Words Disappear Here: My Journey from Somalia to Sweden
Illustration: Xia Gordon. The following is an excerpt from Gå Bara: Min Flykt från Somalia till Sverige (Keep Moving: My Journey from Somalia to Sweden), by Abdi Elmi and Linn Bursell (Stockholm, Ordfront, 2016), here translated for the first time. The excerpt details Elmi’s childhood and youth in Somalia, followed by his journey from Sudan to Libya through the Sahara.
I grew up in Mogadishu, a name that makes everyone think of war. Who was at war at any one time varied, but their identities never made much difference to those of us who lived there. War was ordinary, habitual; we’d grown familiar with it. We handled it as best we could. When we were seven or eight years old, we played warlords with sticks as weapons. When I was thirteen, my classmates died as soldiers. We grew up to the sounds of gunshots. At night, in the dark, my siblings and I would lie in bed, listening, guessing which kinds of guns were firing. AK-47, BM-21, antitank rifle. Each had its own sound: the AK-47 a hard patter, the antitank rifle a heavy, lonely bang. The BM 21 multiple rockets, which could shatter a whole house. Sometimes the gunshot sounds were distant; sometimes they were close. We were always afraid.
I have never experienced peace in my homeland. Somalia is a wonderful place: Mogadishu is sunshine and turquoise seas and beautiful white beaches. Tourists should be flooding in. All my life I have wished, intensely, to see what Somalia would be like without war.
I was born in 1994. Three years earlier, in 1991, president Siad Barre was removed from power. To the rest of the world, he is known as a ruthless dictator. He assumed power in 1969 through a military coup, then ruled the country with an iron fist. But during the chaos that was Mogadishu in the 1990s, he became a symbol for a time when there was security and order, when the roads were passable, when hospitals and schools functioned. All the old folks around me liked to reminisce about Barre’s era. Things were bad, back then. But now they were worse.
The Somalia in which I was born was run by warlords. The warlords were like gangsters; they had weapons; they drank and did drugs. They shot people whenever they wanted to; they raped and beat up innocent people; women could barely leave the house. Then there were the clan conflicts. In the rest of Somalia, the clans are scattered across a wide territory. In Mogadishu, the clans live side by side; we are neighbors, which caused bloody conflicts every day. There was no government or president in control of the country; there was no justice system to speak of. Outside forces made a few attempts to establish order. In 2000, a provisional government was created, supported by the UN. But Ethiopia did not like this, so they intervened and helped foment a Somali alliance opposed to the government. To avoid further conflict, a new government was created, this time composed of different clan leaders from all over Somalia. It was called a transitional government. From the start they had great difficulty cooperating; too many conflicts already existed between them. The clans blamed all the problems in the country on each other. And the warlords only got stronger.
This was my world growing up. It was what it was. My family was very important to me: my father, my mother and my younger siblings Abdifatah, Hamdi, Samsam and Adbikah. I remember a constant stress. We were always on our guard. My mother and father were afraid; they didn’t want me to go far. My friends, we would whisper to each other. .
