CHAPTER 13		|	SOMALIA
		IS THERE PEACE?

“War ! mel ‘absileh ina gei,

take us to a dangerous place.”

—EXAMPLE FROM A SOMALI-ENGLISH DICTIONARY, 1897

THE CONTINENT GREETED ME easily. For a fee, the Oriental Hotel in Hargeisa had sent a driver to meet me two hours away at the sea, and he was waving before the boatmen had secured the moorings. We followed foot traffic between the stacks of containers marked with Asian script until we found the two-room immigration building. My papers were cross-checked by a man in a beret who seemed only mildly caught off guard.

While I waited, I leaned against the threshold of the outer room where a group of kids pored over Jason Statham on Dubai’s MBC Action channel on satellite TV. They saw the American watching over their shoulders. “Isn’t it dangerous?” they asked about my home. All they saw was Jason Statham and his explosions and the bank robberies and the drive-by shootings on sunny American city streets.

My questing stresses had faded, replaced with a heavy solidity like the lull after Thanksgiving dinner. So much of my motivation for getting to Somaliland had been, in my gut, to get to Somaliland. The beret cashed my visa receipt for an inky blue passport stamp.

I saw Berbera only from the backseat of an old car. A heavy tinting sticker was peeling from the window, and through it I could glimpse the crescent beaches between low-slung houses and the shops on the way out of town.

The road from Berbera to the capital is exactly one hundred miles southwest and tilted upward. Hargeisa is forty-four hundred feet above sea level on the Ogo plateau. When the long road was empty, the driver often preferred spending long stretches in the oncoming traffic lane. This was a common trait I’d noticed in other places, too—perhaps it kept the drivers alert. They always had simple justifications, like The road is smoother. And yet, driving in the other direction, it isn’t. But I didn’t need Bataille or a twelve-year-old to explain that draw of the forbidden and the excitement of fear.

I bought a SIM card for two dollars and charged it for one while the man in the passenger seat, gray haired and skinny in camouflage fatigues, got out to buy soda. He was the soldier escort required by law to accompany tourists traveling between cities. He pushed his rifle down between his knees like it was bothering him.

My eagerness grew as east Africa blured into orange and purple. Perfectly flat scrubland stretched out to rough mountains.

Just north of the highway outside Hargeisa, there are two small conical hills named Naasa Hablood: “Girl’s Breasts.” But the country revealed itself to me modestly—the hills were hidden in the dark as we rumbled into town.

I WIPED SLEEPY DROOL from the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand and rubbed my eyes with the front of it. Then I stepped out for the first time in the big city.

“Beautiful man!”

A woman was glaring into my eyes with such intensity that I almost got back in the car. She, in flowing black cloth; me, in something dirty. It was the most aggressively nice thing I had ever experienced, there in the middle of a lumpy dirt road outside the Oriental Hotel.

I smiled back, and she disappeared.

My light skin was a rare coloring in Hargeisa. I had let my hair grow over the thirteen months since my cousin had buzzed it in Jerusalem, and it was curly and sea swept.

I entered the Oriental Hotel emboldened, feeling welcome in my differences, but knowing I would never be able to hide my foreignness here, or delay its discovery, as I had been able to do almost everywhere else. This for me was the first feature of Somaliland.

HARGEISA HAS ALWAYS BEEN a market town. According to one popular etymology, the name means “the place where you take animal skins.” For centuries, pelt merchants from Africa bartered with traders from the Arabian Gulf for sugar and dates.

Since 1953, the two-story Oriental Hotel has been hosting travelers in the very heart of the city. Outside, the facade is a flat, white box sticking out over the goldsmiths’ shops and the travel agency below. Inside, rooms open out onto a wide atrium and plants cascade lobbyward from the mezzanine. There is wifi from the comfy chairs under umbrellas where breakfast is served with a pot of Somali tea. All of this for fifteen dollars per night.

But even that was too much, said the earlier generations. An older Somalilander told me that locals critiqued the idea of monetizing hospitality. “They were saying, ‘You shouldn’t rent a space to a guest! You should give him a space. Free! You know, in your house or something, haa.’ ”

That word—haa, “yes”—functions even more in Somali like a capital on a column, like “indeed” or “exactly” at the end of a sentence or as a weighty reaction. It was the opposite in my America-bound text messages—haa was a clue to read more lightly—but here, the old man was extra adamant: this was why the hotel was called oriental, because it was built on such faraway concepts. (Maybe he knew about the $189 the port pickup had added to the hotel bill, as if that wasn’t most of the nation’s GDP per capita.)

I made my way back outside to the corner. At ten o’clock, vendors were still out on the street, selling things from behind a grooved, knee-high barrier. When I got closer, I realized that there was no barrier at all—only the goods to be traded. On pallets piled five bricks high and five bricks deep, blue Somaliland shillings took in the night air.

The price was simple and non-negotiable: six thousand shillings for one U.S. dollar, and only in that direction. But the most common note in circulation was the five hundred, and so, for twenty dollars, I returned to the hotel with two rubber-banded stacks that bulged in my pockets like contraband. There are pink thousand-shilling notes and green five thousands, too, convenient but harder to come by. They are clean and crisp and unhandled, unlike the faded one hundreds, and papery fifties worth less than a penny, promising to dissolve in your pocket.

This was the second feature of Somaliland, the money bought practically by volume as if we were again trading skins for sugar.

In Hargeisa, the money sits on the street, unafraid—there are no armed robberies or drive-bys: these ramparts built of banknotes are safe. This was what made the boys who watched MBC Action ask, Isn’t America dangerous, when bags of money are snatched at gunpoint in broad daylight?

FLUSH WITH SHILLINGS, I found a restaurant still open and learned to eat pasta with my hands. I went back every day. An olive-skinned man rushed to bring me baasto tossed in sauce and vegetables, and orange juice watered down and sweetened to the point of addiction.

By my second plate, I was learning to flip spaghetti back and forth over my hand—as everyone else did at the long tables—until the strands were folded enough to handle as a ball, which, with practice, could be rolled over the finger tips and popped into the mouth.

“I’m Hussein. My mother is Layla. My father, Mahdi,” said the olive-skinned man. Hussein brought me a pink juice, too, called cano Vimto, a mixture of the fruity, purple British soft drink Vimto and milk. It made me feel like a baby discovering ice cream.

We spoke in Arabic, his like the French spoken in West Africa—clear, light. At the end of every month he sent his wife and mother in Mogadishu fractions of his pittance through the omnipresent funds transfer service Dahabshiil. Other forms of communication were more difficult. “I don’t have a telephone,” he said. He had his eye on a 150-dollar plane ticket home to the Somali capital. “God, I’m sad. God, I want to travel.”

How could I respond, standing there, traveling right in his face? His young man’s wrinkles and wide eyes were fixed in a permanent smile, but transparently lacquered that way. He asked how long I would stay in Somaliland. “How many years? How many months?” For a week, I said, after visiting Yemen. “How many years, how many months?” he asked again.

“Dubai, did you see it? How many years?”

A period better measured in months than in years, I didn’t say—I flit through these places like subway stops. Hussein thought in longer units.

Hussein didn’t have protection in the north, or connections—what the Arab world called wasta. His skin color was perhaps the only thing he liked about himself, and even that caused trouble. “I’m not well here,” he said. “Every night I don’t sleep. I have too many thoughts, haa.” Mostly, they were about going home to Mogadishu.

“In Hargeisa they say ‘iska warran,’ ” literally, give news of yourself. “In Mogadishu: ‘nabad miyaa.’ ” In the south, the greeting addresses the environment, not the individual. Nabad miyaa means “Is there peace?”

He said he’d call when he left. Or when I did. He mimed the entire conversation: “I’ll call you when you leave, Hey, my friend, how’s it going? How’s your mother, how’s your father?” The idea made him happy.

The bill: fourteen thousand shillings (two dollars). I unfolded dozens of blue notes from my stack.

I COULD NEVER FORGET who I was in Hargeisa. I wandered the streets in the morning, noticing how the city colorized the higher I looked—beige at my feet, faded red in the throng of roadside umbrellas at the mouth of the market, always blue overhead. Stores were often painted with bright murals depicting glamorized versions of the items sold inside—cellphones, CDs, sandwiches. At first, I did my best to be unremarkable.

“Hey, Irishman!”

This was the city’s way of telling me “Good morning.”

“White man! Your name? Hey, Italian man!” In my first days, I smiled back. That was the extent of most conversations.

Sometimes when I was walking, I slowed near a shop called Adam Electronics. That way, if anyone happened to shout Hey Irishman! Your name! I could just point behind me. Sometimes I said it was my shop.

It was a lesson quickly learned that eyes would follow me through Somaliland. Not all of them—not even most—but enough to feel the heat on my back. Once, when I sat on a stoop near the market and the shack titled “Business Royals,” and the red building painted with the Coca-Cola logo, a young Somalilander offered explanation. In a perfectly white thobe, he looked down from under a brimless white cap, often known as a kufi in Africa, or as the Islamic taqiyah.

“They think you’re a spy,” he said. “When you take pictures, small pictures, they think you are collecting data.”

It didn’t seem unfair, in a region freshly familiar with colonization and suppression by foreigners and by their own government, that the alien would be suspicious. I was upset that my presence alone could be the source of stress for women on their way home from the butcher’s, but I couldn’t help smiling at the image of my sinister spreadsheet—the one with cells for the pattern of the flowing garbasaar that framed their faces and extended below the knee, for the style of their gait, for the color of the long khimar headscarf if they were styling something more traditionally Islamic. Every molecule of Hargeisa was a potential data point.

The young man might have caught me smiling. “If they don’t understand, they think there is some secret.”

Yet for every chary reservation, there is another curiosity unreserved. Over pasta the night before, I had met a high-schooler named Ahmed who delighted in practicing his English with me. As a former British colony, Somaliland does a fair job of teaching English in high schools, at least in the regions where there are high schools. I practiced my Somali.

Ahmed rushed me into shops at random.

“Tell them!”

“Habeen wanaagsan,” I’d try. Good evening. The men in the restaurant or working around the sewing machine would explode laughing. Where’d you find this guy?

There, my secret was assumed less suspicious and more absurd. I was just a guy, galumphing in the evening, telling people to have a nice one. Another Hargeisan appeared to have vetted me for them, and this was almost always enough.

THERE WAS ALWAYS a light on in the back of my mind: I had books to deliver for Yusuf Gabobe at Haatuf News. This was the objective I used to justify my footfalls. I was tricking myself, and I knew it, but still it worked. The next morning, though, I traded this goal for one so concrete it didn’t need tricks: the Neolithic cave paintings in Laas Geel, dated to seven thousand years old or so, give or take a couple millennia.

I bought a second SIM card from another of Somaliland’s major communications companies—Somtel and Telesom numbers do not connect to each other—and called Ahmed as he’d asked from the noisy taxi yard. No answer.

I negotiated for the drive northwest into the plains with a hoard of drivers who had fenced me inside a firm semicircle. I called Ahmed again. “Stay there,” he said.

Ahmed’s somewhat older friend had cars, he said, and we could go with him. The Oriental offered its own morning sightseeing package for the price of 120 plates of pasta but this way I could rely on the kindness of new friends. Soon, we were navigating through potholed streets in the cab of the friend’s enormous flatbed truck, looking to find something more appropriate at one of his family’s stores. But as we continued to make large figure eights through the capital, I began to lose my fragile faith.

“Do you care if it’s a big car or a small car?” he asked.

“What? No. No, anything.”

“Don’t worry okay?” said Ahmed. “Why are you worried? Don’t worry.” I felt like a bad traveler when I didn’t trust him—it seemed like a good MO to put trust in strangers in strange places—but I didn’t trust him. That is, I didn’t trust he would help do the thing I wanted to do. I started to miss the taxi drivers.

Eventually, Ahmed accepted that all of the friend’s cars were unavailable, and that the seventy-foot truck wouldn’t be ideal for the drive, and the friend went to rent something at twenty dollars per day. Cash is particularly necessary in a country without ATMs. I had hoped to have enough leftover from Yemen. I wouldn’t—not even close—when the bill came for the Oriental. Larger transactions are almost always handled in American currency, of which I had only a few big bills left from the emergency stash. I handed Ahmed’s friend a fifty, expecting thirty dollars or the equivalent bale of shillings in return.

He returned minutes later with no change. It was a two-day minimum, he said, and we needed to buy gas. Trust faltered, but there was no recourse except to whine and ruin everything. I let my displeasure show faintly. I think this put even more pressure on Ahmed. Tourist guides officially required a soldier and government approval, and maybe he started to realize that he couldn’t come through.

Twenty-five minutes outside the city on empty roads, the friend looked worried. He didn’t think we’d have enough gas to make it to the caves. So we doubled back almost all the way to the city, added fuel, and left again, everyone loathing one another more and more.

We approached the checkpoint. “Are you sure we don’t need . . .” I began.

“Don’t worry.”

And when we halted at the metal barrier, the officer took one look in the backseat, at my face and at the papers that didn’t exist, and—I translated on my own by the tone of his voice—told us to have ourselves fucked.

No one really spoke after that. I stewed in the back as we drove solemnly back to Hargeisa, thinking, The only way to travel is to lose yourself in the moment, and that this was the long moment of a beautiful day squandered. As always when I saw that I had drifted out of the present, I berated myself. I wanted so desperately to see things from my eyes and not from far behind them.

Outside the car in an unfamiliar part of town, I asked the friend for the thirty dollars in car rental change. I’d forgotten entirely the math that had gotten us here. At first he was apologetic, shockingly so, and then, as if a switch had flipped, he turned angry. A small crowd surrounded us, gathering information like a lawyers’ barbershop. Ahmed was overwhelmed. Minutes of argument later when I looked back to the car, he was gone.

His friend dropped the car keys in the sand and walked away.

The casus belli was my confusion alone. But no matter how many people I offended, I was still a visitor in their city. A thin and soft-spoken member of the gaggle joined me, and together, as is doable in Hargeisa, we tracked down Ahmed’s friend’s father.

We found him issuing orders in his auto repair shop. “I’m going to solve this. Because one of those kids is my son.”

I talked softly, explaining that his son had spent thirty dollars that wasn’t his.

“What do you want me to do? Where’s my son?” the father began to say, in that part of the day when most men were chewing gat in the shade. He repeated this several times with varying inflection. “Where’s my son?”

“I don’t know. But you can fix this, and maybe you’ll find him one day.” I couldn’t filter all my snideness in the heat, and I hoped it would go unpunished.

“What do you want me to do,” he bit.

It wasn’t a question anymore, and so we left. Reflecting my anxiety in the wrinkles of his own forehead, my new advocate found the owner of the car rental on the street. Because we’d only kept the car for four hours, he gave me ten dollars.

But that wasn’t the issue then. I had let my frustrations—a day poorly spent—turn me sour.

And then I got a call that would fix everything but hurt feelings. The voice on the other end of the line was a friend of Joseph George, the man who always came through.

THE DOORS of the Oriental boxed out memories of the day, the last heat of January replaced by a dark, cozy evening. In the hotel’s leafy atrium I met with Joseph’s friend Omar, a director in the Somaliland Ministry of Youth and Sports. He paid close attention to his phone while we drank spiced tea, oh!—how restorative was the manna from Somali teapots, shaah hawash. The name hints at its relations—to hawayij, that Yemeni spice mix for coffee and a hundred other things—and its role. In Arabic, hawayij means “necessities.”

I hadn’t fully finished a sentence about what I was doing in town before Omar began solving problems. I’ll take you to get the permit, he said. I’ll take you to get your flight tickets tomorrow. Then we’ll get a soldier and I’ll drive you to the caves in my Land Cruiser.

Again, I let myself lean on the goodness of new friends. I wondered if he was one. He was tall, middle-aged bordering on three-quarters, and moved the way a man does when he grew quickly as a boy. While we sat, he looked away often, his face set and distracted. I wondered if he felt an obligation to babysit.

True to his word, Omar whisked me in the morning to the Ministry of Tourism and Culture to reserve a twenty-five-dollar ticket to see the caves and sped through town to the station where soldiers are rented. My eyes unfocused and took in mostly colors. And then: a billboard for Haatuf News, where Brittany’s friend Yusuf worked. I scribbled down the large-lettered Hotmail contact as we tore past.

LAAS GEEL WAS “DISCOVERED” in much the same way America was, as a work of publicity far more than actual unearthing. In 2002, a French archeological team learned of the site’s existence, about five kilometers off the main road. As far as outsiders were concerned, Somaliland put its first treasure on the map. Since then, tourists have learned to ask for directions here, generally making a side trip from Ethiopia. Marked with the previous month’s dates, there were about fifty names in the Laas Geel Visitors Register.

The pre-Islamic shelters are largely unexplored. Some pastoral communities might be aware of the artwork in their area. Some nomads use them as temporary refuge. Some imbue the pre-Islamic art with mystical properties, or avoid the caves for fear of evil energy. To others, the large slabs of rock are good material for toilets.

The Holocene legacy does not filter into Somali or Somalilander identity like the Pharaonic does in Egypt—there aren’t five hundred-foot pyramids staring anyone in the face. The caves haven’t had thousands of years to find their place in the consciousness of any particular collective. The State hasn’t built a national myth here. Celebration of pre-Islamic history can incite a cognitive dissonance in religious circles, as in Saudi Arabia, where the first-century Mada’in Saleh complex carved by the Nabateans (of Petra fame) has suffered the legend of a Quranic curse. In Laas Geel, the major obstacle toward embracing history was the confounding effect it has on modern tribal demarcations. I am proud of this, our shared history; however, we do not share this history. Or, Behold! Something older than I can accept! The cave paintings are a shared ancestor. Preserving this heritage, says Somaliland’s ten-year-old Department of Archaeology, is a major key to peace. It was easy for me to love it all, because I came from the outside.

OMAR’S LAND CRUISER found a little red-roofed house in the shade of a desert tree. A sleepy guard emerged to walk us up the stairs—there are stairs now—to the first of the twenty shelters so pristine I thought they might have been painted within the week.

For the first few seconds I saw only bloodred contours as my eyes rebounded off shapes only man could have made. There are 350 images on the surfaces of Shelter One alone.

My favorite among the cows was not one with strings across its harp-shaped neck, or alternating bars of red ochre and white, but a rare one that filled the space of the lyre with pure abstraction. There were red strings, yes, but then there were the teeth of a comb, and squiggling blobs, wild but contained. They reached the border of the neck, where wide horns appeared in smooth arches, and stopped. I started to see these cow wattles like signatures. Maybe this was an assertion of the artist—in each of these empty necks, there is squiggle room for the individual to take shape.

On the rocks down below, there were real goats, a real camel bravely suckling on the pads of a cactus, an iguanid lizard with perfect camouflage, and an antelope so unflinchingly adorable that our soldier gazed at her with soft eyes. I caught him. The space is spectacular. These are not the electric torch-lit grottos of western Europe, where humans hid from the cold in the bowels of deep caves. Laas Geel, “the camel’s watering hole,” covers a high outcropping where the region’s early settlers could oversee the sloping scrubland below with granite at their backs.

Beholden to few hard facts, we could interpret these discoveries as we wanted. I saw the painted people standing underneath their cows, arms raised high, and wondered who they might have been. The solid white figure with red legs had just bought new pants. Another shape was proud of his coat.

The guard-guide was getting excited, and Omar was, too, as if he hadn’t expected to be. The guide leaned through a tight aperture in a cave wall, narrowing his eyes along the barrel of his index finger and following the sight down into the valley. “When enemies come, they could look out from here.”

“Sure,” I said. “Cool.”

Another natural ledge was the throne room. On the ceilings there were drawings too high for us to reach. “Back then they were five meters tall,” said Omar.

AS WE DROVE HOME, I realized the steering wheel was on the right even though traffic kept to the right. This was a rare combo, shared by some taxis in Afghanistan, like a British string around the new country’s finger. The lettering on the dashboard was all in Japanese. The air-freshening spray was all Omar’s own: “Pure Cigar.”

This might have been where he asked for sixty or eighty dollars. These one hundred kilometers were not a gift—I had mistaken an extra day’s work for charity. Even a director of the Ministry of Youth and Sports could use gas money. (“I have twenty-two children,” he said.)

It is embarrassing to assume extraordinary goodwill in the place of mere politeness. I panicked at the thought that I had been doing this across the Middle East, recognizing an offer but mistaking its kind, making assumptions at lunches proffered, and then leaving local couples shrugging at each other: I guess that’s just what the Americans expect. I’d figured out that the Somali letter X was the same as the hard H in Arabic, the one I once couldn’t distinguish or pronounce without choking a little—and it felt so good to recognize something in a place I couldn’t otherwise read. But the Semitic grammar I’d studied in school, the few Cushtic phrases I’d absorbed here, did not make me part of the family. Recognition is not awareness.

Omar and I began to bargain, factoring in gas and our moods and the soldier-for-hire, to land somewhere a little under the hotel’s package price. And then, somewhere on an empty stretch the car gave up and sputtered to a stop, steaming. We looked inside the hood, and then milled about. The soldier stood at the edge of the pavement, his shadow reaching nearly across the road. A woman in a floral robe and a green shawl strode by, a toddler jouncing on her back. A man passed in mismatched shoes. We looked to be miles away from any shade we didn’t cast ourselves.

When a van came with space for one, Omar ushered me inside, out of hospitality, or automatic custom, or to get rid of me.

THE NEWS ISSUED LOUDLY from the van speakers in a northern accent. In the back, Mogadishu-born Abdirazak and I talked over the radio. His hometown was safe now, he said, but Hargeisa offered more opportunity. And he argued the southerner’s call for unity, appealing to my United States for support.

“Which is better, fifty states or one government?”

“Both,” I suggested. “The states can focus on local services while the federal government can have more power.”

He picked up only on the five-dollar word. “More power,” he repeated. “Somalia is one state. Same language, same religion, same culture.”

IN THE END, the cave paintings told me about as much about Somaliland as a woolly mammoth would tell me about Alaskan politics. But now Yusuf, Brittany’s friend, who had answered the e-mail I sent to the address I’d spotted on the billboard, was coming for tea in the Oriental.

He had the kind of voice Goldilocks would have followed, in English, neither high nor deep. His glasses, with the simplest of frames, were the kind I stopped noticing. A small space between his front teeth, and body language that was never loud. When he laughed, not too often, I felt fully understood.

Just after New Year’s in 2007, Yusuf was arrested with two other colleagues for “defaming” Somaliland’s third president, Dahir Riyale Kahin, and his wife. (In fact, he was charged with obstructing the police work of arresting others in the newsroom for defamation, but he hardly remembers.) As the chairman of Haatuf Media Network, he had published a series of articles outlining the depth of the president’s nepotism and corruption. He waited three months in prison for the trial. By the time of his conviction, the reaction to his cause célèbre forced the government to let him go, a free man with a guilty record.

At our table in the leafy lobby, I delivered my cargo from the Emirates, and Yusuf spoke to me about where I was. “Hargeisa was the bastion of the ‘Greater Somalia’ concept,” he told me. “Hargeisa was spearheading this Somali idea of unifying the whole Somali-speaking territories on the Horn of Africa. ‘Let’s make sacrifices.’ But this didn’t materialize. The only two parts which united were Somaliland and Somalia out of the five—and their unification didn’t work well.

“The armed struggle began in earnest at the end of ’82. At the beginning of ’83, I was expelled from Qatar because I was mobilizing people,” Yusuf said. Despite sweeping achievements in road paving and irrigation and education and literacy—and the unifying power of the newly codified Somali language—Somali president and communist autocrat Major General Siad Barre had been assassinating his critics for more than a decade. With despotism lingering in the Somali government and the economy in shambles, the champions of unification were now fighting for separation. In 1988, guerilla campaigns converted to full-blooded war, attacking Somali Army troops in Somaliland. Siad Barre retaliated with carpet bombing and massacre. “This city was destroyed completely. Most urban centers in Somaliland were completely razed to the ground.”

Other rebel groups contested in the south and by 1991, Siad Barre was ousted by the southern United Somali Congress, who became the factional new rulers of Somalia.

Four hundred meters from the Oriental in the center of Khayriyada Memorial Square, a MiG fighter plane that once bombed the city is immobilized on a painted pedestal. On one side of the mount: 26 JUNE, a reminder of Somalilanders’ first taste of self-rule in modern times, in 1960, when British Somaliland was granted its independence. Five days later, they joined with Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic. On the other side of the fighter plane memorial: 18 MAY. In the wake of the gruesome civil war, on May 18, 1991, the Republic of Somaliland declared itself independent. It is recognized by no one.

“Has Hargeisa recovered?” I asked, pouring cream-colored tea into our cups.

“It recovered and expanded—it’s larger than before. Of course, infrastructure and things like that are still bad, but Hargeisa is far better than it was before being razed to the ground.”

With passports meaningless in every country but Ethiopia, though, Somalilanders are still trapped. Until now, the international community has rejected their plea for self-determination.

Whenever I wrote friends or spoke of Hargeisa to myself, I never knew what to call the country it was in. Somalia, maybe, when I wanted to invoke its relationship to the world. On the ground, I saw why the name was meaningless, or repressive. No matter what, when I gave the place a name I gave one argument power.

YUSUF WAS RESTING his hand on Brittany’s book. “People take the same language, the same religion, and say it’s okay, it’s this homogenous society. But the peril is—there is the caste system in Somali culture.”

Somalia’s demographics are at the top of the homogeneous list in Africa: more than four-fifths of the country is ethnically Somali. A common language is a sign of pride, but it is also a mechanism for condescension. The four seminomadic clan families whose Northern Somali language was declared “official” are known as “noble” clans. About 15 percent of Somalia is non-Somali, speakers of Bantu languages and the Swahili of neighboring Kenya.

In 2000, the transitional federal government introduced the notorious 4.5 system, whereby each of the four noble clans is allotted one share of the power structure, and the remaining minorities are given a collective half.

Another autonomous region had sprouted in the center of the country, and another still on the southern tip, supported by Kenya and Ethiopia as a buffer against Al-Shabab insurgents. (Once, the newly elected president of this state had come to Abu Dhabi for a conference at the NYUAD Institute. Through cosmopolitan Gila, he had extended me an invitation to visit. I could never reach him. “J’habite dans le brousse, moi,” he had said. I live in the bush. The president couldn’t even live in his state, because, insofar as a state exists, it didn’t.) The new names on maps hardly touched life on the ground. It seemed like the region was trying to fight terrorism with semantics.

Each subdivision created a new majority in a smaller place, appearing like cracks across a frozen river. New minorities found themselves stranded and divided. In Somaliland, too, there are segments that decry the Ishaq clan’s hegemony and seek adoption into Somalia proper. These contested districts have opted to create their own autonomous state with a kind of aspirational branding. The Khatumo State, which endeavors to secede from the secessionists, takes its name from Arabic: khatima means “conclusion.”

“A CLAN IS OF COURSE a kind of tribe, but it’s more complicated: it has a system of lineage,” said Yusuf. The obsession with this lineage is soil for the roots of all Somali conflict. Somewhere though, between the painting of Laas Geel and the cornerstoning of the Oriental, there is a shared root. All Somali clan families trace their lineage to the patriarch Soomaal, a descendant of the house of Muhammad. The clans break off at different points in the family tree, spidering into subclans and sub-sub-clans and blood-money-paying groups. Each element is a vital part of a Somali’s identity.

“I have to know,” said Yusuf, who was a part of the same sub-sub-clan as the owner of the Oriental. “Ishaq, Habr Awal, Sa‘ad Muse, Gedi.” Ishaq was the family, Habr Awal the clan, Sa‘ad Muse the subclan, Gedi the sub-sub-clan. “Gedi—it’s the common ancestor we have, my eight ancestral grandfather.” Habar Awal, the clan eponym, he said, was twenty-four to twenty-five links of male lineage ago.

“I don’t know some of my great-grandparents’ names,” I said.

“Good and bad,” said Yusuf. “Many people would rather die if they don’t know,” he laughed.

The system is not without its benefits: names function like addresses. In a nomadic lifestyle, lineage systems have already mapped out potential bed-and-breakfasts, available watering holes, friends. This was why some Somalis said, “We are like the Jews of Africa!” (“With no paperwork you can just trust me,” said a new Somali friend, about meeting new Somali friends.)

In times of trouble, compulsory donations also lift the burden on the individual. “It’s a kind of insurance,” said Yusuf. “So if somebody from the tribe inflicts injury or kills somebody, you have to pay dear. Blood money. It’s collected.”

“How much?”

“One hundred camels for a person. And then you have to change that—” his phone rang, and, with every politeness, he took his leave for some pressing business in Ethiopia.

He would have said that you have to tweak that figure—the Sharia rule for blood money in the school of Islamic jurisprudence honored by Somalis—according to the heer, the interclan contracts. Heer covered everything, and when it didn’t, the clans inked more. Tribal treaties, a Somali scholar noted in 1959, became “a source of law” in the British Protectorate. (The repercussions are obvious: When the colonizers left, Somaliland did not fall into an anarchic vacuum the way their Italian-run cousins did to the south.) Based on Sharia but not beholden to it, the interclan contracts remain flexible. Killing a really good guy or disturbing a long-standing peace between trusting clans, for example—that could raise the hundred-per-man, fifty-per-woman minimums.

The money to be paid is called mag, or diya, in Arabic, and is generally paid in cash at the local market value of the camels—about three to four hundred dollars each in Somalia. (In Saudi Arabia, rising camel values induced legislation in 2011 that capped the penalty for murder at just over one hundred thousand dollars.) The weight falls on the mag-paying group: four to eight generations, totaling somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand men. This group is perhaps the most important single category for a Somali man.

The woman’s half-value is not as much sexist itself as it is an unsavory product of sexism: Women are not a part of the mag-paying groups. As they do not contribute, they do not collect equally. Women are swept up in these systems like an afterthought.

Marriages are most common within the clan between spouses of different subclans. Next most likely is interfamily marriages—that is, close is good, but really different is better than just a bit different. As a Philadelphian Pennsylvanian American, for example, I’d likely pair with a Pittsburger Pennsylvanian American. After that, I’d rather any Canadian over an Iowan or New Yorker or Dakotan. Mostly, exogamous marriage is alliance building, a diplomatic tool and an expansion of protective bonds.

The word for clan, tol, is also the word for “to sew, bind together.” Weak clans very literally became unbound. When they were out of place, locals could call them qaldan: “wrong.” The Somali refugees landing by the thousands every year in Yemen, the families I saw sleeping on cardboard in Aden alleyways—these were almost always escapees from weak clans, those who found themselves qaldan everywhere.

IN THE BLACK HAWK DOWN DAYS, America went to war against the dictator who had ousted the dictator who had marshalled young Somalia into bloody unity. The poorly planned objectives—to facilitate and protect humanitarian efforts in Somalia, and later to capture the dictator—were failures.

“The helicopter used to come at night. You can’t sleep,” I heard from a Somali friend who said he used to play on the Black Hawk wreckage on his way to market. “Dooh dooh doooh dooh. BOOM! Throwing things, bombs, firing from the sky.”

Somalis were trapped between a militant dictator and foreigners infringing on their freedom. “The Americans have no clue,” he said, as they patrolled and confiscated weapons blindly across tribal lines. “They tried to make a peace-making. You don’t make a peace with people you don’t even know.”

For a moment, the subclans of Mogadishu united against the outsiders. And when the outsiders left, the boundaries reappeared like glow-in-the-dark ink.

IN THIS WAY, Somalis were not the Jews of Africa. Jews have all but forgotten the tribes of ancient Israel—ten of the twelve are accepted as “lost.” The clan base is expanded, in part because there is a long tradition of troubles imposed from outside.

I could probably guess my tribe from my last name, but it would be useless. I don’t, like the Ishaq or Dir or Darod or Hawiye, have prearranged grazing territory for my herd. And I don’t have a hundred relatives to call when I’m in a bind. I have AAA. I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

The mag process, in its eye-for-an-eye formation, can cut both ways. I would know that there were a few hundred to a few thousand men who would vouch their eyes for mine. When I wandered in the desert, I would know that I had the might of those thousands behind me. But . . . the individual is no longer responsible for homicide. My kin’s relationships, their grudges, must become my own.

My objections to Somali communalism came from the me-first ego of the American Dream and my first-person destinies made manifest in the bank accounts I shared with no one. Tribes, clans, serious crime resolved by traditional law—this was not the structure of my childhood. The idea that my worth was not a fully individual accomplishment offended the aspirations of all American boys: I would never be a man entirely of my own making. And yet . . .

“Qolomaad tahay?” What is your clan?

A checkpoint.

Ishaq.

A passport flashed.

When I moved, I declared my clan again and again, too. Traveling to some countries, I’d paid 4.5 times the visa price of Chinese and Japanese tourists because their countries had stronger economic ties with our host. In Europe, my Americanness affords me ninety days of visitors’ rights for free. In Yemen I had to watch my ass, but the government had an interest in keeping me safe. These are my heer. These are my contracts.

I saw the smaller elements (of people to trust without question) and said, “It’s too big! Too unstable!” I saw the larger elements (the families bound by contract) and said, “It’s too small! Too arbitrary!” as if the world’s borders weren’t silly enough. There’s a reason that map in the classroom is called a political map. But nomadic Somali polities have never conformed perfectly to this system.

The Somali sultanates have gone; the most influential units today are subgroups of respected men. The upper house of the Somaliland parliament is called the House of Elders. But unless he’s a hunchback, clan identity is probably the first known fact about a president and, unsurprisingly, his particular networks reap inegalitarian benefits.

Kahin, whose “defamation” put Yusuf in jail, had been in office for five years, the first minority clan president in Somaliland. Haatuf’s reporting could have been a tribal issue—Yusuf and his Ishaq clan against the upstart—but it wasn’t: the only difference between the new president and the former dictator Siad Barre, Yusuf told a reporter from prison, was that Barre “was a dictator whom we did not know, but Dahir Riyale is an enemy from within our community and we unknowingly trusted him thinking he is one of us.” It was transcendent in its way: the ruler despised not for clan but for performance.

So long as the political clings to the ancestral in Somalia, it will seem an unprecedented loss of autonomy for those without footholds at the top. One Mogadishan told me what happens when a clan loses supremacy, in a Somali adage addressed to a piece of meat: Ago ko’one a mako areyye. “Either I eat you or I throw you in the sand.” That’s why, among other reasons, there are still Somalis saying, “We need another Siad Barre”: only a totalitarian can override the system.

I LEFT THE ORIENTAL. I walked uptown past the bus station to the packed dirt street named after Abdirahman Ahmed Ali “Tuur,” Somaliland’s first president. His nickname means “hunchback.” I ducked through the walk-in-refrigerator-style curtains and the inquiring glances at a restaurant I hadn’t tried. I felt a little guilty every time I didn’t visit my pasta place, but this one was bigger. They had dry, dense goat meat. They had rice.

I ordered a shared plate of rice and pasta. It’s a dish that claims a certain status because it can be served only in restaurants—a family would never cook the two for the same meal, but a restaurant has both on hand. It is called, aptly, “Federation.” Normally it is served with a banana.

It was cool and dark, and the glances faded. Inside, I was just a messy eater in the lunch crowd, but outside through the plastic curtains . . .

“White boy! Arab! Hey man! Where from! What’s your name!”

“How are you fine! How are you!” The foreigner’s salutations shouted like accusations, as if I hadn’t forgotten how strange I looked.

“Man or woman!” jumpy men offered from storefronts. My hair was longer than theirs by all of it, blatantly frizzing in the sun. “Are you a man?” asked a fast walker as he passed. I answered in the affirmative. “If Allah says,” he said. It was a slightly meaner refrain to the young Yemenis’ “Boy or girl!” greeting. Maybe it was completely playful. Anyway, I had no allegiance to my lack of haircut either.

If I returned scowls with scowls, pressure built instantly. We’d steal fugitive glances and, if we caught the other staring, we’d raise and drop eyebrows until we were dizzy. If I smiled when they stared, they stopped scowling sometimes and smiled back. Or their brows shifted from a stare-at-something-suspicious to a stare-at-something-silly.

I never thought I was thin-skinned to teasing. I accept that I’ve got a nose that could sink a thousand ships. But teasing is certainly funniest when it’s original, and this was getting old fast.

“Man or woman!” It came again from behind me. Fuck it, I thought. What happens when I do this. I put on my sternest face—Whadjusaytome?!—and whipped around. When I did, I saw a short, pudgy chunk of a man grinning odiously.

I had energy to burn, from the sugar with tea or the Federation or the too-short city blocks, and aggression seemed like the only kind of defense that wasn’t passive.

He found my eyes, saw the macho posturing in them. His grin fell. He picked up a rock, and wound it back. We saw each other.

I could feel the street’s attention click, the onlookers squeezing in on us. When push came to shove came to rock, I had no support system—I was clanless. That could have been why I was so easy to shout at: these jabs would see no retaliation from clan politics. I could be a release valve for man’s natural urge to mock.

The division between clans can be great—they may not offer each other assistance, they could find each other on opposite sides of a severe dispute—but a foreigner has no place in this system at all. I was blank. I was a default human for those with history to respond to at will. In a world where ancestry is everything, we shared nothing. The shouts of “Irishman!” and “Italian man!” hoped to hit home—to make my presence explicable and to find a way to connect me to lineage—but when they didn’t, I was purely a visitor again. Guests do have a place in the framework, though.

I turned back around, half-expecting to be knocked out anyway. I heard the rock fall into the sand.

THESE WERE THE WAYS the town got used to me, or I got used to it—sparring partners testing our distance with light jabs. Another day, I asked a man for directions to Somali fast food—small preprepared sandwiches of unidentifiable meat and lettuce on soft bread that is unfailingly delicious. He led me to a popular joint.

“Did you get your money back?” the man asked. He knew that I had sought compensation from the auto mechanic’s son. Everyone knew everything. I’d recouped ten bucks, I told him, and he gave a satisfied nod.

For moments in the small town of a million plus, I felt I was part of it. And as soon as I did, I saw that I was qaldan. I walked through the street eating my mystery sandwiches.

“Don’t you feel shame to eat outside?” A crinkled face appeared from nowhere. “There are some places where they will attack you just for that bit. You are eating when they have nothing to eat. You must feel shame!” I told him I didn’t—but I did. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, or forewarning me. I was starting to get defensive.

“My name is Willie. I speak Swedish also,” he said. And then he was gone.

He left me in a moment riddled with guilt, feeling embarrassed and raw and so, so visible.

It was inescapable; with or without cameras or sandwiches or fat stacks of cash, the tribeless and foreign were lodestones for the curious and confrontational.

At the mouth of the market, a cluster of children—four girls and a tiny boy—hung about in bright robes that hardly covered unwashed shirts. They beamed when I lifted my camera, and relaxed even more when they saw that it didn’t shoot lasers. The girl at the center, swathed in orange, embraced the boy’s head and turned him toward me. She was radiant—and everyone hated her.

A small mob assembled to investigate the objects of my attention. It was exasperating to them, it seemed, that I could care even for a moment.

“These people, Oromo people. Not from Somaliland,” a man said. “When you are writing your article, do not write that these people are from Somaliland. They are immigrants.” I’d never said anything about writing, but why else would I be there, he thought. Or he had seen me before with a pen. Or someone had told him about me.

Oromo is generally translated to mean “The People.” But while they make up the largest ethnic bloc in Ethiopia, the state continues to marginalize them with policy and shocking antiopposition violence. Emigrants to Somaliland (a territory that was largely Oromo a few hundred years ago) are even more starkly without a support structure, or clan connections, or opportunities. They are like the Somalis who flee to Yemen, leaving little behind and finding less.

I took pictures of them, as if the JPEGs would travel with me and take them away from this place.

Another man in Muslim garb put his face in mine. “I am Somaliland, you are Somaliland. They are not Somaliland.”

“I am not Somaliland,” I said.

“In your face, you don’t like something,” said the first man.

“They are not from here and neither am I,” I said, getting ruffled. I became more indignant, less diplomatic in hiding my utter distaste with their attitudes, no longer playing along so they would take me further into their perspective.

If I read about places before visiting them, I might have quoted an old Somali poem:

Woman, the man who comes from next door,

Is not your equal,

He who travels through danger,

And desolate country, like a lion,

Is your equal!

Instead, I seized the opportunity that I’d been waiting a lifetime of action movies for: “If you have a problem with them, you have a problem with me,” I said, actually. I’d never imagined these would be the circumstances.

These children had traveled as much as I had, through countries far more desolate. Were they not our equals? Were they not people? But no one reacted, and the mob dissolved into the road’s shady fringes. They gave me nothing more to fight, and I took heavy steps away on the packed dirt.

Later, one of the onlookers ran into me on the street. He was an old man, and he looked at me like I wasn’t there. “I think you don’t like yourself,” he said.

What a crazy thing to say. I blinked to make sure he was real—that dehydration and anger hadn’t put my own voice into his mouth. But he was there, and I could feel my eye sockets unclench from holding my squinting rage in place, and the anger drained into sadness.

Still I seethed. This was not an all good place. This was not an all hospitable place, and I let myself hate everything about everything for a moment before, sullen, I confessed that I didn’t believe that either. I was tangled in an angry cycle: I didn’t like that I didn’t like these people for disliking other people. As I disliked them, I disliked me more, too.

The man was right, though. Shutting folks out is generally a bad response to prejudice. The anger faded some, taking with it some of the energy in my calves, and the old man disappeared into the twilight rabble.

IN THE LATE MORNING, I cast short shadows on the lobby of the Oriental. I asked Muhammad, the Djiboutian cook, if he might show me how to make local breakfast.

“No, no,” he said. Why would the cook cook when he didn’t have to cook? Wait, he said, and then we’ll go chew qat, or qaad, as the stimulant leaf is known in Somaliland, or chat, as they call it in Ethiopia where the good stuff comes from.

While he finished his omelets, I flicked through e-mails from my parents. I had let my travel plans slip accidentally in a forwarded message. It was the first time they knew where I really was since I’d flown to Beirut. I would try to explain after I’d come home—Afghanistan was lovely, mom, honest! If there were a chairwoman for the unconvinced, it was my mother.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, among other e-mailed prescriptions for Somalia. She was extremely worried. “You’re NOT immortal or even invulnerable.” No one in town would even call this Somalia, I said. I wasn’t in danger. If anything, I was bored.

Bored because I didn’t know how to spend time anymore. Bored because my head felt like an empty laboratory now that all the instruments I used to use had been cleared away. If I responded to boredom with my friends here, I might sidle into the chat rooms to chew until I felt like a god. And then there I’d be with all the power in the world and no idea where to spend it. I could think of no more audacious trips to take into the void, to insist to my friends and to myself that I had no fear.

The next plane to Dubai was in a few days. I still wanted to come home to Masha—I told her I would—but how could I so empty-handed? In the back of my mind, an infinite loop of destinations raced past like a split-flap display in a train station: Was there anywhere I could run where I wouldn’t be stuck?

My mom was worried about the wrong thing. My trying-to-scare-myself addiction wasn’t working, and I was feeling the onset of withdrawal. I didn’t feel immortal, I felt I was dying.

Yes, I melodramatized in the soft chairs orbited by pots of shaah hawash that always seemed to hold more tea than I expected. I had to—mundanity was filling the space danger left. If life was traction on the planet, I saw lostness as a kind of death—and a bad one, like starvation or thirst or exposure.

I was still uncertain, still angry. Yes, the humanity and connections had been real, but what could I take home? What could I have faith in? I was more afraid than ever, with a fear that audacity could no longer mask.

MUHAMMAD THE COOK took me to pick half bundles of chat from the women at the painted stalls. The drawings made the bundles look like small trees or heads of bok choy. Above, the owner’s name is often printed in bold letters. One stand said simply, TAWAKAL: “Trust in God.”

These were the men, inside the dark room just off the main street, craving autonomy from the cares of the world—at least hiding from them—with their bare feet outstretched toward the pile of shoes and slippers collecting on the floor. While Yemeni gat-chewing rooms are often rooms with a view, in Hargeisa there are none, no windows. Instead, the cement housing is luxuriant in its coolness, shade from the equatorial sun.

We slouched back on woven mats against our stretch of wall. “The goats are eating this every day,” said Muhammad. I imagined goats charging the border, wide-eyed and humping each other, gnashing their teeth and bleating bloody murder.

At first there were wide eyes trained on me, certainly the most goat-colored of the afternoon chewers, but they relaxed quickly.

“What are they saying?” I asked Muhammad, drinking his Mountain Dew.

“He say, ‘He is chewing chat?’ I say yes. He say, ‘He like the chat?’ I say, ‘That’s why he’s chewing!’ He say, ‘Okaaay!’ ”

Despite my unusual arrival, I was joining the ranks of the chewers: Somaliland’s 95 percent. And it was only as I prepared to leave, with one foot off the continent, that I could feel this kind of belonging, that I could feel we understood each other well enough. Maybe that was the only place I belonged: in constant flight with a warm perch for the afternoon.

We were chewing the chibis strand, fresh and powerful. The bushels were dry, more like eating paper and dust than Yemen, but consumed with a style more relaxed and elegant. You could hardly notice the bulges building in our cheeks. After this, my fourth session in two weeks, I stayed up all night feeling my thoughts swirling around at the top of my head. They whirled so fast I felt my crown might lift off at the ears like a toy helicopter. Sure, chat made me trust in God—but I thought the god was me.

If the pudgy man had threatened me again with a rock, I would have ordered him to throw it at me before tackling him to the ground and demanding he cook me dinner. I could have punched through walls. I could have made Djiboutian breakfasts. I glared into mirrors and at the ceiling, raging at all the empty space.

AFTER THE KINDLY BANK AGENT e-mailed me in Yemen to say that I was deep in the red, I left Asia with what cash I had. Almost as soon as I saw Africa, I relied on my oldest connections. It took two infusions from friends and family to settle my accounts.

For better or worse, Somaliland is built for this. According to estimates by the United Nations Development Programme, Somaliland receives up to $700 million per year in remittances. This constitutes one-quarter of household income. I joined the throngs in the downtown Dahabshiil to sign for Neal’s funds from Abu Dhabi.

My father transferred funds from the Western Union by the produce section of our local supermarket. Hargeisa’s single branch is a few minutes outside of town, a ten-dollar round trip in a taxi running on empty. To claim cash, you answer a secret question.

“Question answer,” said the man.

“What?”

“Question answer.”

“Yes . . . ?”

“Question. Answer.”

“What’s the question?”

A moment. “Yes.”

“What’s the question?”

“This is.”

“What is? I can’t see your screen.”

He bent forward ever so slightly to read. If this was the question—if it even was a question—it didn’t sound like one my father would have composed. “Chocolate. Name.”

A goat bleated just outside. I paused. He waited a moment, and then spoke. “Sunrise,” he said.

We looked at each other for a moment. He gave me two hundred dollars. I questioned my assumptions about the universe.

I PAID LITTLE ATTENTION to a newscast on the TV in the back corner of the ceiling of my usual pasta place. A new tablemate joined me with a smile in the noodle-eating position: slightly hunched, left arm folded in front of the plate, right arm resting on the elbow and holding a supple wrist.

Flip, flip, flip, pop. I was amazed at how suited human hands could be for gripping slippery spaghetti, how one simple technique could make the difference between highchair etiquette and a business lunch. I didn’t mind the saucy fingers. I knew the sink would be there when we’d finished, and I had nothing else to handle while I thought only of food.

A ball, popped into my mouth. Another. A swig of pink cano Vimto with the left hand, a brief scan of the lively cafeteria. I was grinning now. Another burst of perfect noodles: and then.

And then . . .

“. . . ?” I thought.

And then it cracked. Maybe it was all the sugar from the soda milkshake. Maybe it was some rare vitamin in the pasta sauce, or the way the Question-Answer Man did away with a world that ran on logic. With my mouth full in that dusty corner of Somalia or Somaliland, at the intersection of the restaurant street and the qaad market in the shadow of the Oriental Hotel, something that had always been half-chewed erupted in my gut.

I didn’t need more answers—not to satisfy the questions I had been asking. The questions had all been wrong: Do you hate me? Will you kill me? Am I free here or here or here? Are you “off-limits”?

The real fears—they were gone. Or—they were all unmasked as terrible decoys. The simple geographic prejudice against this part of the world had been like a pile of shit my half generation stepped in, and I had washed it quickly from my soles: it didn’t take more than seven seconds in Afghanistan to see it was different than on TV, just like it didn’t take more than a taste to realize that I was okay with early dinners of small Persian sharks. So why had my discomfort only deepened?

Discomfort came before its reasons did: finding something for it to stick to followed. I felt, I am not okay, and then thought, maybe this is why. I was unsettled for all the reasons any growing thing would be, but instead of recognizing my own teenage obsession with being understood, I convinced myself that I was anxious only because I did not understand the world. I needed to believe that—that there was always something else, something out there responsible for my unsteadiness. There was no seven-second answer that would have felt like justice.

The trouble was not so much that I didn’t know my place in a changing world, but that I didn’t know how to change in a world that was still spinning in ancient orbit.

And the way I looked for answers had made real understanding impossible. It was as if I’d set out on twenty-five thousand miles of blind dates, asking, “Are you awful?” at first blush. Even the answers that could have meant something sounded like total bullshit.

THIS CRESCENDOING DANGER, this quest to raise the bar higher and higher—to find my limits—this wasn’t my quest at all. Plane flights into fear and back out, tickets booked with giddy pride: each “next trip” held within it the very preconceptions I’d been fighting all along. Syria embattled more than Lebanon, Afghanistan more tense than Syria—Pakistan, more terrorized. Then Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia.

This was not the way to grade the world, along the axis of perceived terror.

If I survived the place, I thought, it couldn’t be considered off-limits—it might even be added to the tally of hospitable territory. The greater the expected danger (according to my gut and to travel advisories and to the guts I heard rumbling on the news), the more I valued the discovery of safety. One fun Somalia was worth 17 fun Egypts, and 146 safe Kuwaits.

I charted dangers on a scale bounded by absolutes: absolute freedom on one end, absolute death on the other. Because I hoped for freedom, I assumed that it prevailed until threatened by guaranteed death or imprisonment. At rare moments, those guarantees were there: in earshot of Taliban checkpoints in Afghanistan, at the uncertain border crossing from Kurdistan into Iraq, at the shoreline of the Iranian mainland, on the new Al-Qaeda highways in southeastern Yemen. Every time I did strike one of those hard boundaries, it was an affront to my defense of the region, of humanity, of everything I believed in. Could it be true, that my freedoms really weren’t limitless?

My tactics of avoidance were automatic: I could still be infinitely free, I said, even if a few boundaries were true. To continue without letting go of my absolutes, I reframed the limit as just one closed edge on an open space that expanded in infinite directions. Sure I can’t go there, but I can go countless other places. I felt, in my every fiber as an American, as an adolescent, that I needed to prove it.

As it always is with binary frameworks, to be one thing is to be not another. Safe meant not dangerous, good meant not bad. To be truly free, I believed, must mean to live in a world with no walls.

I treated myself like an experiment, in a series of trials kept mostly random by deliberate ignorance, to test the hypothesis that had been worded for me on September 11: you can’t go there.

All of this to preclude Decision Making. With thinking like this, there are no shoulds and maybes; there are no responsibilities of choice.

I had not accepted my responsibilities as a man, to choose, who to be, where to go—and then to protect that choice, to work for it—because I had not accepted my most basic responsibilities as a human. What more primal choice could there be than the choice to live?—to refuse to become a rolled die by a random hand?

I held on to the comfort of the absolute authority of fear by fighting it, and by calling the fight absolute freedom. I kept the fight alive in the teenage way, screaming, “You can’t tell me nothing!” when I wanted more than anything to be told what to do.

If I took control of my own life—if I made choices to make them, and not to unmake their opposites—all of the absolutes would crumble. The gods of Do and Don’t would be swallowed up in the kingdom of real men.

I could have looked at the spaghetti and seen an exhibit for my case against Somali inhumanity.

Instead, I tasted noodles.

For the first long moment in five hundred days of short moments, I saw this room only as a room full of men and food. That was simple enough to understand, and so, I felt understood. The feedback faded. In my head there was a photo album for these pictures that, for once, did not share pages with an eleven-year-old September Tuesday.

I looked happily at my one hand caked in the tiny skins of grilled vegetables. This was it: messy and full of life and possibility. The full catastrophe.

A weight lifted.

IN HARGEISA, without reservations or demands to be elsewhere, there was no part of me shouting Do this! You can’t leave without that! I wasn’t squeezing every moment for my benefit anymore, or feeling trapped by waiting. So often, time pressed for “efficiency” ends up worthless, like a pressed penny.

I teetered downstairs in the morning, had tea, walked-and-talked, ate Ethiopian food or something new, took a nap maybe, wandered more, drank more tea, returned to the Somaliland Restaurant and ate plate after plate of pasta or something else. Try this, Hussein would say.

It was amazing that in a place at first so unfamiliar—and it continued to be—that I would become so fast a regular. People still shouted “Man or woman?!” every so often, but I hardly heard it. It was all becoming regular to me, too. That was the amazing part: feeling fully me in a new place. I was connected, and I was outside of it all, and I was grounded, and I was unleashed.

I bought my ticket to Dubai. When I left the travel agency next to Khayriyada Square, I patted my pockets with a familiar anxiety. Every time my apartment door closed behind me, this same alarm rang: I imagined myself back behind the lock scanning for anything I might have forgotten. There never was perfect closure; only the feeling that I had remembered enough to go on.

To:

MRS. H. VALEN

71 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

APARTMENT 5F

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

From:

Cpl. HERB VALEN 32997723

SIGNAL DIVISION, SHAEF

APO 757

Somewhere in England

12 September 1944

I WANT TO BROADEN OUT, SEE THE WHOLE SKY, NOT JUST THE PART . . . ABOVE THE VALLEY . . . I DON’T KNOW IF I AM ACTUALLY SAYING ANYTHING. MORE OR LESS JUST FEELING MY WAY ALONG.

I FEEL, THOUGH, I HAVE A WONDERFUL START. A SOLID FOUNDATION ON WHICH TO BUILD EVERYTHING ELSE.

—V-mail from my grandfather to my grandmother