Key Quotes:
Naf yahay orod oo, arligi qabo oo, halkii aad ku ogeyd, ka soo eeg. Oh soul, go run to your homeland and look for it where you knew it. —Ahmed Ismail Hussein, “Hudeidi,” written in detention in French Somaliland,
Remember the green glow of phosphorous, on a bow waved warm tropic night, the wonderful wild roaring forties, when you fought the storm at its height. The scent of the spices off Java, a frigate birds cry to the moon, the sound of the anchor chain surging, when we stayed in that crystal lagoon. No requiem plays at your passing, no friend there to bid you goodbye, who knows that the sea birds are grieving, and perhaps a fool such as I.
Harry “Shipmate” Cooke, excerpt from “The Last Tramp Steamer”
the centre of both of their worlds—four feet five of undiluted hope and promise.
Berlin has low expectations and a worldly acceptance of even the greatest tragedies.
“She uses words like arrows.” “Poetry is war, what else you expect?”
The story she knows well enough from the Torah: sacrifice of a child as small and innocent as them. Isaac’s throat reddened by the blade but miraculously not cut; his silence in Abraham’s arms as, weeping but steadfast, the prophet obeyed God’s command; the ram then sent down at the last moment to replace Isaac and deliver God’s mercy. Both the trial and deliverance celebrated. Diana knows the Muslims tell it a little differently.
“You are the best thing God ever gave me, you and these three boys. I would steal the stars out of the sky for you.”
Mahmood hadn’t really sent any money to Haji Ali, but he had intended to, still intended to, and liked the idea of being the kind of man who did things like that. A just outlaw.
There Will Always Be A Tiger Bay. “Bloody right there will,” she thought. In London, the past year, she had seen There Will Always Be An England scrawled everywhere: on the ruins of bombed-out homes in Victoria, on the plinth of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, on the grey stones of Waterloo Bridge. It was a kind of talisman, a prayer, and it worked, she never entertained the notion that they might lose the war.
The macalim taught Mahmood that becoming a man was like turning wood into charcoal: a process of destruction until something pure and fiercely incandescent emerged. Tears softened the soul while pain toughened it.
the unmistakable war poetry of the Dervish.
Wasn’t it against the very spirit of Islam to cold-bloodedly kill a man when there was still some chance of peace and restitution?
They consider Somalis wild because every man is his own master, but they forget we have one powerful master, Al-Rab, Al-Raheem. We need only our land, Allah will be our sustenance for everything else. If, as it seemed, it was true that the British hated their lives in Somaliland, it would go some way in explaining just how quickly they abandoned the protectorate in ’41, when the Italians invaded from their colony in the south
That’s how they met and how Mahmood fell in love with Berlin. A love platonic and pure, for sure, but weighted by the close scrutiny the boy put the man under. His bearing, his ideas, his silences, his insults, his desires, his hates, Mahmood would have scribbled them all down if he could write, but instead he memorized them and brought them home like birds caught in his snare.
Dualleh the Communist is in London, meeting with his comrade Sylvia Pankhurst. She’s been invited by Haile Selassie to live in Addis Ababa.”
They grew up in a world where the truth was something you needed shielding from.
this steel whale crashing through the waves, had electricity, telephones, lifts, smokeless cookers, flushing toilets, and levers and dials everywhere that did mysterious things. White man magic. It was as if Europeans had remade the world, and they only had to stretch out their hands to bring before them all the wonders of the world.
No way to put out the fire but to burn it!” Those were words to live by.
In Hargeisa, where sunset meant genuine darkness, you could track the slow movement of stars and planets, glittering and pulling you up into a depthless, shifting sea with its coastline of purple, indigo and black stretches. God reminds you through those night skies of how small and insignificant you are, and he speaks to you clearly, his anger and solace tangible in the rain he sends or withholds, the births or deaths he orders, the long, waxy grass he gives or dead, broken earth he carves. The miasma above the prison, above Cardiff, suffocated Mahmood’s faith and separated him from God.
It’s not that Mahmood believes himself important, the past few months have torn away that illusion, but he is extraordinary, his life has been extraordinary. The things he has got away with, the things he has been punished for, the things he has seen, the way that it had once seemed possible for him to bend, with great force, everything to his will. His life was, is, one long film with mobsof extras and exotic, expensive sets. Long reams of film and miles of dialogue extending back as he struts from one scene to another. He can imagine how his movie looks even now: the camera zooming in from above on to the cobblestone prison yard and then merging into a close-up of his thoughtful, upturned face, smoke billowing out from the corner of his dark lips. A colour film, it must be that. It has everything: comedy, music, dance, travel, murder, the wrong man caught, a crooked trial, a race against time and then the happy ending, the wife swept up in the hero’s arms as he walks out, one sun-filled day, to freedom. The image stretches Mahmood’s mouth into a smile.
They will hear that he was a nomad, a chancer, a fighter, a rebel, but not from him, and therefore they will know the price of being all that, the potion and the poison taken together.
“Is it quick?” Mahmood is back in bed, facing the brick wall, taken over by a bone-deep tiredness. “What’s that?” Perkins replies, cracking his stiff spine. “The hanging.” Silence. “Yes,” Wilkinson says finally. “How long it take to die?” “You are out immediately.” “You sure?” “Absolutely.” “Good,” Mahmood says, closing his eyes.
“They want to…to hang me…on my eldest boy’s birthday.”
“And what does a martyr receive?” Mahmood asks, playing teacher. “Jannat ul-Firdaws.” “Yes. The highest paradise.
I have learnt how small and fragile this life is, and how everything in this world, this duniya, is a mirage that evaporates before the eyes. I have tasted the bitterness of injustice. Have you, Sheikh?” Al-Hakimi shakes his head, his pale brown eyes fixed on Mahmood’s mouth. “It’s like swallowing poison.”
He sits in the small bath—his body white apart from some flashes of his real skin—and asks himself what life would have been like if he had been born with skin this white.
Somalis have got the right idea, you wrong someone and you’re forced to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life unless you make amends. You deal with each other face to face. Only cowards live by prisons and cold hangings.”
The wrongful conviction and execution of Mahmood Mattan became the first miscarriage of justice ever rectified by a British court, but the harm it had caused to his family could never be undone.
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