ziopapa

When a Somali man loses his country, he loses his roots. When he loses his religion, he loses his compass. When he loses his culture, he loses the color of his soul. When he loses his family, his wife, and his children, he becomes a living ghost, moving through a land that measures life by comfort rather than meaning.

I speak not from imagination but from the valley between memory and reality, where I wake every morning in North America and try to remember who I am. The question that circles my mind each dawn is not who I was, but what I must become after losing everything that once defined me.

I left Somalia because staying meant death. I arrived in North America only to begin another kind of dying. My country bled from within: clans fought for supremacy, leaders traded loyalty for dollars, and foreign powers fed the fire while pretending to put it out. I remember the last day I saw Mogadishu from the window of a departing plane and the roofs pockmarked by bullets, the sea stretching endlessly blue, as if mocking our brokenness. I thought distance would heal me, that safety in a foreign land would bring peace. I soon learned that exile can be louder than war.

It is a quiet war fought inside your chest, where nostalgia and shame wrestle until one of them wins. Here, everything works, but nothing feels alive. The streets are clean, but they whisper nothing familiar. People greet you politely, yet no greeting carries warmth. They ask, “How are you?” and walk away before you answer. Back home, “Maxaa ka dhacaya?” carried the weight of care; it meant, “Are you in peace?” Here, peace is assumed, not shared.

I arrived with hope that this new world would replace what I lost. But I discovered that no amount of order or opportunity can replace belonging. Belonging is not built by paperwork or citizenship; it grows in the soil of memory, watered by community, and guarded by faith. When those are gone, even paradise feels hollow.

The first thing I truly lost after arriving was my religion—not because I stopped believing, but because I stopped feeling. Islam in Somalia was life itself: the call to prayer blending with the sounds of goats, children, and traders; elders reminding us of patience; neighbors waking you for Fajr  prayers without shame. Here, religion became private, almost shy or in vain. People whispered prayers in corners or scheduled spirituality between work shifts. I prayed too, but my prayers became mechanical, rushed, tired. The heart that once trembled before Allah became numb.

I would go to the mosque on Fridays and find men arguing about leadership or which mosque received more donations. Faith that once united us now divided us by minor differences. I realized then that I had not only crossed oceans but had crossed from a collective faith to individual survival. Losing religion felt like watching the light fade from my own eyes. Without it, every success felt empty. I worked, paid bills, smiled at coworkers, but inside I carried a quiet hunger that no salary could feed. Faith had been my bridge between despair and endurance; without it, I stood in the middle of that bridge, unsure which direction still led home.

One night, alone in my apartment, I opened the Qur’an I had carried from Mogadishu. The pages smelled of the sea, the edges frayed from years of travel. I read not with fluency, but with desperation. The verses reminded me that Allah tests those He loves, that loss is not the end but the purification of the soul. That night I cried, not for what I lost, but for how far I had drifted from who I was meant to be.

Then culture began to slip away, quietly, like sand through open fingers. At first, I tried to preserve it: cooking Somali food, listening to old songs, calling elders back home. Slowly, however, the rhythm changed. My children refused Somali dishes; they wanted pizza. They preferred English cartoons to Somali poetry. They laughed at my accent, corrected my grammar, and rolled their eyes when I spoke of clan history or oral wisdom. I realized culture does not die in war that it dies in comfort bed. The more comfortable our children become in the West, the more foreign we become in our own homes.

I used to be the storyteller; now I am the outdated parent whose stories belong to another century. In the mall, I see Somali mothers with daughters dressed in clothes our grandmothers would have wept to see. They call it freedom; I call it forgetting. But even as I disapprove, I understand—they are only adapting to survive in a world that measures worth by visibility rather than virtue.

Leadership too vanished. In Somalia, even in chaos, elders could stop bloodshed. Here, we have organizations with glossy websites but no soul. Our community meetings begin with ambition and end with ego. Leaders chase grants, not guidance. We are scattered like dry leaves; everyone claims to represent the Somali voice, but no one listens to the Somali heart. When I lost leadership, I lost direction. I no longer knew whom to trust, whom to follow, or how to lead myself. Leadership here is measured by titles, not integrity. A man can hold a position but have no wisdom, a salary but no soul. I longed for the kind of leadership that once balanced justice with compassion, power with humility. Instead, I found committees, bylaws, and endless disagreements. Without true leadership, every Somali man becomes an island, and an island eventually erodes.

My family  final fortress crumbled slowly, vegetatively. At first, we were united by need, navigating forms, translating letters, surviving together. But once stability arrived, cracks appeared. My wife wanted independence, and society encouraged it. “You don’t need to depend on anyone,” they told her. The same system that gave us safety also taught her that tradition was oppression. I still saw myself as a protector; she saw me as an obstacle. I loved her, but love is powerless when two worlds pull in opposite directions. She wanted freedom; I wanted the family to stay whole. Neither of us was wrong, yet both of us lost. Divorce came quietly, with papers and signatures in silence. There was no shouting, only emptiness.

When she left, she took not only herself but the rhythm of companionship that had carried me through exile. My children remained, but not really. They lived with me physically, but spiritually they belonged to another world. They spoke a language I struggled to master, laughed at jokes I could not decode, and believed in ideas that contradicted everything I taught them. They told me I was too strict, too old-fashioned, too religious. I told them they were too lost, too careless, too American. The space between us grew until our home felt like a waiting room. I tried to hold them with discipline, but discipline without understanding becomes distance. I learned that here, children are raised by systems, not parents. Schools, friends, and the internet became their real teachers. I lost my children not to death, but to a culture that convinces youth that rebellion is maturity. Sometimes I hear them speaking to each other and realize they will never know the poetry, the respect, the humility that once defined our people. That realization cuts deeper than war.

So, what should I do after losing everything my country, religion, culture, leadership, family, wife, and children? The answer, I learned slowly, is not to chase what is gone, but to rebuild what can still grow. I began by returning to the simplest truth: a man without faith is a shadow. I forced myself to return to the mosque, even when I felt out of place among younger brothers who came for socializing rather than spiritual refuge. I started small: volunteering, cleaning, teaching a few Somali words to children after prayer. It felt humble, but humility was the medicine my pride needed. Each small act reminded me that I still had purpose. If I could not rebuild Somalia, I could rebuild one heart at a time by starting with my own.

By Osman A Hassan

abayounis1968@gmail.com