Jonny Steinberg Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Jonny Steinberg

Jonny Steinberg shares his experiences meeting and writing about Asad Addullani for his book A Man of Good Hope

When and where did you first meet Asad? What was it about him that intrigued you?

I did not intend to write a book about Asad Abdullahi when I first met him. I had employed him to introduce me to the world of Cape Town Somalis. Early in our association, he and I were strolling through Cape Town's botanical gardens when Asad idly picked up a twig from the ground, snapped it open and drew it to his nose. The smell transported him back more than 20 years. He was six years old, in a madrasa in Somalia, mixing the ink he would use to copy out passages from the Koran. The ink was clearly narcotic; he was reliving an old, forgotten high. I thought to myself, a man who can take me to his childhood so vividly, so intimately, is a man about whom I ought to write a book.

The Somali diaspora is one that many Americans are unfamiliar with. Why is Asad's story a good introduction to the topic?

In January 1990, more than half of the population of Mogadishu, Somali's capital city, fled. The majority never returned. It is a story of such incalculable scale. To get an inkling of what it means, one needs to go up close and look intimately at an individual life, to try, as best one can, to get under an individual's skin. This what I tried to do with Asad. From the age of seven, he had neither a home nor a set of stable relationships with adults. He moved incessantly, forever calculating, forever hustling. His was an extraordinary childhood, disturbing, discomforting, and yet worthy of wonder and admiration. Step back and think of many thousands of lives lived this way and you know something of the of the Somali diaspora.

What sort of research did you do for this book?

I interviewed Asad several times a week over the course of a year. His capacity to re-inhabit his childhood self was quite astonishing and made this book possible. Once I had compiled a record of his life as he understood it, I went to East Africa and traced his childhood journey. In Nairobi, in Addis Ababa, in Dire Dawa and Harar, I walked the streets he'd walked, met people who remembered him, tried to reconstruct the social and political contexts in which he'd made his most important life decisions. I also read as much as I could about street life in East Africa's great cities; Asad was a boy of the streets; he survived because he learned to read them.

Did you ever notice any discrepancies in Asad's telling of the Somali diaspora and the research you had done? Would you ever inform him of these?

Asad believed that he came from a stable, prosperous family that had lived for many generations in Mogadishu. This piece of knowledge was very important to him. I discovered during my research that he was wrong. His parents had in fact been refugees; six years before Asad was born, they had fled their homes in the Ethiopian Ogaden with the clothes on their backs. I realised that Asad had spent his life sheltering himself from his parents' history; he'd stumbled across evidence about his roots several times and on each occasion he had looked the other way. I was very uncomfortable about sharing with him what I'd discovered. But I felt that I must.

What are some of your most memorable meetings with Asad and why?

Sharing with Asad what I'd discovered about his parents' lives was the most memorable episode in our time together. We were sitting in my car, a very intimate space. It was a Saturday morning and the streets around us were thronging with people. He listened to what I said and was silent for a long time. It was the most communicative silence I've ever experienced. The car filled up with great sadness.

Despite all of his hardships – losing his parents, witnessing multiple deaths, losing money – Asad continued to push on. What do you think motivated him?

Although he was uprooted at such a young age, Asad has a strong sense of self, probably because his first seven years were fi lled with a very close, very powerful relationship with his mother. He is strong enough to ask himself, quite consciously: 'Who will I have been when I die? Will I have lived a life worth living?' By the time he dies, he wants to have eff ected a revolution in his lineage, to have given his children lives his parents could not have imagined. He is thus a man prepared to take great risks.

What is Asad up to today? Do you two stay in touch?

He has a job driving a truck back and forth across the Midwest. He aims to buy his own truck one day, to start a business. I'm guessing that he will succeed. His working life makes regular contact hard, but we speak on the phone about once a month.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.