Links by Nuruddin Farah

showed a united front to the hordes of men, women, and children who came from the shanties all around. There was a lot of mingling, a lot of primordial rejoicing. As he watched the shambling efforts at camaraderie, Jeebleh thought nervously about the ingrained mistrust between the youths, who belonged to different subclans, and about the unreleased violence that stalked the people of the land: friends and cousins one instant, sworn foes the next.
    From inside, Jeebleh looked on as a woman in some kind of nurse’s uniform instructed a group of teenagers how to lift the wounded fighter out of the vehicle. The teenagers were rough-hewn in speech and manner, and struck Jeebleh as being careless, picking the wounded youth up like a sack of millet, despite the nurse’s warnings—“Careful, careful!” Jeebleh was reminded of inexperienced furniture movers taking an eight-legged table out of a small room into a bigger one through a tiny door.
    The driver, waiting, kept the engine running.
    Â 
    Â 
    JEEBLEH WAS SAD THAT THE NIGHT HAD FALLEN SO RAPIDLY, AS TROPICAL nights do. He was sad that he took no account of it, when he had wanted to remain alert, from the instant he first remarked that it was coming at them in a series of waves. He wished he were able to tell the meaning of the stirrings in the darkness outside, a darkness that was imbued with what he assumed to be Mogadiscio’s temperamental silence. Jeebleh heard a donkey braying, heard an eerie laughter coming to them from the mournful shanty homes. He had looked forward to the twilight hour, had been prepared to welcome it, hug it to himself, but when it did come he hadn’t been aware of it.
    As they moved, Jeebleh, with nothing better to do, pulled at his crotch to help lift the weight off his balls. From the little he had seen so far, the place struck him as ugly in an unreal way—nightmarish, if he dignified what he had seen of it so far with an apt description. Most of the buildings they drove past—he had known the area well; Bile’s mother had had a house hereabouts once—appeared gutted; the windows were bashed in, like a boxer who had suffered a severe knockout; the glass panes seemed to have been removed, and likewise the roofs. In short, a city vandalized, taken over by rogues who were out to rob whatever they could lay their hands on, and who left destruction in their wake. Jeebleh’s Mogadiscio was orderly, clean, peaceable, a city with integrity and a life of its own, a lovely metropolis with beaches, cafés, restaurants, late-night movies. It may have been poor, but at least there was dignity to that poverty, and no one was in any hurry to plunder or destroy what they couldn’t have. He doubted if there was enough space in people’s minds for the pleasures he had enjoyed when living in Mogadiscio.
    â€œI feel embarrassed that my colleague was rude to you in my presence,” the driver said. “I cannot apologize enough. Kindly forgive us!”
    â€œI suppose I should’ve said to the Major that I had returned to reemphasize my Somaliness—give a needed boost to my identity,” Jeebleh said tentatively. “Do you think that would’ve made any sense to him?”
    â€œI doubt that it would have.”
    â€œTo tell you the truth, I was fed up being asked by Americans whether I belonged to this or that clan,” Jeebleh continued, “many assuming that I was a just-arrived refugee, fresh from the so-called clan fighting going on in our country. It’s irritating to be asked by people at the supermarket which clan I belong to. Even the colleagues I’ve known for years have been lousy at secondguessing how I felt about clan identity and my loyalty to it. You see, we Somalis who live in America, we keep asking one another where we stand on the matter of our acquired new American identity. I’ve come because I want to know the answers. I also wanted to visit these