THERE WAS NO DEPARTURES screen for the day’s single flight. We waited for the long-necked African Express plane to come up and down from Kampala to Nairobi to Mogadishu to Berbera, before it would take us on to Mukalla and Dubai. By the time it would land in the Emirates, the Ugandan crowd had had their ears popped like bubble wrap in a day care.
Before I paid the thirty-three dollar fee to exit Somaliland, I waited with the baggage handlers in a circle of lawn chairs out front under a knobbly tree. One of them, Muhammad, offered a seat and translated from Somali.
“He said, ‘He came by foot?’ I said, ‘He came by boat from Yemen.’ ‘It’s incredible!’ ”
I felt a flash of guilt. I’d spent two hundred dollars on that boat for curiosity’s sake, and through their eyes, I thought, I looked cavalier with the fragile history of the region. I defended myself first on more unobjectionable grounds.
“It’s really expensive for flights,” I said.
“It’s too expensive!” said Muhammad. He smiled big and often. He sat back in his green chair, in a white shirt with slanting green stripes.
“And also . . .” I ventured, “the boat is an experience. It’s nice.”
“It’s an experience,” he affirmed, as though we had decided something momentous.
We spoke in French. Muhammad’s mother was a Somalilander but he was from Djibouti, Somalia’s forty-year-old neighbor formerly run from France. His wife and two children lived in Hargeisa, and every two weeks he took the African Express shuttle home to visit them. He spoke of his friends who had left Africa. He spoke excitedly about how to do it.
“Yes! They left here by foot, they took a car.” Those who had made it from his circle were minor legends. “By telephone he told me, haa, ‘I’m in Oslo now!’ ” Muhammad gave a hearty laugh. It was less a memory than a set of instructions, a fantasy that we could live out by hearing it aloud.
“You leave here to Ethiopia by car, from Ethiopia until the Sudan border. You go into Sudan. You go until Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. When you get there, you take a car. You go by the Sahara, the desert. You go until Libya, and from Libya you take a boat.”
He told me this twice. The price: a thousand dollars for the grueling escape by land, and another similar sum for the ferry, sometimes merely an inflatable dinghy, unprotected and unstocked. On these boats, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis joined the ranks of west African refugees and victims of political uprising.
“How long at sea?” I asked.
“They tell me less than sixteen hours.” Indeed, successful trips often take exactly that long to the Italian island of Lampedusa, hardly halfway from Africa to the mainland. In 2011, when the Tunisian and Libyan rebellions forced many to flee, the UNHCR estimated, two thousand of fifty thousand escapees across the Mediterranean drowned. In 2014, when ISIS coalesced as a regional threat, the number of crossings quadrupled.
A few degrees off course and the boats could strike Malta, where detention can last as long as a year and half before a decision is made. From Lampedusa, the hope is, refugees are shuttled more swiftly to Sicily, or through the UNHCR (Muhammad pronounced these letters in English) to the Netherlands or Scandinavia.
Muhammad was aware of the dangers. He had heard a pregnant woman had recently died. But all this was simply part of the no-regrets Gospel of the Refugees, both history and prescription, both legends and lessons for action.
“Why don’t they send you back?” I asked.
Muhammad was practiced. “We don’t want to go back to Libya because they’re going to kill us. There are people who will kill me there. ‘Go kill me.’ ” He said his lines to the imaginary immigration police. “ ‘You’re okay that they kill me?’ No no no, come on. ‘Okay, I’ll go.’ No no no, stop, stop.”
As a Djiboutian, Muhammad and his friends could not claim refugee status. Instead, they destroyed their passports before making landfall. In order to pass off as stateless refugees, they became them.
“They say where did you come from. ‘I came from the sky.’ ” Je suis venu du ciel. He repeated this. Ciel can also mean “heaven.”
In another fantasy, someone might make it to America. “Your passport, we tear it up. Your picture, I put my picture, I take your name—my name is Paul and I’m an American.”
Then, when you speak with fellow Africans, Muhammed said, putting on a grand American accent and swaggering in his chair, you act the part you want to play. “ ‘I am an American, hey yo, good morning, man, good morning, yes! I’m from America, you know.’ ”
If you’re lucky, you can bluff your way onto a plane. “When they say in five minutes we are going to descend to Louisiana, or even New York, you go in the bathroom and you tear up the passport.” He made the sound of an airplane toilet flushing.
“When you get to immigration, you came from where? ‘I came from the sky, I’m a refugee.’ Refugee from where? ‘I’m a refugee.’ ”
Muhammad clapped the invisible dust lightly from his hands, and then again. That was it. That was where the plan stopped.
“And that works?” I said.
“Yes. Because humanity there, it’s good. But in Africa there is not humanity here.”
Muhammad himself was radiating with humanity, but in his homeland, there remained too many missing parts of too many lives. So he and others were willing to tear up their legal identities in the hopes of finding one more acceptable.
“There are Somalis who have American passports, English passports, Norwegian passports,” Muhammad said. They, too, had to pay the exit fee. “Thirty-three dollars!” he cried. For those Somalilanders, the fee might have been like the bitter herbs at a Passover Seder—a reminder of suffering. Where once it was an anxious journey, now it is a small tariff, paid in remembrance of more uncertain times. The rest of us foreigners paid it, too. It is the price you pay to leave because you can pay, and because you can leave.
MUHAMMAD HAD AT LEAST made it to someplace where those most basic freedoms, if not guaranteed, were respected. In Somaliland, “You can drive a car at one in the morning. No one will ask you why. Not one.”
This had been a theme in conversations with all Somalis: the ability to walk places, and to drive, especially late at night, without bullets or intervening laws or hassle. The ability to move.
I didn’t want to go drive around Berbera at one in the morning. Neither did Muhammad. Sometimes I was too tired to really want to walk around New York or Aleppo or Kabul or Hargeisa. But it was always important to know it was possible.
I felt a kinship—like we were from the same clan of those taking the long route. We moved because we could, and when we couldn’t, we talked about it. I recognized that urge to go, to dare the world to spin under your feet so that when it stops, ah! you’re somewhere else. And I was jealous, in a way, of Muhammad’s friends who succeeded in fleeing war-torn nations and death threats and hopeless economies—of the feeling of finality that comes in reaching a destination that justifies the journey absolutely, doubtlessly. Of the clarity of direction. While many have no choice but to take life-threatening journeys, I took life-threatening journeys just to avoid making choices.
Muhammad’s friends had trekked through the desert for a better life—I’d taken a boat for a better experience. And, three days later, my former employer had me booked on a business class flight over the North Pole. It would take just over sixteen hours to make it from Dubai to Los Angeles, where my brother lived. Then a half day on to Michigan, where Masha was waiting. In another life, I might have spent those exact same hours crossing my fingers against capsizing on the Tripoli-Lampedusa express.
Destination is a word that has been in the English language for a long time, its roots in Latin: “make firm, establish.” It doesn’t take a wanderer’s desperation to see that few journeys’ termini ever achieve that status. In our efforts to reach a destination, though, we are made to face something outside ourselves. For me, running toward gatherings may have been running away from solitude. Running toward the fears of danger might have been running away from the fears of peace. At the end, there was only the choice: Where would I run?
It took me twenty-three years to even begin to accept that someone who existed in a truly different way was not an existential threat. Muhammad’s difference was no danger to my way of life, it was only ever an opportunity to question it.
There was a flash of high noon sun on the sea a mile away. I felt crisped like a hot cookie.
“Tu rentres dedans, tu passes l’immigration—quand tu termines, tu reviens ici,” Muhammad said. Birds were chatting in the trees. He gave me the instructions again. “You go inside, finish with your passport and everything, when you finish, come and sit back here.”
The one-room terminal was bustling. The plane came sooner than I’d expected, and I never made it back to the baggage handlers’ tree. I like to think the offer still stands.