Somali Quotes

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

I strongly believe that love is the answer and that it can mend even the deepest unseen wounds. Love can heal, love can console, love can strengthen, and yes, love can make change.

Sometimes you can learn, even from a bad experience. By coping you become stronger. The pain does not go away, but it becomes manageable.

Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.

What you have learned from experience is worth much more than gold. If you have a house it may burn down. Any kind of possession can be lost, but your experience is yours forever. Keep it and find a way to use it.

Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for the trickster and catch him at the first attempt, but beware of an honest man. (said by the author to be a Somali saying)

I don't feel like I can change the world. I don't even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering.

I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.

A seed is like a little girl: it can look small and worthless, but if you treat it well then it will grow beautiful.

You could see her face, because she was Somali. Saudi women had no faces.

The young (Somali) women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.

Of all the races in Africa there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest, the somalis" Gerald Hanley Irish Writter and soldier in Brittish Army.

I didn't like the endless gossiping or the constant complaints that they were victims of external factors. Somalis never said "Sorry" or "I made a mistake" or "I don't know": they invented excuses. All these group strategies to avoid confronting reality depressed me. Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.

But I also realized that around the world, in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.

Those who number themselves among the followers of Jesus—but don’t witness for Him—are actually siding with the Taliban, the brutal regime that rules North Korea, the secret police in communist China, and the Somalis and Saudi Arabias of the world. Believers who do not share their faith aid and abet Satan’s ultimate goal of denying others access to Jesus. Our silence makes us accomplices.

Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-caliber machine gun in the back.

Clarity of thought is a must for brevity in speech.

In Somali culture hyper-masculinity is the most desired attribute in men. Femininity signifies softness, a lightness of touch: qualities that are aggressively pressed onto young girls and women. When a woman does not possess feminine traits, it is considered an act of mild social resistance. This applies equally to men who are not overtly masculine but the stakes are considerably amplified. If a Somali man is considered feminine he is deemed weak, helpless, pitiful: The underlying message being that femininity is inherently inferior to masculinity.

As a young gay African, I have been conditioned from an early age to consider my sexuality a dangerous deviation from my true heritage as a Somali by close kin and friends. As a young gay African coming of age in London, there was another whiplash of cultural confusion that one had to recover from again and again: that accepting your sexual identity doesn’t necessarily mean that the wider LGBT community, with its own preconceived notions of what constitutes a "valid" queer identity, will embrace you any more welcomingly than your own prejudiced kinsfolk do.

There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones.

think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness

She was eight years old, with the body of a child, but her spirit was weighed down by an adult suffering.

The Tears of Dark Water is not really “about” Somali piracy. It is about the multi-dimensional fallout of Somalia’s disintegration over the past two decades. Piracy offered me a narrative framework to explore not only how a hijacking and hostage crisis could end in tragedy but also how the breakdown of social order on land could inspire young Somalis to take to the ocean.

Many more villagers, who have seen an elephant for the first time in their lives, give absurd exaggerations regarding his size, weight, and height. One of them describes him as ‘a fundament!’. Another, elaborating, alludes to the term ‘firmament,’ because of the elephant’s hugeness. He felt as though the sky was obliterated from his vision. The last to be interviewed by the local TV station swears that he sensed the world lean forward as the elephant came closer and tilt backwards as the beast walked away. This large mammal ambles purposefully. He pays no heed to the crowded silence following him in stealthy consciousness. One of the villagers, a woman often suspected of dabbling in witchcraft, talks of her inspired theory: that this was no elephant, more like a human on a holy mission of avenging justice. Two other witnesses, neither having had any contact with the woman, speak in substantiation of the woman’s claims, giving as evidence the observation that the elephant turned around when someone said something in Somali. Several villagers will not comment, afraid of a fitting retribution should they do so.

A speck of ire can blaze a fire; the fate of war can be sealed with a dart, a butterfly flapping its wings may turn the tide miles apart!

No one assume the strength of self-criticise till he stop criticising the others

Somali proverb that says a brave man is always frightened three times by a lion; when he first sees his track, when he first hears him roar and when he first confronts him.

Everyone seems to agree that it is Minnesotans’ responsibility to assimilate to Somali culture, not the other way around.11 The Catholic University of St. Thomas has installed Islamic prayer rooms and footbaths in order to demonstrate, according to Dean of Students Karen Lange, that the school is “diverse.” Minneapolis’s mayor, Betsy Hodges, has shown up wearing a full hijab to meetings with Somalis. (In fairness, it was “Forbid Your Daughter to Work Outside the Home” Day.)

A few months ago I finished speaking, and looked down at a class of schoolchildren. A Somali girl with dark eyes hesitantly put her hand up and asked, 'Do you think it will happen again?' I can't answer that, but maybe you can. Will it? I hope not.

Perhaps as the Patois and Somali languages were poured into the Black-British pot our cultures would grow in love for one another, but there was an equal chance they would mix like oil and water and refuse to be branded by the disingenuous stamp of race.

Given that individual identity and the daily operation of society are derived from clans and the subgroups within clans, Somalis have no experience with a centralized liberal democratic form of government. Stated differently, no meta-game around a central Somali state has ever evolved endogenously.

Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas—like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls—you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine. And, again, I have always emphasized that its primary victims are innocent Muslims—especially women and girls.

He carries home in the way he walks: an elegant, loose strut. He wears home on his skin in the form of attar, a delicious perfume that makes me dream of Somali coastlines, places where children play football amidst colonial ruins, and young men like Korfa flee in darkness on boats to Yemen and Kenya, determined never to look back.

كل ماتقوله اليوم قد يستعمل ضدك يوما ماء،اذاً من الافضل الاحتفاظ بأسرارك لنفسك وحتى بكل ماتفكر فيه من اشياء

Does not heed to the dark With its shimmering light, Moon quietly bathes the ocean

Erayga Dumar Quraanka wuxuu ku soo arooray 24 jeer, halka erayga Ragna uu soo arooray 24 jeer

so spoil me baby, give me everything i want bc i am lost w/out your leniency i don’t wanna be a queen i don’t wanna rule i only wanna be a princess &wear the jewels

Since the water turns into Ice Different physical shapes the eye See but indeed their building blocks still remain same easy, (H2O) Farah Said.

In the Somali culture many things go unsaid: how we love, who we love and why we love that way. I don't know why Suldana loves the way she does. I don't know why she loves who she does. But I do know that by respecting her privacy I am letting her dream in a way that my generation was not capable of. I'm letting her reach for something neither one of us can articulate.

Waxaannu ka tusin Aayaadkayaga jihooyinka iyo naftooda ilaa ay uga caddaato inuu Quraanku xaq yahay, miyaanu ku fillayn Eebbe inuu wax kasta ogyahay”. Suuradda Ash-Shuuraa Aayadda 53aad.

Before settling in to work, we noticed a large travel case on the mantelpiece. I unsnapped the latches and lifted the top. On one side there was a large desert scene on a marble base featuring miniature gold figurines, as well as a glass clock powered by changes in temperature. On the other side, set in a velvet case, was a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rubies and diamonds—along with a matching ring and earrings. I looked up at Ben and Denis. “A little something for the missus,” Denis said. He explained that others in the delegation had found cases with expensive watches waiting for them in their rooms. “Apparently, nobody told the Saudis about our prohibition on gifts.” Lifting the heavy jewels, I wondered how many times gifts like this had been discreetly left for other leaders during official visits to the kingdom—leaders whose countries didn’t have rules against taking gifts, or at least not ones that were enforced. I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better. I set the necklace down and closed the case. “All right,” I said. “Let’s work.

In just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being approximately 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant,7 including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.8 And that’s not counting the Somalis who have recently left the country to fight with al Qaeda and ISIS. One hundred thousand is just an estimate. We don’t know precisely how many Somalis the federal government has brought in as “refugees” because the government won’t tell us. The public can’t be trusted with the truth. Since becoming more multicultural, Minnesota has turned into a hotbed of credit card skimming, human trafficking, and smash-and-grab robberies.9 Mosques have popped up all over the state—as have child prostitutes and machete attacks. Welfare consumption in Minnesota has more than doubled on account of the newcomers—only half of whom have jobs. Those Somalis who do have jobs earn an average of $21,000 a year, compared with $46,000 for the average Minnesotan. (Consider yourself lucky, Minnesota: In Sweden, only 20 percent of Somalis have jobs.) Eighty percent of Somalis in Minnesota live at or below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with only 8.4 percent of non-Somali Minnesotans.10

But the news reporters had no wish, perhaps no ability, to understand that the fishermen’s coastline had been spoiled with toxic waste, that they could not fish as they once had—Americans really did not understand desperation. It was easier, and certainly more pleasing, to view the Gulf of Aden as a lawless place where Somali pirates reigned. A crazy parent, America was. Good and openhearted one way, dismissive and cruel in others.

ref·u·gee noun: a person who flees for refuge or safety We are, each of us, refugees when we flee from burning buildings into the arms of loving families. When we flee from floods and earthquakes to sleep on blue mats in community centres. We are, each of us, refugees when we flee from abusive relationships, and shooters in cinemas and shopping centres. Sometimes it takes only a day for our countries to persecute us because of our creed, race, or sexual orientation. Sometimes it takes only a minute for the missiles to rain down and leave our towns in ruin and destitution. We are, each of us, refugees longing for that amniotic tranquillity dreaming of freedom and safety when fences and barbed wires spring into walled gardens. Lebanese, Sudanese, Libyan and Syrian, Yemeni, Somali, Palestinian, and Ethiopian, like our brothers and sisters, we are, each of us, refugees. The bombs fell in their cafés and squares where once poetry, dancing, and laughter prevailed. Only their olive trees remember music and merriment now as their cities wail for departed children without a funeral. We are, each of us, refugees. Don’t let stamped paper tell you differently. We’ve been fleeing for centuries because to stay means getting bullets in our heads because to stay means being hanged by our necks because to stay means being jailed, raped and left for dead. But we can, each of us, serve as one another’s refuge so we don't board dinghies when we can’t swim so we don’t climb walls with snipers aimed at our chest so we don’t choose to remain and die instead. When home turns into hell, you, too, will run with tears in your eyes screaming rescue me! and then you’ll know for certain: you've always been a refugee.

In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, aerial bombardment destroyed the Iraqi central bank and with it the capability of the Iraqi government to print new Iraqi dinars. This led to the dinar drastically appreciating overnight as Iraqis became more confident in the currency given that no central bank could print it anymore.20 A similar story happened to Somali shillings after their central bank was destroyed.21 Money is more desirable when demonstrably scarce than when liable to being debased.

Ilhan Omar’s 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States. It is a fertile base for both direct and online recruitment. FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.

passionate reader of books in German, her favorites to date include Stiller by Max Frisch, Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer, Die Große Liebe by Hans-Josef Ortheil, Selina by Walter Kappacher, Der verschlossene Garten by Undine Gruenter, as well as the poetry of Heinrich Heine, Georg Trakl, Ingeborg Bachmann, and, of course, Rainer Maria Rilke. Gunilla currently divides her time between the Baltic Sea and the Italian Alps, where she enjoys spending time with her family, her boyfriend and her red Somali cat, Polzerino.

In April 2009 we all watched entranced on CNN as a Navy SEAL sniper team fired three simultaneous shots, instantly executing the three pirates who had kidnapped a U.S. shipping captain off the Somali coast. From the moment they were mobilized, it took that sniper team less than ten hours to deploy, get halfway around the world, parachute with full kit at 12,000 feet into darkness and plunge into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean, rendezvous with waiting U.S. Naval forces, and complete their mission, start to finish.

A good-for-America immigration policy would not accept people with no job skills. It would not accept immigrants’ elderly relatives, arriving in wheelchairs. It would not accept people accused of terrorism by their own countries. It would not accept pregnant women whose premature babies will cost taxpayers $50,000 a pop,1 before even embarking on a lifetime of government support. It would not accept Somalis who spent their adult lives in a Kenyan refugee camp and then showed up with five children in a Minnesota homeless shelter.

Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia because it isn't safe and they can't go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn't-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do.

I have always been a loner. Even as a child, when my family and friends were off attending parties I would be sequestered in my room, sketchpad in hand, stereo by my side, listening to seductive R&B. Solitude was something I took for granted. Coming from a large family I needed solitude in order to think straight and paint my way out of confusion. My parents were accepting of the fact that I kept to myself and they respected my decision even though it went against my Somali upbringing, a culture rooted in boisterousness and joie de vivre.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF ALL LEGAL IMMIGRANTS—TWO-THIRDS—GET IN ON “family reunification” policies each year. In other words, America has no say about the single largest category of immigrants and we end up with gems like Octomom, the Boston Marathon bombers, and one hundred thousand Somalis in Minnesota. Entire villages from Pakistan are dumped on the country, based not on their expertise in nuclear engineering, but because everyone in the village is related to the first guy who got in. If they’re not, in the strict sense, related, they’ll lie. In

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.

Ruth and I often share the stories that we have heard and the things that we have learned to help the western church and many of its congregations grasp a new, and perhaps more biblical, perspective on suffering and persecution in our faith. We share often about how suffering and persecution relate to our faith. We desperately want our western brothers and sisters in Christ to realize that the greatest enemy of our faith today is not communism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Atheism, or even Islam. Our greatest enemy is lostness. Lostness is the terrible enemy that Jesus commissioned His followers to vanquish with the battle strategy that He spelled out for them in Matthew 28:18-20. He was addressing this same enemy when He plainly clarified His purpose in coming: 'I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.' Our hope is that believers around the world will get close enough to the heart of God that the first images that come to mind when we heard the word 'Muslim' are not Somali pirates or suicide bombers or violent jihadists or even terrorists. When we hear the word 'Muslim,' we need to see and think of each and every individual Muslim as a lost person who is loved by God. We need to see each Muslim as a person in need of God's grace and forgiveness. We need to see each Muslim as someone for whom Christ died.

The night before, Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of homeland security, had called to inform us of credible intelligence indicating that four Somali nationals were thought to be planning a terrorist attack at the inauguration ceremony. As a result, the already massive security force around the National Mall would be beefed up. The suspects—young men who were believed to be coming over the border from Canada—were still at large. There was no question that we’d go ahead with the next day’s events, but to be safe, we ran through various contingencies with Chertoff and his team, then assigned Axe to draft evacuation instructions that I’d give the crowd if an attack took place while I was onstage.

Then I hear a hollering. I’ve been seen. The sailors all cheer. They’re waving and clapping and calling out to me. My glotti picks up only some of it, then gets overloaded and confused: FRENCH: Look it’s a walker it’s a walker it’s one of the walkers SOMALI: A man or a woman? Walker FRENCH: Is she alone ARABIC: She is the hero SOMALI: Woman walker ARABIC: She is in the story SOMALI: Who are you with? ARABIC: She is telling a story FRENCH: Have a good trip madame good trip hello mademoiselle ARABIC: Where are your people? SOMALI: Walk to Africa ARABIC: Where is your mother? SOMALI: It’s not too far ARABIC: Is she birthing or dying? SOMALI: You will be all right FRENCH: Mademoiselle you are a one-of-a-kind Adventurer SOMALI: You are mother to a new race FRENCH: Hail Yemaya!

Lostness is the terrible enemy that Jesus commissioned His followers to vanquish with the battle strategy that He spelled out for them in Matthew 28:18–20. He was addressing this same enemy when He plainly clarified His purpose in coming: “I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.” Our hope is that believers around the world will get close enough to the heart of God that the first images that come to mind when we hear the word “Muslim” are not Somali pirates or suicide bombers or violent jihadists or even terrorists. When we hear the word “Muslim,” we need to see and think of each and every individual Muslim as a lost person who is loved by God. We need to see each Muslim as a person in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. We need to see each Muslim as someone for whom Christ died.

Si un danseur a la possibilité d'entrer dans le jeu politique, il refusera ostensiblement toutes les négociations secrètes (qui sont depuis toujours le terrain de jeu de la vraie politique) en les dénonçant comme mensongères, malhonnêtes, hypocrites, sales ; il avancera ses propositions publiquement, sur une estrade, en chantant, en dansant, et appellera nommément les autres à le suivre dans son action ; j'insiste : non pas discrètement (pour donner à l'autre le temps de réfléchir, de discuter des contrepropositions) mais publiquement, et si possible par surprise : "Êtes-vous prêt tout de suite (comme moi) à renoncer à votre salaire du mois de mars au profit des enfants de Somalie ?" Surpris, les gens n'auront que deux possibilités : ou bien refuser et ainsi se discréditer en tant qu'ennemis des enfants, ou bien dire "oui" dans un terrible embarras que la caméra devra malicieusement montrer (chapitre 6)

Survival is woven into the fabric of who I am. I never asked, 'Why did this happen to me?' bur rather, 'How can I overcome this situation?' It is easy to let past trauma or injustice rule your life forever, but I want to be free, so I needed to understand and forgive others ... above all, I keep in mind that my happiness is up to me now ... I am very proud of my ancestors, my home country, and my past. I have just learned to leave out the parts that don't serve me as a woman, a mother, a human.

Who do I write for? I thought about this again and again over the next few days until the answer crystalized in my consciousness. I write for all readers. But my primary interest is in representing the complex but universal experience of Somalis. I do this because the media representation of the global Somali community is one that is carved out of derivative clichés crammed with pirates, warlords, terrorists, passive women and girls whose entire existence seems to be nothing more than a footnote on the primitive dangers of female genital mutilation. I write because I want to give a long-overdue voice to a community that has experienced a tremendous array of challenges but who constantly face these challenges with the most wicked sense of humour, humility and dignity. My father always used to tell me that in our culture, the done thing when you’re facing hardship and your belly is empty is to moisturize your face, comb your hair, press your clothes and step out into the sun with your sense of humanity intact. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me to this day.

Ryan was complex—he was big-hearted and caring but also resolute and direct. He once e-mailed me an audio clip of a television news interview he gave after a group of Navy SEALs rescued the captain of the Maersk Alabama tanker ship. Pirates had taken the ship and the captain hostage off the coast of Somalia, Africa. The story was later made into the film Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks. A team of Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed all but one of the hostage takers, who had placed themselves and their hostage in a desperate situation. Ryan told the TV reporter, “Despite what your momma told you, violence does solve problems.”1 I understood exactly what Ryan meant—there was no diplomatic or political solution to the crisis, and allowing pirates to take American vessels and crews hostage would set a bad precedent in other parts of the globe. Weeks before, in fact, the pirates had killed other hostages. Ryan’s statement was in no way meant to be bravado; he was merely conveying the fact that many times violence brings about a successful conclusion to a hostage crisis. The SEALs spoke the only language that the Somali pirates understood: violence. Apparently, the SEALs’ response acted as a deterrent, since the Somali pirates have consequently stayed clear of US flagged vessels. Chris Kyle later turned Ryan’s statement into a patch he wore on his hat.

L'affaiblissement de la part relative de l'Occident dans l'économie mondiale, tel qu'il s'est amorcé au crépuscule de la Guerre froide, est porteur de conséquences graves qui ne sont pas toutes mesurables dès à présent. L'une des plus inquiétantes, c'est que la tentation paraît désormais grande pour les puissances occidentales, et surtout pour Washington, de préserver par la supériorité militaire ce qu'il n'est plus possible de préserver par la supériorité économique ni par l'autorité morale. Là se situe peut-être la conséquence la plus paradoxale et la plus perverse de la fin de la Guerre froide; un évènement qui était censé apporter paix et réconciliation, mais qui fut suivi d'un chapelet de conflits successifs, l'Amérique passant sans transition 'une guerre à la suivante, comme si c'était devenu la "méthode de gouvernement" de l'autorité globale plutôt qu'un ultime recours. Les attentas meurtriers du 11 septembre 2001 ne suffisent pas à expliquer cette dérive; ils l'ont renforcée, et partiellement légitimée, mais elle était déjà largement amorcée. En décembre 1989, six semaines après la chute du mur de Berlin, les Etats-Unis sont intervenus militairement au Panama contre le général Noriega, et cette expédition aux allures de descente de police avait valeur de proclamation: il fallait que chacun sache désormais qui commandait sur cette planète et qui devait simplement obéir. Puis ce fut, en 1991, la première guerre d'Irak; en 1992-1993, l'équipée malheureuse en Somalie; en 1994, l'intervention en Haïti pour installer au pouvoir le président Jean-Bertrand Aristide; en 1995, la guerre de Bosnie; en décembre 1998, la campagne de bombardements massifs contre l'Irak baptisée "Opération Désert Fox"; en 1999, la guerre du Kosovo; à partir de 2001, la guerre d'Afghanistan; à partir de 2003, la seconde guerre d'Irak; en 2004, une nouvelle expédition en Haïti, cette fois pour déloger le président Aristide...

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

Edna Adan deplores the cutting and says that international campaigns are ineffective, never reaching ordinary Somali women. As we were driving through the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa, she pointed suddenly to a banner across the road that denounced cutting. “So the UN comes and puts up banners in the capital,” she said. “What does that do? It doesn’t make a bit of difference. The women can’t even read the signs.” Indeed, the international denunciations of FGM prompted a defensive backlash in some countries, leading tribal groups to rally around cutting as a tradition under attack by outsiders.

A doctor named John Murray was working with his wife in a Somali refugee camp when he noticed that many of the nomads, despite pervasive anemia and repeated exposure to a range of virulent pathogens, including malaria, tuberculosis, and brucellosis, were free of visible infection. He responded to this anomaly by deciding to treat only part of the population with iron at first. Sure enough, he treated some of the nomads for anemia by giving them iron supplements, and suddenly the infections gained the upper hand. The rate of infection in nomads receiving the extra iron skyrocketed. The Somali nomads weren’t withstanding these infections despite their anemia: they were withstanding these infections because of their anemia. It was iron locking in high gear.

Matthew Dowd, a former chief strategist to George W. Bush who is now an independent, told me in late February, “Hillary has built a large tanker ship and she’s about to confront Somali pirates.” Brooklyn blew it all off. The math was

In November 2003, an underwater “SEAL delivery vehicle” deployed from the submarine USS Dallas (SSN-700) and entered Somali waters. The clandestine SEAL mission was the first of a dozen to install specialized cameras called Cardinals, which would monitor the coastline.

When he asked about work, Noor laughed. Guled learned that employment in Kenya was forbidden. Like many governments anxious about asylum seekers, Kenya didn’t want Somalis taking Kenyan jobs, so all formal work with a decent salary, with the agencies and the UN, was reserved for Kenyans. Most of the camps’ economy is informal, however, and in the grey economy it was possible to get work in the market, driving, butchering, teaching in the private colleges. The

Globalization – characterized by roving capital, accelerated communications and quick mobilization – has everywhere weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international actors, from English and Chinese nationalists, Somali pirates, human traffickers and anonymous cyber-hackers to Boko Haram.

They would be hyphenated people. Somali-American. What a strange thing, Abdikarim thought, to become hyphenated to a country now gratifying itself with the impression that all Somalis were pirates.

Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth. The

Back in 1992, the camp originally held ninety thousand Somali refugees fleeing the civil war. They had reproduced. Then others had come: more waves of Somalis, as well as Sudanese, Congolese, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Rwandans seeking asylum whom the Kenyans had shipped out to the margins of their country. And they too had had children. Three generations now called this giant cosmopolitan city made of mud, tents and thorns, home. That morning, 1 December 2010, Guled was the newest arrival in the largest refugee camp in the world.

Yet his proposals to deter Somali pirates by going after their financiers’ money met with only limited success. The shipping industry seemed to be more interested in talking about piracy than confronting it.

The British Somali poet, Warsan Shire, wrote: no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breathe bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

Gostaria de correr. Brincar com outros filhotes. Ter uma mãe. Fundir-se à savana. Mas a savana está distante, muito longe. Para ele, é uma terra proibida. Encontra-se em perpétuo exílio, uma criança nascida sozinha. Nem sabe se um dia voltará para a África. Nem sabe se já esteve lá. [...] O elefantinho do Bernini da Piazza della Minerva é um dos melhores amigos que tenho em Roma. Para mim, aquele elefantinho é somali. Tem o mesmo olhar dos exilados. E também a mesma irreverência. [...] Com o tempo, descobri que aquele elefantinho tem o mesmo olhar da minha mãe. Não pode voltar, não pode saciar a sede da sua angústia. O exilado é uma criatura dividida. As raízes foram arrancadas, a vida foi mutilada, a esperança eviscerada, o princípio separado, a identidade despida. Parece não ter sobrado nada. Ameaças, dentes crispados, maldade. [...] Minha mãe viveu muitos lampejos. Antes de ser arrancada da Somália, alguém a havia arrancado da mata. De nômade foi forçada a se tornar sedentária. E todas as vezes teve que reinventar-se, teve que redesenhar o seu mapa. Aquele lampejo que vejo em minha mãe e no elefantinho do Bernini são as histórias que nadam em seus ventres. Afinal de contas, se vocês se aproximarem de uma somali ou de um somali, é isso que vão receber: histórias. Histórias para o dia e histórias para a noite. Para vigília, para o sono... para os sonhos.

Tínhamos que encarar o rosto obsceno daquela realidade que nos tocou no destino. Aquele barquinho naufragado estava cheio de somalis, essa era realidade! Cheio de homens e mulheres, de seres humanos reduzidos a larvas. Aquela embarcação de papel estava cheia de gente com o nariz como o meu, com a boca como a minha, com os meus cotovelos. Todos nós da diáspora somali, no dia em que ficamos sabendo dessa notícia, não sabíamos o que fazer com os nossos corpos. Os que morreram nas costas da ilha de Lampedusa tinham provocado não somente uma comoção sem igual, mas um mal-estar. Por que eles morreram e nós estávamos vivos? Por que o destino nos dividiu em dois? A estação melhorou muitíssimo nos últimos anos. De uma parte, houve a restauração feita pela prefeitura, de outra, várias comunidades migrantes também se organizaram. Há lojinhas de todo tipo. Quer colocar aplique no cabelo? Quer um pouco de cardamomo para os chás condimentados do seu recanto? Quer um tecido com a história da rainha de Sabá para pendurar nas paredes de casa? Em Termini, encontram-se coisas fantásticas: de saris a raiz de rummay para escovar os dentes, e até goiabada que os brasileiros comem com queijo e chamam romanticamente de 'Romeu & Julieta'. E também quantidades infinitas de eenjera e zighinì. Moha, em sua época de ouro, pintou e bordou. Eu e minha mãe éramos espectadoras mudas das confusões que ele armava. Por um período, ele teve até três nomes. Louis para as mulheres que achavam que ele fosse sul-americano, Ali para as brancas que não sabiam pronunciar seu verdadeiro nome (e todas as vezes lhe diziam 'Que massa, como Ali Babá', e Amedeo para as mais duras na queda e experientes. Só disse seu nome verdadeiro à mulher que se tornou, por fim, a mulher da sua vida. 'Eu não queria estragar o nome. É o que me sobrou da Somália, além de vocês.

Igiaba, está vendo aquelas mulheres?'. Bem, sim, eu as estava vendo. Eram mulheres somalis com porte de realeza e trajando roupas vivazes. 'Aquelas mulheres, no passado, eram poderosas. São filhas ou esposas de antigos funcionários do governo, algumas chegaram até a ocupar altos cargos. Mulheres que trabalhavam com a diplomacia e lidavam com segredos diplomáticos. Olhe para elas, mesmo mal cuidadas, que belo porte elas têm. E se aquelas mãos já não ostentam joias, ainda reluzem bem-estar. E sabe por quê? É porque, minha filha, elas não se sentem humilhadas de ter que pedir ajuda. Não há nada de errado no que estamos fazendo aqui.' Eu olhava ao meu redor. Não havia rostos tristes, só havia pessoas passando por maus bocados, mas que desejavam superar aquele momento ruim. Nós estávamos entre aquelas pessoas.

Sabe Igiaba, quando te vi assim, eu me senti impotente. Eu era tua mãe, uma adulta, mas me sentia sem recursos.' Porém, mamãe tinha e ainda tem muitos recursos. Começou a me contar histórias da Somália. Porque, para os nômades somalis, sempre há uma solução escondida numa história. Suas histórias tinham um objetivo: ela queria que eu entendesse que não surgíamos do nada; que por trás da gente havia um país, tradições, toda uma história. Não existiam só os antigos romanos e gauleses, não havia só os latinorum e a ágora grega. Havia também o antigo Egito e os coletores de incenso do Reino de Punt, ou seja, da nossa Somália. Havia os reinos de Ashanti e Bambara. Ela queria que eu me sentisse orgulhosa da minha pele negra e da terra que tínhamos deixado para trás por motivos de força maior. Ela me contava dos nossos reinos distantes, das fortes ligações com o Egito, com a Índia, com Portugal, com a Turquia. Ouvindo a mamãe, eu sentia o eflúvio paradisíaco de incenso e unsi, cheiros que motivaram a rainha Hatshepsut da décima-oitava dinastia egípcia a ordenar uma expedição à Somália. Com as suas histórias, minha mãe me livrou do medo que eu tinha de ser uma caricatura viva criada pela cabeça de alguém. Com as suas histórias, Ela fez de mim uma pessoa. De alguma forma, ela me pariu novamente. [...] foi somente quando eu voltei para Somália que comecei a usar novamente minha língua materna. Em poucos meses, comecei a falar muito bem o somali. Agora, posso dizer que tenho duas línguas-mãe que me amam na mesma medida. Graças à palavra, sou hoje o que sou. [...] Eu sou fruto desse caos entrelaçado. E o meu mapa é o espelho daqueles anos de mudanças. Não é um mapa coerente. É centro, mas também é periferia. É Roma, mas também é Mogadíscio. É Igiaba, mas também é você.

The dream unfolds: Somaly and I are sitting at a dinner table. She wears a white sampot covered in jewels perfectly matching her necklace. She’s almost akin to an apsara in a painting—aggressively elegant, like at any second, she’ll bend her hands backward to her wrists, and sway.

The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis, and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. It is we who remain ignorant. Our terror is delivered daily to the wretched of the earth with industrial weapons. But to us, it is left behind on city and village streets by our missiles, drones, and fighter jets. We do not listen to the wails and shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of collective humiliation, repression, and powerlessness that characterizes existence in Israel's occupied territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We do not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a cauldron of hate over time. We are not aware of the very natural lust for revenge against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moment when the rage erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And willfully uninformed, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence that created them. This is a recipe for endless terror.

But in spite of our alleged freedoms today, we cynical, postmodern subjects – finding ourselves overwhelmed by the injunction to transgress and the burden of choosing every aspect of our very existence – compensate for the decline in symbolic efficacy by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to ever new forms of constraint: in short, we demand that the Other act on our behalf. Instead of recognizing that Capital itself is the ultimate power of deterritorialization, we blame the disintegration of symbolic order on some (religious, racial, ethnic) Other. This “postmodern racism” is inherent to the multiculturalist and (allegedly) tolerant reduction of the sphere of politics proper to the clash of cultures. When all conflicts are presupposed to arise from cultural or ethnic differences, we not only miss the true causes of the conflict. More seriously, the pre- supposition functions so as to depoliticize all problems: the result is a cynical subject. This is why the resigned, postmodern subject of late capitalism views anyone with political principles as a dangerous fanatic. Moreover, as Žižek has argued in more recent writings, “the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one.” In other words, democratic openness is based on exclusion, and right-wing populism and liberal tolerance are two sides of the same coin. This explains why there are forms of racism that involve a rejection of Muslims, for example, with the false claim that all Muslims are racist. This implicit moment of racism in liberal “tolerance” is also manifested in the way that the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy has led to the development of a new ideological formation, the universalization of the fantasy image of the helpless victim: “So the much-advertised liberal-democratic “right to difference” and anti-Eurocentrism appear in their true light: the Third World other is recognized as a victim – that is to say, in so far as he is a victim. The true object of anxiety is the other no longer prepared to play the role of victim – such another is promptly denounced as a “terrorist,” a “fundamentalist,” and so on. The Somalis, for example, undergo a true Kleinian splitting into a “good” and a “bad” object – on the one hand the good object: passive victims, suffering starving children and women; on the other the bad object: fanatical warlords who care more for their power or their ideological goals than for the welfare of their own people. The good other dwells in the anonymous passive universality of a victim – the moment we encounter an actual/active other, there is always something with which to reproach him: being patriarchal, fanatical, intolerant … (Metastases, p. 215) All of this supports Žižek’s initial, provocative claim, which at first seemed so outrageous, that unconscious enjoyment was the cause of the West’s indecision during the Bosnian war. It is the enjoyment provided by ideological formations – such as the fantasy image of the victim – that explains the failure of Western intervention in the Bosnian conflict.

China, Singapore, the Gulf States and others can lay claim to the future all they want, but the weary people of this world – those fleeing home only because home, as the Somali-British poet, Warsan Shire, has written, ‘is the mouth of a shark’ and the ‘barrel of a gun’ – give lie to these dreams. It is always those facing the most desperate straits who are most likely to speak the truth. And in their most dire moments, those brave people fleeing the jaws of poverty and violence continue, against all odds, to choose us. They continue to choose democracy.

A Muslim can never become a Christian, but he can become an apostate. Such people do not have a place in Somalia; we will never recognize their existence, and we will slaughter them.” These words, spoken in 2006 by influential Somali Sheikh Nur Barud, sum up the situation for the very few Christians remaining in Somalia, who must live in hiding.

There is truth in the cliché ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. But as the Somalis learned, there’s little value in knowing how to fish if all your fish stocks have been raided. And as many other marginal communities around the world have discovered, if the fish you catch are then seized by warlords, kleptocrats or other exploiters, then you’re still going hungry. Few Western countries really want to get seriously into the nation-building business, identifying it with the seemingly endless and fruitless US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

former engineer turned militia leader whom I’d described as a mix of Che Guevara meets Somali pirates. I spent the bulk of my three weeks in eastern Congo at my hotel bar—the preferred meeting ground for aid workers and the militia leaders who were supposedly the source of all the troubles. The drinks at the hotel were as expensive as those at any bar in New York or London; the bartender told me that on most nights, if he wasn’t careful with his pours, he could empty nearly every bottle and would have nothing for the end of the week. “It’s the cocaine,” he said, which was cheap and all but worthless in the domestic market. Before leaving, I managed to spend several nights

Even in the dark, I could sense the allure of this wild coast. Idaan had a deep quiet, a spooky sense of wilderness and desolation.

But then hope is like heroin for a hostage , and it can be just as destructive.

I was still fresh enough as a hostage to care about my things, like a man who’d lost his head and wanted to put it back on.

I’d never started down the borehole of a firearm before. My heart vibrated, and the dark notion that he might pull the trigger — that I might just see a muzzle flash and flop over in the dust — infected me with a heavy, unusual calm. I wanted to leap and run, but that would have been stupid. I had to sit and accept the prospect of a sudden death.

We do not know the size and strength of our manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness have cast us into them.

The stress of captivity had turned my mind into a cauldron of contradictory ideas — frustration, self-hatred, surprising impulses to violence — and nothing but the discipline of composition could lead me out of the soup.

Good writing could be a release from narcissism, a declaration of independence, a way to furnish the mental prison.

It is living in civilization that keeps us civilized. It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when one is threatened by other men, men of almost mindless resolve.

Those who champion a so-called Independent America will tell you that drones create more enemies than they kill, and that America will attract more admirers by perfecting American democracy. Do you really believe that young men living among the tribes of the Afghan-Pakistan border are less likely to support extremist ideologies if we build better schools in Ohio and better hospitals in Arkansas? Do you accept that Somali jihadis are less likely to plan attacks on Western targets or that U.S. embassies around the world will be safer if U.S. policymakers redouble their commitment to American civil liberties? In the real world, a leader must often choose the least bad of many bad options. Drones achieve military objectives with much less risk for our military and at much lower cost to our economy. Use them. Never

here is something strange. Between the fatwa and the present, religious killers have murdered just one Western artist – the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 for making a film with the Somali feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet in the same period Western culture changed, and not for the better.

En düşük istatistiklere göre,Kamboçya'daki fahişe ve seks kölelerinin sayısı 40.000 ile 50.000 arasında.Kamboçya'da doğan her 40 kızdan 1'inin seks kölesi olarak satılacağı tahmin ediliyor.

Hem her yerde evimdeydim,hem de hiçbir yerde.

We took them from a boat.” He added, referring to the hundreds of ships that are attacked and held for ransom every year off the Somali coastline. He grabbed a fistful of Tara’s blond hair and twisted her head cruelly sideways.

My mother made sweet tea for him. He seemed a good conversationalist, but perhaps not a good listener, because at times he appeared to be engaged in a monologue with himself. In the midst of the conversation, my father gave me five Somali shillings, an amount equivalent to one U.S dollar. I was so excited to have paper money that I left immediately to go to a neighborhood store to buy cold soda and candy. My father was still talking and laughing when I returned to the house. I watched him closely, studying his every move. I wondered if had come to visit me or to consume large quantities of tea.

Başkalarına kendinden ne kadar bahsedersen-ne kadar konuşursan-kendini o kadar tehlikeye atarsın.