Dr. Maxamed Daahir Afrax
A distinguished poet, playwright, actor, broadcaster, educator and a great innovator, Xasan Shiikh Muumin was borne on 25 December 1931 in the historic costal town of Saylac. He was the only son of a middle class family in the Somali standards of the time. His father, Shiikh Muumin, was a small trader and highly respected man of religion. At the age of nine, Xasan moved with his family to the inland small town of Borame where he grew up and received his Koranic and elementary education in the 1940s. Thus, in his sedentary background, Xasan was rather unique among noted Somali playwrights of his generation, most of whom were from rural (mainly pastoral) backgrounds. Nonetheless, Xasan was not any less versed with Somali traditional culture than any of his fellow dramatists from pastoral origins, as could be observed from his work most of which is deeply rooted in Somali oral tradition.
In his professional life, Xasan took up several employments, the longest and most significant of which was his work for the state-owned national radio station, Radio Mogadishu (1968 – 1976). He worked there as a broadcaster, producer of cultural programmes and as a composer of poems, songs and radio dramas.
Before putting his playwrighting skills to the test, Xasan started his creative career as a poet. His first poems were closely associated with his involvement in the then sweeping political movement for Somali national independence. As a very young man in Borame and Jigjiga, Xasan was attracted to the philosophy and activities of the patriotic movement for Somali independence from the British and Ethiopian colonial rules of the time. This experience has had a remarkable impact in the formation of Xasan’s world view as a committed playwright and adamant advocate of socio-political reform in his country.
As far back as early 1950s, Xasan became one of the founding members in Jigjiga and Borame of the Somali Youth League (S.Y.L), the leading nationalist party in the 1940s-50s. Upon independence in 1960, when the SYL became the ruling party, it lost the massive popular support it had enjoyed in its earlier years; its leaders were fiercely criticised for becoming corrupt and incompetent and for turning away from the original principles of the party. It was then that Xasan Shiikh Muumin abandoned the SYL; instead, he joined the then leading opposition party, the Somali Democratic Union (SDU), later becoming its secretary.
In an interview I had with him in his home town of Borame on 22 August 1997, Xasan explained how his first experience with poetic composition was inspired by the political environment of nation-building orientation that prevailed in the country at the time (late 1950s). He related the story of the first beginnings which he recalled with astonishing detail and apparent relish. It was on a Monday, the 13th of May 1957. Xasan was in Borame as an active member of SYL. The organisation of an important public event was under way, namely, the 9th anniversary of the foundation of the popular party which was scheduled to be celebrated in two days time. By the 1950s it was already an established tradition that literary and artistic presentations, especially poetry and drama with patriotic themes, constitute a major component in the programme of any such public event organised by a political party.
As a young enthusiast with a promising, yet unexplored talent, Xasan decided to participate in the big event with a poem of his own. In our conversation during the interview, he narrated the exiting story of how he locked himself in that Monday evening, with big amounts of cigarettes and qat, for an extra warm-up, and how he struggled the whole night, travelling to unknown territories, carried away by his imagination. The result was three songs, with patriotic themes, one after the other. The first, which he describes as his ‘first-born’ tix (verse), was a didactic account urging the Somali public to struggle for a better future as an independent state. It begins with the words ‘Dadaala Soomalaay’, ‘Oh Somalis, make efforts!’ repeated as a refrain.
In the second song, the poet champions modern education as a key for building a modern nation-state. The piece centres around another instructive refrain: ‘Carruurta wax bara!’ (Educate the children!) The call for modern education was a theme favoured by many Somali poets and playwrights at the time.
As mentioned earlier, before engaging in the creation of full-length stage plays, Xasan Shiikh Muumin composed poetry and short dramas for radio broadcasts. Indeed, it was one of these radio dramas, Hubsiino Hal baa la Siistaa, ‘Certainty is exchanged for a she-camel’ (1966), that first established Xasan’s reputation as a dramatist. Many of his poems (mostly sung) and short dramas were broadcast through former Radio Mugadishu and Radio Hargeysa as well as the Somali service of the BBC.
The famous play Shabeelnaagood (the Libertine) was the first and the most popular of a series of four stage plays which Xasan composed from 1968-1973. The titles of the other three are Gaaraabidhaan, (Glow-worm) (1969), Ehlunaarka Adduunka, (The Damned of the Earth) (1971), and Dunidu maskaxday magan u tahay, (The World relies on the Brain) (1973).
In all of these plays, late Xasan combats against socio-political ills in Somali society; he acts as a social critique committed to ‘winnow right from wrong’. In his masterpiece, Shabeel-naagood, he launches a fierce attack against a set of destructive social and political behaviour. He acts as wise preacher, as someone with primary responsibility to ‘guide the public rightly’ as he declares in the opening of the play. The central theme in Shabeelnaagood is how the then emerging playboys in the burgeoning Somali towns ruthlessly ruin the future of young girls using such deceitful tactics as false marriage. The impact of the extra popular play was such that the tem ‘shabeelnaagood’ (playboy or lady killer) coined by Xasan Shiikh Muumin has become a commonly used entry in modern Somali vocabulary. It should be noted that Shabeelnaagood has been translated into English (the only Somali play translated into a foreign language) by late professor Andrzejeweski of London University and was published in London by Oxford University Press in 1974.
The main focus in the themes of the remaining three plays is social and political critique. In Gaaraabidhaan, for instance, the playwright criticizes the behavior of the new generation of Somalis most of whom are educated in foreign countries and then come back with misconceived understanding of modern lifestyle. Ehelunaarka Adduunka was a cry against the dangers of the prevailing injustice in the distribution of wealth within the new Somali society.
In all his work late Xasan was a true representative of his time of creative committedness and extraordinary artistic energy. The period of the late 1960s and early 1970s was not only the prime time of Xasan’s artistic career but it was the golden era (berisamaad) of Somali literature and performing arts. The entire scene of Somali cultural life was characterized by an overwhelming energy of literary and artistic creation. Cultural revivalism and socio-political reform were the dominant trends sustained by most Somali artists of the time. It was the time when artistic creators where best motivated and most energetic in their endeavour to strike a delicate balance between acting as cultural preservers and championing social reform with modern orientation.
Thus, Xasan Shiikh Muumin truly represented in his plays this prime time in that, on the one hand, he firmly stood for traditional values while on the other he wholeheartedly advocated modern-oriented ideals promoting social change.
Like many other leading playwrights of the berisamaad era, Xasan withdrew from the play-making practice and kept a low profile ever since around the mid-1970s when he moved from the Somali capital Mogadishu to the Republic of Djibouti and, later, back to his district of birth, Borame. It could be the suppression of freedom of expression by the military rule of General Siyaad Barre at the time that had frustrated to silence Xasan Shiikh Muumin and other foremost playwrights, as explained by Xasan himself in the lengthy tape-recorded conversation I had with him in Borame on 22 August 1997. Answering my questions, however, Xasan explained that taking distance from the spot-light did not mean that he gave up his career as a poet/playwright; in fact he informed me of some recent poems of his as well as outlined plays; he particularly underlined the importance of a play script he had under the title of Nabi-Daayeer. He also told me that he intended to reproduce the play Gaaraabidhaan ‘Glow worm’ which he considered as his best ever. Comparing between Gaaraabidhaan, and Shabeelnaagood, he sounded rather critical to the latter. Contrary to my evaluation of Shabeelnaagood, which I have studied in several of my published books and academic articles and which I have graded as the best Somali play ever staged, the playwright looked down to his play saying ‘wax weyn may ahayn [was not a big thing]’. He said that he was not able to invest enough time to improve it further. ‘I composed it in just 21 days’ he recalled. When I asked him the reason why he did not take the time he felt was needed he answered, with some ambiguity, that he was pressurized by ‘some people’ from a position of authority.
The late abwaan, Xasan Shiikh Muumin spent his last years in exile, mostly in Norway. There he continued acting as an educator taking upon himself to ‘guide the public rightly’, this time through public lectures, media interviews and video-recorded literary presentations addressing the Somali community in the Diaspora.
Xasan Shiikh Muumin, died in Oslo, Norway on 16 January 2008. When his body arrived at the Djibouti Airport – on its way to Borame where the late abwaan was buried – the President of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Gulelleh, awarded him posthumously the highest medal of culture. This symbolised how highly this great abwaan was respected by his people.
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* A Somali word for a distinguished, multi-talented literary/artistic creator..
Maxamed Daahir Afrax is a Somali writer, journalist and literary scholar, Editor of HALABUUR Journal of Somali Literature and Culture, President of the Somali-speaking Writers Centre of International PEN
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