My Dostoyevsky Syndrome: How I Escaped Being a Self-Hating Somali

My Dostoyevsky Syndrome: How I Escaped Being a Self-Hating Somali Said S. Samatar The habit of reflection is the most pernicious habit of civilized man. Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim Allahayow nin ii daran maxaan daafta hore seexshay Nin ii daaqsanaayana maxaan daafida u kariyey Jidhku nin uuna dooneyn maxaan hadalka deeqsiiyey Ma degdegee xaajada maxaan ugu dulqaad yeeshay Weji debecsan, dayma aan dareen gelin dubaaqiisa Qosol dibadda yaalloon ka iman dhuunta dacalkeeda Isagoon digniin qabin maxaan kaga deyaan siiyey If any man intended aught of villainy against me By God, how snug I made the forecourt for his bed-mat, nonetheless! And if, with aggression in his thoughts He pastured his horses to get them battle-fit How in spite of this I made him griddle-cakes of maize to eat! Amiably I conversed with him for whom my body felt revulsion. I did not hurry, I was patient in dealing with his tricks. I showed a relaxed and easy mien, My looks gave no grounds for suspicion in his mind Laughter on the surface, not rising from the gullet’s depth. Then, when he was all unknowing and unwarned, O how I struck him down! Ugaas Nuur I. Introduction This is an essay in self-doubt, and in subsequent strivings of the soul to shake off the legion of private demons clamoring to offer their unbid- den company in midnight visitations of the blues. As such, it could be catalogued as a confessional item, as revealing of personality quirks as of political mishaps. A striving confessor, much like a drowning man, must grasp at straws, if only to stave off the looming specter of lost honor. Thus, in the practice of patient soul-exorcism, the handiest 84 Said S. Samatar strategy stems—if one is lucky enough to be favored by the capricious agencies that govern the universe or clever enough to outsmart them — from the vagaries of time. As a venerable Jamaican proverb poeti- cally puts it, “Time longer than Rope” cures all things, from the dis- comforts of the common cold to the more crippling wounds of constricted self-esteem. No doubt this explains why, in the life of nations as of individuals, the measuring devices of time — what we designate as dates—cling to the human conscience as cautionary mon- uments to the clumsy march of history. • 3100 B.C.: the Pharaoh Menes unifies the Upper and Lower lands of the Nile to launch the ancient glory that was Egypt. • 1066 A.D.: the Norman conquest of England ushers in the epoch of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy that was to transform scruffy Britons into a race of world conquering warriors whose empire, at its height, owned a whopping one-fourth of the globe. The sun, bragged British statesmen, never sets on the Union Jack, to which a cynic responded, “And rightly so, because the Almighty does not trust Brits in the dark!” • Every fourth grader with a good tutor knows the world-shattering impact of 1789. • December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor. • September 11, 2001: America is wounded in ways such that she — and the world—will never be the same. • Every Somali must surely think — if he thinks at all — of Sunday, October 3, 1993, as the date that sealed Somalia’s destiny in anarchy and misery. On that bloody Sunday, a force of American Rangers was savaged by Somali warlord General Aideed’s militia in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. Shortly after this disastrous military reversal, the bloodied Americans took the lead in persuading the world community to discard miserable Somalia and leave it to its own devices as a nation of ingrates that, literally, bites the hand that feeds it. In the light of hindsight, the Somalia debacle has taught different lessons to different parties, with varying degrees of interest in the unfortunate outcome. For African states, Somalia represents a cautionary tale in where not to go. For the world at large, “the Cassandra of Africa” became a byword for anarchy and gangsterism. For American military planners, the Somalia disaster was dubbed “the Mogadishu 85 Bildhaan Vol. 2 Syndrome.” It was a harbinger of a new era of nightmarish urban war- fare with no visible enemies to combat and no targets to hit, but only the ghoulish exercise of street fights against ragtag militias that would slink into dark alleys when fired upon, only to reemerge with deadly sniper fire on the hapless Americans in their cumbersome fatigues. The bitter experience taught the Americans to rethink “the science of war,” and to adopt new strategies tailored to “alley” gunfights. Thus, it is Somalia’s dubious honor to have brought about the rethinking of military doctrine in the 20th century. Presumably, the “near-death experience” of the Pentagon in the attacks of September 11, 2001, can now inspire the Fat Boys who work in that building to proceed ever more cautiously, as they prepare to have their “day of reckoning” with the bearded, be-turbaned mullahs in Kabul. For me, the Somalia collapse served to evoke another syndrome, that of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia’s pre-Freudian Freud, mad prophet, and writer of hysterical novels. The Dostoyevsky syndrome began to unfold with his arrest in April 1849, “as a member of a clan- destine circle” of young idealists who evangelized “utopian socialism and dreamed of freedom.”1 Charged with the crime of subversion, which carried the death penalty, Dostoyevsky and his friends “had to undergo,” unbeknownst to them, a “mock execution” wherein: standing before the firing squad he was so certain of the imminence of death that he felt more dead than alive at the abrupt proclamation of the Czar’s clemency; when he finally recovered his senses it was to find him- self in irons and on his way to Siberia.2 Three of Dostoyevsky’s comrades went insane from the harrowing ordeal. Fortunately for posterity (for the world of letters, in particular), the young man destined to become, in André Gide’s judgment, the “greatest novelist” of all time, was spared by some inner resources from cracking up like his fellow cabalists, though the shadow of mad- ness stalked him for the remainder of his life. The four years of incar- ceration at hard labor and five of exile in Siberia were to transform the “father of demented fiction” from a young pretender to sophistication, playing at pan-European cosmopolitanism and contemptuous of “backward Russia” to an archconservative Russophile, who was to attach great, almost mystical values to the alleged wonders of the “Russian soul.”3 The story of his conversion was as improbable as it was bizarre. As the future author of The Brothers Karamazov (“the great- 86 Said S. Samatar est novel ever” — André Gide again) whiled away prison time with murderers and madmen, he was mercilessly taunted by Polish intellec- tual fellow inmates who made common cause in mocking Russia as a nation of “scruffy peasants” with a ruling class of “degenerate leeches.” No love was lost between the Poles and the Russians. The cruel gloating of these sophisticated, unkind fellow prisoners did much to humiliate the sensitive, tremulous, small-statured man. Dos- toyevsky learned shame first hand. His health was permanently impaired as his chronic epilepsy recurred with debilitating frequency. Undoubtedly, self-loathing damages equally the body as well as the soul. And yet, endowed with an inner mettle of steely hardiness, he rebounded to emerge thereafter as a defender of the world’s “insulted and injured,” to say nothing of becoming the apostle of the “Russian soul,” with a nationalistic fervor for “Mother Russia” that bordered on jingoistic dementia. He commenced to see Russia as a pristine, idyllic land, uncontaminated by the sins of godless Western Europe and therefore destined to “save humanity” from its European-led, head- long rush toward nihilistic nightmares. Dostoyevsky turned the act of humiliation into a therapeutic strategy of liberation, personally, politi- cally, and spiritually. The conversion was to unleash his gifts as a novelist of genius with an unparalleled capacity for creating the most memorable character extremes: Starving students and saintly prostitutes, masochistic maidens and sadistic belies, gambling lovers and scheming adolescents, criminals and epileptics, the pure of heart and nihilists, men from the underground and God-seekers, all form a weird, hag-ridden cavalcade of unforget- table characters.4 He also turned out to be something of a Russian national prophet whose funeral was attended by 30,000 mourners. The author of this piece seeks no prophetic pretensions, nor novelistic claims of any sort. And I certainly do not expect 30,000 mourners to turn up at my funeral. I do, however, confess to a Dostoyevskian crisis of the soul. The collapse of the Somali state and the consequent humiliations con- spired to precipitate a personal collapse, so gripping in its call to despair as to frustrate the skills of any aspiring shrink. It led me to appreciate Conrad’s epigraph in the opening page of Lord Jim, abjuring the commemorative power of reflection as the “most pernicious habit of civilized man.” By contrast, Ugaas Nur of northwestern Somalia, the 87 Bildhaan Vol. 2 wily chieftain who, by-the-by, was a contemporary of Conrad’s, could not afford to abjure memory and reflection. Surrounded on all sides by the enemies of his little patrimony, Ugaas Nur is more inclined to har- ness memory as a Machiavellian tool to obliterate his foes. His lines, set against Conrad’s, say as much. To reflect is to remember, and memory seduces the mind, naively believing as it does in the notion of the good old days, when in fact there never has been any such thing.

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