Traders of A Cargo of Guilt
Mohamed Mukhtar Hussein, Ph.D.1 2
September, 2005
The title of Abdi-Noor Hagi Mohamed's newest novel, A Cargo of Guilt3, evokes images of law enforcement and courts, of psychology and emotions, and of individual responsibility. The book deals with varied abstractions of the concept of guilt and contextualizes it as verdicts associated with personal, state, and tribal laws enforced in the lands of the Somali, as intricacies of love, of life, and of inner struggles and personal events lacking logic and argument. It also explores the mass production and transportation of guilt through Somali minds as this society was getting established in the Horn of Africa. The text serves plates of a future state in which Somali people learn to say mea maxima culpa to take responsibility for their personal mistakes, adapting and tailoring ideas from the Confiteor, for their own continued co-existence. Somali men cry, criminals confess and seek forgiveness, and most important of all, members of the Gobta tribe embrace equality of their brethren, declaring that they belong to the same tribe as their victims. Abdi-Noor weaves a central narrative of a family surviving a self-imposed dogmatic decomposition when others lost members into the consequences of the largest exodus Somalia's deadly civil war brought about. The tale is set in Mogadishu before the Somali civil war spread into the capital. Right away, in the first few pages of the book, we learn that Safi, who "belonged to a socially outcast tribe called Midgaan", had just delivered Shamis. Guilt in this context is associated with social control where a large segment of the society is marked as inferior to the rest. Ancient Somalis erected barriers for certain clans, who otherwise are not different than the rest of the society, to ever gain their legitimate equality rights. Even though there were never written laws restricting those clans considered inferior to freely interact and intermarry with others, the Somali people nevertheless enforced this segregation for centuries. The text quickly develops the main protagonist into a full, likeable character. Safi is exposed to her "Midgaan-ness" at a very young age when her playmate explains to her that she is Midgaan and that "anybody who shares something with Midgaans would end up in loss if not in a horrible tragedy." Safi's father was a Mogadishu shoemaker, working in a makeshift store whose only tools consisted of "a metal, half buried in the ground, with a rounded scalp …". While growing up, Safi experiences the bitterness of social discrimination based on her father's profession. She struggles with this enigma all along, questioning her guilt, but her spirit "never ceased to glow like a morning fire". She quietly decides to prove her innocence, on her own terms. During her secondary school years, Safi excelled in sports and was selected to represent her school in the long jump contest. This is where Safi met Haroon who was a member of the school's basketball team. Haroon had eyes "protruding forward as though something was pushing from behind". Safi was attractive with a face glistering "like a sunshine beaming out from the eastern horizons of Sanaag Plateau". The duo were attracted to each other. Safi withholds revelation of her Midgaan-ness to Haroon, internally debating her mother's prudent explanation that they "are a different clan" and that none of her family members "can share marriage affair with other clans who look down" on them as "outcasts".

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