Floating on my back in the middle of the ocean, I can barely make out the coastline—it looks a lot like scenic 1970s Muqdisho but I can’t be too sure. Here and now drifting so far away from the certainty of land doesn’t worry me in the least, because I am savoring feeling on my skin the sensorial juxtaposition between the frosty raindrops falling on the front side of my body and the warm ocean water below, which envelops my verso, my backside. The palatable contrast in temperature and the sensation of the raindrops tenderly ricocheting off my face, my neck, my chest, my belly, and legs gives me goosebumps, an intense physical and metaphysical sensual bliss akin to listening to one of my favorite songs. If I were more pretentious, I would use the French word frisson, which is the technical term for this sensation. It is one of those moments in which my senses feel deeply in tune with the universe, in which the world whistles in my ears and the cosmos gently twirls across my flesh. The hazy outline of the Almnara Towerprovides a mesmerizing backdrop for my reverie, a fantastically fuzzy and centuries-old focal point that tenuously anchors me in time and space. Is that the Adhan I hear that sounds like its coming from under water? Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!
Just out of reach, I catch serendipitous glimpses oftatteredpieces of identifying documents, my identity papers, remnants of state-sanctioned former selves set adrift on memory bliss and not so bliss: passports, birth certificates, school IDs, driver’s licenses, monthly public transport IDs, certifications of citizenship, family registers, identity cards etc. from East Germany, West Germany, Somalia, and the United States that list my name differently according to distinctive cultural and national customs. The shards of paper arrange themselves into a design of ornately stunning migratory patterns around me in the warm water.Over the course of my life, I’ve been classified by at least four different official variations of my surname as well as several more colloquial ones of my given name. Though these distinctive official and unofficial appellations don’t always tidily correspond to fully discrete incarnations of my self, they communicate in shorthand just how penetratingly mylife has been and continues to be defined by borders and different forms of state power. Those naggingly vexatious aspects of globalization and diaspora few people show any interest in discussing in any genuine or sustained way.
After almost being born in an East German penitentiary at the end of 1968, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the year I graduated from high school, I had lived in East Germany (German Democratic Republic: GDR), West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany: FRG), Somalia, the United States, and in West Berlin surrounded by the Berlin Wall. Neither of my parents was a diplomat or part of the military, in case you wanted to ask. The now invalidated identifying documents represent physical remainders of these past selves as they reverberate across continents and oceans.
***
My journey has been long and varied, taking me and all that that entails to many different parts of the earth and numerous other dimensions. Dimensions, realms, and porticoes too abundant to mention, I sit with forgetting as “a map, [which] is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves” (Brand, 224). This “forgotten list of irretrievable selves” envelops me, not quite haunting me but shadowing me nonetheless in super-intense ways. Sometimes I attempt to reconstruct these forgotten “mes” just to see if I can feel and sense in similar ways as then, in that-there time and place. While it works at certain moments, when I sense portals, openings, movements, sounds, smells, incantations, at other times I’m obliged to remain in the street, outside the club, standing in line on a rainy ass and cold night, where I can feel the bass coming from inside but cannot hear the actual music. Access denied, for now. Zugang vorerst verweigert.
A shambolic diagram of disremembered unbelongings organizes my life, becoming a ruttier for the marooned selves I no longer have unmitigated access to or desire to approach. I, too, am the afterlife of irretrievable selves.
There’s a sticky dustiness that adheres to old photos, which is both unique and peculiar, and here it instantly transports me back to my mom’s drawer of old photos in the living room our Berlin apartment, the fifth-floor walkup located at Seelingstrasse 26, 1000 Berlin 19. You see, there were no photo albums when I was growing up, only this drawer in a large china cabinet, which held not fancy dishes, but an assortment of mismatched glasses and other miscellaneous tchotchkes. The cabinet itself like most of the furniture in our apartment was old and came to us free, because it was donated to the charity that then bequeathed it to us. This retractable wooden box was nothing short of magical, because as opposed to the seeming order of a “proper“ photo album, you never knew what you were going to get since the photos were just piled in without any system or rhyme or reason. During my teen years the drawer had the power to instantly teleport me back to my childhood in Mogadishu, Somalia, and to give me a glimpse of my time in Nordhausen in East Germany and Wuppertal in West Germany. The former was still accessible to me via the conduit of memories, as distorted, fragmented, and nonchronological as they may be, while the latter two were only available to me through the photographs. The jumbled photos also offered me glimpses of my parents when they were younger and much happier than they were after we’d moved to West Berlin in 1982. Given that my family had relocated between continents thrice at this point, leaving almost all belongings behind each time (for instance, my beloved blue roller skates in Syracuse, NY in 1982 before we took off for West Berlin), there also did not exist transitional objects that I could turn to prod my memory. This drawer of images was *all* I had.
I sometimes spend hours wading through the picturesque anarchy of these images printed on thick photo paper—some with deckled edges—sometimes imagining what my life would look like if my family stayed in Somalia. Who would Cali Nur Ahmed have become? It’s not only the visual cues that draw me in but the hapticity of opening this section of the cupboard and running my fingers through the photos to see where they land and what image will draw me in. Sometimes I pull on the cold, square, gold-colored hardware in order to view specific images, though mostly I enter this universe to be surprised by what will catch my attention first.
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is a writer, professor, and curator in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, focusing on Black Studies, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, Black visual culture, social technologies, and popular culture.
Works Cited
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Doubleday Canada, 2001.
