Free Transit by Abdourahman A. Waberi Page A

we managed to avoid the cold kiss of killing steel by keeping ourselves at a respectful distance from the authorities. But as one might expect—and perhaps we nourished some illusions in this respect—your father received a cool welcome from his family, and even from some of his friends who had recently returned to the fold. The time was not ripe for mixed-race love or mixed flavors in this erratic country, this womb so fertile it cannot keep its children unless it uses a straitjacket and holds them in neurotic silence.
    When we landed we were dreaming of a world in which people looked each other straight in the eye and spoke to each other like human beings, a world where people spoke man to man the way South Americans address each other— Hombre! —with no distinctions of class, race, or nationality. Alas, this country and its sun drove me mad. Their way of living in apnea infuriated me. Always waiting, spying on the neighbor's breathing, the cousin's breathing, the breathing of the man who came back from Ethiopia that summer or the woman who just found a meaningless administrative job at the Fisheries through her relatives. Waiting. Waiting. I could have written a whole notebook of his return to the country of his ancestors as I waited.
    But there were also things more serious than my petty bouts of melancholy; what's more, you know me, I'm not a poetess of the tropics, you can see that straightaway, right? Sure, they'd warned me, but really, as long as you haven't lived through something yourself it's a waste of time. As long as you haven't felt the tough, concrete reality in your own flesh it doesn't amount to a row of beans. Ali Aref's henchmen kept the little colony in a state of permanent terror as if their political mentors were Dr. Malan and the farmer Ian Smith, respectively the brain behind apartheid in South Africa and the strong manof the future Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia after the name of the British explorer and builder but nonetheless exterminator Cecil Rhodes. On the map of Africa, only Djibouti—besides Rhodesia and Pretoria—was still living under the colonial yoke. I'm sorry, my little cactus, if I'm giving you so many political examples that are not from your time. It's to better render the sound and fury of that period, nauseating and explosive all at once, and then I felt terrible when they associated me with the last little bunch of colonists just because I was French. In fact, I was a walking disgrace; maybe you'll understand that some day. An animal with horns avoided by your father's so-called friends. I couldn't have cared less about their distrust, aside from the fact that all around us the atmosphere was insurrectional. The lower city was untenable even if the Foreign Legion held the main roads and intersections from the end of the afternoon on. On the Richter scale of fear, our world had toppled into eruptive, telluric panic. A world the color of meat and blood. Of poverty, too: never had I seen so many begging hands at every bus stop, so many malnourished children as there were the month after we arrived. It's because of the famine in Ethiopia, said the propaganda. And a world of bling and lucre, where, at noon prayer on Fridays, we could already see crowds of suvs, exhibited as zebus once were in times gone by.
    Ali Aref and his supporters had done all they could to sort people out, and anathema and exclusion were the rule. Your membership in a tribe, or more precisely a clan, contrary to the common appellation, was stamped on your identity card, and, as if that weren't enough, they invented a new population category, decreed non-native on the pretext that they were supposed to be from Somalia. Non-natives and nomads of the inner country had to go through the Balbala checkpoint to get here, to the capital. This checkpoint was a miniature BerlinWall. One word too many and you'd be accused of sabotage on the spot, handcuffed, shackled, and brought to the