A voyage home - part 2

They say that your first memory is usually not with your mother and that childhood amnesia makes it hard for most adults to recollect even the happiest moments under the age of 4. The few lucky ones that can actually remember a real event will usually recall one that does not include their mother. My first memory is of being around 2, maybe 2 and a-half years old outdoors in Mogadishu (or as we call it, Xamar) with my two aunts. I’m sucking on a round sweet, almost the size of a lollipop, it may be much smaller but I remember how it feels large in my mouth. I’m wearing a yellow dress. It’s hot outside. I’m happy. All of a sudden I swallow the sweet by accident (maybe I meant to do it) and begin to choke. My aunts are frantic, running towards me, voices are raised, people talking simultaneously and then it goes black. I remember the panic of choking and the realisation that I had done something bad. The first time I told this to one of my aunts (the older one), we were sitting in her apartment in Cairo in 2005. We were finally reunited since the war and she was showing me things that she had managed to take from our house in Xamar. My grandfather's gold clock, pictures and my tiny jeans skirt from when I was just a baby. At first she went quiet as if she felt guilty that she wasn’t able to immediately validate my memory. Then her eyes widen and she laughs that wild laughter, the one that always feels like it resonates from the pit of her belly: “how could I forget! We had just taken you for a ride in your uncle’s new Jeep and you were crying but sweets always made you happy...” and then I get that familiar look again, the one where she tilts her head to the side in disbelief and says “how could you have remembered that?”

Until that moment, I was convinced that it wasn’t a real memory; perhaps something I had conjured up in a dream or willed myself to believe had happened because it felt so real. After that day, I felt as though a door had been opened, someone who raised me had validated a memory and I was now free to explore the vivid scenarios in my mind with people who were there and whose own memory was far more developed and intact. Our brain is such a magnificent and complex entity that protects us when we need it (without knowing that we need it) and helps us shine brightly when we try so it’s not a surprise to me that I can remember events, places and people, scents and sounds from the age of 2 onwards more than I can remember details from when I was 8 or 9. It’s as though the process of growing up and old is a contious filing and organising of memories; pushing irrelevant ones deeper in cabinets and polishing the best ones for retrieval at any given time. In a way, we are all storytellers.

Stepping off that plane in Somalia with my uncomfortable abaya and converse shoes was a stark contrast from walking across to the Kenyan border with a broken sandal 20 years earlier. In front of the sun and sky, in the middle of the day, I was now calmly entering a land that I was rushed out of at night. I’m not sure what I was expecting - the sky to open up and great me with a thousand sunrays or to step back in time, find myself in my four year old body and realise that everything else had just been a dream; a twenty year long nap that now was awakened. My mother, who sees me standing frozen at the bottom of the plane’s steps, drags me inside to the airport as we wait for our bags. It’s business as usual for her (who came once before me a few months earlier) and the others rushing around, shuffling to grab their belongings. I suppose I thought we would all fall to our knees, kneeling at the same time and grabbing the earth until our fingernails are full of familiar dirt. 

I wish that I could have shared that feeling with every restless refugee in the world - the soothing breeze that flows through even the toughest of hearts when you reach the place where understanding and being understood meet. Home. Home like faces decorated to look just like yours. Home like canjeero flavoured kisses, hugs of goat milk and fresh fish. Home like the air thick with oud and myrrh, clouding tales of near-deaths and broken hearts. Someone is finally coming back after years of exile; someone else is meeting their grandparent for the first time. I, with my new shoes and choked tears, am creating room to house new memories.

more photos by Hanna Ali (opens in a new window)

A voyage home

As the Somali Independence Day yesterday marked 52 years of independence, I started thinking about what that meant and how it feels to celebrate victory and hope so far from home at a time when it feels as though there is little to rejoice. It may only have been half a century since the Italians and the British left but we've certainly been roaming for hundreds of years in the land we came to know and love as Soomaaliya.

The last time I was on Somali soil, I was four and a half years old, making my way to the Kenyan border, literally by foot (or sandal) for a part of the way. It was 1990 and by then the civil war in Somalia had already taken the lives of numerous family members and distant relatives. At that age, I had very little concept of war but I was already well aware of the sound of a weapon when it is being charged or in full use or what a body blown away to pieces looks like on the ground next to you. It was almost a decade later, at around age thirteen, that I started to recollect (or rather make myself recollect) my earliest childhood memories and talk about them to my family as an elimination process of some sort in order to know what was real and what was just anxiety filled visions and dreams. I’ll always remember the look of surprise on my mother’s face when I told her that I remembered our bright red front door, certain people who worked in the household and even the neighbourhood; the mosque up the hill and the shops down the street. Memory is a curious thing, for every little thing that you hold on to, you eventually feel as though you have to let something else go. The few precious memories that I have from my early childhood (aged 2 onwards) are still in parts vivid to me, a warm comfort that I turn to in my time of need (and who doesn’t need warm comfort every chance they get?) So there I was, 24 years young in 2010, finally traveling to that place I had evoked in arguments and in passion that was now something tangible to me, something real, something I would soon be able to smell, touch, feel. Those who have experienced forced migration know all too well that lingering feeling of restlessness that never quite goes away. 

Boarding that plane home I see so many faces that resemble mine. What an overwhelming feeling to be able to eavesdrop into every conversation around me, to be spoilt with common and rare dialects as if listening to a symphony on the radio. They're all trying to outdo each other's high notes. I board that first plane tired and sleepy, having hardly closed my eyes long enough to dream the following night. It's dawn and the sun comes up as we board but inside that airport tunnel, it's hard to know if it is day or night. The plane is full and I sit in the middle (I wanted to sit by the window) but instead there is an older woman sat there and who seems determined not to move. Her voice is particularly quiet for a Somali and it is as if her feeble frame matches that of her enervated voice. I lean in several times to listen closely to her replies - yes she wants water as well, no I don't have to move my arm from the shared armrest.

Up in the clouds, I don't know what to expect, what it'll look like from up here. Will it be green and fruitful or a mirror image of the desert I left behind? Will I be able to recognise it? Will it be able to recognise me? Flying over the Yemeni desert, I realise how ironic it is that I feel so far and yet so close to home. All the notions I ever had about home suddenly flash before me in a surprisingly overwhelming way as if lined up to be judged, mocked, cast aside. I've always considered home, conventionally, where my mother is, as if the world and its continents revolve around her bosom. But now I'm on my way to the real home, the one I didn't have to play nice to get invited to, the one where I can kiss the ground upon landing and greet like a long lost cousin.

As the plane starts to descend, the ocean stretches so wide before me, a deep blue with shades of turquoise that seems to flow into eternity takes my breath away. This is it. This is the land that my mother has so desperately attempted to recreate in our home for decades, the land that was cursed in anger and cried for in despair, the mythical land used in late night stories and shoved deep in every suitcase. The land tormented on the television and conjured up in schoolyard fights, the land my grandmother made me fall in love with as an adult and whose memories I have of as a child I sacrificed many others to retain. You are so beautiful and I'm sorry that it took me this long to say and see that.