Naima's Song -- From Celebrity To Refugee, From Stage Drama To The Real Thing

ALL SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Naima Ahmed gets ready to go on stage.

She perfumes her hair with the sugary smolder of Somalian incense. She smooths pink lotion over her cocoa legs and burnished copper toenails. She irons five costumes, two of them sequined, on a towel spread atop the kitchen table, the only table, in the SeaTac apartment of a friend of a friend.

The flaking apartment complex hums with pre-party excitement: shower steam, a stream of phone calls, a dozen children bouncing on mattresses. Mostly, the air just hums. Swahili songs float through thin walls, past car doors slamming, planes landing, potatoes overboiling on the stove. It seems someone or other is always singing. Usually, it is Ahmed.

TA dada daa, TA tada daa, TA da da da DA da DA daaa.

If this were Somalia before the country was mangled by civil war, Ahmed would be preening backstage in Mogadishu's 5,000-seat theater, in a dressing room lined with huge mirrors, dazzling lights, racks of shimmering costumes. But Somalia is now overrun by men with guns. The East African nation has not had a government or much food since 1991 - never mind a theater.

So, instead, Ahmed sits with actress friend Lula Ali Lula of Minnesota on a velour bedspread in a sallow stucco low-rise. She peers into a shard of broken mirror to touch up her mascara, her eyeliner, the glamorous pluck of her expressive brows. At this moment, gazing at her own reflection, she is no longer a war refugee, a public-housing case number, a single mom juggling English classes, job training, Medicaid forms, bus transfers and a 6-year-old daughter.

She is Naima Ahmed, stage star of Mogadishu, soap-opera princess of Somalia, daughter of the Queen of East African pop music. For a moment, Ahmed is again the person she once was. She is ready to perform. Naima, her fans would call her name: Nigh-EE-ma.

"That's IT!" she smiles, snapping shut her eye-shadow compact. She slips the jagged mirror into her bag. "Ready!" At 36, having survived war, family deaths, marriage as a 13-year-old, divorce, another marriage and divorce, several Kenyan refugee camps and a stint in a Seattle homeless shelter, Ahmed somehow retains her showgirl sparkle.

"When I am standing on the stage and I sing," she says, "I have a lot a lot of spirit. I forget everything and I'm gonna sing and I'm gonna dance and I'm not tired. When I see the people happy about the songs and they like to dance and the music is perfect, I feel much."

There is something beautiful and tragic and brave about Ahmed's elaborate pre-performance ritual in this crowded, humid apartment. It's easy enough to go through the routine when you're the No. 2 female star in the Somali National Theater and you're backed by professional musicians, gel spotlights, thousands of adoring fans. But what if that life gets smashed? What if you are suddenly a refugee instead of a celebrity? What if you are stripped of your language, country, family, career, culture? What's left to make you You?

Like Ahmed, many of Africa's top musicians have fled war and collapsed economies in their native countries. The artists have scattered to Kenya, Ethiopia, Toronto, Paris, Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington, D.C. Some wait in refugee camps, some are missing, some dead, some drive taxis, one is a Boeing machinist. A handful perform and record, sometimes mixing traditional taarab or soukous melodies with dance-club rhythms. A few languish in strange cities, depressed, ashamed and alone. They survived, they are here, but something got lost along the way.

"Imagine Frank Sinatra not having anyone to play for," explains Doug Paterson, an anthropologist who writes about Kenyan music and hosts African-music shows on noncommercial radio stations KBCS-FM and KSER-FM.

Ahmed, too, has had hard times, but so far she has always recovered on the up beat.

A car horn honks in the parking lot. It is 10:20 p.m., and finally Ahmed's ride has come. We speed past glowing strip malls and chrome car lots. Ford, Subaru, Atomic Video, Taco Time. The interstate's halogen lights twinkle pale orange in the distance. Ahmed's eyes shine with nervous excitement. This will be her first dramatic performance since the fall of Mogadishu eight years ago.

We wind up someplace in Renton, in a linoleum-and-vinyl community center crowded with high-cheekboned people speaking Swahili. Men gather in small groups, wearing double-breasted suits and small, stylish spectacles. Women chat on folding chairs in filmy head shawls and chunky black heels. Everyone looks when Ahmed swishes past in fuchsia fringe. Even around town she wears jeans and sweaters instead of traditional Muslim headdress and floor-length skirt. More than clothes, there's her attitude. She's not afraid to make friends with Vietnamese and Latina immigrants, to jump into three English classes even though she stopped formal schooling at age 12, to create a new life instead of just salvaging the old one.

For the moment, Ahmed waits with the other actors in a utility closet plastered with "Renton Rangers Jr. Football" bumper stickers. The tiny stage they'll perform on is dominated by huge blow-out speakers, a mess of cords and connectors and a tall, bald guy warming up on a double-tiered keyboard. Nearly everyone is sipping Pepsi.

Wherever this is, it is the opposite of the rutted terror that was once cosmopolitan Mogadishu. The night's drama, staged by a Minnesota troupe with cameo appearances by Ahmed, is a stiff political satire about people killing Mother Somalia with their squabbling and their greed.

Then comes a squealing karaoke interlude. The man sitting next to me politely explains that this is traditional Somali music. Ahmed lets loose on the dance floor in a rainbow spangled dress, hips gyrating, shoulders shimmying, arms swiveling, chest jiggling, legs sashaying in an ecstatic frenzy of joy and sweat.

"Actually," the man clears his throats as we watch Ahmed's spectacular dance moves, "not completely traditional. Modernized."

If ever there was an example of globalization, then here it is - Naima Ahmed's Northwest debut, Las Vegas meeting Islam at a karaoke party under a Sea-Tac flight path.

AT JASIRA BEAUTY SALON on Rainier Avenue South, you can get extension braids woven into your hair, rent a U.S. post box, fax Kenya, buy deodorant, try on a cheetah-print blouse and, for a modest fee, copy any of the still-existing videos or cassettes made in Somalia or by Somali entertainers during the past several decades.

Jasira Beauty Salon is one of only two such archives in the United States, a repository for recordings of Somali music, movies, television shows and wedding-party entertainment. Neatly stocked on five shelves, the inventory consists of whatever tapes happened to be out of the country, sent to relatives in Abu Dhabi, Jidda, London and Virginia, before war broke out.

"We have the old, the middle and the new," says owner Shamso Issak. Somali poets. Wedding songs reminiscent of sappy 1960s Hindi film scores. Synthesized nightclub hits from the 1980s. Late 1990s re-mixes recorded in Minnesota by refugees experimenting with disco, Caribbean, lambada, retro-rhumba, reggae, even rap.

One video features Ahmed in a short-lived television series filmed during her skinny starlet days. In it, she plays the "other woman," models a different costume every scene and cavorts around a grand Mogadishu hotel (since strafed) in a series of clingy knit dresses, sleek wigs, Jackie-O sunglasses and a sports car.

"Almost everybody in Seattle comes here," Issak says. The Seattle area has one of the largest Somali communities in America. Nine thousand Somalis have settled here, most within the past three years.

"They left everything else behind. The only thing they have is the music to remind them of the way they lived. Our songs, they tell a story. We have some tapes from the early 1980s that are not good quality, but they've been rented a thousand times. It's something to remind them of back home."

To appreciate the significance of Jasira Beauty Salon, and the importance of music and drama to Somalis, it's helpful to know that Somalia did not have an official writing system until 1972 and many people, especially rural villagers, don't read a whole lot. Much of what's considered "news" in the rest of the world - local events, politics, economics, sex - is churned around over there in poetry, song and plays. The music goes where the news does not. Lyrics critique and cajole, insult and inspire. Songs change with the times, but there's always room for tangled love, sexual innuendo, moral judgment, deep regret. Singers can sing things they couldn't write or say.

The queen of this type of pop, called taarab music, is Ahmed's mother, Malika. She has a clear, wailing voice that sways high above the pulsing Arab rhythms. Malika is so famous you can buy recordings of her taarab hits in Seattle at Tower Records and Silver Platters. Along the East African coast, you most often hear Malika singing taarab at weddings. But you might also hear her voice at beach discos, political rallies, nightclubs, circumcision ceremonies, truck stops, village movie houses, along nomadic camel-trade routes and spilling into alleys at night.

Under the glass counter at Jasira Beauty Salon, there are several recordings of Ahmed's mother, including a video of her performance in Beijing in the early 1980s. Malika now lives in a tough refugee camp in Kenya; Ahmed recently filed paperwork to bring her here, but who knows when. We listen to a vintage 1960s recording of Malika singing a breakup / makeup duet with verses in Swahili, Somali, Arabic and English: Forget about that . . . Forget about what happened between us . . .

It is a loopy, finger-snapping tune, and pretty soon Ahmed is swiveling around the hair salon, dancing to her mother's voice while the rain pours down outside.

ONE AFTERNOON, WHILE waiting for her 6-year-old daughter, Asha, to come home from kindergarten, Ahmed and I sit in her High Point apartment for what starts off as a regular interview - two people in chairs, talking.

It has been more than two months since I've seen Ahmed, and I'm struck by her pace of change. In September, the room was startlingly empty, just a string mop and Asha's pink bicycle. Now there are second-hand chairs, a scrappy shag rug, library pamphlets and a Book of Mormon by the phone.

She's changed her thinking, too. Before, she had starry ambitions. Today she tells me she recently turned down an invitation to tour with Lula's Minnesota drama troupe. "My dream now," she says, "is to learn about electronic assembly because that's future job. . . . Yes, if I was in Somalia, I'm a big star, but here, if it is for me to become a big star, that is to God." Hopefully some day, she says. Even if she's 90. For now, she teaches children her dancing and culture so their world won't be just Disney.

I recalled the time Asha taught me a few Swahili words while dancing around the bare living room with the mop: "Hello: JAMbo. Good-bye: KwaHAYdi. Thank You: AN-na."

"An-na?" Ahmed repeated, puzzled. "ASHA! That is not your language! That is Pocahontas!"

Since then, Asha has moved on to the Little Mermaid and I've forgotten the Swahili, but Ahmed has charged ahead, learning English and creating an American life. Every day she tape-records her electronics-assembly classes and English lessons and then replays the tapes next to her pillow as she falls asleep. It's a script-memorizing trick from her theater days, she says, and also, well, sometimes her body is in the classroom but her mind is another place.

Where?

Pretty soon the interview evolves into a performance rivaling William Hurt in "Kiss of the Spider Woman." Instead of a South American jail cell, the stage is Ahmed's spartan living room. The set is two mismatched chairs, a bedsheet curtain, the pink bicycle and scraps of brown carpet. Ahmed uses a scarf and Asha's teddy bear as her only props. Her English is limited, but her body language is so powerful, the dank room suddenly feels hot and dusty and echoes with the seething tumult of an open-air market.

The first sign of war came at the bazaar. Ahmed was shopping for vegetables. A boy grabbed her butt. Another grabbed her breast. They were teenagers, out of control, and soon the city was filled with them, gangs of young men raping women in the streets. "Everybody scared now. Bullets. Ba BAP ba BAP BAP! I wear different clothing now. Long, traditional, cover everything, the whole body."

A crazy guy who had stalked Ahmed since her starlet days became more aggressive. He followed her. "I love you," he told her. He showed her a pistol and bottle bomb. "Yes, yes, I'll marry you," she lied. But first, she told him, she must get permission from her mother, who had gone to Tanzania to perform at a wedding.

"Mommy, don't come back," she wrote her mother. "If you come here, they're gonna kill you, too."

"Tonight," the crazy man demanded.

"Tomorrow," Ahmed promised.

Why didn't you go the police?

"Where's the police? Nothing government! No police! YOU gonna be the police now."

For seven months, Ahmed hid wherever she could, sleeping at a distant cousin's one night, a friend's the next night, holding off the stalker while trying to scrape up enough money or some gold to get out of the country and save her life.

The bank?

"Everybody goes to the bank with big sack on their back like Santa Claus. They come out with their money, and somebody outside is waiting with a machine gun: BOOM boom boom! I say, Hello! OK, I don't need the bank money."

Finally, Ahmed persuaded a boat tender to give her bargain passage. Nine days at sea. One fish. One orange. A little rice. The boat was refused entry at the Kenyan port until a friend fell off and drowned.

Years of refugee camps. Huts covered with blue tarps. Water in plastic jugs. Ahmed's mother lived part-time in the refugee camp, part-time in fancy marble hotels when she was booked to perform. Sometimes Ahmed went along to sing and dance at Kenyan weddings graced with cake and cameras and a special chair for the bride. Returning to the camp, she says, was like going from sunshine to darkness.

She carried baby Asha everywhere, taught children in the camp how to act in little plays. Sometimes she sang, accompanied by a friend playing guitar. "We're gonna sing songs about love, stories, make a show for the people because everybody, everybody has a break in their heart. When we sing, the people are gonna feel UP! Feel Good! Good! And we have power now. We have a heart now. We wake UP now!"

By this point in the drama, Ahmed is exhausted. I suggest we listen to some tunes on her small boom box, the only one in her flea-market collection still working. She usually loves rummaging through her tapes and introducing me to music I've not heard, but today she is reluctant. She's stowed her cassettes in a deep duffel bag tied tightly at the top. This strikes me as odd. Usually the tapes are in a wide, woven bag that's easy to browse. What's going on?

Ahmed tells me she hasn't felt like listening to music lately.

What? Why?

Her body collapses with sadness, and it's not acting now. She tells me her husband died of yellow fever in a Kenyan refugee camp a few weeks ago. No, he wasn't killed years ago in the streets as she'd said in September. He was alive; they were divorced; she still loves him; now he's dead. Here, look at these snapshots; isn't he handsome? She shows me a pencil drawing she's sketched of his face. It's tucked into a photo album along with her divorce paper. She goes to the closet, fetches a white cassette and slides it into the boom box. His voice is strong and clear, even though he died soon after. He is telling her to take very good care of Asha and that someday they can all live together again.

Ahmed doesn't have the vocabulary to explain everything, but I think I understand. Her life as a refugee is riddled with love and regret and authentic inconsistency. Our language to talk about this type of war, the real war, is inadequate. We sputter on and on about clan revenge and starvation politics, refugee caseloads and funding for English as a Second Language instruction. In our American rush to make it all make sense, we overdose on news and numbers and overlook the lives.

The real song is about fast-forwarding without forgetting, rewinding without getting stuck.

Ahmed clicks off the tape and listens awhile to the laughter of children walking home from school. Someday when she's singing songs, she'll sing the song she cannot now say.

Paula Bock is a staff reporter for Pacific Northwest magazine. Tom Reese is a Seattle Times staff photographer.