The day of the apology
The spring of 1985, a heavily pregnant mother, Carfoon Xussein, like a dutiful citizen, listened to a short speech late president Mohammed Siad Barre gave at the ribbon cutting of the Faanole project. Carfoon’s husband was one of the employees of the Faanole project, but it was not why she attended the speech. It was the first time she and her husband, a hyropower engineer, had something to look forward to contributes towards their wellbeing, but it is not just about the goal.
Carfoon, her husband and unborn child lived in Jilib, in their small under-furnished house near the jubba river that grew dark in the afternoon. Working for the military regime had changed them, shrunk them. They were in their early thirties and had baffling patience for incredible stories about late Siad Barre. Once, my mother told me that Siad Barre, as a teenager in Mogadishu, was tenacious local legend who had the impossible job of silencing deimatic behaivour of frogs at the pond making duck-like quacking sound. “ somebody told he heard pond frogs and Barre story too” my father said. They always supported each other’s stories. When my father told me that late Barre killed people opposed to his family laws that prohibited denying women and girls the right to inherit and own properties, my mother added, “ they said he garnished the wages of government employees who failed to pay child support.”
Ten years earlier, my parents would have scoffed at these stories . My mother, adult educator, would have said, “ waa i dheh sheekadaan” in her crisp manner, and my father, electrician, would have snorted, the stories of late Siad Barre not worth the effort of speech. It puzzled me that they had shed those old selves and become the kind of Somalis who told anecodtes about diabetes cured by drinking holy water.
Still, I humour them and half listened to their stories. It was a kind of innocence, this new childhoold of old age. They had grown slower with passing years, their faces lit up at the sight of me and even their prying questions- when will you help rebuild your beautiful country? Each time I fly away to Canada, on Friday afternoons after a big lunch of rice and goat stew, I wondered if it would be the last time I would see them both alive, if before my next visit I would receive a phone call from one of them telling me to come right away. The thought filled me with a nostalgic sadness that stayed with me until I got back to Vancouver Island. And yet I knew i would not visit them regularly because that I had a family and could complain about rising cost of living as the children of their friends did. I would have nothing for which to make amends.
During my a visit in 2018, my parents talked about the increased in violence all over Somalia. Militias, too, had to prepare control. My mother told me how clan militias in entire south and central Somalia had caught civilians, shot them and took their properties.My mother paused, and I waited for a supernatural detail that would embellish the story. Perhaps, just as the international peacekeepers arrived to rescue civilians, the militias had turned into vultures and flown away.
“Do you know,” my mother continued, “one of the armed militias, in fact the ring leader, was Morgan Freeman (used fake name for privacy). He was part of the protective details of late Barre years ago. I don’t think you’ll remember him.”
I stared mother. “Morgan”?
“It’s not surprising he ended like this,” my father said. He didn’t start well.
My mind had been submerged in the foggy lull of my parents’ stories about the war and late Barre, and I struggled now with the sharp awakening of memory.
My mother said again,“You probably won’t remember him. There were so many of those soldiers turned ring leaders.And you were young.” But I remembered. Of course I don’t remembered meeting Morgan. But i remembered hearing stories of the Somalia’s warlords. Of course i remembered Morgan.
Nothing changed when Morgan came to live with his family in the northwestern villages of Somalia, not at first. He seemed like all others, an ordinary looking man from Mogadishu. The other soldiers before him, Joseph, were sent back. And Before Joseph was abdirahman, he had broken promises for villagers of northeastern people, fearing people rising against him, had packed his things and fled. All the warlods treated villagers of northwestern with the contemptous care of who people who disliked our people in the south including Banadir.
I was my parents’ oldest child, born early in their lives. When i got pregnant , i thought i was “caado guur” my mother told me once. I must be around 25 years old and did know a lot about “caado guur” meant. She had a brusque manner, as did my father; they had about them the air of people who were quick to dismiss others. They had meet at work, married against their families’ wishes- his thought her as too independent, while hers preferred a good looking suitor- and spent their lives in an intense and intimate competition over who planted more sesame plants after their military camp work. They listened their radios loud, sit in the parlor and drink their cadeese shaax-that red and white, shapely flask always seemed to be resting on a table near them- and left behind cups faint with brownish dregs. Throughout my childhood, i worried abot not being quick enough to respond when they spoke to me “dhaga fudeed”.
I worried, too, that i didn’t care for farming. Farming did not do to me what it did to my parents, agitating them or turning them into vague being lost to ime, who did not quite notice when relatives came and went. I farmed only enough to satify them,and to anskwer the kinds of unexpected questions that might come in the middle of a meal — What did i think of growing maize?Had Said Barre done the right thing? I some felt like an interloper in our house. I sensed my parents’ disappoitnment in the way they glanced at each other when I spoke about about Siad Barre, and I knew what i had said was not incorrect but merely ordinary, uncharged with their brand of originality. Going to the community gatherings with them was an ordeal: I found their social circles boring. What I loved was listening radios with them. I listened “Wareesiga abdullahi Xaaji” so often that i knew all his questions, and I longed to wake up and be “Hassan Bariiste”. I would ask questions at imaginary guest who had involved in politics . I would pull my notebooks on the table, sit on the stool made of empty milky tins- usually filled with sand, like the “Caano liido tins” and leap onto the microphone, screaming “Hagaag” like Hassan Bariiste. One day, in the middle of my practice, I looked up to see Magool, yes angelic voice Magool standing in the doorway, watching me. I expected a mild fear. She had sung a pro war song that morning, and now the whole country is in disarray. Instead, she didn’t noticed clinched on her loud speaker, and brounght her mic to her mouth, as though singing her own songs to the crowd. My favourite scene. I stared at Magool with the pure thrill of unexpected pleasure. “I watched the song Xalay Daruustii la i dhigay” in the theatre” my mother said.
“Look at this”
She pivoted slightly, leaped up, and raised her straight and high, her body all taut grace and started singing the song. I was a child and had, until then, never felt that i recognized myself in another person.
My mother and I practiced in the back yard, leaping from the raised mud bricks and stepping on the grass. My mother told me to take deep breath, keep my body relaxed, teaching me how to control my breath. My previous attempts to impersonate Hassan Baristee, in the enclosure of my room, had felt stillborn. Now, outside with my mother, doing all the BBC correspondent impressions, I could feel my practice become real, with my mother as an audience and my dad in the house, and endless space mine to echo my voice. This was truly happening. I could become a reporter one day. Outside the kitchen door was a high open door veranda, and I wanted to stand on its flight of six steps and try delivering a speech. “ No,” My mother said. “political speech is too dangerous”.
On weekends, if my father went to the fadhi ku dirirka without my mother, mom and I watched listened Magool tapes, my mother saying, “listen it! Listen it” Through her eyes, I saw the songs a new, some songs that I had thought were merely competent become luminous when she said, “Listen it!” My mother knew what really mattered; her wisdom lay easy on voice. She will rewind the section in which Magool used run out of breath while singing, and listened quitely, gasping at the clean aggression of the fake fake mic- and fabric rope.
“I wish i had a mic,” I said.
“It is very difficult to use, my mother said firmly, and I felt almost sorry to have wanted one.
Not long afterwards, in Kitengela, I came back from school one day and my mother said, “See.” from the cupboard she took out a microphone- two pieces of wood cut from an old cleaning mop and sanded down, held together by spiral of plastic springs. She have been making it for at least a week, in her free time after housework. She showed me how to use it. Her moves seemed clumsy, nothing like Magool’s. I took the microphone and tried to detached it from the mop but only ended with saying few words. My mother smiled. “You think you can just start like that?” she said. “ You have to practice for a long time.”
At school, I sat through classes thinking of the wooden microphone stand’s smoothness in the palm of my hand. It was after school, with my mother, that my real life began. My father did not notice how close my mother and I had become. All he saw was that i now happened to listen more radio programmes inside the kitchen, and my mother was, of course, part of the landscape of the kitchen: cooking, cleaning and washing dishes. One afternoon, my mother finished cooking dinner and interrupted my solo practice on the varanda, “Sing” she said. A duel began, her hands bare, mine swinging my new microphone. She danced danced to my voice hard. One end held my arm, and she looked surprised and then impressed, as if she had not thought me capable. I sung again and again. She made distractive movement and danced and jumped. Time collapsed. In the end, we both panting and laughing. I remeber, even now, very clearly, smallness of scarf that afternoon, and how her the grey curly hair ran wiry like threads down her neck.
On fridays, I ate lunch with my parents. I always ate quickly (a habbit i picked at childhood and my wife Su does not think is healthy at all), dreaming of escape and hoping that they would not turn to me with of their test questions. At one lunch, my mother served white disks of boiled potatoes on a bed of sakumawiki, and then cubbed avacodo and lime.
“The vegetables was too tough,” my mother said, “are rich eating snacks?” She glanced at me. “What is wrong with your voice?”
It took me a moment to realize this was not her usual figuarative lambasting- “what is that big fragrance bothering your sinus?” she would ask, if she noticed a smell in my room that I had not. The sound of losing my voice was alarming. A painful, unnatural deep voice. I mumbled that i i choked with water.
“It looks like Hargab,” my father said.
My mother pushed her back her chair and examined my throat. “Ah-ah! Yes it is. Go to your room and stay there.”
I hesistated, as though wanting to finish clearing my plates.
“Go!” my father said, “Before you infect us all with this thing”
I was confused, edged away from the table. My mother called me back. “ have you had this before?”
“No, mother.”
It’s an infection of your lungs, the thing that helps air in your body,” She said. in the midst of her afsomali words, “Hargab” sounded sharp and dangerous. We are going to buy medicine for you. Use it three times a day and stay in your room. Don’t come to the kitchen until it clears.” Turning to my brother, she “Owkombe, make sure you don’t go near him. Hargab is very infectious”. From her perfunctory tone, it was clear that she did not imagine I would have any reason to go near my brother.
Later, my parents biked to the pharmy in town run by doctors without borders and came back with a bottle of syrup, which my brother brought to my room, with the air of someone going reluctantly into battle. That evening, my mother went went to Karioko farm market meat for dinner; when they returned, it felt strange not to have my mother open the kitchen, not to find her closing the kitche’ windows and turning on the lights. in the quite kitchen, our house seemed emptied of life. As soon as my parents were immersed in themselves, i went out to my brother’s room and knocked on Owkombo’s door. It was ajar. He was lying on his back, his narrow metal bed pushed against the wall, and turned when i came in, suprised, making as if to get up. I had never disobeyed my parents before. The exposed light bulb dangling from the ceiling cast sombre shadows.
“what is it?” he asked.
“Nothing. I came to see how you.”
He shrugged and settled back down on the bed. “I don’t know how you got this. Don’t come close.”
But i went close.
“I have Hargab,” my brother said. “It will go quickly, don’t worry. Have you taken the syrup this afternoon?”
I shrugged and said nothing. The bottle of the syrup sat unoppened in the table. I don’t like medicine. Something my wife, su and share in common.
“You haven’t used them at all”? He asked,
“No.”
“Why?”
I avoided looking at him. “I cannot do it”.
Mo, who could not stop talking about taking care your health and read journals of medicine and nuitrition, could not take medicine. At first, my brother was astonished, then amused and then moved. I looked around my brother’s room and was struck by how bare it was- the bed pushed against the wall, spindly table, a gray metal box in the corner, which i assumed contained all he owned. The civil war improverished us.
I will help you take your syrup”, my brother said. He took the bottle and twisted off the cap.
“Don’t come close,” he said again.
I was already close, I bent over him. He began a frantic blinking.
Breath like in fight with cigaal shiidaad, I said.
He touched my face, gently asked me to open my mouth and then poured the syrup into my mouth.
“Ndo,” He said, “Sorry”
I opened my eyes and looked at my brother, and my face shone something wondrous. My brother had never felt himself the subject of admiration. It made him think of science class, of a new sessame plant growing greenly towards the light. I touched his hand. I turned to go back to my room.
“I will come before i go to school. “ He said.
In the morning, my brother slipped into my room, put the syrup into my mouth, and slipped out and into the rat-sitter of my father’s bicycle, to be dropped off at school.
By the third day, my room felt a familair to my brother, welcoming, uncluttered by books and old newspapers i collected from restuarants around the city. As he put in the syrup into my mouth, he discovered things about me that I guarded closely: the darkening of hair above my upper lip and ringworm patch on left side of head. He sat on the edge of my bed and we talked about “Xiray, xiray dhuxul Sitcome.” We had disccused the drama many times, and we said things that we had said before, but in the quite of my room they felt like secrets. Our voices were low, almost hushed.
I got up to demonstrate my Hassan Adan Samatar impression, and afterwards, both of us laughing, he tapped my shoulder. then he stopped and moved slightly away from me.
“This Hargab has gone,” He said.
My voice was clear. My brother wished i had not healed so quickly.
I dreamed of being with my mother and Hassan Abdullahi Xajji of the BBC Somali in bushhouse, BBC studio in London. When I woke up, i heard my brother didn’t wake up, He was coughing and his throat hurt. “Each time he caughted,” he said, his chest hurt and seemed to caugh pale ugly fluid filled his mouth. He felt as if a sack full of grain of maize were on his chest. He feared something inside him was thawing that was not supposed to thaw.
My mother shouted at me, “ why did you bring this things to my house?Why?” It was as though by catching Hargab, I had conspired to infect her son, my brother. I didn’t respond. I never did when mother scolds at me. She was standing at the of the stairs, and i was below.
“How did he managed to give you Hargab from his room?” my father asked my brother.
“It wasn’t Mo. I think i got it from somebody in my class,” He told my parents.
“Who?” he should have known my mother would ask. At that moment, my brother’s mind erased all the names of his classmates’ names.
“Who?” She asked again.
“Liban chees,” He said finally, the first name that came to him. He sat in front of me and smelled like old clothes.
“Do you have a headache?” my mother asked.
“Yes.”
My father brought me Panadol. My mother telephoned Dr. Saraha Xabashi. My parents were brisk. They stood by my brother’s door, watching him drink a cup of Sibir that my father had made. He drink quickly. I hope that they had drag Gambar into my brother’s room, as they did every time he gets sick with malaria, when he would wake up with a bitter tongue to find one parent inches from, slightly reading the holly book, and he would will himself to get well quickly, to free them.
Dr. Xabashi arrived and shined a torch in my brother’s eyes. Her fragrance and unsi was strong; my brother and I could smell it long after she’d gone, a heady scent close to Cadar that I had Imagined would worsen nausea. After she left, my parents created a patients altar by my brother’s bed- on a table covered with clothes, they put a bottle of milk, a blue tin of tuna and freshly cut mangoes on a plate. This is so expensive that the whole house will be on fiscal fasting. We will not buy anything that week. They didn’t bring gamabar, but one of them was home throughout the week that my brother had hargab. They took turns giving him syrups, Sibir and soup, my father more clumsily than mother (now my wife su knows where i got my clumsiness), leaving sticky liquid down my brother’s face. They did not know how well my brother could take the syrup by himself and that he has been helping me. Each time they ask him to open his mouth and dumped a spoonfull of syrup, I remembered the look my brother made that evening in his room, and he felt haunted by happiness.
My parents closed the door and kept my brother’s room dark. He was sick of lying. I wanted to see my brother, but my mother had banned him from room, as though i could somehow make his condition worse. I wished that he would come and see me. Surely he could pretend to be borrowing a book, or bring his notebook to my room so i can help him with his homework. Why didn’t I go? I have not even said sorry to him. I strained to hear his voice, but his room was too far away and his voice, when he spoke my mother, was too low.
Once again, after going to the toilet, i tried to sneak to my brother’s room, but my father loomed at the bottom of the stairs.
“Owkombe?” He asked. “Are you all right”?
“I want want,” my brother said.
“I’ll bring i. Go and lie down.”
Finally, my parents went out together. I had been sleeping, and woke up to sense the emptiness of the house.
To be continued.
