The facts of his life in a war zone are stark enough. He was eight years old when he first fired a gun. He was 11 when gunmen chased him and three friends through the streets of Mogadishu. He escaped. His friends were not so lucky—they were shot and killed. One day he found what looked like an old potato in the dirt at his school, flung it away from him and blew up half the building. His brother was arrested for blowing up a court building and saved from the firing squad only through the intervention of his aunt, Magool. Somali society was crumbling. Refugees began arriving from the north, described by K’naan and his friends as “those who were brought by the gun,” a phrase the newcomers chillingly twisted into a description of their reluctant hosts: “those who await the gun.” K’naan’s mother made frantic daily trips to the American embassy, begging for the visas that would let them join her husband in New York. In January 1991, on the last day the embassy was open, a sympathetic employee provided them with the needed papers, and the family caught the last commercial flight to leave the city before fighting closed the airport. K’naan was 13 years old.

They landed in New York (Keinan means “traveller” in Somali, a name he would more than live up to over the ensuing years), and though he couldn’t speak English, he had already mastered its pronunciation, rhythms and cadences—at least as assimi­lated through the hip-hop records his father had regularly mailed to him. He learned the formalities of the language surprisingly quickly and was soon writing poetry in English and posting it on Somali Web sites. Learning the language was a matter of survival for him; he thought of himself as a poet, but in America, at first, he was a poet without words. “Nothing matters without language,” he says, “and I fought to get that back.” You begin to sense where the songs come from, though he says that every song starts with a melody. Some little thing, he says, like seeing an old man cross the street unaccompanied, can provoke him to hum something, the melody itself somehow beginning to weave a feeling and a colour. Then the words come.

He, his mother and siblings stayed less than a year in New York. His father had already moved to Toronto, hoping to improve his fortunes in the larger Somali community here (the man is clearly something of a nomad; he’s currently back in Somalia). K’naan says all he knew of Canada before he arrived was that “there was a place called Dixon, Little Mogadishu, the only place that people in Somalia know. If you leave and you’re going to Canada, then you’re going to Dixon.” He’s speaking of the Dixon Road area at Kipling Avenue, around which live some 25,000 of the approximately 100,000 Somali who have immigrated to Canada. The first recording he would make, unknown outside the Somali community but very popular there, was titled “A Place Called Dixon.”

Little Mogadishu has its own official community centre, at Kipling and Dixon, consisting of two small rooms in the basement of a building in a strip mall called Westway Centre. It was there that I met Bashir Ali, K’naan’s uncle, and Abdurahman Hosh Jibril, the chair of the Somali-Canadian National Council (he goes by Abdi Hosh). The place is always busy, most often with people in need of help with paperwork or the demands of various government bureaucracies. The unofficial community centre, said Hosh, is just around the corner on Dixon, and he and Ali would take me there. It turned out to be a Country Style doughnut shop.

On the way, we passed dozens of teens, virtually all of them Somali, connecting, hanging, flirting, arguing. There were moms with kids. Everyone seemed to know Hosh, a dapper, polished gentleman with a politician’s easy geniality, and our progress was slowed by frequent conversations and introductions. When we finally entered the doughnut shop, it was a gunslinger-entering-the-saloon moment: all men, all Somali, all stopped talking, turned and stared (Hosh would tell me later that one man said he hoped I wasn’t there to campaign for Harper). Again, much conversation (Ali, whose English is minimal, came into his own here) and many introductions (among them, a local youth worker, and a journalist, now based in Washington working for the Somali section of Voice of America). There were no young people in the room, but daytime is for adults, said Hosh. At night, the place gets taken over by kids.

Keinan Warsame would have been one of those kids, attending Kipling Collegiate by day (though he dropped out after Grade 10), hanging later at Country Style or among the windswept plazas and high-rises that dot the neighbourhood. Six apartment buildings, known collectively as the Dixon Towers, march along the north side of Dixon Road east of Kipling. K’naan grew up at number 330, some 26 storeys high, currently in the throes of exterior renovations. Hosh says the neighbourhood doesn’t look much different today than it did when K’naan was an adolescent. The apartment buildings huddle around a central grassy area—not a park, exactly, but space, at least, to breathe. Not far down the road there’s an outdoor basketball court, donated by Vince Carter when he was a Raptor. The area doesn’t feel scary, at least in the daylight (busy with locals, including mothers with children, bustling about among the towers), but a lot of young people, K’naan included, got into a lot of trouble with the law in Little Mogadishu.

In his mid-teens, he was part of a gang, known as the Dixon Crew, that numbered more than 100 kids involved in criminal activity. K’naan describes the Dixon Crew as a way for young Somali to band together and figure out the new world and culture they found themselves in. “There were so many of us Somali who were unaware how the culture works,” he says. “We were living in the housing projects and we’re part of that ghetto equation: crime, police, profiling. You have run-ins with different gangs because of it, and then you have run-ins with the law.” He says all his friends were arrested at least once and spent time in jail, and describes the police who came into the courtyard: “We’d sit outside in the evening, and they’d swarm from different directions and take every­body in. We didn’t see ourselves as gangs, but as young people trying to protect ourselves.”

He was arrested some 15 times on charges relating to fights and weapons (never, he says, for drugs), and was held in jail for months at a time. He’s not a violent man, but he says his attitude was, “Hey man, let me grab a baseball bat when I’m walkin’ out of the house because I don’t want nobody fuckin’ with me.”