Two figures, dark and gaunt,
make their way across the terrain.

The first is my father’s uncle, a man I’ve never seen, whose features I invent from some amalgamation of other relatives known to me over the years. His tall form is hunched over with age and exhaustion. The second figure is my father. I see his impossibly young face in stark clarity, ten or so years before I was born—a boy catapulted by his circumstances into adulthood. His jeans are hacked off at the knees, the scraps wrapped around his and his uncle’s feet and knotted around their ankles in a desperate approximation of shoes. The sheets around their shoulders serve as their only barrier from the worst of the elements, a weak shield to the inward curve of their abdomens and the outward jut of their ribs. 

This is an image that stays with me, pieced together from disjointed fragments of stories my father has told me. He keeps the worst details vague, but they’re visible to me as if through the lens of a camera. Sometimes, as I lay in bed chasing sleep, this image projects itself across my mind, unbidden. The scene is partially conjured from some mainstream composite of Africa from the movies: lonely, parched acacia trees and cracked earth, everything awash in a yellowish-beige haze. The image starts off flat; I fill in the blanks from the depth of my father’s descriptions. The sun is unrelenting in the cloudless sky, its light searing into the ground and reflecting the heat back into the atmosphere. The wind does not whistle. Such a landscape is too barren to offer it any turbulence. The memories are secondhand, but I see them in vibrant Technicolor. 

The scene always starts here, in media res. The occurrences leading up to this moment are only loosely defined. I do not know at what point in their journey they lost their shoes and shirts; it couldn’t have been more than a day or two after they began their trek away from civilization. But all of this is relative. In the throes of such fear and hunger, with nothing but that bleak terrain stretched in front of them, a day might well have felt like a week. In any case, what they left behind could no longer be described as civilization. Arbitrary lines drawn up by some long-gone colonial powers had turned into fault lines, splitting the ground beneath them, and from those lines sprung forth a violence that shifted reality. 

The young man who would one day become my father had fled with his mother and siblings from his childhood home under the cover of night. A sympathetic neighbor had tipped them off the day before—the militants were coming for everything at dawn. The family had crammed into someone else’s car and driven away. He mentioned to me once how he had tried returning after a few days to salvage some of their belongings, but their home had been hollowed out, stripped bare. On his way back out, he came across the corpse of his neighbor. The body was slumped in the middle of the open street, still getting pierced by stray bullets. That was the final time my father stepped foot in that house. 

Somewhere on this journey away from his home and into the unknown is where my mind’s eye finds him, with miles of open land stretched out on either side of nephew and uncle. In the scene, neither of them talks much. They are saving their energy, and there isn’t much to say anyway. There is a mutual understanding of the implicit fear between them. They are all too aware that they have only a meager portion of water left in the waterskin they share, to be rationed until they come across the next well. The young man’s eyelid is drooping from a lack of sleep; he cannot bear to let his guard down for even a moment in this new state of affairs. He is a soldier’s son, coming of age in a new kind of war. 

Hunger slows them down as the light fades around them. The night is amorphous and contains any number of horrors, not the least of which is the biting chill in the wind. In the direct glare of sunlight, there was nothing to cast shadows, but the subtle light of the moon now plays tricks on them. The shadow cast by a shrub could convincingly look like a lion’s mane to their tired eyes. The skittering sound of a shrew’s small feet could just as easily be the rattle of a bayonet slung over a mutineer’s shoulder. Nightfall is when the predators come out to hunt, alone or in packs, on two legs or four. The prospect of seeing another human being is equal parts hopeful and dreadful. The pair know what they will be asked if they come across any rogue group of armed men: “Qolamaad tahay?” What is your tribe? The right answer could mean salvation, shelter, sustenance—but the wrong one could mean death. The young man has always excelled in math, and he knows the odds wouldn’t be in his favor. Still, more than anything, they need to eat.

I’ve always had the privilege of knowing that another meal is coming. I have never known that kind of cavernous, gnawing hunger that weakens limbs and scrambles minds—the kind of hunger that shrinks your world to one single, primal objective. When I imagine that young man, hungry and cold on that endless journey, at some point I have to do away with the cold objectivity of an audience perspective. All at once, I’m inside the scene. I start to feel his fear thrumming in my own chest. My throat goes dry, my hands tremble, the questions race through my mind. What kind of willpower would it take to continue walking in the face of such uncertainty? I am sore with the weakness of his muscles, broken down so their energy can be diverted to the organs that need it most. The body turns against itself when resources are scant, like a man gunning his neighbor down in the street—survival of the fittest. My breath starts to shorten with his fear.

I superimpose this portrait of the young figure onto the man I see today. That unshakable faith, that unflappable will. That quiet contemplation, even in his most lighthearted moments. The droop of his left eyelid, the wrinkles on his forehead, the smattering of grey hairs in his beard. The sleepless nights, the dark days. The patchwork of miracles and blessings from Allah that put him here are not lost on me. When my father talks about his past, it sounds like one thousand different snapshots of distinct, unrelated lives. Each image is clear, but none clearer than that young, fearful shot of him, worn and wary under that sheet, his bony shoulders carrying the responsibility of his family’s survival. Skin on denim on soil, step after step. 

Aabo tells me that he and his uncle eventually found people, distant relatives, seventy-two hours and hundreds of kilometers after first setting out. They scrounged together a simple hot meal of grains and milk, extras and leftovers shared between them. Three decades have passed, and he maintains that it’s the best meal he’s ever had.