Links by Nuruddin Farah

Author:Nuruddin Farah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

16.

“HAVE WE GRIEVED ENOUGH?” JEEBLEH ASKED.

“I doubt that we have,” Bile replied.

“Do we know how to grieve? And if we don’t, why not?”

“I don’t know if it is possible to have a good, clean grief when people have no idea how big a loss they have suffered, and when each individual continues denying his or her own part in the collapse.”

“Aren’t many Somalis mourning?”

“We mistake a personal hurt for a communal hurt,” Bile insisted. “I find this misleading, I find it highly unproductive.”

Jeebleh recalled Bile’s early loss of his own father, allegedly at Caloosha’s hands. Seamus had lost his brother, a sister, and his father to sectarian violence in Ireland. Does a child mourn a loss in the same way an adult does? Is there a time limit, a cutoff point after which grieving becomes ineffective?

“How have you coped?” Jeebleh asked.

“I’ve kept myself infernally busy, and I attend to other people’s needs, not mine. I haven’t had the time or the strength to grieve or to deal squarely with the ruin that is all around. Instead I wallow in my sorrows often enough, and feel a more profound despair when I think I might have achieved something more substantial if I had intervened politically, and tried to make peace between the warring sides.”

“Why haven’t you tried to do that?”

“I hadn’t realized until seeing you that I jumped in at the deep end on the day I gained my freedom and decided to stay, and when I chose to set up a refuge, look out for Raasta, be close to Shanta, who is forever needy, and not enter what passes for politics hereabouts.”

“Is there anybody for you to talk to?”

“It’s too late for me to search out interlocutors worth taking seriously and trusting, too late for me to get involved in peacemaking now.”

“Why is that?”

“I would be like an ant that got distracted and went out of the line and is now trying to find its way back into the ranks after a storm has disorganized the line.”

Bile’s worries were posted on his forehead, visible signs of what weighed on his mind. Jeebleh’s own restless thinking led him to his preoccupations. Unlike Bile, who had stayed away from “what passes for politics hereabouts,” he had taken the plunge into the chaotic energy of the place. Now, as a consequence, he was getting lost in the claims and counterclaims of clan politics.

A cat entered the room as though it had more rights to be there than Bile, the resident of the apartment, or his guest. To judge from the way Bile stared at the creature, they were strangers to each other; Jeebleh sensed an unspoken hostility. The cat looked at Jeebleh, then at Bile, then blinked at them both, and made itself comfortable as only cats can in a place where they do not belong. It took its feline time, stretching, yawning, looking at them again. It looked at Jeebleh and smiled, then at Bile without smiling, and caressed its whiskers, Jeebleh thought, in the brooding manner of a man pretending to be thinking.

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