TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN BY THE AUTHOR
Several years ago, while I was working on a project about memory with a group of young Somali refugees attending the Asinitas Italian-language school in Rome, I was asked to participate in the “Dizionario” segment of the Italian radio program Fahrenheit. Each week, an author was asked to choose a word a day for five days, following a personal criterion and with complete freedom. Given that the students and I often ended up discussing the difficulty of translating words and concepts between the Somali and Italian languages, Fahrenheit’s proposal seemed full of possibility. When I suggested the project to the young people and their instructors, they welcomed it enthusiastically.
We had some informal meetings in which many stimuli arose from each word we discussed and, to some extent, from the impossibility of translating it. We found terms that came close to expressing this impossibility and that often took us places we hadn’t expected. The outcome was a story of the many associations stemming from each word we’d chosen.
One of words was the verb “to leave,” partire in Italian. It was very moving to hear the students’ stories about the moment they’d decided to leave. It was something they thought about for years, like an obsession. They called this obsession in Somali, from the verb buuf, which means “to blow up.” Almost no one spoke of a single cause, or as if deciding to separate from their home was like admitting defeat. People in this situation feel they are possessed, haunted by spirits.
Leaving is always something abrupt. There is a popular lullaby in Somali, which women sing: “Hobey hobeyaa, ya hobey hobeyaa, meel laga carrabay, hoyo calow meel laga carrabay.” The word I find intriguing in this lullaby was carrabay. It means “to leave in the afternoon.” You’d leave in the afternoon only in the case of serious calamity, when you’re forced to, because leaving in the afternoon, in the middle of the day, means leaving many things unfinished.
One of the young men who attended the Italian course was named Farhaan. His was a story of repeated departures, a pilgrimage from one country to another, first to Yemen, then South Africa, and eventually Italy. Between these destinations he’d come back home, his leaving limited by the desire to return. The first time he “left in the afternoon,” he was only fifteen years old, and he’d fled his city, Beledweyne, in order to save himself from the conflict. He ran and ran for sixty kilometres, he said. He ran for twenty-three hours in a row. Then he waited: some days later the war reached him, in the town where he’d taken refuge. To escape the violence, he jumped into the river and swam to the other side. Several people followed him, but they didn’t make it across.
The students mentioned their reason for leaving only occasionally: civil war—dalgaalka sokeeye. In the novel Links by Nuruddin Farah, two characters, Af-Laawe and Jeebleh, discuss the significance of this expression:
“In a civil war, death is an intimate,” Af-Laawe said. “You’re killed by a person with whom you’ve shared intimacies, and who will kill you, believing that he will benefit from your death.
And when you think seriously about an entire country going up in civil war flames, then you’ll agree that ‘intimacy’ is more complicated.”
[. . .]
“Do you know the Somali term for ‘civil war’?”
“Dagaalka sokeeye.”
“Precisely,” Af-Laawe asserted.
In his mind, Jeebleh couldn’t decide how to render the Somali expression in English: in the end preferring the notion “killing an intimate” to “warring against an intimate.” Maybe the latter described better what was happening in Somalia.
Maybe this idea of intimacy, inherent in violence, was another reason why the students rarely used this expression. They did not say civil war, but rather burbur, which means “shattering.” The students would say things like, “While I was in the middle of the shattering, I decided to enter the journey.” That’s how disaster reveals the limits of language. or as the writer Gillian Slovo says: “Language is inadequate, to represent such experiences that were so awful they seem to defy normal understanding.”
Is language capable of rebuilding a world broken by violence? one of the main challenges writers encounter is in the sharing of traumatic experiences. As James Dawes wrote in his book That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, there is a contradiction “between our impulse to heed trauma’s cry for representations and our instinct to protect it from representation—from invasive staring, simplification, dissection.”
When I left my home in Mogadishu in January 1991, my son was only a few days old. I set him down on a pillow and wrapped myself in a long black veil. For a moment I thought we would never be back, so I took my last diary, one of the notebooks I had been writing in with so much dedication over countless years. A few hours later the house was stormed and ran- sacked. Pillow, veil, and diary: these three objects have been symbols of that f light, of that break between life before and life after the conflict. They were the talismans of a writing practice that had been interrupted for many years, seven I think, until the journey (perhaps the most important journey in my whole life) to Zeist, in Utrecht province in the Netherlands.
It seemed extraordinary to me that I hadn’t taken a plane for such a long time. The flight was scheduled for the early morning; I think it was March or April because my son, now a young boy, was not at school due to the Easter break. I got dressed, I dressed my sleeping son, and lastly I put in my contact lenses. I was anxious and hurried, and I dropped the left lens and couldn’t find it. At that point I could’ve easily put my glasses on, or at least put them in my pocket to use them only when I really needed to, but for some strange reason (perhaps just vanity) I decided instead to leave the house wearing only one contact lens. My first experience with the diaspora was marked by this altered perception: neat and clear on one side, hazy on the other.
Nearsightedness is a veil between the seer and the outside world. The veil clouds her gaze, but at the same time her naked eye is capable of seeing the smallest details, if they come close to her. The French feminist writer, and philosopher Hélène Cixous, in her essay Veils, describes this feeling of proximity and distance:
Not-to-see is defect penury thirst, but not- to-see-oneself-seen is virginity strength independence. Not seeing she could not see herself seen, that’s what had given her her blindwoman’s lightness, the great liberty of self-effacement. Never had she been thrown into the war of faces, she lived in the above without images where big indistinct clouds roll.
How do individuals who have lost all their points of reference put down roots again, start a new life? Do time and distance allow us to better under- stand how the past matters for the present? I can say that the trip to Zeist was like my homecoming, to a moving home, my home, my guri. After that I regained the ability to write. I chose the diaspora as the terrain of my writing, and diaspora characters carry this break inside them, a gap between before and after, a frontier enclosing something very precious: a secret, a detail, a root. Perhaps for this reason, the last word the students of Asinitas and I chose was casa.
Also read A Life Ruined by Khalid Hussain, translated from Punjabi by Seema Jain, and published in The Antonym.
Follow The Antonym’s Facebook page and Instagram account for more content and exciting updates.
