The Orchard of Lost Souls 221-22 by Nadifa Mohamed Lyrics

They sail through the last urban checkpoint and leave the messy, compacted town to shrink and disappear in the rear-view mirror. A rim of light is developing all around them, as blotchy and bright as overexposed film, the horizon broken up by lopsided pyramids of granite. She has seen a landscape like this only once before, as a fourteen-year-old on her way to Dhusamareb during the Somali Literacy Campaign. “Haddaad taqaan bar, haddaanad aqoon baro. If you know it, teach it, if you don’t know it, learn it” had been the slogan, all the schools, colleges, universities emptied of students and professors for seven months so they could be sent to fight against illiteracy in every town, village and encampment. Radio Mogadishu broadcasters described the conflict in the most passionate terms: the weapons were pens, books, chalks, and blackboards, the heroes simple teachers and teenagers who gallantly battled ignorance throughout the country. Filsan had set out from Twenty-first October Square in Mogadishu during the Eid in August 1974. The President had delivered a magnificent speech and she could still recite parts of it: “The battle you engage in with your forces has more honour than the ordinary one, and has more value than anything you have known.” He was right; if she could go back to that time she would. She missed living with the blacksmith’s family, teaching in the mornings and late afternoons. Learning country songs and dances from the daughters, sitting by the stream at dusk, drinking milk straight from the cow. The whole campaign had been paid for by civilian donations, and even as a fourteen-year-old she had been treated with respect because she could read and they couldn’t. She wrote down the poems of old men in the new Somali script and they folded her scribblings and tucked them into their clothes like talismans. It was a dreamtime—they were full of love for the country and one another; now there seemed to be only rebels and thieves and soldiers fighting each other. She felt that she was the last one still to believe in that old Somalia, the one she grew up with.