The places where memory lives

In the schools that Somaliland’s post-civil-war generation remembers, the war that had devastated much of the territory’s major cities had not entirely left the classroom. Its marks remained on blackboards and damaged doors. Chairs were scarce enough that some of us sat on empty milk cans and bricks. The buildings in which we learned seemed themselves to be lessons in what had happened.

This was Somaliland in the mid-to-late 1990s. Peace did not return in a grand ceremony. It was assembled gradually, amid ruined neighborhoods and families trying to reconnect after displacement and war. Homes had to be rebuilt. Schools had to reopen. Livelihoods had to be recovered. For many families, remembering what had been lost was less urgent than surviving what remained.

Only thirty-one years earlier, the mood had been very different. On June 26th, 1960, British rule ended in Somaliland. The Union Jack came down in Hargeisa and a blue-and-white starred Somali flag was raised. Five days later, on July 1st, Somaliland united with the former Italian-administered territory to the south to form the Somali Republic. The union carried with it an extraordinary political hope, that territories divided by colonial borders might become part of a larger Somali nation.

By 1991, that hope had collapsed into war. The destruction was material and immediately visible. Artillery fire and air strikes, as later recalled by those who resisted to partake, destroyed homes, schools, libraries, public buildings, and historic neighborhoods. Families fled, sometimes carrying little more than what they needed to stay alive. But war destroys in another way, too, one that is more difficult to measure. It interrupts the transmission of memory.

Objects disappear. Archives are scattered. Books vanish. Recordings are lost. Elders die before what they know has been documented. Children grow up knowing that something existed before them without necessarily having the places, institutions, or people through whom they can encounter it. My generation came of age inside that interruption.

We were children of reconstruction. The priorities around us were understandably practical. A society emerging from conflict has to make unforgiving choices. If a town needs both a clinic and a library, which comes first? If there is money for a hospital or a museum, who can argue against the hospital? The answer seems obvious. And yet the question becomes more complicated when stretched over a generation.

A hospital keeps bodies alive. Roads reconnect towns. Water systems allow communities to function. But what happens to a society when the rebuilding of its cultural life is indefinitely postponed? Who preserves the recordings, poems, manuscripts, photographs, stories, and memories that explain to a young person where he or she comes from?

During the two-thousands, while Somaliland was still rebuilding much of its physical infrastructure, another kind of infrastructure was entering our homes. The satellite dish became increasingly common. YouTube appeared. Social networks followed. Suddenly, a generation whose access to its own cultural archive was limited had access to an apparently limitless stream of other people's stories.

Turkish, Mexican, and Arab television dramas became part of everyday life. I remember, in particular, the Turkish series Noor. Episodes were discussed passionately during school breaks -- characters and story lines could occupy conversations as though the events had happened among people we knew. There was pleasure in this, of course.

Foreign culture was not itself the problem. As one of Somali most influential living scholars, Hussein A. Bulhan, argues in In-Between Three Civilizations, Somali society has long been shaped by the interaction of indigenous African, Arab-Islamic, and Western civilizations. The problem, therefore, was not cultural influence in itself, but the loss of balance among these traditions and the gradual alienation from parts of our own historical and cultural foundations.

We could enter those fictional worlds every evening, yet much of the intellectual and cultural world that had produced our own parents and grandparents remained strangely difficult to reach. Somali poetry might be celebrated as an inheritance, but where could a young person encounter the poets? Where could you find old recordings? Where could you sit with a playwright, a historian, a filmmaker, or an elder and ask questions? Where was the place in which heritage stopped being something you were instructed to be proud of and became something you could actually experience?

Then, in 2008, something deceptively simple happened in Hargeisa: people gathered around books. The first Hargeisa International Book Fair was held on August 21st and 22nd at Guriga Shaqaalaha, in the heart of the capital. In its earliest form, the fair was modest. But the significance of what was being created was much larger than the number of books displayed in a hall.

For visitors from outside Somaliland, the fair offered a way of encountering a place rarely represented internationally except through the vocabulary of conflict and political uncertainty. For those of us who were young and living there, its effect was more intimate. It created a space in which reading, writing, history, poetry, photography, theatre, and argument could be treated not as luxuries but as parts of public life.

Over time, Hargeisa became a meeting point for writers and thinkers from Somaliland, the wider Somali-speaking world, Africa, and beyond. Guests have included Wale Okediran, Jonny Steinberg, Maimouna Jallow, Mpalive Msiska, Ciku Kimeria, Dzekashu MacViban, Yusuf K. Serunkuma, Hannah Pool, and Miroslav Bárta, among many others. Delegations came from different countries and literary traditions, including writers such as Firas Khelifi and Jamel Ben Saidan from Tunisia.

At the fair, the figures whose names belonged to books, poems, films, radio programs, or older people's conversations could suddenly be sitting only a few chairs away. We could learn from the teacher and filmmaker Siciid Saalax Axmed. We could listen to Siciid Jaamac, explain the discipline of the short story. We could hear poets such as Rashiid Sheekh Cabdillaahi and Faarax Gamuute, or encounter the great Maxamed Ibraahim Warsame Hadraawi, whose poetry occupied an almost singular place in Somali cultural life.

The distance between an established writer and an aspiring one could become remarkably small. If prose interested you, you found Siciid Jaamac. If theatre interested you, there was Siciid Saalax. If poetry was the world you wanted to enter, conversations with Hadraawi, Faarax Gamuute, and others made that world tangible. This accessibility may have been one of the fair's most radical qualities.

Cultural knowledge is often discussed as though it moves automatically from one generation to the next. It does not. Transmission requires proximity. Someone has to speak and someone else has to be close enough to listen. At HIBF, that proximity was deliberately cultivated.

Workshops developed around creative writing, photography, journalism, literature, and other forms of artistic practice. Young people came to Hargeisa from Somaliland's different regions as members of readers' clubs representing their towns and communities. Some arrived before the fair itself to participate in intensive training, then remained as volunteers and participants during the festival.

A young person might come because he liked books and leave imagining himself as a photographer. Someone who had never considered becoming a writer might attend a workshop and begin writing. A volunteer could discover journalism, publishing, cultural management, or theatre almost accidentally. This is one of the peculiar powers of a cultural institution, it gives form to possibilities that a person may not yet know exist.

The fair also attempted something more complicated than celebration. It treated Somali culture as something capable of exchange. Through initiatives such as Iswaydaarsi—“The Exchange”—literary translation became a two-way conversation. Under the direction of Dr. Jama Musse Jama and through Il Ponte Invisibile, works from international literary traditions were translated into Somali, while Somali poetry, literature, oral traditions, and ways of thinking were carried into other languages.

For cultures that have experienced colonialism, war, displacement, and political marginalization, “international culture” can too easily become a one-way road: the world speaks and we translate; the world produces and we consume. Iswaydaarsi proposed something different. Somali readers should be able to encounter the literature of other societies in their own language, but Somali thought should also travel outward.

In time, the work surrounding the book fair extended beyond the annual event. The Hargeysa Cultural Centre created something that had been missing from the city's civic landscape -- a permanent cultural home.

Its library, gallery, books, historical materials, and collections -- including thousands of recordings on cassette -- provide forms of access that a temporary festival cannot. But perhaps equally important is the ordinary life of the place. Young people meet there. They organize discussions. They rehearse cultural dances. They launch books. They hold events. They argue about ideas.

We often speak about preserving Somali heritage as though preservation were primarily an act of storage. Find the old manuscript. Record the poem. Collect the cassette. Protect the historical object. Put it somewhere safe. All of this is necessary. But an archive that nobody encounters is only partially alive.

This is why I have come to think of the Hargeysa International Book Fair as part of something larger than Somaliland's literary calendar. For my generation, it became part of the work of cultural recovery. Those of us who grew up after the war inherited a society that was reconstructing itself materially while also trying to remember itself. We did not always know what was missing because we had been born into the absence. HIBF made part of that absence visible by filling it.

Nearly two decades after that first gathering at Guriga Shaqaalaha, what remains with me is not simply the image of book stalls. I think instead about meetings between generations.

It was a place where young people met writers whose names they had previously only heard. Where poets encountered people who might become poets. Where readers discovered the possibility of becoming writers. Where volunteers stumbled upon professions they had never considered. Where young Somalis were invited to imagine themselves not merely as consumers of culture but as its future custodians.

That achievement should also make us uneasy, because it reveals how much remains undone. One book fair cannot carry the cultural memory of an entire society. Neither can one cultural centre.

Somaliland is urbanizing rapidly. Social media has transformed the habits of attention. The mobile phone has placed an unimaginable quantity of information in the hands of children who may nevertheless live many kilometres from a public library. Algorithms can deliver Istanbul, Cairo, London, Seoul, or Los Angeles to a screen in seconds. Yet the history of the town in which that child lives may remain inaccessible.

The problem is no longer whether young people will encounter the wider world. They already do. The question is whether they will encounter themselves with equal ease. There are promising answers.

In Hargeisa, initiatives such as FanKeenna have created spaces for visual art and cinema led by a younger generation. The Gabiley National Library has demonstrated what a regional institution devoted to books, research, and community life can represent. But isolated success is not the same thing as cultural infrastructure. A country's memory cannot belong to its capitals alone.

What happens in Berbera, with its extraordinary historical position on the coast? What becomes of a public library if it exists as a building but not as an active civic institution? What of Burco, with the immense literary and poetic heritage of the communities around it, if its municipal cultural spaces remain quiet? And the question becomes more urgent as one travels farther from the large cities.

What does cultural access mean for a child in Baligubadle or Oodweyne? What is available in historical rural crossroads such as Xarshin, Saylac or Waraabeeye? Where are the rooms in which their histories are collected? Where are the local archives, libraries, storytelling spaces, cinemas, galleries, youth centres, and small museums through which a child can discover that the place where she lives has a past?

The answer does not need to be a monumental building in every town. Sometimes cultural infrastructure can begin with a room. A library with a thoughtful collection. A community archive. A recording project in which young people interview elders. A small gallery. A local literary festival. A cinema club. A place where old photographs are identified before the people capable of identifying them disappear. A centre where a teenager can hear a poet, learn photography, watch a Somali film, or find a book that makes his own world seem worthy of attention.

What matters is the encounter. Without these encounters, we reproduce the conditions in which my generation grew up, a strange asymmetry in which distant cultures are intimately available while one's own history is fragmented, inaccessible, or reduced to slogans.

We cannot demand that a child value a history we have given her no means of discovering. We cannot insist that a generation preserve poetry it cannot hear, manuscripts it cannot see, films it cannot watch, stories nobody has recorded, or historical places that have been allowed to decay. A society must make memory available before it can ask its children to carry it.

This is why the old argument—hospital or museum, clinic or library—is ultimately a false choice when understood across the life of a nation. Of course, a person needs health, water, roads, schools, and security. But societies are not made solely from the infrastructure that keeps people alive. They are also made from the institutions that tell people who they have been, what they have endured, what they have created, and what they might still become.

The lesson I take from HIBF is therefore not simply that Somaliland needs more book fairs. It is that cultural recovery requires places. Places where generations can meet. Places where memory can be questioned rather than merely revered. Places where the oral can become recorded without ceasing to be alive. Places where young people can inherit culture and also challenge it, remake it, and eventually add something of their own.

The deepest threat to cultural memory may not be that people consciously reject it. It may simply be that they never encounter it. War once created that distance violently, by scattering people, destroying institutions, and reducing life to survival. Today, the danger is quieter. It is possible to lose a relationship with the past while sitting peacefully in one's own home, scrolling through an endless world designed elsewhere.

We cannot close that world off, nor should we want to. We can, however, make sure that when a young person looks up from the screen, there is somewhere nearby to go. A library. An archive. A theatre. A museum. A cultural centre. A room full of books. And, perhaps most importantly, another person waiting there who remembers something worth passing on.