The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it’s so pure and powerful.

You want to reach people, but you also want to reach them in the most authentic way. You now have a mass market and an audience that’s listening, but they’re in love with a song that means absolutely nothing to you.

My question about my art and my music has always been, ‘Am I good, or am I good because?’ I’m not the artist who wants to have the ‘because’ attached.

I am one of those people that’s never been really cynical about life, you know.

I’m an optimist about other people. I’m not an optimist about myself.

I know that often times a lot of people who work in music, whether they be labels and so on or even artists, want personal recognition. We want to be recognized for something, for what we did. I’d rather my song be recognized for what it’s doing and that’s important. It’s not so important how many people know me.

From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don’t necessarily have or even want to have.

I don’t feel political most of the time. Sometimes I’m placed in positions because no one else will go there.

The problem is that rap is so often a caricature of its own image. Nobody comes to the table with the seriousness of the effect that it can have; nobody is prepared for that.

Art isn’t held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you’re a loser if you’re making music until you prove otherwise.

In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all – it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras. I got to fully experience and appreciate both the tragedy of Somalia and the beauty of it.

I do think that some of my songs, like Take a Minute, are like the train between the two worlds. It starts out with the question of “how did Gandhi ever withstand the hunger strikes and all / he didn’t do it to gain power or money as I recall,” and its sweep reaches all the way to this part of the world. I think maybe I’m a translator, because I lived in both worlds and truly understand them. I understand the discontent that comes from not having. But I also understand the anxiety that comes from wealth and convenience.

I think it’s a mistake to work on success in career. I’ve worked on my passions obsessively. How can I say what I want to say more precisely than the last time I said it? Success is such an elusive concept. When you work for it, I think you get it in a way you might regret it.

I wasn’t making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it’s one of the more undervalued positions.

There’s definitely anger, the demand of more from the world, a demand for justice. There’s no other way I can perform the vocals than the way you hear them. It’s not just the words, it’s what is being felt.

It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren’t. Never something you set out to be.

It was interesting to find how dominating American vision is all over the world. I think there’s something to be said about the world’s mindset and its economics and all of that, and I think it affects the way we see ourselves and it affects music.

I’m writing from a place of – a center of authenticity, somewhere that only I know how to write from.

Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that’s totally alien to it.

The pirates are serving a purpose right now. They come from regions which have been completely ignored, and Westerners have tried to destroy these regions by their constant plundering of resources and by the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. The pirates really began in order to discourage these actions – initially. And then the business became lucrative.

I learned to fire guns at the age of nine or so, but luckily was not out killing people. We zigzagged the streets to escape those trying to kill us. I guess it would have been a matter of time till I turned around with a gun myself, to go after those coming for us. But I was fortunate. The grenade incident was about an explosion which destroyed a section of my school, from a grenade that me and my cousin detonated by accident. We both lived to tell about it.

It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.

Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they’re about their own thing.

I enjoy mediation. I think the artist’s position is often to mend the things we feel are broken. Whether that’s between two cultures or two thoughts. We’re always trying to reach, trying to expand something.

You have to let the world speak to you and then you speak, you know, so I’m in that moment now where I’m finding the world’s voice.

It’s not longer ‘Look what I can do, I can do it better then you.’ It’s just I am.

My life owes me. Like an overdose, I’m slowly
Drifting into the arms of trouble, then trouble holds me

To reach your goal authentically is probably, in the end, going to mean much more to you than having reached it in a false way.

And any man who knows a thing, knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all.

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Wavin’ Flag.

I’m not about trying to get and get and get. I feel good when I get, but I kind of feel better when I give.

It’s better to light a candle than to curse the dark
In the eyes of the youth, there are question marks.

The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.

And any man who knows a thing, knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all.

I faced quite a few challenging times, and in front of those, I was more positive than some people not facing those conditions. I’m actually of the belief now that it is that struggle that offers you that open-hearted hope.

When I get older, I will be stronger.

Until the lion learns to speak, the tales of hunting will be weak.”