One late April morning in the year 2000, I woke with a smiling face and walked to the madrassa at six. There I wrote down the last lesson on my board—the end of Surat al-Baqarah, the final Koranic chapter. I was so excited! This meant I could graduate from school and go anywhere in the city, dance, and watch movies, without worrying about Macalin Basbaas and his beatings. I had memorized all 114 chapters of the Koran—fluently reading 6,266 verses in perfect Arabic. The day I came home from my last lesson, Mom had a huge smile on her face. As a gift she had bought me a white kanzu, the robe worn by sheikhs, and a tisbih, the necklace of Islamic prayer beads. I never put them on.
A few days later we gathered for a brief party at the madrassa, ten of us who graduated that day, looking forward to a world without the Angel of Punishment. Macalin Basbaas made a very long speech, still holding his bunch of sticks tied together in his hands, ready to administer some last-minute pain.
“This is the moment that your parents have been waiting for,” he said. “Not as much as we have,” I thought.
“This is the beginning of your future. You all need to go out and spread the word.” That meant Macalin Basbaas wanted us to open madrassas of our own or be at the mosque permanently every day. And for some graduates, this was a dream. They dreamed of going to Saudi Arabia or Egypt to pursue Islamic studies. But I had other dreams on my mind. “If those who want to be sheikhs can dream of a foreign country for Islamic studies, why can’t I dream of America?” I wondered. “If they have been inspired by speeches from the sheikh, why can’t I be inspired by the English words in the movies?”
Macalin Basbaas droned on, but my mind was somewhere else. By early afternoon all of us graduates were running all over the streets, our joy multiplied by a thunderous sky ready to deliver much-needed rain. I felt very accomplished; I had survived seven years of beatings from Macalin Basbaas. Was it possible to learn the Koran without beatings? I felt certain I would not have succeeded without the threat of those sticks. But when I saw and felt the scars across my body, I realized I could never beat children like that. I could never be a madrassa teacher.
To celebrate graduation, we went to Falis’s video shack with no worries about waking up at six the next morning or reciting the lesson for the day. The movie was a new one for us, called Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy as an African prince who goes to America to find a bride. I translated as usual.
Little did I know, while I was at the movie celebrating graduation, my mom had been chatting with Dhuha and some other women in the neighborhood. As usual Dhuha bragged about her three sons, who were older and had become sheikhs. They dressed in robes, went to the mosque all day, and read the Koran. Other women talked about their sons opening new madrassas and teaching the Koran to a new generation of Mogadishans.
I got home in the evening to see Mom and Dhuha sitting happily. A glass of camel milk with two cubes of ice melting in it was on the short leather stool next to Mom. Dad had slaughtered a chicken, he was pulling the feathers out. It was a graduation gift for me. I sat down, happily drinking my milk, hungering for chicken meat. They never told me how they got that chicken. Mom was massaging my head as she continued the conversation with Dhuha. I went into my room and saw a fresh cloth spread on my mat, a gift from Dhuha. Then Mom walked into my room with Dhuha.
“Abdi,” she said, “tomorrow you need to go back to the madrassa and start as the assistant to Macalin Basbaas.”
I felt like someone had fired a gun at me.
“We arranged it all with Macalin Basbaas,” she continued. “He will be waiting for you tomorrow.”
“But I need a break from the madrassa!” I protested.
“A break?” she yelled. “You don’t need a break at all; you need to go to Macalin Basbaas tomorrow! You are not a student anymore but you can have your own madrassa someday, and to do that, you need to stick with him. He will show you the way to be a sheikh.”
“Mom, I don’t want to stick with Macalin Basbaas!” I stormed out of the house.
Mom kept pressuring me to go back to the madrassa and practice more, to be sure I wouldn’t forget what I had learned. She also insisted that I go to the mosque regularly. I withheld my anger, but the final straw came a few weeks after my graduation, when the Tabliiq knocked on our door.
The Tabliiq are proselytizers in the Muslim world—pious Sunni men who come to houses dressed in long robes and turbans. They knock on any door where young men live, asking the young men to travel with them around the city and encouraging them to go to the mosque daily. When they came to our house to take me, I refused to go. To my mom I was now a lost cause. Gone forever was her dream of my being a respected sheikh with a shaved head who hates music and reads the Koran all day. My parents kicked me out of the house. I was fourteen years old, and I went looking for my brother.
By day Hassan hung around Zobe Square, which was crowded with elders and militiamen who gathered to talk about politics and clan rivalries. They cursed at each other and then cursed America and Israel for the invasion of Palestine. Hassan idled around nervously, always looking over his shoulder for militia recruiters. He was fifteen and so tall for his age. Now that he was old enough to carry a gun and chew qat, his choices grew even narrower.
And now I was out on the streets with him, dodging the militias and ducking when we heard gunfire. We traveled all over the city but knew to avoid certain high-crime areas. The northern Madinah district, where the hospital was located, had been taken over by a crime gang called Ciyaal Faacali. These young men had emerged from the ashes of the civil war, with no police or laws to stop them. They not only robbed people but also committed brutalities not seen in the southern parts of the city. They would hold up their hand and tell a person to pick one of five fingers. Whichever one you picked, they would name something you had to do, like drink mud or swallow a battery or even a bullet.
To avoid the street gangs, people were crowding into the safer southern part of town, where we lived, which became dense with people and stores. Two movie theaters opened, the Cinema Mogadishu and Cinema Ducale. Stereo stores popped up in other neighborhoods, selling cassette tapes and sound systems and even making recordings. My friends and I went to one of these stores to record our own rap songs on a tape. We rapped in a mix of Somali and English, describing a girl with hair like an ostrich and a walk like a camel. We sang English chorus lines like “She’s the best!” “Come to me, babe!” “Dance with me, babe!” I felt like I was part of this new musical revolution and that we were creating something amazing.
My parents were still mad at me, so I never went home. I slept on the streets at night, covering my head with the shirt I was wearing. By dawn the early-morning prayers broadcast from speakers on the minarets woke me up. My friends Bocow and Bashi had also been evicted from their houses, and they stayed with me on the streets.
Even though many people had returned to Mogadishu, there were still empty houses, most of them crawling with giant bugs, littered with trash and shit, and stiflingly hot at night. We hung around in those houses sometimes to eat and talk, but it was much better to sleep outside in the fresh air. I would sneak around to the back of our house when I was hungry, peeking through the holes to make sure Macalin Basbaas wasn’t there. Sometimes I heard his voice and I made a run for it. When Mom was taking a nap and Dad was listening to the BBC Somali service, I would quietly jump in the window. I looked around for food, sometimes there was maize left over. I scooped the gruel into my pockets and jumped back outside, out to the street, to share with my friends in the empty houses. They did the same for me, sneaking into their houses to steal food. We walked to the beach to wash our clothes in the ocean.
I had not asked to be thrown out of my house, but now I was happy to pursue my own dreams, to live my own life without fetching water and food for my family, without Macalin Basbaas. I still prayed, and I respected the Muslim teachings about charity and justice. I consider myself a good Muslim to this day. But I had seen from the movies what was out in the world, and I wasn’t going to live in a mosque.
Starting in 1998, Somalia had some good rainy seasons that soaked Mogadishu. I remember my mom saying it rained because the warlord Aidid had been killed just a year before, during a shoot-out among his own clan. With the rain new life would quickly emerge. There were butterflies and dragonflies floating around everywhere; small lizards came out to feed on the new insects. The rain also brought back the flowers and their sweet fragrance, scents I have not found anywhere else in the world since.
But the rains also came with mosquitoes that carried malaria. It was getting hard for me to sleep outside, with the sound of mosquitoes in my ears followed by their painful bites. I decided to come back home. My mom saw the scratches on my body, the bites, sores, and bruises all over my face and hands. My brother, Hassan, also came home briefly, devoured by the insects and looking sick with malaria. Sleeping in our old room, with the rain hitting the roof, felt like floating on a ferryboat. Hassan and I stood in our courtyard during downpours, filling any container we could find, even cups and bowls, to collect drinking water. When the rain stopped, we had to scoop the water out of the rooms of the house; it was everywhere because the roof had so many bullet holes.
Everyone seemed to be forgetting about the war. Nomads like my mom were happy because to them rain was a sign of prosperity. She started humming the nomad songs for her goats and called out to her flock, even though they were gone forever. She ran around in the rain, laughing. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen my mom happy like that. Mom would sit with me sometimes to see if I had changed my mind about going back to the madrassa, but whenever she mentioned that school, I would get mad.
With no more Koran lessons, I could spend even more time learning English. I recorded the sound from the movies on a cassette player, then replayed it constantly, listening to the words. I practiced English freely on the streets, talking either to myself or to my brother or to my friends. I told people that in America you feel free, you can be a singer or an actor, anything you want. I still joked with my friends that the marines left me behind, and they laughed at me. But they stopped laughing when I started teaching English to a group of boys and girls in the neighborhood.
I put together the lessons myself, trying to think of easy ways the children could learn. Lesson number one was introductions:
BOY: Peace be upon you.
GIRL: Peace be upon you too.
BOY: How are you today?
GIRL: Fine, and you?
BOY: I am fine. Thank you.
Lesson number two, second day:
BOY: Where were you born?
GIRL: I was born in Waberi. And you?
BOY: I was born in Wadajir. When were you born?
GIRL: I was born in 1989. And you?
BOY: I was born in 1988.
I must have been fifteen when I started teaching English, for the few coins my students could afford. It was something many people thought I could not do, but the three students I had on the first day soon turned into ten. The lessons were repeated every week until each student memorized the passages—just like I had learned the Koran. So my madrassa training had not gone to waste. Unlike Macalin Basbaas I did not beat my students; in fact I encouraged them to have fun. I would ask two students to stand up and face each other and practice the lesson by having a conversation. During the lessons I would wear my blue jeans, my new long T-shirt, and sneakers. As I taught class, I would swagger and move around like a rapper. The students seemed to think I was so cool, this Somali guy who speaks English and dances like Snoop Dogg. I thought I was pretty cool too.
By the turn of the new century Mogadishu was divided into two economic classes: those who had relatives abroad, and those who didn’t. Our family was in the second group. The lucky others crowded every day into Xawaaladda Barakaat, the money-wiring office in Bakara market. A man with a long beard sat behind a closed door and spoke to people through a glass window, flanked by three men armed with AK-47s. The man asked for their names and the name of the sender. Then he asked where the money was coming from, always faraway places Hassan and I dreamed of seeing called Minnesota, Seattle, London, Toronto.
Somalis who had made it to those places were lucky to escape the country. Eventually, they had been resettled in North America and Europe from refugee camps in Kenya and Yemen. They found jobs in the West cleaning hotels, stacking shelves at Walmart, and driving taxicabs. And they proudly sent hundreds of dollars back to their relatives in Mogadishu. We all knew they must be getting so rich. The civil war was now going on for ten years, and with no government or treasury the Somali shilling had become a worthless currency. The U.S. dollar was now the money of Somalia, and it was flooding in through those wire transfers called hawala. People left that window with fifty dollars, a hundred dollars, two hundred, three hundred.
I had no one in America, not even a distant relative. I felt it was unfair for me not to be able to collect dollars, while people who did not even respect America or speak English could go there and get American dollars. Here I was, Abdi American, and I had never seen a dollar in my life except in the movies. I wanted to see one in real life, but as people left the window, they clutched their dollars tightly and walked fast to their houses. I could never see them.
Next to the remittance window was a telephone center where people called family members in North America or Europe. “Thank you, I received the money. God bless you!” people said. I wanted to hear the voices of the people on the other side in case you could hear Americans talking in the background, chattering in English. Maybe I could hear Arnold Schwarzenegger! Mostly I wanted to talk in English to someone who lived in America. I sat there daydreaming, imagining what I would say: “Hi! How is New York? I love America. I want to come!”
People who got money from America and Europe ate freshly cooked beans, rice, meat, and eggs. At our house we were struggling just to get corn. Our mom went out every day to work, walking miles into Bakara market to get a porter job for people who bought sacks of rice with dollars received from abroad. Mom would put the whole sack on her back, trudging miles to the rich person’s house. With the cash she made, she would buy food for us.
Dad had gained back much of his strength, but his mind was always somewhere else. He managed to wake us up at five o’clock every morning to perform the dawn prayers with him and then read the Koran. But one morning in September 2000, Dad didn’t call us. When we finally got up, he was gone. Mom said he had left in the night, to Bakara market to catch a bus to Baidoa. He told Mom it had rained a lot in Baidoa and he hoped to start farming there. Also, he heard on the BBC that after Aidid’s death his militias had withdrawn from the city; the Rahanweyn had learned how to carry guns and had retaken Baidoa. Mom was praying for his safe passage, her forehead on the floor, as Nima made tea.
I think my dad left mainly because he was lost and bored in Mogadishu. There was no work for him, he felt useless. And he had given up on me and Hassan becoming sheikhs. Maybe he could be something in Baidoa. His departure was not the same as when he walked into the bush that night in Baidoa almost ten years before. Back then we were all so scared to lose him; we didn’t know how we would survive the war. Now things were different; Hassan and I were the men of the house. He left without saying good-bye, probably because he was humiliated.
In truth I was a bit excited that he was gone—first because I hoped he would do better in Baidoa, but also because I would get a break from his harsh scolding about my new lifestyle and from praying with him and always bathing him and trimming his hair. It was like another freedom to me. Strangely, my own dad had become something else to me. None of my friends in Mogadishu even had dads, they lost theirs in the wars. Mine was alive, and I knew I should be grateful for that. Instead, I was grateful for more freedom.
Mom hummed her nomad songs and prayed for Dad as she scraped the maize from the pot. She had not protested his departure, in fact she encouraged him to leave. It would be less stress for her; she would not worry about him getting shot in Mogadishu. “When your dad settles in Baidoa, we will all move there and start herding animals,” she said with a smile. I walked outside and thought to myself, “She is crazy.” I wasn’t sure we would ever see Tall Nur again.
Meanwhile, I hated growing older—not because I was afraid of getting old, but because each year added to my potential to end up in trouble. I had watched boys turn into feared militia fighters when they became teenagers, killing people and chewing qat. Once you enter that life, there is no going back. The choices were so narrow. You could become a sheikh and call the mosque your home, or you could carry a gun. To me, either was going down a dark path to a world I did not want to live in. My mom did her best. She woke up early every morning and forced me to get up and pray. My prayers took two minutes; hers lasted two hours. Even though she could not read the Koran, she prayed in Somali. On and on. She prayed for our family, for food on our table, for farms and livestock in Baidoa. None were answered. “Allah has plans for us,” she always said. Meanwhile, Hassan was making his own plans.
My brother had returned to the streets after his malaria bout, and he had been hanging out more often at Zobe Square with the men. I would walk down Zobe Street and see him and his friend Hussein sitting against a wall, hiding from the baking sun. I would sit next to them and talk about life.
“I want to leave Somalia,” Hassan told me one day.
“You have been saying that for years,” I said. “You are still dreaming.”
“Now it’s for real,” he said. “Now I will do it. I have the buufis.”
Buufis. That was a word meaning “temptation to leave,” and it was being used by young Somalis who had seen all the money coming in from abroad and wanted to get their own life away from Mogadishu. Hassan was still dreaming, but his dream was growing bigger.
“Where would you go?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe Kenya, Djibouti. But I want to leave Somalia.” Young men his age were leaving for Yemen, Kenya, Dubai, Saudi Arabia. These places were by now dealing with so many Somali refugees that it had become a crisis, and they were putting people in refugee camps. Hassan told me that if he left Somalia, he would earn money and send us some, fifty or a hundred dollars a month; that would help our family stay together. These things Hassan told me sounded good, but I did not want him to leave us; we would miss him, but also we would be worried for him, because in Mogadishu there was no communication system. If he left, how would we ever find out about him?
Nearby, a crowd of elderly men were engaged in the regular fadhi kudirir debate, a Somali custom where men (never women) gather over tea and talk about clans, politics, animals, and other important topics. They were talking about how great the refugee camps were in Kenya and Yemen. They said the camps were a gateway to America. Some of them had sons and daughters who had made it to the United States, Europe, or Canada. One bragged that his son was a taxi driver in Seattle, sending hundreds of dollars back home, then another described how his own son worked as a truck driver in Minnesota and was paid thousands of dollars every day. Many were sure they would soon be going to America through something called family sponsorship. But first you had to go through the refugee camps.
“Everyone who is sending money from America had been through those camps,” said Hassan. “Once in the camps it is easy to go to America. It only takes something like three months, and while you wait you get food from the United Nations. It’s heaven!”
But without money for transport, Hassan was stuck in Mogadishu. He looked out over the Indian Ocean and asked Allah for wings to fly across it to America. I told him that beyond the blue waters of the Indian Ocean was heaven, that’s where the dead end up. The ocean divided the dead and the living. He laughed at me. “No, Abdi,” he said. “There is life beyond the ocean.”
I told Hassan how much I missed him at the house, how our family had survived through the wars and the famine, and how we now barely saw each other during the day. How we were all taking separate ways, including our dad. Hassan didn’t say much, but I could tell he was also sad.
One morning I went to see him at the wall. Hassan was listening to the elders engage in a heated debate about the new American war in Afghanistan. The men had been cursing the United States and praising Osama bin Laden. They were organizing protests against the war, and against America. “This is a war between Muslims and non-Muslims,” said an elder, throwing one hand in the air as if he wanted to go fight the war himself while holding a cup of tea in his other hand. The crowd nodded and all said, “Yes!”
I placed one hand on Hassan’s shoulder. “Come home, brother,” I said.
He did not protest. We walked home together. When I reached out for his hand, he held mine tightly.
Back home, Hassan didn’t say much, but I could tell he was thinking of a better way we could all live. “There is life outside Somalia,” he finally said. “We can do something. People who are sending dollars from abroad are just like us. They left Somalia and now they have jobs.”
Mom looked at him and said, “I wish you were abroad.”
“Mom, I will leave,” he said. “I need your blessings. We are now grown up, Abdi and me. We can either carry guns and kill people or leave and send money back to our mom and sister.”
He was right. If I was not enjoying movies and soccer and dancing at weddings, I would be as bored as Hassan and also recruited by the militias. It was then I realized how wrong my parents and Macalin Basbaas had been in trying to stop me from going to movies, learning English, or dancing. I knew that movies and music had saved my life.
Hassan asked for Mom’s prayers. I remember her looking him in the eyes and saying, “I would like to see you leave. May Allah be with you.”
That’s all Hassan needed, Mom’s prayers. That, and money to get a ride to the border. So we started selling the pigeons. I sat on the side of the street with a boxful of birds, selling them for a few cents each. After two weeks almost all of our pigeons were sold. We got a total of ten dollars for the birds and two dollars for some wooden scooters that we had built with our hands.
At dawn on a Sunday morning in September 2004, Hassan walked out the door with twelve dollars and a plastic bag containing a blanket to sleep on.
“Be strong,” said Mom. “You will make it.”
I walked with him and his friend Hussein to Bakara market, to see him off. Again Hassan and I held hands the same way we had done as children when we walked up the hill to Madinah Hospital, dodging sniper bullets and rolling jerry cans of water back down. This day we held tighter; I felt like I did not want to let go of my brother, but I knew I could not let him stay. He felt the same way. I saw tears in his eyes for the first time in years. Hassan had been strong enough to sleep on the streets of Mogadishu, go a whole day without eating, but it was hard for him to imagine living far away from Mom, Nima, and me. He would not be flying home at night like the pigeons. He was on his way out from our family, maybe forever, and we all knew it.
We walked deep inside the dusty market. Then, through the shouting of the hawkers, we heard our mom’s voice coming from behind.
“Hassan! Wait!”
She could not stay home; she decided to come say good-bye to her son.
When Hassan saw Mom, tears soaked his face. I watched as my brave mom and brave brother hugged and cried.
“Do you want to change your mind?” she said.
For a minute I thought Hassan would decide to stay, but finally he released Mom and said, “Let’s keep walking.”
Soon we spotted the car that would take Hassan to the border of Kenya. It was a green Mercedes, parked in a narrow alley, but it was hard to tell it apart from the surrounding market stalls: its roof was piled with hay, bags of corn, and luggage all tied together. The front passenger seat was loaded with baskets of fruits. A live goat was bleating under the hatchback, its legs tied together. The driver’s door was missing and the hood was gone; it seemed like a car in a Hollywood movie crash scene. I couldn’t believe it would actually move, much less travel hundreds of miles on potholed roads. So there was a gamble: it was the cheapest ride Hassan could find, but if it broke down in the bush, there would be no refund, and he would probably die of thirst in the desert.
Two women in the rear seat looked angrily at Hassan. “We don’t want him in here, put him in the back!” one of them yelled at the driver, who was standing at a nearby stall, eating bread and drinking tea. He was missing one arm, probably from a gunshot, and he barely had any teeth in his mouth. He lit a cigarette using his one hand and laughed through his qat-stained tongue and cracked lips. He did not care who sat where as long as he got his money.
The driver opened the hatchback and indicated that Hassan should climb in with the goat. The two women in the backseat smiled. They would not have to share their space with a man, which was sinful. So Hassan squeezed into the hatchback and curled up with the goat. There was goat shit everywhere. And of course this car had no air-conditioning, so it would be an oven under that hatchback window across the bush. But Hassan didn’t care. He was finally escaping Somalia, the place he called “a roofless prison,” under the airless hatchback window of a ruined Mercedes-Benz, with a goat.
When the market lady who ran the tea stand started bothering the driver to pay his bill, as well as his breakfast bill for the last three days, he stubbed out his cigarette and said, “Let’s go.” But the engine of the car would not start, the battery was completely dead. It took five guys pushing to kick the motor into life, spewing a cloud of black exhaust. The breakfast lady ran alongside the car demanding money from the driver, who argued with her. “Next time!” he shouted.
I hugged Mom as we watched the car trundle through the crowd of porters and shoppers, past the pyramids of tomatoes and peppers, the driver honking nonstop. The car turned from the market alley in to the busy main road. Under the hatchback, Hassan stretched his hand out from behind the goat to high-five us. Then my brother disappeared.