kaluumayste
Take the Poo to the loo
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=bildhaan
A good read.
All of the above — from a hellish continent to a humiliating career to a hopeless country to a hapless elite — conspired in a nefarious cabal to saddle me with a crushing load of self-doubt. I hit the depths of a spiritual low, and hence the looming nightmare of self-hate in the offing,when I proceeded to conceal my national identity as a Somali. Yes, I variously posed as an Eritrean, an Ethiopian, and a Sudanese; but then I lurched back violently when Eritrea plunged into war and misery, the Ethiopian government started killing university students en masse, and the Sudan lapsed into an interminable racial and religious conflict. I began to wonder what country is left that could serve as a creditable camouflage for my concealment; whereupon, I hit upon Kenya as a reasonable comer for self-hiding. So, I began to claim to be a Masai, on the grounds that of all Kenyans, a Masai is easiest for a Somali to impersonate! For one thing, their physical looks and pastoral lifestyle resemble those of the Somalis to a remarkable degree. For another, no Masai sojourned at my university, making the risk of exposure rather low. Quite confident in reinventing myself as a Masai, I pulled off the shelf a couple of works on the Masai and joyously reread the wonders of Masai life and lore. In this endeavor of happy fraud, I particularly feasted on Joseph Thompson’s account, in the 1880s, of the Masai’s beautifully bucolic life. The only feature of Masai culture that worried me concerned the requirement to confront and kill a lion with a spear single-handedly, as a Masai warrior must in order to earn eligibility for marriage.
Still, I relished the description of the life of the last great Laibon, or Prophet-chief and Boss-Universal, with his one hundred adoring wife-lasses, a realization that served to inflame my sexual cupidity! But another thought accompanied and doused with frigid waters my inflamed libido. I remembered that the consumption of cow blood occupies a key place in Masai culinary arts. This cut against the Quranic injunctions against eating blood, causing the Islamic residue in my makeup to rebel. So, I stopped being a Masai and tried Rwanda (the author of this piece truly did sustain these mental lacerations). Though I was not too crazy about getting mixed up in the Hutu/Tutsi bouts of bloody feuds, I could cover up easily as a Tutsi, the Watutsi being lost Somalis, or at any rate, lost Cushites, and therefore bear a striking physical resemblance to Somalis. I stayed comfortable in my new identity as a Tutsi for a season. Then, disaster. The Ebola mystery, an incurable plague, far deadlier than AIDS, broke out in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, threatening to engulf western Rwanda. The Congo that boasted the dubious distinction of being the birthplace of AIDS, obliged once again to give the world the new gift of Ebola. This, together with the massacres of 1994, made Rwanda not so attractive an adopted country, after all.
I was stuck—physically, spiritually, emotionally. Then I revisited the story of Dostoyevsky and how that near-mad man unlocked his mind. He turned his inferiority complex about being a Russian into a therapeutic, if militant, Russophilia. Dostoyevsky’s inspiring example proves that life allows us second chances. Perhaps no man can forever dwell in the “Slough of Despond” (Pilgrim’s Progress) without risking the thorough annihilation of the biological itch to survive.
Inevitably, one must bounce back up from the black mood (no pun intended). How liberating the study of the Dostoyevsky experience has been. As he had leapt from shame of Russia to a noisily self-affirming Russophilia, I, too, forthwith was transported from the regions of selfdoubt to the bliss of a self-embracing Somalophilia. The return to being Somali, after so many futile efforts at becoming something else, turned out to be delicious...and easier on the nerves. Now everything Somali has assumed for me the sweet fragrance of the once- (and again-to-be) beautiful Somalia, from the magnificent oral poetry (witness Ugass Nuur’s lines) to the idyllic sweetness of the pastoral world, in which I was born and spent my adolescent years and to which I yearn to return, if only the damn feuds would cease and desist. Anyway, Somalia, with or without feuds, is likely to be my chosen destiny, unless of course I choose, out of some opportunistic future impulse, to play my Ethiopian card once again! The current signs in Somalia, though not terribly alluring against the standards of others, are alluring enough for a Somali academic used to small things in the way of political and economic progress in his troubled homeland. First, though Somalia as a state may have died, the Somali people have shown themselves to be resilient, born survivors, even thrivers.
Consider this seasoned New York Times description of life in Mogadishu, the capital long judged as Somalia’s Heart of Darkness, a fiefdom of rapacious warlords, cutthroat gangsters, and assorted free lance looters: There are five competing airlines here; three phone companies, which have some of the cheapest rates in the world; at least two pasta factories, 45 private hospitals; 55 providers of electricity, 1,500 wholesalers for imported goods, and an infinite number of guys with donkeys who will deliver 55 gallons of clean water to your house for 25 cents.12 So there are Somalis who drive donkeys, after all! The balance of the country seems to be doing even better. The reason for this happy
A good read.
