The City in My Mind

A series in which writers from around the world describe the view from their windows.

OFTEN I live in one place but write about another place very much unlike it. I wrote my first novel as a student in India, and I wrote my latest while commuting among Newcastle in England, Minneapolis and Cape Town, where I reside. As befits a writer who lives more in the mind than in my physical surroundings, I base my work on memory, which I enrich with my knowledge of Somalia — where my novels are set — and supplement with my imagination.

When I start a work, I first visit Mogadishu to do research, then return just before publication. During this time the attitudes of the city’s residents, their dress habits and even their diet will have undergone changes, depending on the politics of the country’s competing factions.

On a clear day, the beauty of the city is visible from various vantage points, its landscape breathtaking. Even so, I am aware of its unparalleled war-torn decrepitude: almost every structure is pockmarked by bullets, and many homes are on their sides, falling in on themselves.

From the roof of any tall building you can see the Bakara market, the epicenter of resistance during the recent Ethiopian occupation; its labyrinthine redoubts remain the operations center of the militant Islamist group Shabab. Down the hill are the partly destroyed turrets of the five-star Uruba Hotel, no longer open. Now you are within a stroll of Hamar Weyne and Shangani, two of the city’s most ancient neighborhoods, where there used to be markets for gold and tamarind in the days when Mogadishu boasted a cosmopolitan community unlike any other in this part of Africa.

So what do I see when I am in Mogadishu? I see the city of old, where I lived as a young man. Then I superimpose the city’s peaceful past on the present crass realities, in which the city has become unrecognizable.

Nuruddin Farah is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming novel “Crossbones.” Matteo Pericoli, an artist, is the author of “The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York.”