Why are mortars and mounted jeeps Cannons and missiles Weapons untargeted At midnight and daytime Fired on the town? What crime have the people committed? … Does someone get paid For the dead and the wounded? Is the flow of their blood Turned into a mineral like gold? ..MR0-
Odd as it may seem, such verse could help ease Somalia’s torment. From the outside, the country looks as jury-rigged as Kaarlye’s recording setup. Illiterate bush kids carry assault rifles, drive Land Cruisers and listen to rock and roll at top volume-when they’re not fighting each other. The nomadic code of right and wrong has disappeared and nothing has replaced it. But poetry is a powerful component of Somali culture, and poets remain highly esteemed. Traditionally, almost every significant event in Somali life was composed in verse: marriage, separation, a mother’s advice to her daughter about whom to marry, even a petition to God. Poems incited wars-and helped end them. “The peace genre of Somali poetry has a cooling effect, like pouring water over hot coals,” says Said Samatar, a Somali professor of history at Rutgers University who was raised as a nomad.
Again the poets are trying, at least, to put out the fires. But few people have a chance to hear them. “I am almost alone here now,” says Kaariye, 54, who lives in a dilapidated artists’ colony in southern Mogadishu. “We weren’t happy to leave one another, but people fled to different places because they were scared.” Of about 80 poets, playwrights and singers who once lived in the colony, only five remain. Kaariye would like to reunite his fellow artists in a performance that would urge reconciliation. But at the moment he is reluctant even to enter the National Theatre: the pockmarked building is near the Green Line, a refuge for bandits.
Every poet has his own horror story. Abdulle Rageh, who has lived in an abandoned house on the north side of Mogadishu since fleeing his own home in the south, lost his eldest son last November to a group of thugs. “They captured him, put a muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger,” he says. Mustapha Sheik Elmi recalls the night shells blasted his neighborhood, rocking his house and dusting his family with sand. He and his children ran outside. “One of my daughters came to me and said, ‘Father, what is this meat?’” Elmi recalls. “It was a human hand. I asked them: ‘Do you all have your hands?’” The severed hand, it turned out, belonged to a dead neighbor. Still, the poets persist. Elmi recently helped bring 200 leading members of the feuding Hawadle and Abgal subclans together in a Mogadishu villa. As a rock band banged such tunes as the reggae classic “I Shot the Sheriff,” waiters delivered heaping trays of rice and meat. Explained the poet: “In Somali culture, if two people eat something together, they won’t fight again.”
There’s a limit to how many people the poets can reach personally. Cassette tapes and radio can be powerful media in a country with a deep oral tradition. The BBC sometimes features Somali poetry, but stations in Mogadishu are run by warring subclans and thus boycotted by those poets who consider themselves neutral. Poets in Mogadishu, as well as Somali intellectuals outside the country, have urged the United Nations to help them disseminate antiwar verse. One widely promoted idea is to create an independent radio station, located outside the domain of rival warlords, yet strong enough to reach the most remote village. “Just beam in the lyrics,” says Samatar. “I’m convinced it would have a great effect.”
Most Somali can’t afford batteries now, so they probably wouldn’t hear radio broadcasts unless the United Nations also distributed speakers to local tea shops or other gathering spots, relief workers argue. And the creation of a “Radio Free Somalia” under U.N. auspices raises the thorny issue of intervention. Opponents of the idea argue that the radio station might be seen as a first step toward a U.N. trusteeship-and thus as a threat by at least some of the local warlords. A few lines of misguided verse could make the United Nations a party to the conflict rather than an intermediary.
Peace-minded Somali could try to set up a station on their own-which might have more impact than yet another U.N. project, showing outsiders as well as locals that rich Somali are willing to make sacrifices to save their country. But many wealthy Somali seem more interested in cash than in verse. A bronze statue of Somalia’s greatest poet of this century, Mohamed Abdulle Hasan, who led a revolt against British colonial occupation, once stood in front of Somalia’s Parliament building. The plinth is now empty. According to Mogadishu residents, the statue was dismantled and shipped abroad, to be sold as scrap.
