Dadaal

There are words that are said, and there are words that are carried.

I grew up in a language that did not waste itself. Somali, in my home, was never just communication. It was instruction, inheritance, sometimes warning, often prayer. A single phrase could hold a lifetime inside it. A question could feel like a reckoning.

Warsan Shire once wrote that when we see injustice, we ask: “dhiiga kuma dhaqaaqo?” does your blood not move?

It is not a passive question. It demands something of you. It assumes that to witness is to feel, and to feel is to act. It refuses the luxury of indifference.

Another of her lines lingers with me: “where does it hurt?” and the answer, always, everywhere.

Because to be raised the way I was, in the stories of a people who have known rupture, migration, survival, is to understand that pain is not isolated. It travels. It echoes. It becomes collective memory. You inherit it without being asked.

But you also inherit something else.

My mum used to say dadaal.

Work. Strive. Keep going.

Not loudly. Not in long speeches. Just a word, placed gently, like something she trusted would grow on its own. At the time, it sounded small. Almost like a whisper you could miss if you were not listening carefully.

But Somali words have a way of expanding over time.

What was once a whisper has become something else entirely. It has become a force that fills my chest. A rhythm I cannot ignore. A quiet instruction that refuses to leave me.

Dadaal.

She was not asking me to succeed.

She was asking me to endure.

To persist when things did not move.

To keep going when stopping would have been easier.

Because success is not always immediate. But effort, real effort, is constant. It is something you return to again and again, even when there is no guarantee of reward.

And now, that word no longer feels soft.

It feels like a lion’s roar.

Uncontained. Unapologetic. Impossible to silence.

Because when she said it, she did not just mean me.

She meant strive for those who were never given the chance to begin.

For those whose lives were interrupted, displaced, rewritten by forces larger than themselves.

For those whose names are not written anywhere but still live in the language we speak.

In Somali, words are rarely just about the individual. They stretch outward. They belong to a wider we.

So when I move through the world now, I feel the weight of that inheritance. Not as a burden, but as direction. As something grounding. Something clarifying.

When I hear “does your blood not move?” I know that silence is not an option.

When I hear “where does it hurt?” I know that empathy must be expansive.

And when I hear dadaal, I know that effort itself is a form of resistance.

The words I grew up hearing did not stay in the past.

They followed me. They shaped me. They are still shaping me.

And now, when I speak, I understand that my words, too, will carry weight.

So I choose them carefully.

I carry them deliberately.

And I refuse to let them be small.

Because some words are not meant to be whispered forever.

Sincerely,

Idman