Burning Red Moon
Killing as tribal duty. Countryside destroyed by invasions and civil wars.
Clans who burn crops and rape their enemies’ women.
There’s no way to live, no work to be found, nothing left but hunger, sand, stones .
. . and weapons. Alarming numbers of weapons.
Traffickers, pirates, and foreign armies have left a trail of them, enough for the local population to exterminate each other completely.
It’s hard for me to understand Somali pride, the devotion to those desolate and blood-drenched deserts that to them are a Garden of Eden. How can you fall in love with hell? Despite the cruel environment, Mogadishu inspires, in those who leave it, nostalgia and an eagerness to return.
“You too, Zahra Bayda?” I ask her. “Do you suffer from longing too?”
“Somalia pains me, I carry it inside me like a wound, and I dream of going back. But nationalist pride isn’t my thing, the world is big and round and in my reach.”
Untamable Somalia defeats everyone, but above all it defeats, punishes, and bleeds itself.
Zahra Bayda quotes an old Somali saying to me: With my brother against the rest of my family; with my family against my clan; with my clan against the other clans; all the clans together against the rest of the world.
Zahra Bayda comes from one of the so-called weak tribes of Baidoa, the Rahanweyn, farmers who have no weapons and are therefore attacked and massacred by strong tribes, such as the Marehan and the Ogaden.
Fleeing Baidoa, city of the living dead, her family sought refuge in Mogadishu, which, along with Baidoa and Kismayo, forms a triangle of horror.
“So much death infused me with passion for life,” Zahra Bayda tells me. “You learn to be strong even when you’re not. You find a balance between the fear of dying and the euphoria of continuing to live in spite of everything.”
She’s the daughter of a poor man’s third wife.
She had twenty-four siblings, seventeen of them dead: seven by hunger or sickness, and ten by violence.
Once a month she calls her mother and asks: How are things, do you think I could return?
Her mother always replies, Not yet, my daughter, things are bad here, wait a little longer.
Zahra Bayda lives in wait for the day and hour when her mother says: Come home now.
As an adult, she’s started to understand her long-suffering, submissive mother, even to appreciate her, recognizing her quiet way of protecting her daughters from hunger, their father’s fury, the lust of men, and general violence.
“Do you want to tell me?” I ask.
“Tell you what?”
“Your life.”
“In your dreams.” She rebuffs me every time.
Until today. She has to call her mother at an agreed-upon time, but her phone isn’t charged, so I lend her mine.
A while later, when she comes back to return it, she seems worried.
She tilts her head and lowers her gaze in a way I haven’t seen before, you could say she strikes me as vulnerable, or defenseless.
She’s unrecognizable, she who’s always throwing her self-confidence and colossal self-esteem in your face, now suddenly here, like a punished child.
Evening falls coolly, and I propose a walk to some nearby ruins where the sunsets are gorgeous.
We climb a mound of enormous stones, sit high atop it with our legs dangling into the void, and there, unexpectedly, she breaks her secrecy and lets her memories escape.
“My daughter is called Iftiin, which in Somali means ‘light,’” she says. “Iftiin Ferrer. She’s completing a degree in social anthropology at the University of Barcelona.”
“Do you realize,” I say, “that I don’t know you? I didn’t even know you had a daughter . . .”
“My mother doesn’t know either.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four years old, and your mother still doesn’t know?”
“Nor will she. I had Iftiin when I was a child myself. In Somalia, at thirteen years old you’re considered a woman.
From the moment my daughter was born, I swore that she would never endure what I had.
And as far as I know, that’s how it’s gone—well, to the extent possible.
Iftiin had the childhood I never did. She and I, the two of us out in the wide world.
Seriously poor, but still, she grew up happy, healthy, and free.
I never allowed her to be mistreated, and today she’s a good young woman, intelligent and beautiful; I’m not shy about saying it, because it’s true.
She’s a typical Somalian beauty: tall and thin, toasted skin, a wide forehead, big, bright eyes, voracious teeth, and long, coltish legs; they say she looks like Iman, David Bowie’s Somali wife; it’s a flippant comparison, I know, but Iftiin really does look like Iman.
And I’m not saying this to make fun of you, Bos Mutas, nor of your fantasies, but at the university people call her .
. . the Queen of Sheba. It’s common, all attractive Somali or Ethiopian women get called that. ”
Zahra Bayda doesn’t want to be like her mother, but tries to understand her.
“For my mother, suffering is part of her very being,” she says.
“I decided when I was little that that wouldn’t work for me.
Don’t ask me why, but unlike my sisters, I knew I wasn’t born to suffer.
Life was hard, yes, but I wasn’t going to surrender to misfortune with my hands tied, as if there were no other choice.
Life is suffering, that’s my mother’s only maxim.
But for her daughters, maybe deep down she’s always wanted something else.
I’ve spent years struggling to make peace with my mother, whose mind is eroded by unimaginable injustice and pain.
Now I suspect that there’s a hope of happiness in some corner of her, not for herself, but for her daughters.
She left me that as an inheritance, and I’m thankful.
I want to return to Somalia before she dies.
I want to forgive her and for her to forgive me, I want to see her with new eyes, in a more compassionate, less distant way. ”
Gerald Hanley, a British official in Somalia during World War II, perhaps the only Westerner who managed to settle into and grow fond of those hot-winded lands, wrote that he couldn’t recall them without thinking of daggers, spears, fierce eyes framed by curly hair, tribal fanaticism, hysterical aristocrats who enslave southern tribes, mad, stubborn camels, rocks that scald the touch, blood vendettas of forgotten origins that nevertheless still get settled by the blade.
He described its inhabitants as the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest .
. . of people.1 Is Zahra Bayda like that too, the proudest, bravest, vainest, most merciless, and most generous?
I’d been working with her for several months now and still couldn’t decipher her.
She’s a great conversationalist, like all Somalis, a people in love with speech and oral traditions; not for nothing do they call themselves Masters of the Word.
She’s like that too, and yet she’s secretive.
Within such a talkative polyglot, great silence can hide.
Her large family lived crammed into one of the shacks of an enormous slum, among dirt roads and alleys where ramshackle cars clattered and donkeys carried burdens bigger than themselves.
The air was a condensation of salty heat.
The house smelled of incense, wood smoke, and stews spiced with cumin, garlic, and onion.
Child, close the door, you’re letting in dust!
But the dust was already inside, the dust was entering no matter what, and was there to stay.
In the mornings Zahra Bayda went to school, and in the afternoons she took care of four sheep with black heads and white bodies, leading them to the outskirts to find grass.
Like all other girls, she wore clothes dyed red with beets by her mother and aunts.
In the summers, the temperature rose to 120 degrees, famine bore down, and so many people died that her father, a gravedigger by trade, became sick with exhaustion and couldn’t dig anymore.
“My mother waited on my father as if she were his slave,” Zahra Bayda says.
“Every night she’d heat water for his bath, scrub his back, and dry him off.
Until my father married again, brought the new wife home, and ordered my mother to heat water for her too.
My mother obeyed and filled the tub, but the fourth wife, who was very young, complained to my father, saying the water was too cold for bathing.
My father told my mother to reheat it. My mother dared protest, Let her heat it, she said, What is she, crippled?
My father punished my mother until his hands swelled up from hitting her.
I must have been about seven when this happened, and that very day I decided I’d never marry.
I’d never be anyone’s wife. I’d study, I’d get a degree, and I’d go far away to a place where I could work, so I’d never have to carry hot water for any man or take his beatings. ”
Some people warn against making wishes, because you run the risk that they might come true. That’s what happened to Zahra Bayda as a girl: She was forced to leave home, much earlier than planned.
Her mother and aunts kept a shrine to Makeda on the patio and worshipped her there. Makeda is the name given to the Queen of Sheba in those lands. Makeda, the immaculate, the inviolate, pure flower among flowers.
“I don’t know whether you’ll want to hear this, Bos Mutas, given the way you idealize her. I don’t think there’s any crueler cult than Makeda’s, nor any more brutal initiation rite.”