The Social Cartographer

There once was an average man. He was born in the desert. He lived in the desert. All his friends and family would say that he was easily irritable. But this is not his story. He married a beautiful woman and they inherited a farm. But this is not her story. They had four kids. The second child was the only boy. He was rash and got into a lot of trouble. This is his story.

There is an old Somali proverb that goes like this: Me and my clan against the world, me and my brother against the clan, me against my brother. If I were to tell the story of Somalia it would go like this: First we fought against the Arabs. Then we thought we where Arab. Then we fought against each other. We pretended we weren’t brothers. Then we fought against the Portuguese and we won. Then we fought against the Italians and the British and we won…some of the time. They made us fight their World Wars. They made us fight each other. Then we were free. We fought each other. Then we fought Ethiopia and we lost…twice. Then we fought each other. We lost. The world came to help us. We fought the world. We said we won but now we’re not sure.

Unlike the rest of Africa, Somalis tend are more homogeneous, in that they share a common language (Somali), and a common religion (Islam). In that sense the Somali people were divided into five territories. Present day Djibouti was called French Somaliland until 1977. Until 1949, the northern section of Somalia was known to Western Powers as British Somaliland. The south-central section was known as Italian Somaliland. The southern section of Somalia, known as the Northern Frontier District, was given to Kenya. While a large western portion known as the Ogaden was given to Ethiopia. It is needless to say that Somalia went to war twice with Ethiopia over this disenfranchised territory.

After World War II, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the USSR acquired jurisdiction as the Allied powers of World War II over the fate of the lands of the former colonies. As they could not come to an agreement on the issue of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, the matter was referred to the United Nations. The United Nations resolution granted independence to Italian Somaliland after ten years and named the area a UN Trust Territory under Italian administration. After ten years, the north and south agreed to join and called themselves the Republic of Somalia. And so told is the invention of Somalia.

Only two years after Abdi Rashid Ali Sharmarke defeated the first president in elections, Ali Sharmarke was assassinated. A military group, led by General Mohammed Siad Barre, seized power and declared Somalia a socialist state. Siad Barre made it illegal for anyone to ask someone else what clan they were, but soon he began to deny people in the north certain rights like positions in the central government. Acts of nepotism was exacerbated by the fact that the central government consisted of a southern majority. These same regions in the north were able to establish order after the capital, Mogadishu fell in 1992, mainly because the area consisted of one major clan. The south became an array of clans in battle armor.

If I was born a century earlier I could have looked around, looked at the sky, and predicted that this was going to happen. I would have said that all of it was inevitable. But nothing is inevitable. I left my country when I was around five. I do not know how old I am. We do not celebrate birthdays in Somalia. When a country blows up, literally blows up, everybody knows that they face tough times around the corner. I lived with my family. My mother, father, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins all in one village. Because Somalia is a semi-arid desert, crops often fail. In preparation the government had grain storages for these hard times. Some time in 1992, my family and I walked for six days on foot to the nearest town, Baardhere. There were thousands of other families looking for food. There was no food. In order to feed their army, the government had taken the food. And so we sat and waited. Slowly, we starved. Somehow, I got to a feeding center wrapped in a smelly little blanket, and was severely sick and was not responding. The center was closing so they called the clinic near by. The doctor didn’t want to go out because it was after dark. If you go anywhere even during the day you need personal bodyguards which involve “technicals” crowded was teenage boys shouldering AK 47s. A “technical” is a modified pick-up truck with an anti-aircraft gun mounted to the back. But a nurse volunteered to go with the doctor and he finally agreed. I spent a month recuperating. But I wasn’t healing. There was no medicine for me.

The war had not ended, but everyone was finished. A group of Botswanan peacekeepers visited the hospital. Their army doctor saved my life, he had the medicine I needed. The Americans were pulling out, the UN was pulling out, the aid agencies where pulling out. Somalia was too much for the world. If you were to look at a history book or other works of historical literature under Somalia, you would find very little. Maybe a reference to pirates or one incident called black hawk down. The world does not understand Somalia. And I am not sure we understand ourselves. We are on the African continent, in the African Union, but we are also in the Arab League. We speak Somali, English, Swahili, French, Italian, and Arabic. We are nearly all Muslims. We claim to be a nation of poets yet we speak with the barrel of a gun instead of our voices. We have Africa’s longest coastline yet we don’t like seafood. In Somalia we have people who speak the same language, eat the same food, and pray in the same mosque trying to kill each other. I don’t understand.

I came to the United States in 1995. My first years in Vermont were difficult and confusing. I had never seen snow before. I tried to come up with an explanation as to why the seasons changed. I thought it was because during the summer people are too hot so they run their fans and air-conditioner. Some how this cools the air. In the winter people are too cold so they fire up their stoves and drive a lot more. Somehow this heats up the planet again. I started school that fall. I was very excited to be around other kids even if I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The first time I got in trouble in school was in first grade when some kid cut me in line. I couldn’t talk to him, so I punched him. I got to know the principal. Around this time, the Disney movie The Lion King had come out. So when the kids heard I was from Africa, it was like, “Oooh, Lion King”. I just like to reiterate that Africa is the second largest and populated continent. Countries are very different, the people are very different, it is not a country. If you went on vacation to Canada, there’s no reason to say you went on a vacation to North America. The language used in The Lion King was not made up. Its Swahili; Simba means lion, Rafiki means friend, Mufasa means king, and so on. More importantly that language is specific to southern Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania.

The more I knew about American culture the less I knew about Somali culture. When I came to Vermont there was only one other Somali family here. However, I am adopted. That nurse that came from the clinic with the doctor is now my mother. So I am the only Somali within like forty miles. In addition I am a Muslim in a Christian house. I do believe that this has helped me understand the world better so it was not a bad thing. The older I got the more I wanted to find out about where I came from, but I had no one to tell me. I am an orphan. When my family and I walked six days to Baardhere, there was fifty-four of us. Now there are only two.

All this time Somalia has been in chaos. I have one uncle that lives there. We don’t talk very often but we stay in touch. In June of 2006, my mother and I went to Nairobi, Kenya, to visit him. He had to travel from the small village in Somalia on the back of a pick-up truck that was smuggling narcotics. They had to bribe the border guards. It was the first time that I had seen him in over 12 years. During the three days that I saw him, I could not make myself believe that we were related. “Who was this man?” I thought. But more importantly ,if we are connected, “Who am I”? After meeting my, uncle I did not sleep for three nights. During this time in Somalia there was sporadic gun fights. Somalia was burning.

In 2007, my grandmother died. That’s my adopted mother’s mother. After my visit with my uncle I had been struggling to reinvent myself. In the year 2007 I was planning on going to college in Canada. My grandmother died a month before I left for school. Somehow she had been the glue that held together my foundation. So at school instead of inventing myself, I spent my first year discovering new foundation.

As I gotten older I have liked Vermont more and more. I have liked it for its wilderness and its general acceptance of others. But most all I liked it because I could see the sky especially at night. I was able to run through the woods behind our house in my bare feet during the summer. I was able to look at the stars at night and wonder what lay beyond. I was able to freeze my toes while flying down a hill on a slim piece of plastic called a board and I was able to enjoy it. To this days I do not do well in big cities. When I went to New York City with a high school class, I wanted to crawl under the buildings. It was so loud, so crowed, and the buildings were so tall it made me sick. If you want to be able to see the night sky and touch the evergreen trees during the summer, then Vermont is the place to be. But if you want to learn about the world and see where you stand, then you could do better than Vermont. Of course I only learned this when I visited Toronto.

When I was in Nairobi, I saw on the TV for the first time video footage of the continuing chaos in Somalia. After 13 attempts by the International Community to create a functioning government for Somalia, in 2004 they established in their 14^th attempt, in what was this time called the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG). The TFG was supposed to coordinate between the warring parties and create a more organized interim and representative political system through to a democratic election in 2009. Unfortunately, the TFG had to fill the power void of a previous political body that, in many ways, had more legitimate power. In this way we describe legitimate power as that which is approved by the people. This previous political power was called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) which based governmental law on traditional and religious ideology. Never-the-less, the situation gets more chaotic when in 2006 the historic foe of Somalia, Ethiopia, militarily supports the TFG. The invasion by Ethiopia is not only due to the political domestic interest of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, but also due to the political interests of the United States, and its ruthless campaign in the “war on terror”. As already proven by the catastrophic Iraq War, it is extremely unlikely and difficult for occupation to lead to sovereignty.

The truth is the there are no reasons for this to be happening. Wars are the failures of society not the failures of individuals. As much as I blame the United States, Ethiopia, and the United Nations, I blame the average Somali much more. This was our fight. This was our loss. The globalization gremlins will tell you that the world is getting smaller. I am here to tell you that its still 40,000 KM around. Feel the earth that you walk on. The Earth is not dirty, we are the Earth, we should be humbly by it presence. Face it, the world is too big for you. You can not understand it all, none of us can. Relish your family, because they are all you’ve got. They will tell you where you come from. Somalia is my country. I do not love its politics, but I believe in its people. The past and the future are very much connected. This was then, that is now. People some times see me as anti- American. Pay attention folks: having socialist ideas does not make you a communist nor anti-American. The US has always left me with the feeling that there is something more to be desired. There are other counties out there, other people that are just as brave, smart, and beautiful. The US is just not my country, I just live here. I’d move to Canada, but its too cold. I wonder how long it would take to skateboard to Mexico. Until that day I will be searching for my country.