CHAPTER 6

My Cousins

In the months following my father’s death, with news of my mother and Mahad swirling about me, I found myself actively seeking out more news of members of my extended family through my cousin Magool. I was not just going through the motions of politeness when I begged for updates. I had made a journey, physical and mental, from the tribal framework to that of the West, but now it was as if a door had reopened to the world beyond the looking glass where I came from. I needed to look back and discover what had become of my relatives—and perhaps also to make sense of what my family roots had made of me.

Magool told me first about another of our cousins, Ladan, a year younger than I. My grandmother used to single her out as the most evil child she had ever known, and warned me to stay away from her, never play with her, and most of all never copy her waywardness.

After what Somalis call simply Qabta, “The Apocalypse,” when the civil war broke out and the great Somali exodus began in December 1990, Ladan and her mother fled to Kismayo and then to Kenya, where Ladan got into trouble. Pregnant, she didn’t know where to find a clandestine abortion clinic and she didn’t have money to go to a proper hospital. At just about that time, worried that her pregnancy would show, she got an opportunity to travel on a false passport to the UK, where, like everyone else, she asked for refugee status. A few months after her arrival she gave birth to a girl.

I knew of this through the normal Somali gossip network, just as I had already heard that Ladan chewed qat, the mildly intoxicating leafy narcotic about which my mother was so concerned when we lived in Ethiopia. In 1998, when I too was living in Europe, I went to visit Ladan. She told me the most shocking stories about her life. I learned about an industry housed in the hidden corners of some Mogadishu neighborhoods where, if a girl had misstepped and had the cash, women would sew her vagina closed. These same women, for a fee, would also cut open a bride whose scar from her childhood mutilation was too thick to be opened forcibly by her husband. (Often, just as no anesthetic is used in the mutilation, none is used to reopen the woman.) They also secretly carry out abortions and deliver babies who are known to be wa’al, bastards. Those children and their unwed mothers endure a truly terrible life.

When I visited her, Ladan was single and her daughter, Su’ad, was about five. Su’ad was overweight, she lisped and could not seem to walk straight, and she had a look of constant terror in her eyes. Ladan yelled at her, cursed her, and sometimes hit her. Su’ad was lonely; she told me that she had no friends and that the kids in school refused to play with her and giggled behind her back, calling her fat. The teachers ignored her. Ladan either hadn’t noticed any of this or didn’t think it was important.

Now, in 2008, Su’ad was a teenager, Magool told me, and Ladan was pregnant again, by another man. Given what I knew about Ladan, I asked if she was ready for another child; she was still on welfare. Magool is younger than I, but her reply sounded as though it came from the lips of a world-weary old woman. “Planning is not something Ladan is good at,” she said.

Magool said that Ladan was now completely addicted to qat, and Su’ad was growing up amid addiction, abuse, and emotional neglect. Maybe her fate would be no different from her mother’s. Of course escape is possible, but the conditions are not conducive to her becoming educated, or happy. In the event that she were to “return” to Somalia—a word that is a falsehood, although all Somalis use it, for Su’ad was born in the UK, not Somalia, and she holds British citizenship—she would not last long. In Somalia my grandmother’s clan mentality is omnipresent, and Su’ad doesn’t meet even the lowest of my grandmother’s standards: she is wa’al.

Magool told me another story about a cousin of ours, Anab. Anab had arrived in America a little before I did, in 2006. She was younger than I, and although I had never met her, I knew of her. All of us did. She was said to have stabbed her husband, killing him, somewhere in Kenya or Tanzania, where she was living as a refugee. What actually happened—or who was at fault—was not clear to me. But what was clear was that Anab’s husband’s family considered her a murderer.

Another cousin, Hassan, had also established himself in the United States. He was pious and respectful and good. Hassan was working as a cab driver. Almost every cent that he made went back to the family. His father was by then almost seventy, but he continued to marry young wives and had well over forty children.

Hassan supported many of those children and their mothers. (Many of them were adults, but Somalia has few jobs and high unemployment; never having learned any skills, most of his siblings had little or no income and no visas.) Hassan had also applied for resettlement visas for several of them to enter the United States as refugees. I felt pity for him. Like Farah Gouré, the clan elder in Nairobi who for years helped my mother, and countless other Somali refugees, he was denying himself the fruits of his own labor, bleeding himself dry in order to meet the endless needs of others.

When Anab killed her husband, Hassan’s family begged him to contribute to the payment of blood money to the husband’s family. The clan, for reasons of honor, must collectively pay for the acts of its member. Next they implored Hassan to take her to America, to prevent a revenge killing by her husband’s family and the blood feud that could follow.

From my Western viewpoint I struggled to understand what I was hearing, but from my old tribal mind-set it made all the sense in the world. According to Shari’a, which is incorporated into Somali clan law, murder is settled in one of three ways. A chain of revenge killings is set in motion that can last for generations and can even lead to civil war. Or the family of the perpetrator has to compensate the family of the victim with a payment in money, livestock, or one or more brides, free of charge. Or an agreement is reached by the elders to kill the murderer and thereby end any possibility of a blood feud.

When she finally arrived in America, Anab was twenty years old and already had a child. She soon met and married, under Shari’a law, a Somali living in America named Shu’ayb. (Apparently they never bothered to marry under American law, so this Shari’a wedding was not actually legally valid.) But now I learned that, just two years after she arrived in the United States, Anab was under indictment for attempted murder; the authorities believed she had tried to kill Shu’ayb when she discovered him on the phone with another woman. She realized that he was speaking to a woman with whom he was very intimate, perhaps even married. With her baby asleep in the room, Anab eavesdropped on the conversation. Then, overcome with rage, she drew a knife and began stabbing him.

The clan raised enough money to bail her out of jail. Anab’s husband survived the attack. Her trial was pending, and her daughter was in the custody of social services.

For hours I thought about these stories. Hassan was still working for the bloodline, dutifully obeying the constant demands to send the family money and to rescue them from the challenge of perpetual hunger, disease, and the general uncertainty of life outside the West. He saw this as compassion and goodness: this rule of behavior was visceral, instilled in him down to his marrow. In a tribal context, it was the right thing to do. But look at the consequences.

When someone applies to live in the United States, he has to produce a clean police record from every country where he’s lived. But the American resettlement officials probably hadn’t realized that in Kenya and Tanzania you can buy a clean police record from the police, and in a place like Somalia there’s no one to even buy it from. The American resettlement officials also might not have realized that the more close-knit an ethnic community is, the more loyal its members are to the strictures of their clan and religion, and the less likely it is for those members to succeed in America, for the simple reason that they put kinship and Shari’a law above a secular law that they feel is alien to their way of life.

A few days later, in a long, late-night conversation, Magool told me about another relative of ours, Hiran, who was in a mental institution. She had gone mad. Magool told me that Hiran had learned in 2003 that she was HIV-positive. But then she met a boy who was good to her, who truly, Magool said, loved her. Yet Hiran never told him she had the virus or took precautions. Now she could no longer hide her diagnosis, for she had full-blown AIDS.

The horror of these stories of Magool’s took me back to my years as a translator in Holland, and the countless girls for whom I had acted as interpreter after they got into trouble because of their ignorance of the Western ways of sex and affairs of the heart. One desperate girl refused to accept a positive test for pregnancy and maintained against all evidence that she was a virgin. She hysterically demanded that the doctor do a second and a third test. Test after test, over the span of three weeks, showed that she was pregnant, and her period never came. When she finally faced the reality that she was indeed pregnant, that she had indeed had intercourse, the doctor offered her an abortion. At the sound of the word, which in Somali is less technical, translating as “pulling out” or “flushing out” the baby, she sobbed. She called herself a sinner and a fornicator and cried that she deserved to be flogged and stoned, for she would no longer have a place in heaven. She told the doctor she could not compound her sins by adding to them what she felt was the murder of an innocent child. She finally decided to have the baby, knowing that she would be taunted as a whore by her relatives and that the child would forever be branded as wa’al.

Such is the tragedy of girls and women who by the strictures of their upbringing and culture cannot own up to their body’s desires, even to themselves. But this attitude is not limited to women. Many times I would translate over the phone—never, in such cases, in person—for a Somali man who had agreed to take a blood test to discover whether he was HIV-positive. I would hear the Dutch doctor say those three horrible words, “You are seropositive,” and the wheels in my head would churn to find a way to describe such a thing in Somali.

The first time, I admitted my ignorance. I told the doctor, “We don’t have a word for seropositive in Somali. How can I best describe it?”

He said, “In the blood test, it shows that there is a virus in your immune system.”

I struggled to find the Somali word for immune system, or even virus, and finally told the man, “In your blood test, invisible living things were found that slowly will destroy the army of defenders in your blood.” I went on to describe that the blood is made up of white blood cells—though we don’t have the word cells—and red blood cells. “The white blood cells are an army that keep away enemies that come into your body and make you sick. But some things, like the one that was detected in your blood, are too strong for your soldiers without the help of medicine.”

My explanation was taking some time, and the Dutch doctor interrupted me. “Is all that necessary?”

I explained to him, “There’s no Somali word for seropositive, white blood cells, red blood cells, viruses, bacteria, or AIDS.”

The Somali man’s voice, sounding very alarmed, cried out, “AIDS?” He pronounced it aydis. “Aydis?! I don’t have that! I’m a Muslim! And I’m a Somali! We don’t get Aydis!” Confused, embarrassed, but relieved that my client understood me, I clung to the word Aydis and told him, “Yes, they found, in your blood, the thing that will make you get Aydis later, but you don’t have it now. Not yet.”

The doctor interrupted me again. “He does not have AIDS now. He’s only seropositive. We can give him medication to prevent the HIV virus from turning into AIDS.”

The Somali man yelled through this, “Aydis! Tell him I don’t have Aydis! Muslims do not have Aydis!”

Subsequently I endured several similar conversations. Now, I imagined my cousin Hiran in 2003 going through the same ordeal and hearing, no matter what words of explanation were actually said to her, only You are going to die, and what you are going to die of is an outcome of sin, of fornication, of denying the laws of Allah. So many patients, after finally accepting that they did, in reality, have Aydis or something that would give them Aydis one day, perceived it as Allah’s punishment, an internal flogging or stoning. Often they refused treatment, for that would compound their initial sin by denying Allah’s judgment. Others remained in denial and continued having sex with others, even their innocent spouses, passing on the virus.

I fully understood my cousin’s context. Islam and tribal culture had mystified and denied her understanding of something as natural as her own sexuality. Now that she was living in the diaspora, this religious control mechanism could lead only to denial and hypocrisy, self-undoing and destruction.

I wondered what Hiran’s boyfriend thought of the personal cost to him of his trust in her. I haven’t spoken to him; I don’t know him. But I imagine he might have thought when he met her, She’s a Muslim girl, she wears a headscarf, she condemns any kind of sexual activity before marriage, so she must be a virgin.

When proponents of cosmopolitan, multicultural ideals wax lofty about tolerance and welcoming and warmth, they overlook these consequences, which people like my cousin’s Irish boyfriend end up suffering. It is these people who become disillusioned with welcoming people like us into Western society.

How does one judge Hiran’s actions, or lack of them? She knew she had tested positive for HIV. She knew that she had acquired it through sexual intercourse and that she could pass it on. She didn’t tell her boyfriend because it was too hard for her to admit it, even to herself. She didn’t insist that he wear a condom because she denied her condition even to herself. She made it unreal.

Two people from different cultures met. One was from a society that stresses individual responsibility (in this case, sexual responsibility), and the other was reared to think in group terms. She was brought up in fear of her own sexuality, steeped in self-loathing for having sex outside of wedlock, taught to distrust the infidel. He felt trust; she betrayed it.

When Hiran was finally diagnosed with full-blown AIDS she could no longer cope and went into temporary psychosis. Only then did her boyfriend discover her illness, and he immediately had himself tested. He discovered that he too was infected. According to Magool, after he got over the initial shock and devastation, he continued to visit Hiran in the hospital. When she was well enough to talk, according to Magool (who was present), he asked Hiran why she had never told him. Hiran said, “You gave it to me. I got it from you.” Only then did he stop visiting her.

At the heart of the clash of values between the tribal culture of Islam and Western modernity are three universal human passions: sex, money, and violence. In the Western perspective, the debate now raging about how to assimilate minorities (read, Muslims) into Europe and how best to wage the “war on terror” that began in America in response to the 9/11 attacks boils down to fundamentally different views on sex, money, and violence—or, transposed into loftier vocabulary, demography, buying power, and military capability.

Having studied the rhetoric of radical Islam, and having tried as a young woman to live according to its principles, I know that the same three themes are the yardsticks by which Islamists measure what they consider the decadence and moral turpitude of the West.

My cousins, like so many individuals in a globalized world—including myself—are caught between the two worlds. They were never prepared for life in the West. European and North American societies have been fundamentally reshaped by the values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shifted the balance of power from the collective to the individual. During these hundreds of years, thinkers and activists developed and refined ways of allowing as much individual liberty as possible within the realms of these three urges without sacrificing the common good. (Who determines the “common good” shall forever remain a subject of debate, in open societies as in all others.)

These three passions lie at the center of Muslims’ journey from tribal life to Western societies that are based on the values of the Enlightenment. Immigrants from traditional societies that have been dominated for centuries by the bloodlines and values of clan and tribe make the physical transition to the West in a matter of hours. Often they have been driven to look for a better life when home has become a nasty, unwelcoming place. Yet both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

Ladan, Hiran, Hassan, and Anab, like me, succeeded in coming to the West with personal high hopes of a better life, and at least in the case of Hassan, with the additional hope of success for his father, his aunt, our uncles, my mother, and a host of siblings and cousins. We were resilient and resourceful; we were survivors, even (in the case of Anab) a warrior. But their lack of clarity about where they stood on the core issues of sex, money, and violence—their failure to recognize that where they live geographically must change where they stand ideologically—has led them to human tragedies of disease, debt, and death. I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind.

Ladan and Hiran grew up in families from a merchant clan. Their families were among the wealthiest in Somalia, with international business interests. Because of their wealth and commercial ties to foreign countries, these families could purchase the gadgets of modernity. These girls were used to having a car, televisions, videos, and other modern possessions.

The circle of people with whom they interacted in Somalia followed Western fashions and proclaimed (almost too loudly to be true) their Western attitudes. Ladan in particular spent much of her teenage life with female role models who knew more about Valentino, Armani, Prada, Gucci, and Chanel than chapters in the Quran or the sayings of the Prophet. They conducted a grim competition about who looked sexier, because Western fashion is about displaying the female body.

Ladan and Hiran wore makeup, styled their hair, and even mixed with boys. Yet their modernity was only skin-deep. Their fathers were both very successful and frugal, yet they allowed their daughters the trappings of Western culture. Even so, they didn’t educate them about how to make money, let alone save or invest it. And their apparent ease with the visible markers of a Western lifestyle did not translate into a stable sense of identity or a coherent, resilient approach to the vicissitudes of life.

Many Westerners entertain a general belief that non-Westerners who have grown up in large cities with wealth and cultural ties to Western countries are better prepared for life in modern societies. But Ladan and Hiran did not grow up with a complete set of moral values, either Islamic or Western. They looked modern; they played the part and dreamed the part, but they were not anchored in Western sexual mores. They indulged their desires as if they were indeed Western young people, but they did not escape the culture of shame. They buried their shame under elaborate layers of secrecy and hypocrisy; they hid, even from themselves, the bare, bold fact that they were having sex.

*    *    *

As I heard about the troubles of my family, I was once again filled with a sense of guilt and regret. But this was different from the earlier guilt I had felt at escaping my arranged marriage and from my regret at betraying my father and compromising his honor; it was different from the guilt I had felt at putting my mother in a position where she was blamed for what I had done. I no longer had that old, constant remorse, that constant guilt about what I could have done for my family in those years of silence and anger, after I had fled from my clan to a society that was free, informed, and affluent, to a new world in which I had learned to survive.

Now my guilt stemmed from a new feeling: that I should have shared some of those tools of survival with the closest members of my family. Instead of cutting them off, I should have called them more often. If I had kept up with Hiran and Ladan, perhaps I could have helped them to shed their religious and clan convictions—to learn about contraceptives, for example, and face up to their sexuality, instead of pretending (even to themselves) that they weren’t really having sex and thus taking no precautions.

My actions were selfish, but they were not malicious. They were selfish because I had chosen to improve my life, pursue happiness in my way. They were treacherous because, in achieving my personal goals, I was aware that I was disregarding long-held traditions of my family and religious edicts.

One evening, about three months after my father’s death and after conversations with my mother and Magool, I sat down to dinner with an American couple who had become very close friends of mine. While I ruminated over the ruins of my family, we talked about the books of Edward Banfield, who maintained that the tightly inward-looking focus of traditional societies impedes their members from progressing in the modern world, for it prevents them from making bonds outside their clan.

Afterward I asked myself, What is it about our Somali culture that holds us back? Perhaps part of it is that we do not have much to call culture anymore. There are no Somali historians, few authors, few if any artists of any kind. The old ways are broken, and the new ways involve only violence and disorder. As a tribe we are fragmented; as clans, scattered; as families, dysfunctional.

Slowly I sought reconciliation with my family, and yet with every renewed tie I felt more alienation and more sadness at how far and fast our family had regressed. Haweya, gone. Mahad, a shadow of himself. Hiran, broken. My half sister, Sahra, denying modernity, choosing to entomb herself in her veil. Ladan, unaware of the volumes of books, videos, and DVDs on parenting, now preparing to bring another child into the world, oblivious of the risks to which her addiction and poverty expose her daughter. My conscientious cousin Hassan, spending his money to prop up people invested in outdated values.

I wanted to tell Hassan, Save your money, buy a home, get an education—above all, rethink the values of our grandmother, and teach your children new ethics. Help them develop the tools to be successful and get ahead in America. Our grandmother was disciplined and resolute, but her lessons about traditions and bloodlines cannot carry us through this new landscape. If we try to hold on to them we will break apart, for the old ways have failed. Even Somalis can learn to adopt the values of a liberal democracy.

One evening, staring at my grandmother’s photograph above the fireplace in my apartment, I began thinking about her first voyage away from the lands of her ancestors. She must have been only about forty when she crossed the Red Sea in a dinghy, traveling from the port of Berbera, in Somalia, to Aden. Her husband’s third young wife had just had her second son. Shame and jealousy burned within her and propelled her out of the desert with her youngest daughter, who was still not married.

I imagined her, afraid perhaps, but excited by the motion of the sea and the challenge of the unknown. Perhaps, secretly, she desired to escape the monotony of the nomadic life, a life with a very short span, vulnerable to natural disasters and war.

My grandmother used to talk to the dead. She talked with our forefathers, calling them by name. Many a time she warned us not to cross them, not to bring down their fury. As I stared at her photograph, I realized that I no longer feared my forefathers, and I marveled at that. I looked at her dark, piercing eyes, so full of judgment and accusation, and in my mind I spoke to my grandmother. And then, because my literacy has robbed me of my grandmother’s flawless memory, I did as I always do when something is important: I pulled out a notebook.

It began as fragments, part English, part Somali. It was not a conscious composition, like an article or a manuscript. I had no clear idea that what I was writing was a formal farewell, a statement of adieu to every family tie I had ever known and to all the bequests my clan, tribe, religion, and culture had ever bestowed on me. But gradually it dawned on me that, just as she would have done, I was talking to my forebears. I was writing my grandmother a letter.