Prof Said Sh. Samatar
AUGUST 4, 2013 WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY as the day when the world came to a standstill, the sun gawked from his sphere in astonishment, the moon tore into the heavens with a prodigious peal of Somali laughter, the stars gazed on earth with luminous incredulity. What drove these celestial bodies into commotion was the spectacle of two Somali girls slugging it out verbally in a heated exchange at a meeting (in the Ugandan capital city of Kampala) of Government of the Troop Contributing Countries (TCCs) to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), notably Djibouti, Brundi, Ethiopia, Kenya , Sierra Leone and Uganda. About the fighting girls: the one Fowsia Yuusuf Haaji Aadan, foreign minister of the “Government” of Somalia , the other Amina Mohammed Jibriil, freshly appointed foreign minister of Kenya.
The TTC’s ministers were rushed into meeting, almost in a panic because someone at the U.N. whispered the proposition that the African peacekeeping troops be replaced with a newly formed U.N. force to take over from the Africans.This caused widespread alarm among the TTC countries since it threatened the end of the millions of pork-barrel dollars they eat up annually in the name of giving peace to Somalia. In the event, the ministers went one better and asked the U.N. to offer more appropriations to dispatch more peace keepers to hapless Somalia. But the ministers’ request was overshadowed by the war of words between the two Somali girls.
To inject a bit of biography into the diplomatic face-off, start with Fowsia. The scion of an illustrious Isaaq family, Fowsia is stately and elegant with the look and luster, the bearing and presence of nobility. Moreover, her prominent family not only played a vital role in the development of education in the north but produced a number of literary luminaries. Her uncle, for example, the late Abdisalaam Haaji Aadan, was a master poet, famous for composing hilarious satirical poems. His mock heroic song (Gabay-Xayir), for example, “Annagoo Togii Herer Fadhina, Tumasho Soo Qaadnay” (“Residing by the Valley of the Herer River, We Struck Upon the Exciting Prospect of Partying”) is a bucolic song, mercilessly burlesquing the Dervish Commander, Ismaa’iil Mire’s jihadist narrative poem, “Annagoo Taleex Naal Jihad Taladi Soo Qaadnay” (“Residing by the Valley of Taleex, We Brought Up the Question of Waging a Holy War Against Infidels”). Space does not permit here a full-blown line-by-line analysis of Abdisalaam’s biting satire on Ismaa’iil Mire’s triumphalist holy-war song. It should be pointed out, however, that I penned an extensive piece, an almost word-for-word contrastive rendition of Mire’s original and Abdisalaam’s mock heroic spoof on it. Maybe it is high time to put it in WardheerNews for a wider readership. Perhaps the best known among Abdisalaam’s parodies on the corpus of Dervish poetic canon is his raucously funny quatrain versicle, “War Maandhow I Sii,” a withering mockery portraying Sayyid Muhammad—poet, mystic, warrior leader of the Somali nationalist Dervish movement—as a voracious imbiber of the fiery waters known as alcohol. The poem, made to look like it had been composed by the Sayyid, is addressed to his disciple and poem memorizer, Xuseen Dhiqle:
Wad Iidoorka dilayaan Xuseen, weelka ku hayaaye
War maandhow i sii bahashanaan, ku ahay waayeele
Wab markaan ka siiyaa indhaha, wahab ka duulaaye
Imana waasho naxariisna waa, kala wareeqnaaye:
O, Huseen, I’ve in this container the demise of the Iidoor (Isaaq clan-family)
Beloved, my son, give me of this Thing,
This Thing that transports me into the status of a prudent elder….
But a sip of it and lethargy flies from the eyes,
It turns not my head, nor makes me insane,
But only removes mercy from the heart!
Then a questionable line, which I doubt was in Abdisalaam’s original:
Ogaadeenku wuu wadi lahaa, waanu se aqooone
“The Ogaadeen clan-family would have eagerly indulged in its pleasures but are wholly ignorant of them.”
About the other girl. (Incidentally, the word “girl” is used here in a generic sense to refer to these grown-up mature ladies.) A highly educated Kenyan of Somali ethnicity whose progenitors hailed from the Daarood Dhulbahante clan-family, Amina is just as stately and elegant, a luminous six-plus footer with a sparkling demeanor that shrinks petty mortals into oblivion, and with a resume of diplomatic and other Olympian professional achievements .
The verbal warfare broke out between the two ladies when, allegedly, Ms Fowsia demanded that the Kenya diplomat be expelled from the meeting in order to censure Kenya for its blatant interference in Somali affairs, particularly its virtual occupation of the newly self-declared autonomous state of Jubaland, in south-western Somalia bordering Kenya. EXPELLED!? Without impugning Fowsia, who is only carrying out her government’s instructions, imagine the chutzpah. Kenya remains, by far, the most powerful, prosperous country in the region, and as such, is a dominant member in the IGAD community and TCC. And yet, here we have rickety, God-forsaken Somalia, “the devil’s concoction of clans,” as a poet once put it, comprised of an unruly mob of warring clans, a virtual heart of darkness, occupied by the armies of no fewer than five neighboring countries, pretending to throw Kenya—one of Somalia’s occupiers—out of the meeting.
This illustrates a larger point, namely, the yawning gap between our dismal existence and abilities as a people and our pompous fantasies of ourselves as God’s gift to the world. In the eyes of the world, we are the worst sample of people to disgrace the human landscape. “Too bizarre,” in the words of James Jonah, former Sierra Leonean diplomat, “too filthy and too suicidal to deal with.” What have we done to our children, abandoned as they are to abject poverty and mass prostitution in the drinking bars and brothels of the very Kenya our diplomat is trying to expel? Contemplating the pass we’ve brought to ourselves, any other people would have wilted with collective, malignant shame. But not Somalis. We strut and fret, and funk our way around in the five continents of the earth, defying no fewer than twenty reconciliation conferences that strove to end our nightmare, “our long journey,” to borrow a phrase from Eugene O’Neill, “into night.”
Back to Kampala: the Kenya Somali and the Somalia Somali went at it, red-in-tooth-and-claw, before the astonished eyes of other attendees. Characterizing the cacophony of crudities in the shouting match, a knowledgeable source to me: “Meel xun bay isla tegeen.” To Anglicize it, “They went down to the gutter with each other.” Can anyone think of any Somali discourse that doesn’t end up in the gutter?
Needless to say, ethnicity establishes Somali identity. “What a man’s address is in Europe,” wrote the doyen of Somali Studies Professor I. M. Lewis, “his clan is in Somalia.” If this is so, the two merry ladies at Kampala may, ineluctably, turn up in the environment of their ancestors, the one to Banu-Hashemiteland, the other to Khaatumoland. In divine precept, “Kulli shaye yarjac ilaa aslihi.” (Everything in the end returns to its original element.) Then they will embrace as fellow Somalilanders, and forgive and forget. For now, though, given the hemming and hawing and head scratching, given the devil’s country of a Cassandra Somalia has become, the two girls will resume, sooner rather than later, their jolly head-butting. GO, GOLDEN GIRLS, GO!
Prof Said Samatar
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