Mersa Fatima

I am contributing this article as part of Asmarino on going initiative to translate articles from Tigrigna/English  to Arabic or the opposite so that no one is left from getting news and information about Eritrea and Eritreans . This article about an Arabic novel “Mersa Fatima written by the Eritrean well-known novelist Haji Jaber.

Haji Jaber is , an Eritrean journalist and novelist -born in the coastal city of Massawa in 1976. Currently he is working as a journalist in the Al-Jazeera  TV channel. His first novel "Samrawit” won the "Sharjah ( Arab Emirates) Prize for Arab Creativity 2012. Samrawit is in its 4^th editon, while the subject of this article “ Mersa Fatima” in 2013   is in its 2^nd edition.

Mersa Fatima

The protagonist of Mersa Fatima  is from a village near Gindaa. As a little boy , he was a shepherd. Later he learns Arabic and becomes its teacher. But he gives up teaching and goes to Asmara. In Asmara he starts to work as a shop boy and there he meets Salma. From the first page of the novel to its end, he never stops mentioning her beauty, their love and dreams. But suddenly Salma disappears. Where is Salma? That is the plot of Mersa Fatima. Is she in Sawa or Shegrab refugee camp or in the Sinai desert kidnapped by human traffickers?

Searching for Salma in Sawa

What do you do if you are told that your lover is taken to Sawa? As you know, there are many songs that speak of a lover going from a place to place in search of his/her beloved. Our hero in Mersa Fatima decides to voluntarily enlist for the national services so that he can go to Sawa. However, if you decide to go to Sawa voluntarily, the authorities will think that (a) you are drunk or (b) you are insane, and in both cases they will reject you. But if they can verify that you are not a drunkard or insane, they will take you to use you as propaganda.

Our hero goes to Sawa, but in Sawa men and women are segregated and they only mingle once a month for the musical party. Our hero desperately waits for that day. When that day comes, he sees lots of young women coming from different battalions. He searches for Salma among the thousands of girls but can not find her. But when Thomas, the singer, takes the stage, our hero has a brilliant idea. Some men and women were going to the stage to cheer Thomas. But they are allowed to do so only if they present money as a gift to Thomas. Our hero takes 50 nakfa and the guards surrounding the stage gladly welcome him to go to the stage and cheer Thomas. Our hero goes to the stage and dances, hugs the singer and waves to the crowd in the hope that Salma will see him. He stays there longer than the guards expected and as a result, a guard with a stick walks towards him and tells him enough is enough. When he comes back from the stage, many girls surround him and ask him his name while he asks them if they know Salma. No is the answer he gets.

Life in Sawa is harsh. A lot of slavery-type work with little food or rest, and poor hygiene. But this turns upside down two times a year and life becomes sweet. The food is good. You get nice bed sheets and you are told to clean yourself. The first time is when the “beles” (a name given to Eritrean in Diaspora when visiting Eritrea) are coming to Sawa. They are the boys and girls, from Europe and North America. They speak funny Tigrinya and are the tourists of Sawa.

The second time that life in Sawa is sweet is when the parents visit their loved ones and here again the government tries to tell them that the loved ones are eating nice food, sleeping well and are clean.

So in Sawa they really teach you how to operate a gun besides your high school subjects. But the main reason they take you there is to make you break the stone out of a hill. That physical operation has to do more with the psychological aspect of your being. By ordering you do that illogical task, they want you to be an obedient person. You forget that you were once a brilliant student who challenged not only your classmates but also your teacher. At Sawa, you are just like a machine operating by the orders of the commanders. When you graduate from Sawa, they want you to serve the regime forever. Unless you are strong enough to not be destroyed from inside, chances are are that you are going to carry the slave mentality.

You are lucky if you are selected to be a personal servant to one of those who command the camp. In Mersa Fatima, our hero becomes a driver for colonel Manjus. As a driver, you have access to the nearby towns. Our hero drives the colonel to the women’s camp and there, while waiting for his boss, he searches for his lover but without any luck. He decides to cross the border thinking that she might have left Sawa for Sudan. Kidane, his roommate, supports the idea and encourages him to do so. Kidane was one of the university students who demonstrated openly against the government. He was sent to Sawa via Wia. Kidane and our hero read and discussed  George Orwell’s Animal Farm secretly .

Looking for his lover in camps of refugees

He has to cross the border to be in the Sudan. While crossing though , he finds persons who can allow you to cross the border. So the system is that before you encounter the nomad human traffickers, there are persons whose main job is to make you cross the border and our hero  calls the me “the new Shifta”. They  are located at the border with the Sudan. Unless you pay them money, they won’t let you go to the Sudan. And in the Sudan, you will end up in either of two camps: the refugee camp or the notorious human traffickers’ camp.

The human traffickers know your destination. You do not have to tell them. You want to go to Israel and through their chain of franchises scattered in the deserts of Egypt, they exploit your relatives in Europe or North America or inside Eritrea. It doesn’t matter as long as they are paid in US dollars.

Literature on Eritrean refugees in Sudan is rare . Mersa Fatima provides snapshots of the old, young and child Eritrean refugees in the Sudan. In Mersa Fatima the protagonist assimilates with refugee life. He lives, works and plays like a refugee. He becomes an assistant to a vegetable seller who is a one-legged refugee.

There are three important persons he meets in the refugee camp and all three represent the three types of Eritrean refugees in the Sudan , the refugees of  the 60s, the  70s and 80s and the refugees of post independence . Oum Awaab, an old woman , a refuge from the 60s and she is the mother of all. She is old, poor and a refuge who has nothing but a big heart. She is the one who helps our hero get a job as assistant fruit seller. The fruit seller, Ameer represents the second type of refugees and maintains good characters.  

But our hero  still asks for Salma. The refugees give him hope that he will find her among the refugees but that does not happen.

Did the human traffickers kidnap Salma?

Our protagonist thinks Salma is hijacked by the Rashidah and wants to save her. But he in his turn is hijacked. By now you know the attitude of our protagonist. Remember why he climbed that musical stage in Sawa. So when hijacked by these human traffickers who are after his money or kidney or free labour, he asks them if they have seen Salma. They think he is nuts. You remember when he told the authorities in Asmara that he wanted to go to Sawa? They thought the same.

Mersa Fatima also gives us the picture of these human traffickers. Here, it is another world with its own system. There are bosses, middle bosses and little bosses. There are those who do the dirty work, the dirtier work and the dirtiest work. Among them is a woman who has a sickness seen by her community as a taboo. She is neglected by her community , became an outcast and the only way for her and her son to survive is by cooking food for the refugees so that they don’t die before they are traded. She doesn’t want to be part of the traffickers but that is the only way for her survival.

At the human traffickers’ camp you are exploited. They exploit you by making you work in their farm lands or by stealing your body parts, especially the kidneys. They exploit your relatives to pay the ransom. And if you are a woman, add rape to those atrocities.

A character in Mersa Fatima saves herself from rape by telling the man who was ready to rape her that she is HIV positive. He screams and runs away.

The human traffickers will demoralize you. To them you are not a human being. They call you “slave” and “Habesh”. Yes “Habesh” even if you are from the lowlands of Eritrea. For them it doesn’t make a difference which part of Eritrea you come from.

Our protagonist suffers a lot under the human traffickers in search of his lover. So before his kidneys are sold or his body deteriorates due to slave type work or he is shot and killed because he can’t afford the ransom for his release, he escapes.

Back to the refugee camp  

Again he hardly finds news about Salma in the refugee camp. He tells his refugee friends that he couldn’t find a trace of her with the human traffickers. Some friends suggest that he forgets her and secure a UN protection status so that he can resettle in one of the developed countries. He can do that. He has the a good case to be accepted and the potential to be successful settler  in one of those countries. But to him that means nothing without Salma.

Back to Eritrea

“Salma was looking for you,” says his friend in Asmara.

His friend tells him that after he left for Sawa, Salma came to him and asked about him. He also tell him that Salma with a help of friend also fled to the Sudan to look for him.

Our protagonist is left in limbo. Did Salma go to Sawa willingly in search of him? Did she look for him at the refugee camp? Did she make herself vulnerable to the human traffickers so that she can find him in their camps? Did she follow the same route he followed in search for her? That is the story of Mersa Fatima.

I would like to end this article where the novel ends

I was not sad by the news of Salma. I was not sad because I overcame sadness. I was only busy by the numbers of circles that I passed without finishing them or the circles finishing on me. I was not sad because

 Salma for sure will repeat her circle that she started in the beginning : here in Mersa Fatima where all fates start and finish.