My father died a week after I went to see him at the hospital. Just before he died, he slipped back into unconsciousness. The machines kept him alive until the doctors pulled the plug. I knew it was going to happen, and yet when I found out I still felt a pain that was primeval in its intensity.
I would have to stay away from the funeral. All day long I imagined the scene in his apartment: all the women of the clan coming by, sitting on the floor, drinking tea, telling stories, consoling each other, wailing, and waiting for the men to return from the cemetery where they buried him.
I found myself walking around my apartment in America, obsessively cleaning, trying not to think. I could have gone to see my father earlier; I couldn’t ignore the choice I had made. I could have canceled my trip to Brazil or my trip to Australia and just flown to him after that first phone call in June. I could easily have called and canceled my commitments, but I didn’t go to see him because it wasn’t convenient, because my sense of belonging had shifted away from my duty to my father, away from the smells of Somalia and Nairobi, to a new tribe.
I had made a selfish choice. I did not go because I could count on my hands the number of times I had spoken to my father since I had wriggled out of his grasp sixteen years before, and every time the conversation was the same: a sermon that was not just monotonous, but dismaying.
Even after I fled from my father and his plans for me, I had still looked up to him as a leader, as someone who had acted against the injustice and tyranny in Somalia, who had fought to bring his family, tribe, and nation into a democratic, modern system of governance.
The first cracks of my disenchantment came in 2000, when I met him in Germany, where he had gone for an eye operation. It was the first time I had seen him after eight years of exile. I was still studying at the University of Leiden, bursting with all kinds of ideas, longing to see him again yet afraid of what he would say to me. Even so, when my father began talking about Islamic law, making what seemed to me weak, even silly arguments, I was almost speechless. This was my father. He was still a brilliant thinker and leader, invincible and strong, so I made excuses: this couldn’t possibly be the real man. After that meeting, however, every conversation ended the same way; even when we last spoke on the phone, before I had gone to Brazil, I had wanted to stop myself feeling disappointed at how inconsistent his ideas and beliefs were, how irrational.
Just as I had lied about my identity when I sought asylum in Holland, my father too, it seemed, had lied to cheat the asylum system so that he could live in Britain. The tribal hero, the preserver of the culture of Islam and the clan, took handouts from the unbelievers on a false pretext, with a fake passport, though, unlike me, he had nothing but contempt for their values and way of life. Before he died he had even applied for and received British citizenship, not because he wanted to be a British subject but because of the instrumental benefits of free housing and health care. At the same time, he continued to lecture me never to be loyal to a secular state; he repeatedly urged me to return to the true faith. If I had stayed with him for a week he would have trapped me in a week-long lecture. He would have asked me to reunite with the family—his wives, their daughters, some of whom probably think I should be put to death and who certainly consider me a whore.
We who are born into Islam don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy. (Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad elevated it and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live happily, in union. Polygamy creates a context of uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the other wife getting? Who is the favored child? Who will he marry next, and how can we manipulate him most efficiently? Rival wives and their children plot and are often said to cast spells on each other. If security, safety, and predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for power.
My grandmother, a second wife herself, used to say that our family was too noble to feel jealousy. Nobility in Somali nomadic culture is synonymous with self-restraint, with resilience. A higher-status clan is more self-conscious, hence more stoic. Expressions of jealousy or any other kind of emotion are frowned upon. My grandmother said she was lucky, and people called her spoiled, because after her older cowife died her husband didn’t take another wife for many years, until my grandmother had had nine children. Even then, he only married again because eight of those children were girls.
My grandmother had thought her position was safe, because even though she had given birth to daughter after daughter, for years her husband did not marry another wife. And then he did marry again. And that third wife, to my grandmother’s enduring shame, gave birth to three boys. My grandfather had a total of thirteen children.
There was nothing my grandmother could do and nothing she wished to say, so she did not protest. But after that, the worst in her came to the fore: she became mean and petty, exploding with temper at her children, who took the brunt of her anger.
Long after I was an adult, I realized that it was jealousy that finally drove my grandmother to walk away from her husband. After my grandfather’s new wife had her second son, my grandmother could no longer contain her shame and envy, and she left their home in the desert, ostensibly to look after her adult children, which included my mother.
My mother’s story was similar. Even though she was my father’s second wife, from the day she learned that my father had married a third woman and had another child, Sahra, my mother became erratic, sometimes exploding with grief and pain and violence. She had fainting episodes and skin diseases, symptoms caused by suppressed jealousy. From being a strong, accomplished woman she became a wreck, and we, her children, bore the brunt of her misery.
Of my father’s six children who made it to adulthood, three have suffered mental illnesses so severe that they can barely function. My sister Haweya died after three years of depression and psychotic attacks; my brother Mahad is a manic-depressive, unable to hold down a job; one of our half sisters has had psychotic episodes since she was eighteen. Aunts and uncles on both sides of my family have cases of Waalli, or generic “madness,” as they call all mental problems in Somali.
Perhaps polygamy invites madness, or perhaps it is the clash between aspiration and reality. All my relatives desperately wanted to be modern. They yearned for freedom, but once they found it they were bewildered and broken by it. Obviously mental instability has biological factors too, but it is also affected by the culture we mature in, the tactics and strategies of survival we develop, the relationships we have with others, and the unbearable dissonance between the world we are told to see and the world in which we actually live.
As I spoke with Magool after my father’s death, it occurred to me that the message that Abeh had tried so desperately to tell me on his deathbed was probably that I should look after his wives: his first wife, who also lives in England; his second wife, my mother, who lives in Somalia; his third wife, Sahra’s mother; and his fourth wife, a woman whom he married in Somalia after Sahra was born and with whom he had no children. I had almost forgotten about the fourth wife’s existence.
I pondered this for some time, something I had never permitted myself to do while he was alive. My father had hurt so many people, as he married women and fathered children and then left them behind, more or less untended. Judging my father by my adoptive Western standards, I found that he had failed in his duties toward his wives and children.
I have never condemned my father or allowed myself to feel real anger toward him. But if I had gone to his side and spoken truthfully to him before he died, I might have had to open an emotional closet I have nailed shut. Now that he was dead I felt contempt for myself, and I was filled with regret for everything he and I might have done differently.
* * *
I grew closer to Magool in the weeks after my father’s death. My young cousin had grown up smart, independent, a free spirit, tough and yet compassionate, with a no-nonsense attitude toward life. Now she was the suddenly my only precious link to my extended family. Magool had lived with me for over six months in the Netherlands in the early 1990s. Unlike Sahra, she adopted the Western values of individual responsibility in matters of life, love, and family. Because everyone in her environment had tried to convert her back to Islam, she knew how annoying the process was and never tried to convert me. Magool was also my connection to the Somali bloodline to which, whether I liked it or not, I still belonged.
One day I asked Magool for news of my mother, and she told me a story that surprised and pleased me.
All those long years after my father had left my mother alone in Kenya with three children, Ma had refused to say more than a word or two to him. Her mute, awful anger lay between them even before he left us; her silence filled our house on Park Road in Nairobi, until he could no longer bear it. When he came back to Kenya ten years later, she turned away from his outstretched arms and ignored his endearments, even in the presence of family and friends.
After I fled my family and my father moved to London, Ma followed the news about him closely, Magool told me. When she learned that he was dying and suffering, she believed it was because his soul was not being allowed to depart quietly and in peace. My father’s kidneys failed, then started functioning again; he would breathe on his own for a while and then had to be hooked up to the ventilator again. Ma saw all this not as the effects of leukemia or the septic infection that was raging through his body and killing his organs but as a sign of, a prelude to, the explicit tortures of the grave that loom so large in Islamic teaching.
In the hell described in the Quran, flames lick the flesh of the sinful; burning embers will be placed under their feet, their scalps will be scalded and their brains boiled. These tortures are endless, for as their skin is burned it is replaced and burned again. In the suffering of my father on his deathbed, my mother believed, Allah and his angels were giving him a taste of the punishments to come for his wrongdoings.
I imagined my mother must have asked herself whom my father could have wronged more than he had wronged her. Who else had he abandoned, cheated on, dragged to foreign countries? Who but she had gone hungry and watched her fatherless children fall away and betray her after he departed? Who could possibly have suffered more than she because of the sins of Hirsi Magan Isse? My mother felt she held the keys to my father’s last chance for salvation before the grave, so she resolved to act.
Perhaps she thought that by doing good she might be forgiven for her own sins. Or perhaps it was because she truly loved him. (This is what I tell myself.) Maybe her sense of ethics and justice, of being the daughter of a respected judge among the nomads, never deserted her, or maybe her act was all about power. Whatever her reasoning, my mother decided to register at my father’s deathbed like his other wives. Her presence was different from theirs, however. She cajoled Magool, the daughter of her younger sister, into going to the hospital on her behalf to deliver a message.
I am not sure how, but Magool had grown friendly with my half sister, Sahra. She found out from Sahra that my father was in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and also found out which ward he was in. Then she went to see him with a message from my mother. Unlike me, she did not talk at first, but hovered quietly for a few minutes, until she felt comfortable enough to whisper his name. Magool said that he opened his eyes and raised his head to see who she was. Making eye contact with him, she then delivered the message my mother had made her memorize:
Dear Uncle Hirsi,
I am here on behalf of Asha Artan Umar, the mother of your children. She wanted me to convey to you that she forgives you for any ill will that has come to pass between the two of you. She seeks forgiveness from you for any wrongdoing on her part and she wishes you an easy passage to the hereafter. She prays fervently for your admission into paradise and for Allah’s mercy on you between now and when you meet Him.
When Magool related this story to me, I asked her how Abeh had responded. “I don’t know if he heard me,” she answered. “He lifted up his head for a second, and then his head fell back on the pillows. He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them again. I am assuming he heard. At least that is what I told your Ma.”
“What did you tell her, exactly?”
“I told her that he heard me, that I could see he understood. I’m not sure he really did, but she is old and lonely and it will do her good to know that the father of her children got her message.”
I don’t remember my mother being in a forgiving mood too often, but I knew how much this would mean to her, and it made me feel better too. Regardless of her motivation, my mother’s message to my father was gracious and timely, and it surely brought her some peace.
One afternoon, less than a week after my father had passed away, Magool phoned me. “Ayaan, Abaayo,” she said, using an endearment that is best translated as “dear sister.”
“Yes, Abaayo, dear, what is it?” Is there more bad news? I wondered.
“Abaayo, Ayaan …”
“Uhhhmm, Abaayo Magool.”
“Abaayo Ayaan.”
“Abbbaaayyo. Yessss.” I tried to contain my irritation but failed.
“Will you do me a favor, Abaayo, please, Abaayo?” Magool asked me. “Just this once?”
“Abaayo, what is it?”
“Please, Abaayo, just say yes first?”
I hesitated. I had no idea what Magool would ask for, and I didn’t want to commit to something I could never deliver. From the old days I knew that Somali relatives ask—no, demand—money, immigration papers, the smuggling of people and goods; they request to be allowed to camp in your home for three days only, which stretch into forever. All this is preceded by floods of endearments of “dear sister” and “dear cousin” and all the special Somali words for every inflexion of relationship that lies beyond and in between.
“It depends, Abaayo,” I responded. “I will say yes if what you ask won’t compromise my safety, if it is legal, and if I can afford it.”
Magool laughed. “No problem, Abaayo.”
I was now more intrigued than irritated. “So?”
I was silent for a few seconds, taking the time to find the right response, and when I spoke again my voice was so soft that she asked me to repeat what I said. “Magool, I don’t know if ma wants to talk to me anymore.”
“Abaayo”—the compassion in Magool’s voice was plainly audible now—“I will give you her phone number. Yes, she wants to talk to you. She is all alone now. My ma was with her until a few months ago. Now my mother has gone to Tanzania with my brother. Your mother is all by herself and she asks after you all the time. Please, call her. Promise me you will call her.”
At first I felt a jolt of childlike excitement. Then I felt fear; I dreaded the confrontation that would be bound to occur as soon as I spoke with my mother. But that was soon overcome by the sense of duty she had inculcated in me, and the guilt of having neglected her. My father had just passed away. What if my mother was taken ill? Would I ever see her again? I knew the answer: my mother is in Somalia and I am an infidel who would be killed instantly on arrival. I would not be present at her bedside.
But at least I could talk to her. And so I tried the number Magool gave me. I got an out-of-order signal, a busy signal, a recorded female voice telling me in English and Spanish, “All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.” Magool had warned me that getting through to Somalia was hard and advised me to keep trying; I called so often, whenever I had a little free time, that it became a habit. I had almost come to believe that Magool had deluded me and the line would never work when finally, one afternoon, in the front seat of the Land Rover of a friend of mine who was driving me out of town to buy furniture for an apartment I had just rented, I connected to the phone line in my mother’s dirt-floor house in Las Anod, a place located between Somaliland and Puntland, two autonomous regions in what was once Somalia.
“Hello,” said a soft voice on the other end. (This greeting came to us Somalis when the British introduced the telephone to our country; ever since, Somalis say hello when they pick up a phone.)
“Hello, hooyo, Ma. It is me, Ayaan.” I held my breath, certain she would curse and hang up on me.
“Hello, did you say Ayaan?” Now I was certain it was my mother. I hadn’t recognized her voice at first.
“Hooyo, mother, mother. Yes, it is Ayaan. It is me. Please don’t hang up.”
“Allah has brought you back to me. I am not going to hang up.”
“Mother, how are you? Do you know that Father just passed away?”
“I know that. You must know, my daughter, that death is the only thing that is certain. We are all going to die. What credit for the hereafter have you built for yourself?”
I sighed. My ma had not changed. It was as though the five years in which she and I hadn’t spoken had never been. Her voice was the same, with its echoes of her Dhulbahante clan, and so were her constant references to death, to the hereafter, and her expectations and demands, her evident, manifest disappointment in me, her oldest daughter. I made an attempt to change the subject: “Ma, I think it was gracious of you to send Magool to forgive him on your behalf.”
“Did she pass on my message?” she asked me eagerly. “What did he say?” My mother was desperate to know how Magool had handled it; she must have heard gossip about Magool’s ungodly life, for she also wanted to know whether her messenger to his hospital bed was appropriately dressed.
“Ma,” I replied, “Magool is a responsible and honorable young woman. She did exactly as you said. She told me that Abeh responded, that he understood her, and I am sure you can be comfortable that it was not too late.”
“Ayaan, did you go and see him?”
“Yes, Ma, I did. I am happy I did. It was tough.”
Our conversation went on like this, stiff and tense, almost like strangers speaking, but with ripples of unspoken meanings and fears. Ma filled me in on the details of my grandmother’s death, in 2006, “around the time that Saddam Hussein was tried and executed,” as Magool had said. Grandmother had become deaf, Ma told me, and she grew smaller and more immobile, until one day that mighty, fearsome force of will stopped breathing.
She told me a little about her own life since then. She was living alone in Sool, a district in what was once the land of the Dhulbahante, her nomad clan of camel herders. I paused for a moment to imagine it: a little hamlet of cinderblock buildings, unpaved roads, thorn bushes, and endless dust. She would have to fetch wood to make charcoal for the brazier. Perhaps she was comforted by being among her ancestral people.
Then my mother turned the conversation back to what I was doing to invest in my hereafter. “Do you pray and fast, and read the Quran, my daughter?”
It took me so long to think of a good answer that she asked if I was still there. I decided to tell her the truth. “Ma, I don’t pray or fast, and I read the Quran occasionally. What I find in the Quran does not appeal to me.”
As soon as I said the words I regretted it. Predictably, she flew into a rage. “Infidel!” she cried. “You have abandoned God and all that is good, and you have abandoned your mother. You are lost!”
Then she hung up on me.
I was shaking and trying not to cry. To my friend Linda, who had been sitting beside me in the driver’s seat, the whole conversation had been a series of weird emotional noises in the strange sounds of the Somali language. Now, baffled, she looked on as I raged and tried not to cry in her front seat.
“My mother never listens and she never did listen to me,” I burst out. “Should I lie to her? Why does she want me to deceive her? Isn’t that just self-deception? What will she gain from my telling her that I pray and fast? You know, listening to her trying to frighten me into believing that dead people will all stand up on just one day and traipse around and be tried in a giant tribunal, and separated into the good ones and the bad ones—it’s just insanity!” On and on I went, sounding pretty much like my mother, ranting.
Linda, clutching the steering wheel with one hand and trying to calm me down with the other, implored me to listen to her. “Ayaan, please, try to empathize with your mother. She’s all alone …”
“My mother is scared. It’s worse than being alone: she’s frightened,” I said. “She believes in a God who has her paralyzed in fear. She is worried that her God is going to torture me in my grave and burn me in my afterlife. These are not fairy tales to her, she believes them to be as real and true as the red lights we are approaching now, and it is the only thing that matters to her. She will never give up on it.”
Linda slowed down and pulled over, and then she let me have it. She told me that, as a mother, she could feel my mother’s pain. She told me that even though she had hung up on me, I should call my ma right back.
So I did.
I was almost certain the call wouldn’t get through, and that if it did, Ma wouldn’t answer. I thought she would be seething, feeling sorry for herself and cursing me. But she answered the phone, and before she had a chance to berate me I yelled at the top of my voice, fearful that she would interrupt me or cut me off, “Hooyo, I am sorry I hurt you—I am sorry that I don’t pray and fast—I promise I will work hard at attempting to let it all in—I will go into the Quran with an open mind. Please forgive me …”
“Stop rambling and listen,” Ma broke in, louder. “I want you to listen.”
I caught my breath and asked her one more time not to hang up.
“I am not going to hang up,” she told me. “You are the one who disappeared for all these years, who left me alone with only your poor brother Mahad, who, you know, is sick. Your sister died, your father left me, and my mother passed away. You are all I have. I am not going to hang up on you.”
“Ma, I am really sorry,” I stammered. “I want to help. I have some money for you. I want to send it to you. How do I do that? I don’t know of any Hawala enterprises here in the U.S. who can transport money safely to Somalia. Besides, many of them are being investigated by the U.S. government for helping al Qaeda …”
“I don’t want to talk about money,” my mother said. “Allah is the giver and taker of life and of nourishment. I want to talk to you about Allah. He sustains me; he sustained me all the time you were gone. I want you to listen. Are you listening?”
Dutifully, I answered that I was listening, though I pursed my lips.
“I am displeased that you gave up your faith in Allah. Do you remember when we were in Somalia, you got a fever, you had malaria. I thought I was going to lose you. I had lost Quman, your youngest sister, a few months before. I was desperate, so desperate to keep you, and I begged Allah, and he let you live.
“Do you remember the airport in Jeddah, when your father did not show up? You children were too young to understand it then, but the Saudis almost put us on a plane back to Somalia, where our escape would have been discovered, and all of us might have been put behind bars. I prayed to Allah, prayed for his mercy. I understood that he was testing me and I never lost faith in him.”
I wanted to say that it was thanks to the inefficient if terrifying Saudi bureaucracy, plus sheer luck, that we made it out of Somalia. All those secular factors combined had saved us from being caught, not her one-sided conversation with Allah. But all I did was purse my lips some more and say, “Hmmm, yes, Mother.”
“Do you remember our lives in Ethiopia? You and Mahad got lost one day and all the Somalis were predicting the Ethiopians would bring you back cut into little pieces. I prayed all night and you were both brought back to me healthy and alive. Throughout those low hours of desolation I never lost faith in him.”
I remembered, acutely, Ma’s prejudice against Ethiopians, how even after they brought us back safely she never lost that narrow-mindedness. Do please get to the point, I thought.
“I gave birth in Ethiopia to a dead baby. I wept and wept and went through it all without once losing faith in the creator and sustainer.”
“Hm.” Because you are a survivor, Ma. And your belief contributed to your survival, no doubt about it. You derived strength from your belief in Allah, but it also blinded you to options you had, and never took.
“I was dumped with the three of you in Kenya. Your father left me in a strange place with nothing. I took on all the humiliation his absence exposed me to. I watched your brother drop out of school. I listened to the news from my home and relatives in Somalia who were massacred by Siad Barre. I fell ill, I endured losing my home, I watched my youngest daughter lose her mind and I dealt with the shame she brought on me. I endured your distance and silence and now I’m sitting here with nothing. My only son is no support. All of you have abandoned me. There are open wounds on my leg, there’s fluid coming out of them that is neither blood nor water. I itch. I can’t sleep. And not once have I lost faith in Allah.”
I wanted to say, Ma, Abeh left because the two of you were incompatible. You mollycoddled Mahad into a spineless mommy’s boy; he grew up frightened by Abeh, and you beat and cursed Haweya systematically. You were dogmatic and incurious. And faith in Allah has nothing to do with it. You made choices that made your life miserable and blamed others. I was surprised at my own anger, my inward blasphemy. But I said only, “Yes, Mother.”
“We will all face our maker,” my mother told me. “You will die too.”
“Yes, mother,” I said, thinking of the words of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell: “When I die I shall rot.”
“So tell me,” she asked, and I knew she was fighting back tears—I had grown up with her eternal sense of abandonment and self-pity. “What is it that makes you question the Almighty? Why are you so feeble in faith? What are you committed to, then? What happened to you? Are you bewitched? How can you doubt him? I can bear everything, but I can’t bear the thought of you forsaking Allah and inviting his wrath. You are my child and I can’t bear the thought of you in hell.”
I thought, I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny. He is arbitrary and incoherent. Faith in him demands that I relinquish my responsibility, become a member of a herd. He denies me pleasure, the adventure of learning, friendships. I am feeble in faith, Mother, because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman—because I don’t want to be like you. What I said was “When I die I will rot.”
I instantly regretted it. It was like torturing her to say such things, even though it is what I believe to be true. Ma was not interested in my thoughts or my answers. Her queries didn’t seek affirmation, only obedience. She wanted me to lie to her.
So I again said I was sorry. “Mother, I will try, I promise to try my best,” I murmured. This was hypocritical, and I knew it.
At first I called my mother every day, then once every two days, and then every weekend. My conversations with her grew ever more unbearably depressing. Eventually I ended up calling her perhaps once a month.
Our talks were always strained. Ma wanted forgiveness from God. I wanted forgiveness from her. She wanted forgiveness for herself because, since I had strayed, God might want her to pay in the hereafter for doing a poor job of teaching me his commandments. As long as we talked, we served each other by soothing our own images of ourselves, preserving each other’s pride. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her any details of my life; everything I said would be interpreted by her as irreligious, blasphemous, or immoral. I would try to avoid the subject of religion, but that is not easy in the Somali language, where all greetings and farewells are beset with Allah’s will, mercy, and blessings. In every conversation my mother deployed every kind of tactic she could to try to persuade me to return to her strategy for survival—belief in Islam—even though to me it was the root cause that had made her life so miserable in the first place.
I found myself falling back into my old habit of punctuating her sentences with appropriate noises that would convey that I was listening, though in fact I zoned out until I could interrupt her with a question. After a while, a typical phone conversation with her would go like this:
“Hello, Ma. It is Ayaan.”
“Assalaamu-alaika.” (May Allah bless you.)
“How are you, Mother? Did you sleep well?”
“Allah is merciful. He takes care of me. I sleep well and eat well because the Almighty desires so. And you, Ayaan, are you praying?”
“Not yet, mother.”
“You have abandoned your mother and you have abandoned God. Does it not matter to you? Please, just wash, just stand on the mat, bow your head. Who knows what Allah will inspire.”
I would feel shame and guilt, and anger at my own shame and guilt. How easily I fell back into the habit of seeking to assuage my mother’s anger. So I would try to deflect the conversation: Had she received my latest bank order to pay for medicine and food? Then I would try to race away. “Mother, I just called to greet you, I have to run, I will call you when I have more time.”
“What are you pursuing? What is chasing you? Remember to pray and thank Allah …”
“Ma, I have to go.” Talking to her, I always find myself implicitly obeying the Somali rule that a child cannot end the conversation. I can’t just hang up. I have to wait for her to indicate that I can go.
“Haste is bad. Why did you call me if you have no time? You have distanced yourself from Allah and from us, you are on the edge, you must come back, you must pray …”
“Ma, I have to run, to work, please let me go.”
“Go then, my child, may Allah bless you and protect you from the jinn and from Satan.”
“Amin, amin, amin, you too. ’Bye.” I would hang up feeling inadequate, a failure.
I felt like a failure because talking to her stirred in me the dormant feelings of guilt and duty to serve and obey my parents. As long as I was not in direct contact with Ma or other relatives, or people from our culture, I could suppress these sentiments. But having heard her voice and learning of her plight in her remote village in Somalia, I felt the pangs of guilt cut through my soul. Ma also knew how to work me, from when I was a little girl. As she continued to complain about how she had been abandoned and neglected by my father, Mahad, and Haweya, about the civil war, about her skin ailment, her age and general malaise, I tormented myself with “What if” questions. What if I had been resourceful enough to send her money, called her, sent her pictures, just let her know that I cared, that I was her daughter?
I wondered if I had been “good.” Duty was the most basic virtue I was indoctrinated with as a child. But I knew the answer. It was clear to me that from the perspective of my upbringing, by her own standards, I had failed my mother.
It was difficult to contain the flood of nostalgia that overwhelmed me after my father died. My memory, mysteriously, marks the colors of places for me, so that recalling even just those colors can be soothing. My mind still harks back to colors, long after forgetting the stories and the streets and even the people.
I remember the off-white sand in front of our house in Mogadishu and the blue of the cloudless sky, the houses painted white with shutters that were sometimes blue but mainly green, a whole spectrum of weather-beaten green paints. The bougainvillea were an explosion of purple, pink, crimson, and all the shades in between, in the bright, hot, and unrelenting sun. I remember the yellow-green of the papaya tree and the brown blotches on the flanks of the white goats, and how you could tell them from sheep, even across a great distance, because the sheep’s heads were black and their bodies white. I remember the cobalt blue of my first school uniform and the yellow of the shirts of the boys who terrified me. The bright colors of the shawls and draped garments worn by the women and the darker hues of gray and green of the sarongs worn by the men are as fresh in my mind as if I had seen them only yesterday. I remember the stark palette of grays, whites, and blacks in Saudi Arabia, then the suddenly clanging, clashing colors when we moved to Kenya. My memories of Holland are a series of dim but lovely harmonies, muted cream-colored stone and mild green fields and gray skies.
In the weeks and months that followed my father’s death, it was the season that in America they so poetically call fall. Outside my window in the house I was visiting in upstate New York, tall trees, which I was told were oaks and maples, filled the landscape. Almost as I watched them, their large leaves seemed to shift color, some maroon, some yellow and red. Then they fell so that the ground became a vast, beautiful carpet, embroidered with designs in gold, brown, and deep oxblood.
The sky is of a different blue in America, not as sharply bright as the one above Mogadishu and not as dim and gray as the sky above Leiden. I yearned for the warmth of a fireplace where I could stare at the flames that so resemble the beauty outdoors, where I could warm my toes and think about what it would be like if I were still encircled by my family.
When my sister Haweya died in 1998 I wanted to die too. I felt that all the compromise solutions that I had patched together to enable me to negotiate a successful life in a modern country alongside the ancient values we had been taught made me a worthless, spineless person. I thought that the best of us had been taken, and that I didn’t deserve life if she could not have it.
When my father died I did not so much miss him as I missed the illusion of certainty, the childish feeling that I was beloved. I longed for a structured, stable life, one in which my goals and the behavior required of me were consistent. In a way, I understood fully what Sahra and others saw in religion, which is the chance to be like a child again, protected, taken by the arm and told what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do—to take a break from thinking.
I felt remorse at my alienation from Sahra and the rest of my family. Sahra may be downtrodden from an objective standpoint (or, at any rate, from mine), but she doesn’t feel that way. She has a daughter and a husband; she is protected from loneliness. She belongs. She has the certainty, the strength, the clear goals that stem from belief. She was with my father through his old age and death. I was not.
I was thirty-eight years old and I was only beginning to truly understand why people want to belong somewhere, and to understand how difficult it is to sever all ties with the culture and religion in which you are born. Outwardly I was a success. People wrote articles about me, they asked me what books I was reading and what I thought of Barack Obama. My speeches received standing ovations. But my personal life was a mess. I had escaped from my family and gone to Europe because I hadn’t wanted to be trapped in marriage to a virtual stranger I didn’t like. Now, in America, I felt rootless, lost. To be a nomad, always wandering, had always sounded romantic. In practice, to be homeless and living out of a suitcase was a little foretaste of hell.
I stared at the black-and-white photograph of my grandmother that hangs on my living-room wall. I felt a stab of pain and avoided her piercing eyes, but her words had jabbed their way into my mind: The world outside the clan is rough, and you are alone in it.