North to Paradise

by Ousman Umar

After just one week in Tripoli, I spent four years in Benghazi; that’s how unpredictable the journey north can be. Sometimes you leave a place when you’ve only just arrived, you’re just a blip, as if you were never even there. Other times, you end up waiting for what seems like an eternity, and you build something resembling a life. Nothing is certain.

I never got used to the ways men and women interacted there, which was governed by strict rules. Taxis and buses are segregated by gender: you aren’t allowed to get into a vehicle with a woman, and if you find yourself near a woman on the sidewalk, you have to cross the street. Or at least, you do if you’re Black. You also never see a woman alone outside: she’s always with her father, her husband, or an older brother. And of course, you wouldn’t even dream of looking at a woman. If the man she’s with catches you, he’ll start throwing rocks.

One of the biggest problems in the city were the violent street gangs of young Libyan men called “the Asma Boys.” Instead of wearing traditional clothing, they dressed like westerners: sneakers, cuffed jeans, etc. If they saw a Black man on the street, they would beat him until he couldn’t breathe. We had to be very careful to avoid them, and tried to stay in populated areas.

There is almost no concept of leisure or recreation in Libya. There are no movie theaters. There are only three TV channels, and they mostly play footage of Qaddafi railing against the United States.

the Libyans didn’t work much. They got money just for having children. The more kids they had, the more money they received, because there are only five million of them occupying an enormous territory, and they have a massive amount of oil. So they were paid just for being Libyan. They are very rich people: the government has empty apartments that it makes available to anyone who wants to live there, but in Libya, they think only poor people live in apartments: everyone is expected to have a house of their own. Meanwhile, we Black folks lived differently, on the outskirts, in the slums.

Many of the migrants you see on the news, arriving on the Mediterranean coast or dying at sea, depart from Libya. There, smugglers cram them onto rubber or wooden rafts and shove them out to sea. Sometimes they pack as many as four hundred people onto a single raft. I knew people who tried to cross there, where smugglers charge a thousand dollars for passage to Europe. Often these people came back, saying they had been cheated out of their money.

In that basement in Casablanca, we met several women who had been trafficked and subjected to unspeakable sexual violence. Many had become pregnant and were now traveling with newborn babies: children of the connection houses. Even with all the suffering I experienced, I know that my hardship pales in comparison to what female migrants endure. At least I had some freedom. But in a country like Libya, where women must be accompanied in public by a male family member, it’s impossible for female migrants to find work, and they have no choice but to enter de facto slavery in the country’s forced prostitution networks. Otherwise, they don’t eat. Rape is so commonplace along the journey north, in and out of the connection houses, that these women have to find ways of coping with it; if they didn’t somehow adapt to their reality—if they fully acknowledged and processed this violence—the trauma could kill them.

When I got off the train and set foot in my new city of Barcelona, I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness. Then, instantly, I felt fear, because I found myself face-to-face with an escalator, something I had never encountered before: I thought it looked like an enormous, deadly python. Everything was new and exciting. And there were countless aspects of this new world that I didn’t understand. This, at last, was Paradise, the Promised Land. It was February 24, 2005.