The Somalis boast of a remarkable tradition of oral poetry. RAHMA BAVELAAR examines how oral poetry gives meaning and identity to the experience of a community in exile.

Somali Oral Verse in Exile

By Rahma Bavelaar

Now you depart, and though your way may lead
Through airless forests thick with hagar trees,
Places steeped in heat, stifling and dry,
Where breath comes hard, and no fresh breeze can reach—
Yet may God place a shield of coolest air
Between your body and the assailant sun.
And in a random scorching flame of wind
That parches the painful throat, and sears the flesh,
May God, in His compassion, let you find
The great-boughed tree that will protect and shade

This hauntingly beautiful valedictory poem, which the Somali poet, Sufi Sheikh, and anti-colonial warrior Sayyid Mahammed ‘Abdille Has-san composed for a departing friend in the late 19th century, possesses an uncanny premonitory quality in the light of the troubled modern history of the rugged land it describes.

Could the elevated spiritual state of the man who was to become the hallowed symbol of Somali pride and national-ism have permitted him to foresee the malediction that would befall his people in the century to come? Could he have known that the tribulations of the lonely traveler he so eloquently evoked would soon be the reality of his entire nation, as the perpetual violence of the late 20th century swept hundreds of thousands of men, women and children onto the perilous road into exile?

Whatever the scope of the Sayyid’s insights, his words must certainly have acquired a new sense of urgency for the Somali refugees who have sought peace and protection across the globe in the wake of 29years of civil war. And just like their ancestors, whose poetic heritage constitutes the foundation of Somali collective memory and identity, Somali communities in exile continue to record their experiences in verse. Although Somalis are now possibly the largest African Diaspora in the West, their culture and history are very little known to their hosts, whose awareness of Somalia rarely goes beyond war and famine.

This article aims to shed some light on the Somalis’ greatest cultural capital—oral poetry—and its significance as an “imagined” collective forum where the entire community can comment on, conceptualize, debate and express the shared experience of war and exile and formulate a way forward.