyenas caused no more problems, she went to the city to design clothes and get married. No more hyenas.
That evening, at the end of the year, she heard these harsh voices again. They had returned. Without a doubt, they’d come back. They would descend on the city the next day.
She heard their plans. She heard their betrayals. She smelled their vile odor.
“Oh no,” she shouted, “leave the children alone! Take whatever you want but don’t touch the children.”
The relatives who were with her in the room shook their heads. They thought she was insane. “Waa ku dhufatay, she’s going crazy.”
“No, friends. I’m sane. I’m well. I swear it. But the hyenas are returning. They are great in number. They’ll hurt the children.”
Someone reminded her that she wasn’t in the woods anymore. They were in Mogadishu, the city, the capital, the one and only Xamar, and hyenas had never been spotted here. They told her to put aside once and for all her wood-dweller’s language: that was what had caused Somalia to backslide.
Only Maryam approached her, asking, “How many hyenas are there?”
“Many, my love. Too many to count. They’re not like the ones from before. These will never stop killing. These ones are never satiated.”
“I understand,” Maryam said.
“What? What do you understand, my girl?”
“Power is a woman who doesn’t share.”
Wardhiigley was shelled. Their house was taken by cannon shot. Their home was in the same neighborhood as the presidential residence. They paid the price for an annoying proximity. Power does not share. There can’t be too many lions in a pack. Only one leader, one guide. So the leaders thought. No one wanted democracy anymore. Everyone wanted to become the new Big Mouth. Only power, force, and blood. The Manifesto was forgotten and with it, its ideals, all of its hopes.
Bushra heard the hyenas plotting every night. In every laf, a conspiracy. Games to double-cross the tribes. They were accused of nepotism, despotism, plots, and intrigues of every sort. Everyone looked after themselves. Weapons and devastation went hand in hand. Meanwhile, the city died. Meanwhile, the children suffered.
“Where are you going, Bushra? You can’t go outside,” her relatives enjoined. She was getting fed up. “I’m old, nothing can happen to me.” Lame, she traversed the empty streets of her lost city. Big Mouth Siad Barre had gone away, exiled to Nigeria. And then he was stone dead. The rest of the city followed his lead. They were all dead by then. Blood continued flowing in their bodies out of sheer inertia. Siad had won. Divide et impera. He’d infected many people with his greedy thirst for power. With his cancer.
Bushra walked among the ruins. She saw horrors.
She saw a boy on the ground. Face covered in blood and sand. Torn uniform, a gaunt body. Wearing government colors. They had just shot him, a mortal wound. He should’ve been taken to the hospital right away. Instead, he was surrounded by militants with masked faces. One said, “I’ll finish him, friends, leave it to me.”
A woman in uniform skeptically approached the quasi-ca
daver. “What’s happening here?” she asked him. The boy began reciting the Quran. He was dying and nothing else came to mind. He bonded with those last words, that last bismallah. “What are you doing here, where are you from?” The boy did not have eyes to look. He barely whispered, “I’m from Puntland, but I’m not a government worker. I did it for the money. The militiamen here are paid well. Please, brothers, don’t kill me. Please…waa lai siray, they tricked me.” Then darkness. End.
The hyenas yelped in laughter. “Yes, more blood. Kill each other. More blood, Somalis. For us, we feed on it. You’re all so stupid. That’s fine by us.”
Bushra realized that seeing people die wasn’t like in the movies. On-screen, people closed their eyes, let their head dip to one side, their hand to the other, and left themselves exposed to the camera’s eye. Dying was easy on film, child’s play.
“Is he dead?” Bushra asked. She didn’t know why she was asking something with such an obvious answer.
“You don’t see it, ajuza. You don’t see that his brain has tarnished my new shirt? Ajuza, fool.”
“Why did you do it?” Bushra insisted.
The hyenas surrounded her. “Kill the old woman. She asks too many questions. We don’t like her. Kill her.”
The man, who was the same age as Juje, pointed his AK-47 at the old woman’s forehead.
Bushra looked at him inquisitively.
“Leave that woman alone. She’s not from the Marehan tribe. Leave her be. She’s from your own laf, you can’t kill her…,” a voice said, emerging out of an indistinct chorus.
Was it the hoarse, high-pitched voice of a woman or a man? Bushra looked in that direction. A sundress. She recognized that dress. It was hers. It was one of the ones Elias had sewn with waxed cotton in the Congo. She was very fond of that dress. She hadn’t been able to find it. And to think that she’d searched everywhere. Here now, after so many years, she saw it on Majid. It was the voice of her husband, her lost friend. Hoarse voice and shrill notes. The voice of a man and a woman.