The city of women and children had become a city of refugees. The streets swarmed with former herders and farmers, most of them Maay-speaking Rahanweyn from Bay, Bakool, and Lower Shabelle regions, the places my parents came from. They had come to Mogadishu for the food brought by the UN forces and to seek work like fishing, or porterage at Bakara market, or digging people’s latrines. When the Western troops left, the ancestral lands of these new arrivals had been overrun by the warlords and they could not go home. Now they were stuck in Mogadishu, a city run by tribal militias who hated them.
The Hawiye of Mogadishu did not know much about the refugees and assumed they were mostly criminals. Some of the very poorest Rahanweyn were in a subclan known as the Eelaay. They wore amulets around their necks and arms and often lived by begging instead of herding animals. Because of these Eelaay people, the Hawiye assumed that all Rahanweyn were beggars—similar to the way many Europeans think of all Romany people as shiftless “Gypsies.” To many Mogadishans they were all disgusting.
My mom often went out and met the Rahanweyn refugees on the streets. She helped them find spots to build makeshift camps. The first place she could think of was out past the airport. The road from the airport to Lower Shabelle region was empty and treeless, with harsh sunshine and dust blowing from the sea breeze continuously. No one would bother the poor refugees there, she figured. Within one day, they set up over a hundred makeshift tents of sticks and plastic bags, but the next day the militias came and destroyed it all. Some of the refugees spent the day sitting on the open ground, one side facing the Indian Ocean and the other the endless sand dunes.
Their despair was like my dad’s. He had no plans, and he never left Khadija’s compound. Her family could give us only one room, and Hassan, Mom, Nima, and I crammed into it. There was no space for Dad, he had to spend the night outside exposed to mosquitoes. So we took shifts: he slept during the day in our room when we all went out; by night he sat outside in the courtyard, swatting mosquitoes and praying. Gone forever was the strong man who jumped over fences, chased lions, and scored hoops. Whenever he stood, he leaned on a stick, his tall body bent in half. I helped him get to the bathroom, take a shower, and dress. The brave dad who carried us on his shoulders, in his basketball jersey, needed help with everything. Hassan and I sometimes jumped through the window to sneak out and escape the work. I would go to the movies, and Hassan would disappear with his friends. We would be out all day and come back with so much to do for Dad. We had to wash his clothes, trim his hair, and walk him around the house.
My dad could not understand why all this had happened to him and his family. When he had money and played for the national team, he had always given to charity, given money to the poor, helped everyone. Why did he deserve this misery? Had his prayers not worked? Had he given less than he was supposed to? He did not know why Allah put him in this misery. But his faith was stronger than ever, he prayed five times during the day, he even prayed extra hours. He could not go to the mosque, but he had a prayer mat in the house. The prayers kept him alive, but he had so much guilt. “I used to go to movies, went to clubs, and traveled abroad,” he told me once. “God might be angry with all that sin.” He believed those sinful things could explain why he suffered and lost his wealth. And it was a message to me not to go to movies.
One night while Dad was in the courtyard kneeling near the fire, uttering prayers, a loud knock came at our tin gate.
“Who are you?” said an angry voice from outside.
“Why don’t we know who you are?” yelled another voice. “Open the door or we will kill you!”
Dad got up and knocked at the door to Khadija’s house, trying to wake her up. She was Hawiye like the men at the gate and could maybe calm them. But the militiamen were impatient and kicked down the gate. Khadija got up quickly and managed to get herself between the militiamen and Dad. By now we were all awake. I was standing there watching as the men pointed a gun at my dad’s face while Khadija tried to stay in between, putting herself directly in the line of the barrel. With our Mogadishan accents, Hassan and I stood close to the militiamen and kept yelling, “He is our dad, please leave him!”
The militiamen seemed very angry. Before they came to our house, we heard gunshots in the neighborhood; they had shot and killed a Rahanweyn man, a beggar who was sleeping on the streets because he did not have a place to stay. They asked Dad what his clan was.
“I am Rahanweyn.”
But Khadija told them we were Mogadishans first. “These kids were born here. They don’t know about clan,” she said. Luckily, they walked away, but the harassment of the Rahanweyn continued and grew worse. All of this was nerve-racking for my dad. Already weak and confined to the house, now he was worried that if he ever did get up the strength to walk around, he would be attacked by Hawiye gangs. So he retreated further into his small world and his bored mind.
Part of the problem was that Rahanweyn were not allowed to carry guns and so were defenseless. In almost every Hawiye house in the city there were guns, even houses where no militiamen lived. When Siad Barre’s government fell, the citizens stormed into the government arms stockpile. There were more guns in the city than people. There was more ammunition than food. It became a thing to own a gun to save your life. Most people slept with a loaded AK-47 sitting next to them.
Khadija brought home two guns, an AK-47 and a SAR-80 assault rifle given to her by a relative who had plenty of guns and wanted to get rid of some. Khadija, her son Abdikadir, and her daughters, Fatuma and Fardowsa, all took turns shooting at a bucketful of sand set up at the corner of the house. Abdikadir and I carried the AK-47 outside, walking around to show it off.
Some of the Rahanweyn beggars would come to Khadija’s house early in the morning around five to beg for a cup of tea. Mom was usually up at this time making tea for my dad, and when the beggars came and spoke in their Maay dialect, she would respond in Maay, “See hayteng?” How are you? “Hadhawaw fadheew.” Come in, have a seat.
Mom and the beggars would get into deep conversations as they sipped their hot tea in the house. Khadija did not understand Maay, so it was easy for Mom and the beggars to talk about how bad life had turned under the Hawiye militias. They talked about life in the Bay and Bakool villages, the animals, the nomad life. Many of these beggars in Mogadishu had been some of the wealthiest people in their villages; they owned hundreds of camels, cows, and goats—assets they thought would never disappear. But like my parents they had not even a chicken today, nor a place to live. They bragged about their past life. They talked about fighting hyenas, lions, and cheetahs. They were warriors who fought with knives, spears, and bows. They had no idea why God had abandoned them and left them begging on the streets.
Their conversation would come to an end as they remembered that they had to be on the road again to find food for their children, who were sleeping on the streets. But every morning they came by to chat with Mom. Usually Dad was asleep, but he sometimes woke up to join the conversation.
Then one day none of the beggars showed up. Mom went out to see what had happened. Down the street, around a corner, her beggar friends had all been killed by a sniper; the killer piled their bodies on top of one another and was yelling, “They were burglars, I shot them!” For sure they were not burglars. Mom returned home and prayed for them to enter heaven.
Most Rahanweyn men returned to the harsh life in their villages, which the militias also controlled. The women remained behind and did all the dirty jobs; they dug out latrines and removed shit, carrying bucketfuls of shit on their shoulders and dumping it in the sea. They begged or hawked on the streets. I heard later that only one out of four of their kids survived to adulthood. But they showed strength and perseverance.
Hassan and I could identify with these beggars because we would have been like them had we not been born in Mogadishu and received the goodwill of our neighbor Khadija. Still, no one else we knew let beggars into their houses, and Hassan and I were a little embarrassed by it. By now we had started to distance ourselves from our parents. We had no stories of our own to tell about the villages, or the nomad life. All we knew was Mogadishu. We had a Mogadishu accent, the neighborhood was our home, and all our friends were Mogadishan. We had become so unlike our mom but especially different from our dad, who could not blend in at all. He pined for his village, and Mom hoped for the same. They waited for two things: the rains to return and the Aidid militias to withdraw from Baidoa so they could go home. Hassan and I were home in Mogadishu, and we hoped we would not move to a village in the bush.
Every day I walked out to the airport, hoping to see the American marines coming back to rescue me. But all I saw were the tread marks of their big tanks in the hot, soft tarmac of the runway. Discarded U.S. military boots were still scattered across the sand dunes, drying in the fierce sun of Mogadishu. The airport had been closed since the troops pulled out, and quickly the militias turned the terminals into a butchering place for people they did not like—dragging their victims inside and shooting or hacking them to death. Their jeeps, mounted with automatic machine guns, parked in the middle of the runway as the militiamen wandered aimlessly around the airport, not sure what to do. There was no commander they listened to, no schedules to follow. Their days were always the same: wake up every morning, get qat, sit, and chew. We gathered around them every afternoon when the sun cooled down a bit and they were too busy chewing their drug to mind us. They usually had plenty of qat that could fill their cheeks the whole day, but the next day they would have to ride fifty kilometers out of the city, to a makeshift airport where the qat flew in from Kenya and Ethiopia, to escort the shipments into Mogadishu. Their technicals, loaded with leaves, barreled into Mogadishu with engines screaming, like teenage drag racers trying to impress each other. This juvenile display of power reminded us every day that these were the rabble that had kicked American marines out of the city. They were so unorganized they never figured out how to use the main airport, because Aidid and Mahdi, the rival clan leaders, couldn’t agree on how to run it.
Other than sheikhs, the only role models for young men in Mogadishu were these rebel soldiers with their guns, their cheeks full of qat, and their endless bickering and cursing. I didn’t chew qat, but I cursed every day at my friends for fun, and they cursed back. Our fiercest obscenities were related to pigs and dogs, two animals much hated in Mogadishu. “Son of a dog!” “Son of a pig!” “Your dad is a dog and you are a dog!” Everyone would get very angry when associated with these dirty, satanic animals that cannot be touched. When I saw Americans kissing dogs in movies, I’d make a face like sucking on a lemon. “How do they trust the dog?” I asked myself. “What if the dog bites them?”
One day Dad called us out to the courtyard. “I’m going to take a walk around to see if my brother Hassan is still in his house,” he said. Dad had not left the house since the Americans and United Nations left. So this was a big step, but one filled with danger. In Mogadishu under the warlords it was very dangerous to knock on people’s doors, especially for a Rahanweyn. None of us had been to our uncle’s house since we returned to Mogadishu, we didn’t know who was living there.
But Dad found the courage to walk to the house. Leaning on his stick, in his worn-out clothes, his hair a mess from our homemade haircut, he looked like one of the Rahanweyn beggars. People avoided him on the street. Unfazed, he shook his head and took small steps toward the KM4 circle. He stopped briefly every few steps to catch his breath and then kept moving, looking around. Everything had changed, no more clubs and restaurants, no cheering fans slapping his back.
Uncle Hassan’s house was there, still standing, with some damage to the roof and walls. The back side of the house was gone. The green tin door that my dad remembered was not there; instead, a gate of thorn branches covered the entrance. He stood there hesitating, deciding whether to move the thorn gate and go inside; many houses had been looted and taken over by militiamen and their families. Who lived here now? Dad stood there waiting for any movement, or someone to come out. It was very quiet inside. He didn’t hear a single noise except the flapping of the tin roof, which had come loose from the rafters.
After a long wait he heard some noise inside, the sounds of kitchen cleanup and distant chatter. He didn’t know if it was Uncle Hassan’s family. He came closer to the gate and looked through it, but he could see nothing in the courtyard.
“Salaam aleikum!” he finally said. No answer.
“Is Hassan here?” he yelled.
Then Uncle Hassan’s daughters came out to see who was asking for their dad. They did not recognize my dad.
“No,” they responded as they looked at him, studying him.
But Dad recognized them and cried out their names. “Salada! Anab! How are you? It’s me, Nur!”
At that point Dhuha, Hassan’s wife, came out and joined the girls. They all welcomed Dad inside. Everyone cried; they hugged.
They told Dad how Hassan had been killed by a bullet, or two, or three, or six in his head. No one knew how many bullets, but someone knew he was shot in Beledweyn town. Dad had no more tears to cry. His own parents had starved to death or were eaten by animals, who knows? His other siblings had gone missing and were presumed dead. Dad reminded the grieving family that his brother Hassan was by now in heaven and that we will all die and go where the dead are.
“We are happy you are here for us,” said Dhuha. In Somali culture a man must take charge when tragedy strikes a sibling’s family. Ideally, he is supposed to marry the wife of his deceased brother, a union of mercy called dumaal.
But Dad was in no position to be the man of their family; he couldn’t even be the man of his own family. Even if it were possible for my dad to care for Hassan’s family, he was in too much danger as a Rahanweyn man. With the wars still happening, and men being killed daily, our dad might be next. He reminded Dhuha about this, saying he did not want to cause more grief to her family.
Dhuha said she understood, then invited us to come and stay in the two-room mud house that had been built on Uncle Hassan’s property. This was a relief to us, because now Hassan and I would have our own room. Dad, Mom, and Nima would stay in the other room. Nima had turned seven, but she looked somehow both younger and older—small and frail from years of malnutrition, and already missing some of her permanent teeth. And she was still struggling to speak well.
Now we woke up every morning alongside family members, and Dad had stories to tell every day, which made him feel better. He and Dhuha would sit and talk while Mom and Dhuha’s kids were busy doing the chores. (Dhuha was older than my mom and also had two grown daughters, so she was excused from housework.) Sometimes we shared sweet tea with cloves, cinnamon, and camel milk. Only one full kettle was made at a time; everything was measured, from tea to water. We were told we could shower only once a week with a three-liter jerry can, and we were given just five minutes each to use the bathroom. The most difficult rule was that everyone had to be at home no later than seven in the evening. Mogadishu was completely lawless, and crime in the city was high at night; even people without guns were using knives to slit throats, and there were burglars who jumped into houses. Dhuha asked our dad to be the guard at night. It was one way he could still be the man of the family.
Our new room was so much better than Khadija’s tin-and-cardboard shack. The mud walls at Dhuha’s absorbed the heat during the day and released a bit of cool air at night. The room for Hassan and me had only one straw mat, no furniture, no beds. But it had a wood-framed window, and we could sneak out through that window and come back in without anyone noticing us. We had to be so quiet because the wall between our room and our parents’ room had cracks and holes from bullets and rockets, and we could be heard when we came in or when we talked. Always when we lay on our mat talking, Mom would yell at us to go to sleep.
It was pitch-black in our room at night, we had no electricity or lantern and could not see each other, but we could see the glittering stars through the small window. As we both lay on the mat on the dirt floor, Hassan talked about Kenya, Yemen, Europe, and America. “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone visit Kenya on their vacations,” he said. Which definitely is not true but gained my attention.
“Nairobi is like New York,” he said. “They have highways, nightlife, clubs, music, movie theaters. And a lot of white people.” Many years later I would see New York and realize how different it is from Nairobi, but at the time I imagined either city was no closer than the stars we saw through the holes in our roof.
“I want to leave Somalia,” said Hassan.
We were talking at night while lying on our mat, as usual.
“You are dreaming,” I said. To me leaving Somalia seemed impossible. First, I could not imagine going anywhere while Hassan was still around. How could I leave without him?
Besides, at that point I was not unhappy with my life. Life in Somalia was harsh, but it was all I knew. You wake up in the morning with no plans and no future. Every day is the same. They come and go; months come and go. No New Year’s celebrations, no holidays, no birthday parties. Even the Eid was nothing to look forward to in war-torn Mogadishu. The Eid is the biggest Muslim celebration, after the last day of Ramadan, like Christmas in the West. In good times, kids get to dress in brand-new clothes and buy toys and sweets. But since 1991 the Eid in Somalia was just like every other day. No clothes, no toys, no sweets. All we had was our mom telling us stories about the fun Eid holidays we had before the war.
While many people like my brother dreamed of moving abroad, I found peace sitting at Falis’s video shack watching movies. The things I saw in the movies seemed unreachable, but at least I could learn the language they spoke. I had been paying close attention to what the American actors were saying. Nobody else cared. The only Western language people in Mogadishu knew was Italian, and not much of that. Falis and everyone else at the movie shack wished the movies could be in Italian, or maybe Arabic. English might as well have been Chinese. But I wanted to understand it. I would walk up to Falis as she was busy collecting money and ask, “Falis, please could you turn up the volume today?”
She would look at me and laugh. “Why would you want to hear that crap? You don’t even understand a word.”
But I did. I sat very close to the speaker. I had been making progress on picking up words. Sometimes even when the dialogue was in English the movie had English subtitles, which made it easier to learn how to write the words. I also learned about the culture. The movies often showed kids’ rooms decorated with posters of rock and movie stars, which inspired me to decorate my own room. I collected old, worn-out posters I had found in the ruins of the Cinema Ecuatore and other buildings—posters of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis. Falis gave me some posters that she was going to throw out because they were torn. I would glue them together using the sap from the apple of Sodom plant, and then we used that sap to glue the posters onto the clay walls of our room. Using a piece of charcoal from the madrassa, I wrote on the walls the English words I had learned from movies, plus movie titles, names of stars I liked, and some daily phrases I taught myself, most of them swear words. I liked it when actors in the movies swore.
Fuck you.
Bullshit.
Get the fuck out of here.
Motherfuckers my name is Abdi American, I am a powerful man. Be careful.
Rambo, Terminator.
I’ll be back.
I also wrote a notice on our wooden door: “Stop. No coming.” I meant for people not to come into our room, but of course no one would ever be able to read that. When Mom saw the walls tattooed in English, she gasped. Then she saw the poster of Madonna in a bikini hanging next to where I slept. This was the last straw. She slapped me hard on my face and yelled, “Lailaha ilallah! There is no god but Allah! Nur, come see what they did! I will kill these two boys!”
In Islam it is sacrilegious to have any pictures of the human form, much less Madonna in a bikini. To my parents, we were inviting the devil into their home and pissing off the angels that stick with us until death. Raqib and Atid are the two angels that sit on our shoulders, invisibly writing down all of our actions, thoughts, and feelings every single day. On the day of judgment we will be confronted with all the actions the angels have put down, and Raqib and Atid will be present in front of God as witnesses.
Mom ran from the room, yelling it was a sin hole and if she stayed a moment longer she too would be damned by Allah. She talked to our dad in the other room, then they both came back in. Dad was furious.
“I never expected this!” he said, pointing at the poster of Madonna. “What is this? Is this why we sent you to the madrassa? Are you out of your mind?” They both kept yelling at us for being evil and littering our home with infidels. Finally Mom tore off all the posters and erased all the words as best she could. When she told Macalin Basbaas, we were whipped. Even after all that, Mom was angry because you could still see the words we had written because the charcoal was hard to erase completely. So I was forced to scrub the walls with water and get rid of the notice on the door. From this time on, whenever something bad happened, I was blamed for bringing evil to the house. One time a stray bullet hit the roof; my fault. Another time Nima was coughing and wheezing and I was blamed for it. The things that I wrote and the posters just became a huge problem for me in our house.
Even while I was scrubbing English off my bedroom walls, I was writing new words on the walls of abandoned houses where no one could scold me. I especially liked the walls at Horseed Stadium because they were smooth concrete—perfect for charcoal. The letters came out in dark black. I wrote, “I am not lost,” which I learned from the movie Die Hard. Then I painted the American flag, a huge one, on the wall with the stars and stripes. Boys looked at the words and wondered what it meant, so I translated for them. The next day I went back and saw that they had erased it all by smacking it with their sandals, which made the charcoal dust fly off. I was so mad I wrote “shit” and “fuck you” on the wall. They asked me what it meant. I didn’t know, only that in movies it’s what people say when they are angry.
No one gave me credit for all the words I taught myself, not even my parents. Learning Arabic or reading the Koran was the only thing they wanted me to do. But I had my brother at my back, himself inspired by movies. We found joy in talking about movies, English, actors, singers. We practiced English more than we practiced Arabic. We didn’t have enough vocabulary to say much, our grammar was not perfect, but we got better. We collected English words from old worn-out magazines that had probably ended up on Mogadishu streets after libraries and schools were looted in 1991. My parents used these magazines to start cooking fires, or as napkins, but I used them as textbooks, underlining phrases and words I thought were good. I noticed they used many prepositions such as “over,” “down,” and “up,” and we were confused about when to use them. So Hassan and I practiced, building our own sentences. “Down here, over your head, get over to Mom.” She came to check our room every day to see if we had smuggled in posters again. In the madrassa I was frisked every morning. It was embarrassing; no other student was inspected. Macalin Basbaas always said that the devil dwelled in me, but I didn’t care.
Every night after Dad listened to the BBC Somali service, Hassan and I would tune in to the six o’clock English-learning program by the Voice of America called New Dynamic English. The show featured two characters, Max and Kathy, who talked about American culture, U.S. cities, and how to speak American English. The shortwave broadcast had a lot of static, and the lessons were hard to understand sometimes, but we listened carefully anyway. When Mom or Dad found out, they would snatch the radio from us and tell us, “Go say the evening prayers. Go to the mosque.”
We went to the movies instead. Hassan and I held hands walking in the dark to the movies and back. We would get home after nine; by then our dad was the only person awake, reciting his regular prayers, or sitting in a corner of the house in the dark with his head leaning against his hand, looking up in despair and boredom. Mom and Nima were deep asleep after a long day of washing dishes and clothes, cooking, and cleaning. We would tiptoe into our room from the window and quietly spread our sleeping mat. Other times Dad would be with Dhuha’s family in their own house in the front of the courtyard, and then Hassan and I could come through the latched wooden door, which we learned how to open by reaching through the cracks and pulling the latch.
Friday was the weekend in Somalia, the only day off from the madrassa. In the morning heat of the city my madrassa mates and I gathered under the shade of neem trees. Often we played mancala, a type of sowing game using stones and small holes in the dirt, played in the West as a board game. We had to stop the game at noon, when the mosques of Mogadishu all rang the call for the important Friday prayers, called Qudbah. Before going into the mosque, Hassan and I had to clean our arms, legs, head, and ears. Huge crowds of mosque goers filled up the streets, except the militiamen, who sat in the beds of their technicals ignoring the call to prayer. The rest of us had to sit through an hour-long lecture by the imam before we stood up for the prayers. In the lecture, the imam talked about how sinful it was to watch movies, how non-Muslim nations were planning to eliminate Islam by trying to spread their languages including English, their culture through movies and songs, and soccer. Hundreds of men in the mosque all nodded, my brother and I as well.
Macalin Basbaas was always seated in the front row very close to the imam, an exalted position. He never missed one Friday. He even arrived five hours ahead of time. One day he took the microphone and mentioned many names of his students who go to movies, and he asked for the hundreds of men to pray so that the sinful students would return to the Islamic culture and stop watching movies. My name, of course, was among the ones mentioned. When the prayer ended and men started pouring out of the mosque, an imam took the mic and asked for those whose names had been mentioned to stay behind. I did, along with two other friends and several other students I didn’t know from other neighborhoods. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, a time when the heat of the day radiates through the walls of the mosque and turns it into an oven. We sat on the floor, sinful sweating boys. Six men, short and thin, their beards almost touching their chests and with fierce eyes, surrounded us and started their harangue.
“It is the devil, the devil is taking advantage of your weakness!” one yelled, so loudly that his spit was almost landing on my face. “You are all weak! That’s what the devil likes! Now you are serving the devil against Allah! You go to movies, the devils smile and Allah frowns. You need to quit now! Start coming to the mosque for the five daily prayers. We will also provide lectures on how to defeat the devil. Come to the mosque!” His eyes were like they had caught on fire, he threw up his hands as if he were talking to the devil himself. He was so threatening we couldn’t say no. We all agreed. But the next day I never showed up. Outside the mosque, the imams had no power. Not yet.
Anyway, I was more afraid of my mom and Macalin Basbaas than of the imams at the mosque, but I kept going to the movies. We also played with our dangerous slings, shooting at birds, cats, dogs, anything that was not human. And we played soccer. We could not afford a real soccer ball, so we made our own from old clothes, rubbish, and shredded plastic, all tied together to look like a ball. Our goalposts were made of sticks. We had no cleats of course; we played barefoot, tackling each other and scoring wild goals to the cheers of our teammates and the boos of our opponents. There were many places in Mogadishu where we could play soccer, but we had to hide from our parents and madrassa teachers, so we played near the beach by the airport, away from their sight, and away from the militias. When Mom asked where I was, I always told her I was at the mosque reading the Koran. I made sure to clean the dust off my feet but leave a spot of dirt on my forehead, which indicated I had been bowing and praying. She looked at my forehead, sighed, and smiled.
Nights were always good for several reasons. Macalin Basbaas never came out of his house at night, and the wandering sheikhs stayed in the mosque. It was a good time for my English practice at the movies. Liberated for a few hours from the Islamic surveillance, I sat on the dirt in front of the TV screen, savoring the freedom. My friends would come find me, now appreciating my basic English skills. They sat close to me because it was my job to tell them what the actors were saying. My translating got pretty accurate; people knew this because events in the movie happened the way I predicted, based on the dialogue. “They are planning to kidnap the little girl!” I would shout. And the girl gets kidnapped. My friends would applaud, not because the kidnapping happened, but because I said so. I became known at the movie shack as the translator. Little did I know that someday I would be working as a paid interpreter in Maine.
Outside the movie shack, life went on at the madrassa. Children graduate as soon as they have memorized the entire Koran because that is the only point of instruction, so I was motivated to study hard. We had to completely memorize over six thousand verses, and we had to know which verse is next to which without looking at the book. I was surprised to find myself able to memorize easily, just like I was memorizing English, and do the recitation with Macalin Basbaas. My parents were so proud of this, and they waited eagerly for the day I finished madrassa, because they had plans for me. They wanted me to follow in the footsteps of Macalin Basbaas and all the other fashionable long-beards in the city who carried Korans, not guns, and gathered around mosques every day. In a city where people die every day from guns and diseases, I would be prepared for it by being sinless. This meant no movies, no women in bikinis, nothing but the glorious Koran.
But I had other plans. Falis had started letting me into the movies free of charge—without having to sweep the floor—because I could attract a crowd who were enthusiastic to hear my translations. They encouraged me to learn more and listen. It was fun to have a crowd all leaning their heads toward me when I shouted out in Somali what the actors were saying. Unlike at the mosque or the madrassa, in the video shack we could talk, shout, play, or even just move around. But as soon as the movie ended, we ran home because we had to be up at six in the morning to go to madrassa, and first we had to memorize the lesson for the next day, which of course we had not done while watching the movie.
Learning English and American culture started as something for fun, an escape from the miseries of our life. But soon it became more than entertainment. I was discovering the world beyond Somalia and learning that I could make my own decisions about my life. I discovered that the American accent is not like the British, and I could tell the difference from the way Americans talked in movies and the British announcers spoke on BBC Radio. I learned from movies that no one is above the law, not even leaders. That people are held responsible for their actions. In movies the police would chase thugs and arrest them, something that never happened in Somalia. I learned the freedom of women doing things men can do. In some movies I could see kids going to school in buses the color of Falis’s turmeric makeup; I wanted to go to a real school in a turmeric bus and learn things besides the Koran. I learned that not all Americans are white, there are black people there who stand shoulder to shoulder with the whites. In Somalia there was no black and white, only black. We don’t even look like the Arabs who many Somalis claim to be. There were no laws, and even if there were, the militias would have been above them. I realized we had fallen behind the rest of the world, but I had no idea when Somalia would catch up to the way life was in the movies.
When I asked my parents why Somalia was behind and in a total mess, they always replied that it was Allah’s will. He put us in this mess, he is the only one who can get us out of this. How can you argue with that? But somewhere in my head I told myself, “Allah is not responsible for this mess, why would he do that?” Somali militias were the ones who bombed our house, killed my uncle, and shot at us while we went to fetch water. It was not Allah.
The learning continued for me. I learned that all white people are not the same, they don’t speak the same language, they don’t use the same money, they don’t live in one country, they don’t even have the same religion. Some even don’t eat pork.
“Mom, there are some white people who don’t eat pork,” I said one day.
“Shut up!” she said.
“And, Mom, America is not next to Somalia.”
“I said shut up!”
One night as we lay on our backs on a mat looking up at the stars, I told Mom, “The moving stars are not lucky stars; some of them are satellites.”
“What is a satellite?” she asked.
“They are moving machines or ships crossing the skies.”
“You are being misinformed, Abdi, shut up!”
“Mom, there are nine planets among the stars too.”
“The Koran tells us there are seven,” she said. “Shut up and don’t try to say anything about that.” I went quiet and kept listening to Mom’s stories of how the blinking stars are our ancestors trying to communicate. But this time I did not believe her.
Today I communicate with my mom on a cell phone connected to a satellite. I wire her money every month thanks to other technology. Hopefully, she does not look at the stars the same way now.
I don’t blame my parents; they had been trying to make me be a good man, even though being good can take many forms. Whenever I started arguing with my mom about things like satellites, she blamed the movies. “Those evil movies that you go to are making you very stupid!” she would say. “You have let the devil take over you!” She was especially mad that the movies were distracting me from becoming her dream son, a sheikh.
Even though my mom despised my movie habit, I earned a new privilege: because I was near graduating from the madrassa, I was now allowed to bring my friends to our house. In my room we talked endlessly about stories in the movies. They listened as I spoke English and tried to teach them. “How are you, how are you doing, how is it going…these are all the same,” I told them. “They all mean the same.” Mom occasionally walked in and angrily told us to talk about the Koran or go to the mosque. We would leave, walk in the direction of the mosque until out of sight, and then do something else.
Sometimes we went to the Sufi mosque, where they didn’t even care if we spoke English. The Sufis were not so strict; they just minded to their chants and ceremonies without telling people what to do. Macalin Basbaas never went to that mosque, he cursed the Sufis as evil, but Hassan and I liked to sneak in and listen to the chanting. It was so peaceful and mysterious. I fell in love with those gentle people. Later the radical Islamists destroyed their tombs and erased their culture from most of southern Somalia.
By 1996, the video shack was no longer the only entertainment in Mogadishu. The warlords still fought and shot their guns constantly, but some culture and normal life were returning to Mogadishu. One big change was public transportation. Some men who returned to the city had converted Toyota pickup trucks into buses by putting seats in the back, charging a few coins for rides. These buses, called xaajiyo khamsiin, meant we could explore parts of the city beyond our neighborhood. The drivers risked their lives every single day, negotiating through roadblocks manned by dangerous militias. Some went as far as the border of Kenya.
At first my favorite place was the grounds of the former presidential palace, which was now a playground for kids. I walked from the palace to the Parliament building, which had become a camp for displaced people because there was no Parliament, then on to the beautiful Catholic cathedral. The bishop of Mogadishu, an Italian, had been killed by militias while he was saying Mass in 1989; the church itself was later destroyed by Islamic radicals in 2008. But in the 1990s you could still go in and walk around, listening to the echo of your footsteps in the great hall.
Outside the cathedral was the famous Via Roma, named because it had many fine buildings with arches and terraces and tall shady trees. On one side, in front of the skeleton of the former central bank of Somalia, tall coconut palms swayed in the breeze from the Indian Ocean. I walked up the road toward the beach, past convenience stories that had opened in renovated buildings. Owners were standing at the doors calling out to passersby. On the walls they had painted pictures of popular snacks like bur (sweet doughnut holes), bajiyas (savory doughnuts made from crushed and skinned black-eyed peas with onion, garlic, and tomatoes), and especially samosas, the fried meat-filled pastries that al-Shabaab would later ban because the triangular shape was considered Christian, I guess like the Holy Trinity.
I loved to go to a candy store on Via Roma called Xalwo Shakata. One day, after stuffing my face with sweets, I heard strange music blasting out of the entrance of the building next door. A small wooden sign, written in chalk, read, “Al-Faghi Studio and Stereo.” On the wall were photos of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and someone had written their names in Anglicized Somali: “Maaykal Jaksan,” “Stiif Wandhar.” The wooden door shook with some kind of loud music; a crowd of people were practicing wild dance moves in front of the building. Some people walking by covered their ears with their hands. The music was not Motown or soul, which I had heard before in movies and on tapes. I just stood there in awe. I tried to go inside, but the DJ wouldn’t let me; I guess it wasn’t for kids. But I could hear the music outside and twist my body like other people on the sidewalk. A crowd had built up, everyone dancing and laughing, and someone told me the music was American and called hip-hop and rap, and also some music from Jamaica called reggae.
This was the beginning of my new life. Al-Faghi became my favorite place to go every day, practicing how to dance with the crowd on the sidewalk. When I got home, I practiced by myself. Tupac Shakur and Bob Marley became my favorite artists after Michael Jackson. I decided if I was going to talk like an American, I should also dance like one.
I got myself a cheap boom box and some tapes. Soon I felt ready to show my dance skills in my neighborhood. Mom would find me on the streets dancing with the boom box and scowl. “Stupid boy!” she said. I had to sneak the boom box into our room through the window and hide it by digging the dirt and burying it under the mat so that when Mom came in she would not see it.
The hip-hop culture was spreading fast into Mogadishu. All the young people who weren’t trying to become sheikhs started wearing hip-hop fashion that we saw on television and posters. The people who ran Al-Faghi were young men who had just returned from Yemen and came with some cash to establish a music store. Similarly, the Bakara market was booming with small clothing businesses. The clothes were brought in from Kenya, Yemen, and Ethiopia, worn and old but not torn. For just a few shillings I was able to buy a black baseball cap that said “Titanic” and baggy denim jeans. I found a few plastic bracelets to wear on my hands and a bandanna for a do-rag head scarf. With my cap twisted sideways and my pants sagging below my waist, I practiced walking with a ghetto swagger; my friends Bashi and Bocow did the same thing, and we called ourselves a posse. This was all good timing, because I was starting to get interested in girls, and by now in Mogadishu girls were falling only for boys who could dance and who dressed in jeans.
The new hip-hop culture disgusted the Somali elders, who started calling us saqajaan—idiots—but we weren’t trying to impress them. My dance skills and ability to speak English made me popular with all the young people in the neighborhood. Soon people were coming to my house asking my mom, “Is Abdi American here?” She was so mad when she learned I was the one they call American. To her American meant Christian. She would definitely want me to be called Abdi Saudi Arabian. My friends Bocow, Bashi, and Mohammed now regretted not paying as much attention when we all sat at the shack watching movies. They were still just regular Somalis on the street, while I was becoming the neighborhood star.
Around this time Hassan and I started to drift apart. For one thing he couldn’t play soccer: when he was very small, he had been bitten on the foot by a poisonous snake, which my dad then killed. The snake bit off some of his toes, and the venom caused a bad swelling and infection. From that day he always walked with a slight limp. Nor did he go to movies as much as I did. But he had his own friends, Mohamed, Daud, and Hussein, and they got interested in raising pigeons.
Hassan had caught a male and a female pigeon and pulled out enough of their feathers so they could not fly. They laid eggs and had chicks and also brought other pigeons home. Soon we had hundreds of pigeons in the house to take care of. Hassan and his friends would race them—carrying them away from the house, letting them go, and seeing which would fly home first. Our male pigeon Gariirka was always so fast and clever and surprised everyone, winning over and over again.
Hassan should have been ahead of me at the madrassa, but he lost interest in memorizing verses. Finally the pressure became too much for him; he defied our parents and Macalin Basbaas and dropped out of school a little before graduating. When a student drops out, his parents disown him. My mom told Hassan not to come back to the house again. Just like that, my brother was living on the streets.