“Hannah, roll a six!,” Mahad, Alliance Wellness recovery program resident, pleaded as the game of Ludo intensified. Ludo, a strategic and competitive board game, was popular among Somali American men, such as Mahad, who were in the process of renegotiating their dependency on substance use. These men also held vivid memories of playing Ludo in Somalia and neighboring countries that they moved through as they sought asylum from Somalia’s civil war. I first heard about Ludo when I began fieldwork at Alliance Wellness, a recovery program for an East African communities that was developed out of community need in Bloomington, Minnesota. With increasing rates of opioid related addiction and deaths among Somali Americans, Yussuf Shafie recognized a need for culturally appropriate therapy and recovery programs for Somali Americans in Minnesota (Feshir 2019).
I. Laughing in Recovery
I first became interested in Alliance Wellness’s therapeutic model, and the ways Islamic constructions of healing (e.g., Friday Prayers or remedies of a Quran verse) intersect with mandates of Alcoholics Anonymous. However, when I arrived at the clinic in 2023, I quickly became drawn to Somali American men’s deep laughter during competitive games of Ludo. This essay, in response, explores how Somali American men learn to breathe and envision a thriving life not through the grammar of Alcoholics Anonymous, but through the language of laughter.
When I visited Alliance Wellness, most residents self-identified as Somali Americans aged 18-26. These young men claimed to be in recovery, reexamining their fentanyl, meth, and alcohol use. Even though my visit was brief, program director Yussuf Shafie was generous enough to provide a thorough tour of his program. From Monday to Friday, I accompanied Alliance Wellness staff members to pick up new intakes from prison, took residents to multiple appointments (e.g., hospital visits, court, bail, and ID clinics), and observed the clinic’s day-to-day operations from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. When the clock struck 4 p.m., I would ride in one of the Alliance Wellness-operated vans that transported residents back to sober living homes scattered throughout Bloomington. I would join residents as they rested from a full day of therapy, retreating into vintage action movies, catching up on episodes of their favorite show on Netflix, or playing Ludo. These late afternoons became the highlight of my trip. I became consumed by the radiant energy of laughter spilling from the living room and the Somali American men’s banter that playfully enticed an audience. Even the lingering sting of roasts—targeting each other’s physical appearance, speech, and embarrassing moments-quietly whispered care and affection. Ultimately, I became interested in exploring what it meant to tell these young men’s histories with substance use and recovery through laughter.
Picture of Ludo Board taken by Hannah Ali
II. Ludo
Evenings at Alliance Wellness’ sober living facilities resembled Terrance Hayes’s We Should Make a Documentary of Spades. Hayes’s (2015) poetry narrates Black history through the competitive and lighthearted game of Spades. Hayes depicts Spades as existing between “magic and mathematics” and offers a lens to the tensions, strategies, dreams, and memories that shape African American lives. Amidst the rivalrous nature of spades, Hayes ends his poem with the line, “Spades is a game our enemies do not play,” reminding readers that Spades prepare communities to collaborate in addressing tension, develop the fortitude to tackle challenges, and imagine alternatives to present-day affairs and possible histories. Similarly, Ludo invited Somali Americans to collaborate in learning how to breathe and to dream of possible victories, even as they were surrounded by grim statistics that reminded them of their slim chance of sobriety, survival, and resistance to the carceral system.
Like Spades, Ludo is a highly strategic game played by teams of two players. As Mahad explained, players take turns rolling the dice and can only place their pieces onto the board after rolling a six. The objective is to put all your moving pieces onto the board and move the pieces across the board and into the central zone, often marked with a large X. A player’s movement across the board depends on the numbers rolled. If a player’s piece lands on a spot already occupied by the rival team, they can kick that piece off the board. The rival team then has to roll a six to reenter their piece onto the board.
At Alliance Wellness, Ludo got rowdy, but awakened the Somali American men’s creative imagination. Despite the ample availability of resources and games in halfway homes, young Somali American men turned to a handcrafted Ludo board made from cardboard. These men inherited the board from the previous residents at Alliance Wellness, who left behind traces of their legacies in fading signatures and moral notes inscribed on the board, like “DO NOT CHEAT,” written in the bottom left corner. They used everyday items—isolated buttons, selective cheese pieces, and coins as their moving pieces—while using empty pill bottles to roll their dice effortlessly.
As the game commenced, tensions rose, and innovative winning strategies coalesced with crafty trash-talking. Visions of a near-sighted victory rub against a playful, competitive energy that results in deep laughter. The laughter of Somali American men in recovery drew in an audience and seized the moment. These men remained carefree in these moments, often falling backwards on the couch or folding inwards, holding onto their stomachs and releasing a laughter that vibrated through the entire house. In these moments, I thought about what recovery became for these Somali American men as they let go, shed themselves from their daily worries that weighed heavily on them, and imagined a plausible and foreseeable victory. More importantly, I began to consider how this form of laughter—one that does not forget but creates space to breathe and imagine wins, which is at variance from normative discourses (Povinelli 2012)—contributes to an anthropology of laughter.
III. The Anthropology of Laughter, Humor, and Play
Anthropologists have turned to psychoanalysis and philosophy to explore how humor and laughter illuminate human experience with gender dynamics, fear, hope, family tensions, morality, and unconscious thoughts (Freud 1905; Mintz 1987). Laughter, in this regard, enables socialization within cultural norms, power dynamics, and the particularity of time and place (Radcliffe-Brown 1949). Laughter is thus both healthy and dangerously inappropriate. For instance, Julie Livingston (2012) shows how colonial archetypes of Africans as having high pain tolerance beset the contemporary ways Africans in Botswana laugh to articulate and co-experience pain. On the other hand, excessive laughter, as in the case of the 1961 laughter epidemic in a village in Tanzania, is perceived as “resulting from psychological distress” (Broyles 2016, 10). Similarly, cultural maxims such as “laughter is the best medicine” are complicated by studies showing how detrimental laughter can be to therapeutic bonds (Broyles 2016). In some cases, ‘off-topic’ humor from Black students operate as sites of refusal from surveillance often entangled with the performance of progressive politics (Shange 2019).
IV. The Significance of Somali American Men’s Laughter
At Alliance Wellness, I also noticed how young Somali American men turn to humor and laughter to socialize experiences of sobriety or resist the structure and authority of Alcoholics Anonymous discourse while establishing rebellious rhythms and narratives of sobriety. However, as I played Ludo with these young men, I became more interested in how laughter also served as a ventilator of life and a space to imagine victory. The moment Somali American men entered their sober-living facilities, I would hear deep sighs of exhaustion and relief. Evenings at these sober homes became a site of raaxo (Somali for ease or pleasure) or nasasho (Somali for rest), phrases these young Somali American men informed me were among the many Somali words for healing.
In these moments of deep rest, I noticed that Somali American men adopted a distinct breathing pattern. While therapy taught these men to rework the tensions of past and ongoing pain, evening rest sessions filled with board games and laughter enabled them to breathe, shedding the burdens that consumed them and the emotionally taxing realities of therapeutic work. These young men lounged on the couch and hunched over a board game, simply existing/breathing in a space of ease and laughter. These moments held their lives in a way that did not contain them—unlike the ship’s hold in Christina Sharpe’s (2016) In the Wake— to reductionist framings of Blackness, history, and, in this case, sobriety. Instead, these spaces anticipated a flourishing of life, reminiscent of Salvador Zárate’s (2023) description of the soil holding on to Eric Garner’s breath. I became interested in how such a space of the anticipation of life evoked a space of imagining and dreaming.
At Alliance Wellness, young Somali American men had ordinary dreams (Fast 2024; Ralph 2014) of finding a secure job, building a family, and reuniting with hobbies they once enjoyed. However, during Ludo, a blissful, regal mode of dreaming emerged. Somali American men at Alliance Wellness would confidently believe they could control the dice outcomes, commanding me and others around the Ludo board to roll numbers that satisfied their thirst for victory. Their hopes of winning were further enriched by playful banter and laughter, allowing them not to take themselves seriously as they redefined the stakes of what it meant to win. I considered what it meant to win in such a space of ease and comfort. As I basked in these hopeful reiterations of possible outcomes, I thought: What did it mean for these men to dream of victory in a space that held their life with care, expecting them to flourish rather than fail? Most importantly, how did these visions of winning in Ludo—through hope and strategy—paradoxically reflect young Somali American men’s everyday fears, aspirations, and dreams that are speculative and rooted in the conventional? What did it mean to digitally archive these moments of laughter and dreams of victory?
V. Photo-Ethnography and Laughter
My flight was delayed twice the night I was set to fly out from Minnesota to Toronto. I took this opportunity to review my fieldnotes and was astounded by how often I wrote ‘laughter,’ ‘laughing,’ and ‘play.’ Next, I flipped through my camera roll, which discreetly captured views of halfway homes, vans, and board games to avoid revealing the locations and personal identities of residents. Drug ethnographers, in particular, have turned to photography to document the intimate lives of communities that use or inject drugs and the ways they navigate structural violence (Schonberg & Bourgois 2009), health interventions (Fast 2024), and the biopolitics of methadone clinics (Bourgois 2000; Garcia 2010). However, as I sat in the airport, gazing intently at my notes and pictures, I noticed how neither my prose nor the images of places I visited in Bloomington sufficiently captured the raw, immediate moments that residents’ laughter generated.
Even when laughter is captured in audio recordings, it only emerges as a reaction and effect. However, laughter’s repertoire (Taylor 2003)—embodied performances shaped by personal histories, shifting contexts, deep-seated desires, and unconscious thoughts—remains an opaque and ghostly residue (Gordon 1997, 2008) in the elusive forces that provoke its existence. Residents’ laughter cultivated demands, forcing me to adopt a method that made me stay in the moment of laughter and play rather than fixate on documenting the clinic affairs. This enabled me to consider how Somali American men’s laughter also spoiled (Taussig 1999) what it means to research recovery history, turning me to the secrets and dreams that laughter and play narrate for young Somali American men.
Acknowledgements
Thinking is never a solitary act, and with this in mind, I want to extend my appreciation to the communities who thought through this piece with me. I send my gratitude to Yussuf Shafie, the residents, and the staff at Alliance Wellness for their generosity and for allowing me to follow the work of their organization.
Thank you to Feysal Mohamed, in particular, whose comment—“It is funny how the Men think they can control the outcome of the dice”—inspired this piece.
I am equally grateful to the young men in recovery who shared their stories with me.
Mahad is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of the resident. All other names preferred to be named.
Finally, I want to extend my appreciation to Dr. Rachel Prentice and my colleagues in the Qualitative Methods class, who helped me think through my arguments for this work.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Jessica Caporusso
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