Jeebleh was comforted by the prospect of affording his mind time to dwell on another subject, and he thought, half remembering a quotation attributed to J. M. Synge, that there was no one like Seamus to soothe and quiet one’s nerves on an evening such as this. Meanwhile Seamus’s unerring sense of kindness toward everyone made it possible for him to speak a gentle reprimand in the very idiom that made you think he was praising you. The man thought of the world, Jeebleh reflected, in images that surprised even Seamus: unpredictable in an interesting way.
Shanta was excited to high heaven, and so was her voice, as she addressed Seamus, who now assumed the role of a moderator at a panel discussion, but only momentarily. “They ceased to be angels,” she said, “which they weren’t in any case, and became who they were, Americans, when they used overwhelming force in such an indiscriminate fashion and lots of innocent Somalis died.”
Bile agreed, adding that, from the moment they landed and started putting on a circus for the benefit of prime-time TV back home, you felt they couldn’t have come to do God’s work.
“Why did they come, then?” Seamus said. And when no one spoke, he gave his theory: that everything that could’ve gone wrong for the Yanks had gone wrong because they saw everything in black and white, had no understanding of and no respect for other cultures, and were short on imagination, as they never put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. They were also let down by their intelligence services, arriving everywhere unprepared, untutored in the ways of the world; he brought up the collapse of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the disintegration of several ramshackle states in different parts of the globe. “They came to show the world that they could make peace-on-demand in Somalia, in the same dramatic fashion as they had made war-on-demand in the Gulf. They came to showcase peace here, as a counterpoint to their war effort elsewhere. Iraq and Somalia had one thing in common: both were made-for-TV shows. Christ, they were uppity, but they never lost their focus — the prime-time performance was their focus all along.” He turned to Jeebleh, who looked ill at ease. “I am agreeing with you. What’s your gripe?”
Jeebleh pondered for a few seconds. “Doesn’t the sound of a gunshot make the birds perched side by side on a telephone wire take off in fright, all at the same time?” he asked rhetorically.
“Y-e-s?” Bile seemed interested.
“But a few seconds after taking off in fright,” Jeebleh said, “don’t many of the birds that haven’t been hit come back to sit on the same telephone wire, or another one very much like it?”
“What’s your point?”
“The Americans shouldn’t have permitted the armed vigilantes to return to their haunts. They should’ve disarmed them soon after their arrival, when the irregular armies allied to the Strongmen were afraid of America’s military might. They sent contradictory messages to the warlords, and then fell back on this zero-casualty idea. I’d say they lost their focus, all right.”
“Perhaps the cutthroat conditions the Americans encountered here, which they had no way of dealing with, made them blow hot and cold?” Shanta speculated.
“There was another problem,” Bile said. “A problem to do with definitions.”
“How do you mean, definitions?” Seamus asked.
Perhaps because the conversation was no longer about Raasta and Makka’s return, Shanta became more garrulous than Jeebleh had known her to be since their first encounter, and couldn’t control her enthusiasm. She fidgeted, got up, moved about, then returned to her original seat, mumbling something to herself. No one paid her any mind.
Bile spoke. “The U.S. forces failed to define why they really came to Somalia in the first place, soon after the Gulf War. This was never made clear. The ‘good’ Americans, just back from defeating Bad Guy Saddam, were seen on TV holding a dozen starving babies at a feeding center — a picture of postcard quality. Later, after the trigger-happy U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of innocent civilians and turned the life of the residents into hell, we asked ourselves how the Americans could reconcile the earlier gestures of mercy with the bombings of the city, in which many women and children were killed. And did you hear what one of the U.S. officials said when they pulled out after the October debacle? ‘We fed them, they got strong, and they killed us!’ Do you recall who it was said that?”
“Some U.S. major or other,” offered Seamus.
“A spokesman of the UN, actually,” Bile said.
“He could’ve been U.S. Army, though.”
“What’s the difference?” Shanta said.
“A matter of definition!” Bile said.
Seamus took it from there: “Surely StrongmanSouth’s armed youths who shot at the Americans, and killed many UN Blue Helmets of other nationalities, were not the emaciated babies with whom the Marines had those heart-wrenching pictures taken in front of the cameras? Surely the spokesman of the UN military was mistakenly equating the small group of armed militias who fought against them with the whole of the Somali nation?”
“Don’t Somalis take the part and mistake it for the whole too?” Jeebleh knew he was in a distancing mode, apart from “them.”
“I agree,” Bile said. “We too mistook the small group of senior officers and the military on duty here for the whole of America. You’d have thought from listening to the ranting of a supporter of StrongmanSouth that America had gone to war against the whole of the Somali nation, which of course it hadn’t. When one takes the part for the whole, one seldom bothers to distinguish between the uncouth soldiers with whom we’ve become acquainted and other, well-meaning Americans. I am sure there are millions of Americans who are good people, and millions of Somalis who wouldn’t hurt an American fly. When you think of it, the Americans, by their actions, made a hero out of StrongmanSouth, and this prolonged the civil war. After all, it was after their hasty departure that he nominated himself president. I’d say the American-in-Charge met his equal and Faustian counterpart in StrongmanSouth.”
“What of the Belgians, the Italians, or the Canadians?” Seamus asked. “They didn’t act less uppity or more humanely toward the Somalis, did they?”
Shanta now addressed Jeebleh: “Did you know that in everyday Somali, the term amerikaan means ‘weird’? Why do you think that is so?”
“I know too that the term amxaar, the Somali word for ‘Ethiopian,’ means ‘unkind,’ ‘brutal,’” Seamus said. “And I can tell you why.”
“The coinage of amerikaan to mean ‘weird,’ I should point out, precedes the Somali people’s recent encounter with Americans in the shape of the Marines and Rangers who shot the daylights out of them,” Jeebleh said. “Maybe it came about as a result of the Hollywood movies we’ve seen?”
“I think it’s in the nature of the strong and the weak to define each other in ways that make sense only to one of them, not necessarily to both,” said Seamus. “To the Somali, the Amerikaan is weird, to the American GI, the Somali is an ingrate and a skinny.”
“And I would hate it if a GI Joe not worth a quid of chewed tobacco were to make up our minds for us about America!” Jeebleh replied. “Moreover, let’s ask ourselves a question: Can we blame them? Is a whole country responsible for a crime committed by one of its citizens? Can all of America be held responsible for the gaffes made by one of its nationals, however high-ranking, or however representative of the power invested in him?”
It was then that Bile reminded them of how the rotors of one U.S. helicopter had blown a baby girl, barely a year old, out of her mother’s arms and up into the dust-filled heavens. They all fell silent, affected by the unimaginable horror. Jeebleh wanted to know if Bile had ever met her.