I planned to chronicle my time in Somalia. Then got second thoughts

For a year now, I have been talking about my trip to Somalia, the country I’m from but never visited. I had always planned to return, and when my grandad fell ill and eventually passed away (Allah yarhammu) last year, I began to feel that time was running out. I also desperately needed a break from my life in medicine, which had involved moving every year (sometimes every six months) for the past four years. I was completely over it and in need of a reset.

So, I booked a five-week trip for my mum and me to Somalia. My aunt and her three teenage sons would join us. We rented a house in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland and spent the time with my extended family, all of whom I was meeting for the first time.

As I took in my surroundings and thought about sharing my musings, a sense of unease swirled within me. The discomfort was about how I, a diaspora Somali, was coming into Somalia and reporting on what I was seeing. I questioned my motivation for reporting in the first place, and how much of it was being driven by an internalised western perspective that assumes westerners have something inherently valuable to say about faraway lands.  

I want to say something that is probably obvious to you, but which came as a shock to me: I am very much a westerner. Just saying it makes me want to do the burambuur and make canjeero (lol), and it flies in the face of what I’ve told myself and what my world has reflected back to me my whole life. It is very easy for me to see my Somalinimo in the context of the perpetual minority state in which I live. We see the contrast: yep, I take my shoes off in the house and you don’t; I cannot eat before an elder, and you can; I’ll get the ginger beer, thanks; I talk with my hands like I’m doing taekwondo. As a uni student on my PWI campus, I used to say I may as well be green. That awareness of my differences has mellowed and settled as I’ve gotten older and gotten out of my own way about these things. She’s still there, no doubt, in an evolved state — the Alien Superstar-ification of my superego, if you will. But the central narrative remains the same: I’m mali af.  

It’s funny how what we tell ourselves about ourselves is kind of bullshit. What is much harder for me to see is how I am a westerner. I am–gasp–like them, and the west lives within me. My New Zealander-ness came out in quantifiable, external ways at first. I’d reach for the seatbelt instinctively in the beat-up Toyota taxis that had probably been running since Purple Rain, only to find that, half the time, they weren’t there. And when they were, no one used them. It took me two weeks to stop freaking out in every car ride. Or how I was horrified by the littering, and one time I broke and went on a tirade to my cousin about how her plastic bag could kill birds, only to see that she was looking at me, befuddled. Turns out, she did not give a shit about the birds. That’s a Kiwi-ass rant to go on right there.  

But it did run deeper than that. My image of Somalia going in was shaped by my parents’ 30-year-old perspective of a war-torn country with animosities that ran deeper than one could imagine. I read history books on the border wars in the Horn of Africa, military coups, a country brought to its knees in the early 1990s, and one that never quite stood up again. By projecting my familial history onto present-day Somalia, I imagined — without realising — a people that were 30 years behind. What I found instead was a society that had largely moved on and had new things to worry about.

Thinking that people are behind you, or in harsher terms, backwards, is pure colonialism. Most of us–I hope–have decolonised our minds enough to reject the notion of the conqueror as the default superior and the conquered as inferior. But that hierarchy exists covertly elsewhere, and I thought about it existing in the realm of the observer vs. the observed. Colonialism has always privileged the eye that watches, not the figure that is being watched. Of course, bearing witness and reporting on what you observe can be powerful testimony. But thinking that this is because you are reporting it to others like you — that kind of thinking comes from the logic of empire. Like you’re taking information back to the real place, where real people live and real decisions are made, and so they ought to know about what has been recorded. This thought process is why history books will, to this day, quote primary sources from some white guy who went to a foreign country, rather than primary sources from the actual people of that land. This covertly espouses the white man (read: colonial, often literally) as the objective observer, rather than what he really was: a foreigner without a lick of local context to explain what the eff he’s seeing. The same goes for how museums in the global north will have stacks of photos and paintings of subjugated peoples just for us to observe, as if the western observer’s gawking has ever done anyone any good. The gaze is dehumanising, as the feminists would say. But it’s the colonial observer’s insistence that their observations are special that exists everywhere around us. It’s why every other year some westerner will write a book titled a variation of “This is how the whole world and known universe and all of space and time works” — that’s definitely a ‘my observations are king’ move. You are not going to find other traditions with that level of arrogance.

And perhaps the same goes for me. I did write and want to share my descriptions of the land I went back to, the eyes I looked into, the children, my family. But I also struggled to separate my genuine creative urge to share my disjointed homecoming from the colonial-born lens that lives within — the one that tells me that my observer eyes matter in a different, superior way. One of my preoccupations is how colonialism has so deeply affected how people in the west think that they don’t even catch their own bullshit. Turns out it’s got its claws in me too. Maybe thinking about how it sucks is as much a part of its machinations to keep us captive. All publicity is good publicity, you know. Perhaps I should take a leaf from Hargeisa and simply get on with it.

In my formative years, I spent my time closer to the bottom of the social order in New Zealand. The hierarchies I subconsciously accepted in my world were tipped upside down by being in the global south. I suddenly found myself at the top. In a very material way, I was so obviously a beneficiary of the systems of power that exist in that world. If anything, I’m closer to the top than the bottom. There’s a dissonance there that is difficult for me to reconcile when I write about Somalia. But I think that space has also filled me with a type of gratitude that leaves one humble, not haughty. It made me want to step down, not step up. But I definitely need to build a bridge and get over it, so take this post as a massive grain of salt for everything else I write about Somalia.

This article was originally published on Fardowsa’s Substack in September. The link can be found here.