Le verger des âmes perdues

Deqo cannot see what anyone would want with Karl Marx; she looks like she has TB, typhoid, and every kind of sickness going. In Saba'ad people would have run from her.
'Look at me,' she says.
Deqo stops and looks her squarely in the face.
'How old do you think I am?'
There are already white hairs on her head, her breasts beneath the sheer diric hang down to her navel; she is far into old age in Deqo's estimation.
'Go on, say it.'
'Fifty? Fifty-five?'
Karl Marx laughs, revealing broken khat-stained teeth. 'You little bitch! Take twenty off that and you're close.'
Deqo smiles in return, not believing her words but too polite to challenge them. 'Why are you called Karl Marx?' she asks.
'Because I have shared and shared and shared until there is nothing left to give.'

The urge to preserve, store and shroud her possessions has manifested itself quietly; she cannot remember when she began collecting the flakes at the bottom of the spice tin, the too-short-to-knit-with lengths of wool and the dried-up medals of soap, yet everywhere she looks rests another knot of plastic or cloth hiding the detritus of her existence. All has been condensed into tight bundles, her fifty-something years of town life - the papers, the gold, the money, the photographs, letters and cassettes - can be packed up, carried away on the back of a camel and blown away or destroyed in a rain storm. Her bungalow with no heir will slump into old age and crumble back into the sand, her life of solidity and bureaucracy and acquisition leaving less of a print than the circles scorched into the desert by long dead nomads.

Impactant portrait des femmes somalis,