Notes from a fractured generation

I was born on this land after the 1990s, at the close of the previous century, into a life shaped by statelessness and displacement. I belong to a generation that opened its eyes amid exile and wandering. The first sounds that startled us awake were the crack of gunfire and the heavy darkness of refugee camps. Hunger became our constant neighbor. Many of us were raised within the crowded confines of displacement camps. Homes turned into spaces where we were taught the clans and lineages from which we came. Places of worship became sites where armed religious movements were ignited.

Our education was, and still is, without firm foundations or stable pillars. We never received a unified curriculum or a meaningful system of learning. My generation came of age at a moment when the intellectuals of society had already fled the land. What remained were figures unable to anticipate what lay ahead, burdened by resentment, and it was among them that we wandered and grew up. The tyranny of dictatorship, the refusal of the short-sighted to compromise, and the resentments that ignited conflict left their full consequences in the hands of my generation.

From the refugee camps, the intellectuals called out to us with appeals for peace. Meanwhile those whose actions had led us into displacement, called for war. In his memoirs, the late surgeon, politician, and former Minister of Health, Mohammed Adan Sheikh, makes a clear admission: “Somalia was torn apart by warlords. Afterwards, they attempted to empty historical memory of meaning, stripping society of every civilizational and religious value, as well as every form of brotherly solidarity. In their place, they imposed a culture of violence and hatred.”

The marks of civil war, the darkness of refugee camps, hunger, and the absence of meaningful education have left us, thirty years later, sharing a deep and collective exhaustion. As we share this exhaustion, we also share fragmentation and forms of separation that are intellectual, emotional, and psychological. We became the firewood that fuels religiously framed and clan-based wars. Warlords rode on our backs, as if my generation had been born solely to perish. At that point, we fractured from within. One part surrendered to circumstance and exile. Another looked upon death and saw in it a chance for escape and the promise of a different life. Those who stayed were struck by the bullets of warlords. Those who fled were swallowed by the sea. Yet both groups carry the same inheritance of despair, hopelessness, and dissonance. We were born into death and misfortune. Our parents often referred to their era as “the good old days.” We named ours “the mournful days.” They spoke of days of safety and healing. We spoke of days of mourning and illness.

In this way, my generation became victims twice over. First, we were raised in fragmentation. Later, we were consumed by life itself. The era of collapse into which we were born shaped fractured bodies, a fractured collective memory, and a fractured history. The generations before us, whose own hands destroyed society, never gathered beneath a tree to ask whether they could create a livable future for those who would come after them. Today, my generation too fails to ask whether we can create a life worth living, and whether we can offer the next generation a future that spares them the suffering we endured.

There is no doubt that my generation stands before the task of finding a path out of social fragmentation and existential and material collapse, while reckoning honestly with this shared damage and keeping its gaze fixed on what lies ahead. Mohammed Adan Sheikh writes in the same memoir: “In every political situation, and in military ones as well, there are choices to be made. There are possible paths that those who hold the knife can consider, in order to reach the best possible outcome or to avoid the worst consequences.”

In this spirit, recalling the poet Mohamed Mahmoud Qaaqaa’s words, “In times of darkness, no lost man’s shadow will ever lead you.” my generation must wrest the knife from those purveyors of confusion who have clung to the past for thirty years without producing anything effective or worthy of life. Those who wandered at the end of the last century cannot be the source from which my generation seeks guidance in the century whose beginning we entered in ruins.

Once again, my generation must choose with care and think deeply about practical steps and viable paths that lead toward the best outcomes and help us avoid the catastrophic fate that befell the generations before us. We must free ourselves from the snares of clan fixation and sub-clan enclosures, and must restore education and freedom of thought so that thinkers may emerge who are capable of responding to a society that has collapsed and remained suspended for thirty years.

This echoes what Basil Davidson wrote in the introduction to the aforementioned memoirs: “When thinking about Somalia’s future, it is certain that a return to the past will not occur. That may be why Mohammed Adan does not linger on recounting the achievements of the 1970s, because life cannot be restored once it has ended. At the very least, it cannot be revived by breathing into it again using the same paths and the same tools.”

My generation must refuse to remain trapped in exhaustion and withdrawal, or to stand watch over a corpse that has been repeatedly breathed into for thirty years. Instead, we must accept that our duty lies in redefining and recharting Somalia, whose reconstruction was torn apart by warlords. From there, my generation should attempt to rebuild a history that carries meaning, and then restore every civilizational and religious value, along with every form of brotherly solidarity.

We must consult one another and replace the culture of violence and hatred that led to destruction with a culture of compromise and mutual restoration. This would dismantle the project of withdrawal and fragmentation upon which confusion-makers, intoxicated by greed and spectacle, continue to drain the blood of our generation and those yet to come.