A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) Read Online Free PDF Page A

about which he would often change his mind. That he was an Abdullahi and an AliYusuf would disappear from his life for years on end; there are, he would discover, many ways of being Somali other than through one’s clan. And then, without warning, his lineage would burst back into his life and shape his fate. When it did so, he would feel that he had been asleep for years, reeling further and further from himself.
    There and then, on that truck, Asad and Abdi were two minors without family. They were headed south toward Kismayo, the last Somali city before the Kenyan border, in a vehicle commanded by people with no immediate interest in their fate.
    On the second night, they stopped at a town called Afmadow. In each previous town, the refugees had settled into mutually wary groups, and everything had felt brittle and on edge. Here, there were people in control. Some of the men in charge were government soldiers. Others were clearly not. The memory of them brings forth fragmentary images from Mogadishu: Asad recalls important men striding through government buildings. These buildings were unlike any others in Mogadishu. He remembers them by their very tall arches; he remembers walking beneath an arch and looking up. The men here in Afmadow, he registered, moved with the same long and purposeful strides as the ones in the government buildings.
    For the first time, Asad was asked two questions that would be repeated to him again and again over the following twenty years: Who is your father? What is your clan?
    He grabbed these questions gratefully, as if they were gifts of milk and bread. “Abdullahi Hirsi,” he replied. “AliYusuf.” These men would know what to do with such information. Perhaps they would lead him to uncles or other family; perhaps Aabbo himself was here.
    Asad and Abdi were assigned places to rest for the night. They bedded down side by side. Many other bodies surrounded them. Asad enters the head of his young self, drifting off to sleep in a strange city on an evening in February 1991, and he thinks he knows what the young Asad saw. He rose up above the mishmash of bodies and found a cord running from each, just where the buttocks meet the back. These cords all raced away in one direction, many dozens of them, toward Mogadishu, where each made its way to the home in which its owner belonged. Asad’s cord snaked into the house he had sketched for me and found its way to the parental bedroom where it wrapped itself with hunger around his sleeping mother.
    When he woke, it was daylight. People were walking about. It seemed that much time had passed. He turned to his cousin to find that Abdi was not there. He remembers wandering from adult to adult, asking each if he had seen his cousin. And then his memory blanks. He does not recall how he found out that during the night the important men who reminded him of the government buildings had recruited Abdi into a militia, that they were conscripting every boy fifteen years or older to fight.

Yindy
    The stack of names Asad had offered when first asked—his own name, that of his father, his lineage, his clan—entered the great circuit of information that traveled through the ranks of Afmadow’s refugees. It was as if Asad’s lineage was being poured through a sieve so that the grit of thicker, closer attachments would get caught in the netting.
    At some point during this process of sifting, Asad was led by the hand through a market in the very center of the city and deposited into the hands of a woman he did not recognize. He had been told that she was family, close family, and that she would look after him. He remembers well his first sight of her. She sat on a low stool, legs apart, stirring a large pot of tea. Her name was Yindy. As with his siblings, Asad describes her in the first instance by her teeth.
    “They were damaged,” he says. “I had never seen teeth like these before. They were black, as if they were bruised. As if somebody had beaten her