On Particular Lumps

Building an aqal together. Captured in the Ogaden desert. (Courtesy of Abira Hussein’s work with Magnum’s photographic archive).

“I shall have failed to communicate my meaning if I leave behind the impression that I am constructing theories. I haven’t got the kind of equipment which is required of men who engineer ideas; but I do believe that what a person thinks is very much determined by the way that person sees.” 

― George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile

Specificity is unbearable. Avoiding it, equally so. You might recognise the behavioural patterns of the latter. Talking in circles. Peppering your thoughts with disclaimers. Lingering pauses. Dutifully holding your tongue. Writing around a festering wound, skirting the lip of something bottomless, something you’re struggling to understand in order to save your life. You might recognise this flailing, its wary reticence. Self-preservation is instinctual. A cocoon can be a place of relative safety. Maybe it isn’t fear preventing you from showing your hand. Maybe you’re skeptical about the benefits of being disarmed, of your pain being dissected and flogged in the marketplace of commodified injury. Porousness can be too risky, especially when it can be used against you. You can admire it in others, but always from a distance. 

“Ma ifkiibaa, Ma aakhiraa, Intee baynu joognaa, Intee baynu joognaa.”

― Magool 

I have been that kind of writer, knowing what to keep to the chest and what to poke at. Provincialism bores me, as does the flatness of representational politics as it’s commonly understood and discussed. I’ve always been moved by the frission of unexpected affinities, the jolt of unfamiliar entanglements, that moment when you’re pulled into the orbit of another perspective and forced to confront what it reveals about your own. I’m increasingly less interested in mirrors, preferring portals. But somewhere along the line, I ended up mistaking particularity for self-indulgence. In kicking my feet against culturally encouraged, unproductive navel-gazing and ego-driven essentialisms, I’ve bitten my lip time and time again. Part of that has involved not publicly interrogating Somalinimo, the knotty substance of being Somali, or what it mean to be received in the world as a child of the Horn’s hooked finger. To write honestly about this would be akin to exposing the soft, fleshy tissue of the tendon, the Achillean weak spot. In avoiding this confrontation, I have often lost myself. 

So many of us confine our most potent thinking to those spaces of trust and hazy safety. Kicking it with friends. Group chats. Long phone calls stretched across oceans. Barbershop/salon theory. Shisha spot intimacies. Inherited truisms that you spend your youth trying to resist. Encounters with unnaturally open strangers. The justified paranoia of elders. The rare wisdoms of someone who is almost always wrong about everything. Songs, plays, stories, and turns of phrase which give voice to what struggles to be named. So much fails to make it onto the page. It’s why a conversation overheard on the street can feel closer to the bone than a lauded best-seller gracing the bookshelves or the latest interventions in radical theory wielded by the tote-bag contingent. Honesty doesn’t, and has never, paid. The disconnect is even more palpable for those of us who don’t have the luxury of inhabiting carefully curated echo chambers. Our knowledges, our marrow-thinking (to borrow from Yeats), is ours to refine and guard, too precious and risky to share with outsiders. Besides, you don’t expose your vulnerabilities to your opps. And so, it passes between us, this contraband criticality, in all its ragged lucidity. An analytic of pattern-spotting we sift through in order to protect and defend ourselves. Somalinimo as shorthand. 

Somalis love a good natter. Yet, across our transnational networks, our expressiveness belies deep silences. These silences are more noteworthy when you consider that Somalis, at home and in diaspora, have had the terrible luck of being at the nexus of practically every major political “issue” or “crisis” that has exploded into mainstream consciousness this side of the century. From disappearances to deportations, whatever grips the headlines is basically another Tuesday for most of us. Our banalities are the stuff of other people’s nightmares. The past few decades have been a lurch from one upheaval to another. In diaspora, we’ve only recently come into our “voices”, or rather we’ve joined the cacophony of the Conversational Industrial Complex™. The discourse machine mirrors the endless rambling of fadhi ku dirir. Naturally, Somalis take to it with gusto, which only further emphasizes what we choose not to say, who we choose not to alienate with our specificity. 

What to say, finally, of this teeming web of contradictions we call Somalinimo? Where to begin? Its choking dysfunction? Its irrepressible buoyancy? Specificity is a lump in the throat. Life has trained us well in swallowing and taking things as they come. I’m trying to pause. Catch myself in restraint. Somalinimo is the tight, border-repelling bonds between a scattered and battered people. It has informed so much of my personality, my ugliest compulsions. My daily acts of self-betrayal. The responsibilities I’ve shouldered and the dues I’ve paid. As I grow older, disentangling my selfhood from the reflex arcs of Somalinimo has become an urgent task. We are more than what we’ve had to survive. If I don’t remind myself of that, I will lose sight of what I should rightfully take pride in. If I don’t write about it, I won’t be able to make sense of it.

Across a span of historical ruptures, Somalinimo has been defined against the backdrop of insecurity. That’s been the one constant. Somalis acclimatise to volatility, until it becomes the room temperature itself. Staying still long enough to acknowledge what happened to you isn’t an option. In these circumstances, Somalinimo manifests in various symptoms. It naturalises itself, presenting as stubborn pride, delusions of grandeur, a celebration of the mythologised haughtiness observed by Arab explorers, European colonisers and Western anthropologists, the residual legacies of the Indian Ocean slave trade and its organisation of blackness, the tortured relationship of dispersed Horners to global Africanity, an ease with transience, the single-mindedness of the pastoralist and the mercenary guile of the seafarer, insularity, a hardened exterior, a wicked sense of humour, tolerance of the intolerable, the compartmentalisation of tragedy, diminished expectations, deferred dreams, large-heartedness, playful cynicism, bitter hope, communal self-obsession, revenge fantasies, deep reservoirs of generosity, resourcefulness, intense temperamentality, quiet patience, the valorisation of strength and an impatience with fragility, and the appreciation of Odysseusian cunning. The geesinimo of geeska Africa. It’s burning one’s self at the pyre of self-sacrifice, time and time again. It’s teaching your children to do the same. On the continent, Somalis continue to be wracked by violence. In diaspora, we have been the scapegoats of scapegoats, singled out for the particular debasement reserved for the latest arrivals. The fresher off the boat you are, the more you present an opportunity for everyone else to affirm themselves and their identities by kicking you down the ladder. This punitive coalition is multicultural, uniting the petty bourgeoisie immigrant classes with their nativist oppressors. We all love an easy target. 

In between, our youth die in Mediterranean waters. Anti-Somali sentiment, with its odd blend of outright hostility and prying curiosity, follows us, hot on our heels, affixing historical skirmishes and animosities to contemporary assaults on the stateless, the poor, the unruly Horner, those straddlers of Black and Muslim worlds, in internal and external exile. Shiftas. Secessionists. Pirates. Bandits. Welfare queens. Fifth columns. Aliens. Dishevelled cosmopolitans. Anti-Somali ideology is the glue, binding together antagonisms that have long shaped political realities in the Horn and beyond. Though these resentments are under-theorised publicly, we disentangle them in the smoke of cafes, the intimacy of bedrooms and backrooms, the nooks of playgrounds and impromptu gatherings, in the diasporic consciousness of Somalis who love to contrast and compare their lives, in arenas of debate where Somali concerns take centre stage. 

We keep track of each other, even as we fall through the cracks. Detained in Kenyan prisons, surveilled in Ethiopian administrative zones, burnt alive in South African townships, washing up on Yemeni beaches, organ-trafficked in Libya, starting all over (again) in Egypt’s suburbs, taking refuge in the familiarity of the Arabian Gulf even while being stung by the perilous nature of residency status, cooped up in Scandinavian housing projects, cloistered and detached in Britain’s major cities, dying prematurely on Toronto’s streets, hustling, scrimping and saving our way into the American dream. We trade tales, in our own tongue. The Somali is a trickster figure. She expects no welcome or reprieve. She’s no ventriloquist. Topicality is no concern of hers, and she doesn’t need to borrow or exaggerate grievances. If it’s not happening to her, it’s happened or is already happening to a cousin, a friend, a family acquaintance, a clan member halfway across the world she is raising money for. She tends to each crisis, picking up the pieces. The last time she divulged her reality, her colleagues slipped into an awkward silence. She cracks a customary joke. She keeps it moving. Either at the mercy of friends or foes, she swears by the old proverbs. Baahi badan, baryo badan, iyo bukaan badanba waa laysku nacaa. The needy, the beggar, the ailing; all eventually create resentment. With her hands outstretched and her back poker-straight, she is a maddening figure. No one wants to be pitied, least of all Somalis. 

Through it all, a feeling of superiority persists where most people would expect an inferiority complex. (More than anyone else, fellow Somalis have endlessly taught me about what it means to have an unbending sense of self that’s remarkably unconcerned with what others think of you. It’s a soul-sustaining brand of arrogance). Somalis don’t hate themselves, and that’s a good enough reason to be hated. 

“Nearly every Somali yearns passionately for pan-Somali unity, while everything he does, in practice, contravenes his yearning from coming true.”

― Said Sheikh Samatar 

In a recent interview, the novelist and enfant terrible Nuruddin Farah likened his worldview to that of the Ancient Greeks. They divided the world into Greeks and Barbarians. To him, the division is between Somalis and non-Somalis. Farah, like his meandering novels, is straining towards an unsettling conclusion. If Somalinimo is perpetual estrangement, then where does that leave us? We aren’t unique in what we have faced: ongoing war, the disintegration of civil society, refugeehood, imploded dreams, incoherent nationalisms, poverty and criminalisation in diaspora, the ravages of the War on Terror, conditional inclusion into the folds of Muslim immigrant communities and hyphenated Black identities, failed experiments with integration, fetishistic consumption, the sedimentation of fiercely gendered stereotypes, and the pervasive isolation which aggravates shame and silence in families and communities. Somalis have had less time and resources to get our thinking down on paper. What distinguishes us is our alertness to tumult and what it takes to survive it, the irresolvable nature of our national project, and our refusal to have faith in anything else. Somalinimo is a categorical impasse. I find myself agreeing with Farah’s description of it as a “protective adhesive”, or the recognisable odour of our sorrow.

 “Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone.”

― Karl Valentin

In times of mass confusion and manufactured outrage, I think Somalis are in the enviable position of knowing where we stand and who stands with us. Victimhood has become a kind of tawdry currency in the hands of the Anglosphere’s most cushioned, but maybe our distrust of it can keep us grounded. We aren’t hoodwinked easily. Hypervisiblity has denied us the opportunity to be true chameleons, but we manage to deflect and scheme in plain sight. We guard our hearts. We give our best to each other. Away from Somalia, we haven’t forgotten our brothers and sisters.

Somalinimo has been torn apart by neighbour killing neighbour, but it’s also been reforged in new ways. We’ve watched myths die and re-establish themselves elsewhere. We are possessed, as Kaha Mohamed Aden writes from Italy, by “ambitious demons”. We’ve watched our world/s end over and over again. We aren’t scared of new beginnings. I think we can make it, if we begin with that fountain of specificity: the lump in the throat.