What am I looking for? What truths can be revealed to me, a Somali Italian woman born in different geographies and epochs, by the beauty and militancy of books that were written and songs that were composed during the years I was growing up?
I find a first response in Bessie Smith:
When it thunders and lightnin’, and the wind begins to blow
There’s thousands of people, ain’t got no place to go
And I went and stood up on some high old lonesome hill
Then looked down on the house where I used to live
Black water blues done called me to pack my things and go
’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more.
This song is cited in James Baldwin’s book The Last Interview and Other Conversations, published in 2014, which Eleanor Paynter—an academic and friend who had invited me to spend a period of time in Providence, as a guest at Brown University—helped me discover.
In the first interview, Baldwin says that he never listened to Bessie Smith in America, but in Europe she helped him to reconcile himself, to put down roots again. So, music. After the first years of leaving Mogadishu, Somali music, melodic and tragic, didn’t speak to me anymore. But later on, it was actually music itself, in the distance of time, that allowed me to reconnect with myself. The only possible return. I think about the audiocassette that my dad sent me of a poet named Hadrawi who narrated that in prison he wrote a song in honor of his mother with the invisible ink of milk (Hooyooy la’aantaa/ Adduunyadu hubaashii/ Habeen kama baxdeen/ Oh mother, without you/ Surely the world/ would never have come out of the darkness); I think about the Somali women who landed in Rome after the tahrib, or rather after the crossing of the desert and the sea, young women who believed that conserving those verses in their memory was incredibly precious, as if it was worth life itself; and then I think of the Roma Tre archive, where I would catalogue conversations, photographs, film, and documents that had been removed from public memory. I’m listening to Bessie Smith and I’m thinking about her words, she’s talking about a disaster that almost killed her, she accepts it and tries to move onward. This house, invaded by the water and destroyed, looked down on from above, speaks to me. “What’s missing are my connections,” Baldwin writes about his voluntary exile in Europe.
I’m traveling in the United States with my daughter Yasmin, whereas 20 years ago, the first time I was invited, coincidentally to Providence, I wasn’t able to take her with me. I was still breastfeeding her and I still remember the drama of our separation: New England winter is frigid, they told me, and how will you be able to talk when you have a newborn strapped to your chest? My breasts squeezed out excess milk in the university bathrooms and I barely spoke English. This trip is a kind of catharsis, of compensation: we move around America, from the East Coast to the West Coast, and together we observe that which at times appears to us as opulent brutality. I let myself be transported through the streets of Los Angeles, in the passenger seat of an old Cadillac, borrowed from Claire, whom I had met many years ago in Rome. I remember precisely when and where: in the Feltrinellli café in Largo Argentina. At the time I still hadn’t left Italy; actually, I was passionately involved in the country, working as a cultural mediator, writing and participating in the public debate on migration, new generations, and on how the removal of Italy’s colonial past influenced all these questions. Yasmin is driving—I never got my license. She drives me towards a flea market where we each buy a pair of jeans that look good on both of us, some earrings, a jacket, and a shirt for her brother; we eat tacos at a Mexican stand, we walk a long way around the mythical Griffith Observatory, and we visit the exhibition of Camille Claudel at the Getty Museum. The sense of the body and of the myth, her tormented relationship with the sculptor Rodin, her folly and, together with that, her long exile until her death in a mental asylum. In Scheherazade Goes West, Fatema Mernissi talks about the necessity of narrating and re-narrating as a strategy against brutality: she firmly believes in the role of dialogue and the imagination. Knowledge alone, according to Mernissi, does not allow a woman to exercise her power; it’s only through dialogue that this can happen. Writing in Italy for me had meant digging through oral stories, stories that were recounted to me during long nights spent on the phone with friends and family from the diaspora, or stories recorded with a tape recorder. They could be the intimate affairs of migrant women, or young people with origins in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Cape Verde, or Somalia, who were raised in Rome, like my first son. Their existences were linked with mine, and in it all I searched for an intimate meaning: what did living in Italy mean to us? Writing about it was like an ethical and artistic duty: I needed to treat what I had had the privilege of listening to like treasures. As Julia Kristeva writes, the exiled person, “instead of questioning his being, questions his place: ‘Where am I?’ Because the space from which the renegade, the excluded person, interrogates themselves is never singular. Neither is it homogenous nor totalizing. But it is essentially divisible, flexible, catastrophic.” Writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous: at the end of the day, we can write from anywhere. This brings me back in time. There’s a difference between choosing to move to a new place and being constrained to do so; and yet, the mourning that grows inside you is no less painful. My obsession had always been that of reimagining Mogadishu, my “Garden of Eden,” even if it was anything but a terrestrial paradise. “Maybe life only offers the possibility of remembering the garden or forgetting it,” Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room. “One thing or the other: you need strength to remember, you need another kind of strength to forget, and you need to be a hero to do both things together.”
Exiled persons cannot be deprived of their memory, they must resist memoricide; through narrating we recreate the possibility of cancelling the geographical and temporal distance of what we’ve lived through. And yet I’ve never talked about what it meant for me to leave Rome after having lived there for eighteen years, raised a child, and given birth to two more. Blood that, differently from the blood of wars, didn’t redden knives and guns, but had led to several births.
A painful reluctance and a migration had taken place during an age in which the weight on our shoulders gets heavier and the future ahead of us appears inevitably shorter, even though with time we refine ourselves not with intuition but experience. Maybe we gain some wisdom, but the desire to take risks is reduced.
When I arrived in Italy, after the war in Somalia, I was just over twenty years old. Italian was my native language, an ambivalent advantage, because I was convinced that the people around me would recognize me for what I was. My voice stuttered and was full of a forgotten colonial past of which, due to a question of love, I was the result. I was outraged and hurt by Italy’s failure to recognize its colonial past and maybe it was for this reason that I mustered up the courage to write. But Italy, even though I had resisted it for many years, pushed me away—an affliction of betrayal—and, once I left Italy, I felt that I was once again forced into exile, even though this time the reason wasn’t a war.
“Maybe,” Baldwin writes about the decision to leave his country, “as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.” Something has ended up in the wrong place, in fact, is an expression that from a distance of many years has entered into many languages, but what does looking for oneself truly mean? A truth that only distance allows us to see, to exclude a discourse that seems like it only pertains to us, the only possibility of knowing ourselves is distance from ourselves, discontinuity, hiding from the buzz of common places that imprison us and at the same time protect us. I had Somali and Italian friends who, like me, had moved to Italy, some to Florence, some to Bari, Latina, or Turin. I happened to run into them many years later, in the cities where they decided not to move from anymore, and what struck me most of all was the way in which they had begun to talk and behave as if they had grown up in those places, mimetically adopting the ways of expressing oneself and the rituals of the place they lived. I envied them; however, I thought that maybe to love, at the end of it all, means the desire of another place, means accepting that we are all guests in our own house, just like in the language that we speak and that existed before and will exist after us. Loving implies an enormous responsibility and an enormous risk. The only war that matters is the war against imagination, Diane di Prima writes in Revolutionary Letters. Imagination, the Garden of Eden of an impossible return.
I remember leaving Rome. It had taken us little more than a week to put everything that we thought would be useful in boxes, meticulously emptying the long house where we had lived for a long time in just a week. A house of compartments, like a train, the rooms ringed together like chains. Jimmie Rodgers sings:
Now, when a woman gets the blues, Lord, she hangs her head and cries. But when a man gets the blues, Lord, he grabs the train and rides.
Maybe I even hung my head and cried on the inside, but here’s our train at the end of August, eleven years ago, the car so full it seemed on the verge of exploding. It hadn’t been easy: separating the necessary from the futile, choosing books, clothes, and objects to bring along—maybe their heat would warm us up in the first months of exile. I was distressed, terrorized by the destiny that awaited me and my children. What would happen to us in the new languages, maps, and codes? We were enthusiastic and a little foolish, our friends observed us incredulously, envying—with love—the thickheadedness with which we left our country behind. “I’m coming to get a coffee and a bit of energy with you,” one of my friends said as I was emptying out and redoing luggage, and that was a great consolation for me. All of this boxing up, quickly separating things, even for me, who doesn’t keep anything, was at the same time both liberating and painful. I frequently thought about the moment that I had decided to leave Italy. The first time, the first time that I had left the city I grew up in, I was forced to do so, bringing my firstborn around my waist, without coming back, until thirty years later. Other geographies, other places had come after, yet despite it all it was always as if something escaped me: a fragment, an echo, an intimate detail of my memory. The diaspora, the principle on which my first works are based, is an emotion, a profound resonance, a nostalgia that implies a departure with no return. Absence and at the same time, the thirst of an electrifying future in the present. Differently, the poet Joël Des Rosiers writes that the most illuminating concept for our condition is that of metaspore, an emblem, the Greek prefix meta (after, beyond, with) applied to the botanical metaphor of the spore and its dissemination to the four winds of the world.
The metaspore is what measures the distance between intimate beings and the unexpected intimacy of that distance, whether geographical, temporal, or cultural. It is an aesthetic category, an emblem of Beauty purged of all identity entropies. The metaspore arises from a logic of improvisation of space and time, a logic of recreation, placed under the sign of becoming.
A metaphor of germination, spores scattered to the four winds that are reborn in unexpected places and trigger new existences in their surroundings, vivifying not only their own existence, but also that of the new world in which they are rooted. Here we are, then, in this existential condition of metaspore. Brussels is sunny when we arrive in the late afternoon. I’ll learn later on that it’s a pretty rare occurrence—the winter darkness lasts for a while and the sky is often overcast. It’s funny to think of that first moment when a place, a city, is unknown to you and then slowly, as the months pass, every building, tree, street, monument takes up space in your mental map. The same thing had actually happened to me in Rome: guided by a little book about places and museums, those first months I tried to reconstruct my trajectories.
There’s something that I like to remember: it’s when I went to visit the poet Iolanda Insana, whom I venerated: she lived close to via del Corso, I believe, and she had her verses hanging from small ropes. She told me: “Ubah, listen, when the sun is out let’s go chop wood.”
my steps sink and the horizon wobbles/ with its heaps of scraps and garbage/ and yet I grab onto the kite/ and I leave behind/ behind the hill/ mounds and mass graves/ with no trees
We go chop wood every time there’s nice weather, we invent our own rites, we weave a new canvas, even though we are forced to leave everything behind. In the first months in Brussels, tired and angry with Italy, I would seek refuge in a small studio, separated from my house, where I would write obsessively, trying to find an answer as I obsessively observed a black woodpecker with a red crest who persistently hammered a nearby tree. After a while I was able to write Commander of the River, where Rome appears disarranged, through the myths and wanderings of an eighteen-year-old black boy who, despite himself, was raised in that city. In the garden at the house with high ceilings on rue Champs-Elysées, I cultivated hyacinths, hydrangeas, and roses and there was a small tree that soon revealed itself to be full of honey, which I used to learn how to make a cake. My Eden, a secret garden like the one that I had cultivated in Rome with my firstborn Harun, climbing through a window to a roof where together we had planted jasmine, apricots, and lemons. In the beginning, Brussels appeared too quiet and hostile to me, and yet I could look ahead and see that this new city didn’t ask anything of me and nor did it, at the same time, recognize anything, and above all it didn’t demand that I belong to it. Leaving wasn’t easy. Migrating means disappearing into yourself, dying and being reborn, running the risk of becoming invisible, or rather, of being seen in another way. The organic basket from the vegetable garden full of broccoli, black roots, cabbage, and yellow, red, and purple carrots wasn’t enough to give me roots again. “It may be that a life in exile,” Edward Said writes, “unfolds according to a different calendar, less seasonal and less regulated than life ‘at home.’ Exile is a life lived outside the usual order. It is nomadic, decentralized, contrapuntal: and one does not have time to get used to it before its disruptive force erupts again.” I was wasting away in a sense of loss that, in the beginning, due to being a mother, I was able to defeat. The cure: stability in a place. Going to get my kids at school, obsessively studying French to help them with their homework, scenting my house with incense, and preparing meals. I would dance in the kitchen, observing, between pans and terracotta pots, my movements reflected in the window, happy and at the same time oppressed by my vulnerability and by the weight of responsibility. I would think: maybe one day this solitude of places will end, this nostalgia for an elsewhere that’s just an illusion. And the oysters at the market on the weekends like everyone else, the concert of tongues, mint tea at the hammam, where a Moroccan woman who had lived for thirty years in Calabria would massage my skin, the cassavas and the Matogné plantains, all of this wasn’t enough. Baldwin knew where his home was: “Refuge is expensive,” he writes, “the price that the guest needs to pay is to delude himself that he’s found a safe port.” But did I have a safe port? Far away from Italy, I didn’t need to legitimize myself anymore. Abandoning editorial expectations, disputes, failures, and racism, meant earning independence and power. I didn’t need to demonstrate anything anymore, nor represent anyone: I could read, write, and think anything that pleased me. Brussels, paradoxically, eventually (when my enthusiasm began to wane) helped me to break the silence in which I felt trapped in Italy. As Audre Lorde magnificently writes, the transformation of silence into language and action means revealing oneself, a dangerous act that requires enormous courage.
Fighting to not end up like Antigone, in the marvelous rereading by Maria Zambrano, buried between stones and, after all, buried inside each of us. The heroine of the tragedy would never have killed herself, the Spanish poet and philosopher believes: “How could Antigone kill herself when she had never thrown away her life? She never even had the time to realize she existed.”
As women we are always “out of place,” a woman not in her place is something that we don’t want to see and that the world outside prefers to hide. I needed to realize what I had become, my atopic being, a rhizomatic movement fertile with waiting.
A wandering, a geography of becoming that encompasses multiple belongings that don’t allow one to indulge in the simple nostalgia of coming and going, a geography that develops itself in an unpredictable circulation, digging through the layers of memory, both personal and collective. Memory isn’t linear, it’s full of holes and traps, it follows a temperamental path, it lingers on hidden histories and obsessions.
What did I become after having left Italy? Four years of isolation in Belgium (people freeze during the winter, houses become sealed fortresses where only few intimates have access) and, finally, I left for my first long residence in America, in Iowa. I had the myth of the United States and, if Baldwin discovered that he was American while in Paris, I can say that I discovered that I was European during my American residencies. Since then my nomadism has become unstoppable. Far away from common and known places, everything was a continual reconquest, a disorientation, as if I was trying to rebuild what daily voices could no longer tell me through the strength of imagination and desire, a geography of wandering that, of course, came back to very real places for me where I had often lived, but that kept pushing me towards the dimension of myth. I no longer had the consolatory balm of the voices that gifted me their stories; now I had to unravel myself in new spaces, taking refuge in archives and books in order to decipher them, plots of past times that reclaimed the present. How to talk here and now about the various residencies that helped me write? Saint-Nazaire, where I worked on Antigone and studied the history of reconstruction in the postwar period in the municipal archive, an old history that spoke to me because I was always obsessed by my Mogadishu that was destroyed in front of my eyes. Can we really rebuild? Or Marseilles, another port city, where I went with my daughter and wrote the story “The Phases of the Moon,” the catalyst for the novel of the same name, where I dug in the memories of an old sailor from Djibouti and became passionate about the history of human zoos. And maybe most of all Stellenbosch, in South Africa, where, because of the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic, I decided to remain, despite the adverse warnings and that terrifying word that hung in the air—repatriation—surrounded by my characters, digital archives, Somali newspapers, photographs, random documents, and, above all, daily correspondence with Ahmed Qasim Ali, an engineer of my father’s generation who became not only my lovely pen pal, but a fervid supporter of my writing. Where was I supposed to repatriate to?
“Love,” as Baldwin writes, “doesn’t begin and end like we seem to believe. Love is a battle, love is a war, love is progress.” Love, like the act of writing for stateless people, is the torment of always beginning again from zero, the pain linked to travelling, a challenge to brutality and oblivion, an ethical duty to protect those precious things that we conserve in our memory.
