When Farah is hassled entering into Britain because of his passport, he is consoled by an elderly Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust only too familiar with the expression Step aside . The genesis of this book is the civil war. Somalis fled the abattoir of Mogadishu en masse in 1990, arriving stateless in Kenya with nothing but their suitcases and an ocean of stories . One Kenyan can t understand how a country ceases to exist overnight, its assets auctioned off by a fleeing elite. At the root of the mass exodus is violence, a substitute for elusive power , and the only medium the displaced, the marginalised and the alienated employ to talk to each other .
Borders engender violence.
But Farah does not only finger the ideas of empire , because throughout he provokes fellow Somalis into questioning their own responsibility. In a civil war like ours, mourns Abdullahi Omar, no one is innocent. Farah is neither us nor them , and his position allows him access to a staggering range of people. There is a poetry in his interviews, fierce and disturbing, as his subjects from all factions of the civil war try and make sense of their flight. As his subjects sound the depths of their refugee experience, Farah reciprocates in full with his own story of how he had to reinvent himself as a writer in exile.