Nadifa Mohamed - The Orchard of Lost Souls (132-33) lyrics

Still with her eyes closed, she turns back from the shop and stands in front of Umar Farey's hotel, the windows are tinted green and always shut, and shadows flit behind the decorative masonry on its roof. He built the hotel using his police pension in seventy-six, the same year he lost four of his fingers to a stray dog. It had been frequented by Somalis returning from jobs overseas, sailors and oil workers mostly, and Farah would spend his evenings over there talking politics. Between seventy-eight and eighty-one the hotel made the neighbourhood lively with weddings and the reappearance of long-lost men. But then in eighty-one the tone of the place changed; there was no joy, just congregations with furrowed brows gathered to lament the ever worsening situation. First the doctors in Hargeisa hospital were arrested for trying to improve conditions for their patients, then the student demonstrations broke out following their d**h sentences, and finally the National Freedom Movement, formed by Somalis living in London, began military action to remove the dictatorship. Since then the hotel has cast an ominous pall over the street. Unsubtle spies pace its perimeter by day and return at night to drag guests away at gunpoint; it has become a secretive place from which you can almost hear the ticking of a bomb.