The skeletons of buildings:
The bombed-out buildings are shocking enough.
There are street after ruined street of them in the centre of Mogadishu.
Some have been reduced by shellfire to rubble. Others retain a building-like shape – the rough skeletons of once-ornate Italian colonial apartment blocks or shopping arcades.
But the really eerie side to many parts of Mogadishu is the lack of people
It’s not as rubble but as “rough skeletons” that we can see the actual death of a building. Like a pile of ash (of papers, a body, leaves), rubble is itself and not what it was (a house, a dam, a statue). The sum: for the death of a thing to be seen as a death, it must retain some of its living form: “the once-ornate Italian colonial apartment block.”
