Hip hop and rap almost always conjure up badass black boys, bitches and bling, an indulgence in a half laughable, half scary gangsta aesthetic. When you meet K’naan, the adjective that first comes to mind is languid—even if you know something of his criminal past. His performances, though, are anything but limp. I saw him in Nathan Phillips Square last September. A featured performer for the second annual Manifesto Festival of Music and Art, he ignited the crowd into a trilling, tribal ecstasy, hundreds of hands held aloft in the sign for peace.

I had met him a few weeks earlier. He doesn’t make much of a first impression. He enters a room unobtrusively, a wisp of a man in a black coat, with a Russian-style ushanka hat perched somewhat precariously on his ’fro. I would have guessed he was 15 years old, but he is 30, married, with two sons, three years old and 18 months. His wife, Deqa, is a pharmacist. He is very thin. His voice is soft. When we were introduced, the proffer of his hand was so imbued with delicacy, and its residence in my own so ephemeral, that I was inclined to raise it to my lips. This is a man, I can’t help but think, who survived Somalia’s civil war? Who spent time awaiting trial on assault and weapons charges in all three Toronto jails? Who turned a nice little concert for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees into a public scolding for its failures in Somalia? Well, yeah. This little guy.

K’naan, like M.I.A. and Buraka Som Sistema, is making a new kind of hip hop, the music of a globe-trotting immigrant, the hip hop of the diaspora. And it has garnered him an international following. His first full-length album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, won the Juno Award for rap recording of the year in 2006, and last year took the BBC Radio 3 Award for world music in the newcomer cate­gory. Between February and October last year, he made 63 concert appearances, all over Europe and the States. His new album, Troubadour, will be released in January.

K’naan is not, in hip-hop lingo, a “biter”—a much despised assimilator of other singers’ styles and subjects. He is so much his own man that his song “What’s Hardcore” is practically a declaration of war on the dominant hip hop style, contrasting the harsh reality of life in Somalia with American ghetto posturing:

We begin our day by the way of the gun.
Rocket-propelled grenades blow you away if you front.
We got no police, ambulance or firefighters.
We start riots by burning car tires.
They’re looting and everybody starts shooting.
Bullshit politicians talking about solutions.
But it’s all talk, you can’t go half a block without a roadblock...
So what’s hardcore? Really, are you hardcore? Hmm.

That one little “hmm” is all he has to say to skewer the fur-coddled gangstas.

Somalia was not always a land drenched in the blood of its people. Keinan Warsame (his legal name—hip hop seems to demand a certain orthographic eccentricity on the part of its practitioners) spent his first 13 years in Mogadishu, and the memories of his early life are idyllic. Women were the significant, powerful figures. His father, Abdi, left to find work as a cab driver in New York when K’naan was very young, leaving him in the care of his mother, Marian Mohamed, and his aunt, known as Magool, the most celebrated Somali singer of her time (she died in 2004). He has an older brother, Liban, and a younger sister, Sagal. He remembers Magool singing songs to him as a boy while he sat in her lap. “Those songs would become big songs on the radio,” he says. “Mine was a home of eloquent people who talked of dreams. My grandfather was a respected poet, too, and my mother is a poet in her own right.” As he speaks, he enters a kind of reverie, drifting back to the age of four, lying out at night with an older cousin in the open courtyard of his home, trying to count the stars and listening to her story of the moon. You can see a tree inside the moon, she said, “and each leaf on that tree holds the soul of one human being. When a leaf falls within the tree of the moon, someone dies.”

One day, leaves began to fall in numbers from the tree inside the moon. “Sort of like when it’s about to rain,” he says, “you get this wind, and before a war there is a wind of violence and you start to see the apprehension in people, the refusal to go out late at night. Those little things…there’s no school today, for some reason.” He was witnessing the beginning of the Somali civil war. The neighbourhood he grew up in would become known as the River of Blood.

He has spoken often of those years, though it is painful for him. He is the child of an oral culture, where language seems to resonate in ways that beat at the very doors of your soul (Somali did not have a universally accepted written form until the adoption of the Roman alphabet in 1972). In oral cultures, says K’naan, “eloquence, not posture or muscle, is the way to arrive at manhood.”