SURESH RAMPHUL
What does it mean to live in fear and run for your life amid Somalia’s impending civil war? British fiction writer, born in Somalia, Nadifa Mohamed, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, tells the heart-wrenching story of three women desperately caught in chaotic situations. 9-year-old Deqo is an urchin cared for by prostitutes in a refugee camp; Kawsar, an elderly, is bedbound as a result of a savage aggression by the police. She has had several miscarriages in her life and the babies are all buried in the orchard. Then we have a female soldier in her 30s named Filsan. She is responsible for brutality on Kawsar, who will find herself with a broken hip. Circumstances will bring them together. When Filsan’s lover will die in a shooting, she realizes belatedly that her life is virtually empty and that she is serving the army for nothing. As a deserter she redeems herself by braving all obstacles to undertake a perilous journey with the child and the invalid to nearby Ethiopia. Nadifa Mohamed’s “The Orchard of lost souls” was published by Simon and Schuster, London, in 2013.
The parade
1988. It is now 18 years since the President’s rise to power after a military coup in Somalia. It is celebration time. People are trudging to the stadium to attend. They have been forced to do so. They have been instructed through megaphones what to wear. The point is to show the foreign dignitaries how loved the regime is. The stadium, made for 3,000 spectators, is crammed with some 10,000. It is a world of pretension. The foreigners will take the popularity of the regime for granted but we know that the reality is different. People are increasingly disillusioned and discouraged and there is a rebellion brewing to oust the President.
A mammoth painting of the dictator (page 7) is hanging over the stadium. Incidentally, in V.S.Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River”, Penguin Books 1980, in which the location is an unnamed African State, we are told that the President’s photograph is everywhere. This makes the narrator, Salim, feel that they were all serving him. The omnipresence of the President’s painting or photograph is often a powerful psychological means to emphasize total power over the people. Even in his absence, he is there, right in front of you, behind you, on your head, next to you. In Naipaul’s book, “all along the road were big boards about ten feet high, uniformly painted, each with a separate saying or maxim of the President. Some of the painted portraits of the President were literally as big as a house. We had nothing like that in our town. Everything in our town, as I realized, was on a smaller scale. There was an element of pathos in these maxims, portraits and statues, in this wish of a man of the bush to make himself big, and setting about it in such a crude way. I even felt a little sympathy for the man who was making such a display of himself.” (p 258)
To come back to our book, General Haaruun arrives. Kawsar blames him in her heart for her daughter’s arrest and disappearance. Deqo is participating in a dance (she has been promised a pair of shoes) but confused by the dust beaten up by the dancers and the discordant music, she makes a few wrong movements. She is isolated, thrashed, and insulted. Kawsar notices this. She protests vehemently. Filsan takes her to the police who will leave her with a permanent injury. And Filsan, for all her loyalty, is mishandled by the General himself: he touches her inappropriately in the car on the way to a hotel. She resists. She is disgustedly pushed out and left alone to make her way home.
We are revolted at the way women are arbitrarily arrested, cruelly treated and disrespectfully handled. The soldiers hold the power and they think they can do what they want. There is no sense of justice. Kawsar is falsely accused of assaulting the soldiers. Deqo sleeps in a barrel, collects fruits and sells them for cheap; her clothes are “items that ghosts have left behind” (p 50). She is herself like a ghost “unseen by passers-by, tripped over, stepped on” (p 58). Being a refugee she has no right to enter public buildings. This means no schooling. The government is more interested in holding on to power than working towards eliminating poverty.
Child soldiers
In the refugee camps “no one dares challenge the Guddi (soldiers), least of all the aid workers who have to do what they are told by the armed policemen who bounce around the camps in jeeps” (p 98). It is the reign of fear, submission and bending to authority. We are shocked to see children pursued by soldiers in vehicles, captured and led to the lorry “arms twisted behind their backs” (p 99). A woman shouts: the boy is too young for conscription but the children are compelled to join the army to fight the rebels. It is harrowing to see children separated from their parents. In “A Bend in the River” one character, Zabeth, talks about the villages and mentions “Young men were being kidnapped here and there by the police and the army: it was the new government tactic.” (p 231)
When children are coerced into combat, it raises certain disturbing questions. What will happen to their future? Despite international protocols on children’s rights, the children recruited forcefully and illegally will be exposed to death. They will be trained to kill. NEWSWEEK, May 13, 2002, in a report covering child soldiers, wrote about how children are drugged and brainwashed into becoming killing machines. One child survivor reported that they would make a shallow cut on the temple, beside his right eye, pour powder in it and cover it with a plaster. The child said, “Afterward I did not see anything having any value, I did not see any human being having any value.” Another child survivor recounted how they cut his left pectoral to put in heroin. During operations he took drugs two or three times a day. It made him feel powerful and fearless.
One child confessed that when villagers refused to clear out of an area the child soldiers would strip them naked and burn them to death. Sometimes they used plastic, sometimes a tire. The children would “partially sever a person’s neck, then leave him on the road to die slowly”. One child revealed: “I saw a pregnant woman split open to see what the baby’s sex was”. The children were forced to do amputations – villagers were called out and ordered to stand in line. The victims were asked if they wanted a long hand or a short hand (amputations at the wrist or elbow). The children were promoted according to the number of amputated hands they collected in a bag. This is just to say how war dehumanizes the perpetrators of violence and how it makes innocent victims suffer untold misery.
Anarchy
In “The Orchard of lost souls” women are running their families because their husbands have been grabbed off the street and conscripted. BBC broadcast has been banned. The shops are bare “as the subsidized rice and flour have disappeared to allow the government to obtain more foreign loans” (p 150). Sacks of USAID donations smuggled from refugee camps are sold at ridiculous prices. 10 doctors are executed for organizing a clean-up of a hospital. Kawsar is at a loss: “policemen have become torturers, veterinarians doctors, teachers spies and children armed rebels” (p 165). Her husband, a policeman, was made to retire early – “the police service had purged all of those who challenged the government edicts” (p 141). People are accused of giving water to the rebels: their reservoir is to be destroyed.
Nadifa Mohamed’s account is poignant and thought-provoking. Power in the wrong hands can lead to anarchy and immense suffering. Her evocation of a disorganized and disordered nation and her portrayal of tormented characters are strikingly realistic. She justifies the tough and distressing events and scenes in the book by stating that her approach was to bring violence out in the open and make it something we confront; “So even if it is difficult to write, I force myself to because an honest portrayal of reality demands that.”
Being dispossessed of everything is demoralizing. For the victims of war and dictatorship, it will be a long and slow road to recovery.
