Ma told me that my brother Mahad, who lived in Nairobi, was badgering her for my phone number. She hadn’t given it to him. She warned me that if she did, he would ask me to help him get a visa to Europe or America, and she begged me not to do it. She had a terrible fear of losing him to the infidel countries, which, in her mind, had driven Haweya to madness and death, and me to far worse: to apostasy, immorality, immortal doom. The West had taken her daughters, and Mahad was all she had left. She asked me to send him money so that he could come live with her in northern Somalia.
I wondered what complex and conflicting emotions Mahad felt when he heard that Abeh had died. When my little sister Haweya and I were small, our brother seemed to us to have the key to a privileged connection with our father. When Abeh had languished in a prison in Mogadishu, Mahad had visited him. Ma always took her eldest son to places she would never allow her daughters to venture to.
Then Abeh escaped, and we girls were at last allowed to participate in the adventure. We fled Somalia and moved to Saudi Arabia when Mahad was ten, I was eight, and Haweya six and a half. In Saudi Arabia we would at last meet our father, ma said. But when we begged Mahad for details about Abeh, he assumed a pompous, professorial tone and described a figure of mythical proportions: hugely tall, infinitely strong, impossibly understanding and good.
I wondered out loud whether Abeh walked or floated. Mahad said I was foolish. Mahad always told me how foolish I was. He used the word doqon—“gullible, dupe”—and it hurt. But I was too excited by the prospect of meeting Abeh to dwell for too long on bad feelings.
“Oh, Mahad,” little Haweya interrupted, “will he lift me up on his neck, like our uncle?”
“He might,” Mahad replied. “Come here, little one, let me lift you on my neck.” He bent down, and clumsy Haweya clambered onto his back, tugging his hair. Mahad began yelling.
Ma came in; we were making too much noise, again. The two-bedroom flat in Mecca was hot, far too hot, and too small for us. We were used to a house in Mogadishu, with a yard to run in and a talal tree to climb. Ma was afraid that we would annoy the neighbors so much that we’d be evicted from the apartment. She used to order Mahad to take charge of his younger sisters and keep us quiet. Now Haweya had pulled his hair a little too hard and he was making the noise. She let him have it. “You’re letting me down again,” she cried. “I am on my own. Must I look for food to keep you from howling at night, or must I keep you from behaving like animals? You tell me.”
Mahad entreated, “But she pulled my hair.”
“How did she reach your head?” Ma snapped.
“She wanted to know if Abeh would put her on his neck.”
Ma screamed as if there was fire throughout the building, “You wa’al bastard child. All three of you are cursed—monsters, cursed! I hope death finds you in lumps. May the ancestors tear you to pieces!”
Mahad, his voice shrill and desperate, pleaded, “Ma, this one wanted to know if Abeh walks on air and this one wanted to climb on my neck. What do you want me to do?”
Kicking off her shoe, Ma hurled it at his head and raced toward him menacingly. “What I want from you is to be a man, you traitor. I want you to be a man. You are such a weakling, defeated by two girls! How will you ever stand up to men? How will you wrestle? How will you honor your forefathers, fight a lion, earn your share of she-camels? It is my tragedy, my unfortunate fate that I have but one son and he is incapable of even keeping his sisters under control. How will you ever lead an army? Control a battalion? Rule a people? You can’t manage two little girls—what are you good for?”
Mahad ran off to the bathroom, fighting tears.
Neither Mahad nor Haweya nor I had ever seen a lion. I had seen camels, also cows, goats, sheep, lizards, and a reptile called abbeso that terrified me into such a fit that to this day the thought of it keeps me from looking up what it might be called in English. But I certainly didn’t know the difference between he-camels and she-camels. Mahad may have had an inkling, but I doubt that he ever got close enough to a camel to tell its sex.
For a rare moment I felt grateful to be a girl. I would never have to wrestle lions, real or imagined.
Mahad, having more freedom than we did, was exposed to all sorts of adventures, but he also had to face much worse trials than we did. In Saudi Arabia the law requires women to hide and never step outside without being escorted by a male guardian. Our mother leaned on Mahad, her ten-year-old, to act as that legal male guardian for her whenever our father was away, which turned out to be most of the time. She indulged him with luxuries she would not have wasted on girls, but she also ordered him to take responsibility not only for his behavior but also for Haweya’s and mine. He acted as Ma’s interpreter from Arabic, which we learned in school, to Somali. He was expected to decipher the world for her, to protect her and us, though he was only ten. Sometimes he heard the Saudi men say lewd and ugly things to Sometimes they called her abda (slave) and other times aswad (black). Mahad would pretend not to hear them; he never translated those words.
It would be an understatement to call Mahad’s relationship with Abeh troubled. But from the instant Abeh finally arrived in Saudi Arabia, my father adored me, indulged me, forgave me my mistakes, cuddled me and stroked my hair. He let Haweya climb on his neck, tug his hair, and sprint back and forth in the tiny flat, screaming the ancient battle cries that our grandmother had taught us. Abeh’s attitude to Mahad was just the opposite of this indulgence. He showed little physical affection. He ordered Mahad to stand up and raise his chin and look him in the eye. He expected Mahad to be impeccable in manners, in dress, in prayers, in helping Ma.
Mahad could never fill Abeh’s shoes. When he failed to meet our father’s lofty and often vague demands, Abeh would glare at him. Abeh humiliated Mahad and often slapped him across the face.
When we moved to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, one of my father’s relatives came to visit us. He drove a white Toyota pickup. He left his key in the ignition to greet my parents before seeking a parking space. When we saw him coming into the house with extended arms, Mahad slipped past him and ran to the pickup. He started the engine and hit the accelerator, then the brake, knocking his head on the steering wheel. The car responded to Mahad’s handling with screeching noises that attracted the attention of the adults, who were engaged in elaborate exchanges of greetings. Ma stepped outside without her black hijab and screamed in shock. She yelled that Mahad had hit his head. My father strode out of the house, opened the door of the truck, pulled Mahad out, lifted him with both hands, and threw him on the ground. Then he kicked Mahad. He removed his belt with one clean swing and started lashing my brother, now helpless on the ground.
As always when Abeh hit Mahad, Ma threw herself at our father, screaming curses, begging Allah to make him barren, and appealing to our ancestors to paralyze him. She started beating my father on his back and shoulders, first using her hands, then throwing her shoes at him. Father hurled a few words of contempt at Mahad—something about honor—and then went back into the house to attend to his relative.
Mahad was writhing in pain, doubly humiliated because not only we, the girls, were watching, but so were the little boys from the neighboring homes. He did all he could not to cry, then gave up and howled like an animal.
Every evening Abeh would order us to wash, brush our teeth, put on our nightclothes, pray, and go to bed. Haweya and I would usually obey, but Mahad used this routine to try Abeh’s patience in silent mutiny. He would go into the bathroom, lock the door, and stay in there for hours. My mother would listen for the sound of running water and hear none. No one knew what Mahad did in there, but he would not turn on the shower. Meanwhile our bedtime was being delayed. Ma would stop my father from breaking down the door. After what seemed like hours, Mahad would emerge as dry as when he went in, dressed just as before. My father and mother would argue loudly; Ma would call my father names, and Abeh would retaliate by calling Mahad names. They were disgraceful names: comparing Mahad to a girl, calling him a coward, threatening to whip him with the belt, saying he was not his son.
Sometimes, just before prayer time, if Abeh was home he would spit at Mahad, “You filthy boy—or maybe I should call you a girl—did you do your ablutions?”
Mahad would look down and press out of his lips, “Yes, Father.”
Abeh would shout, “Look at me, look me in the eye!”
Mahad would turn up his chin, find a spot on my father’s forehead, and glare.
“Did you do your ablutions?” Father would growl. Ma would position herself between her son and her husband.
“Yes, Father,” Mahad would say, his voice trembling.
“But you are dry. Where is the wetness?”
“I dry fast,” Mahad would stammer.
Abeh would raise his voice: “Liar! Liar! Little, filthy liar, you will never be a man. You don’t have what it takes. Get away from me! Right behind your mother’s skirt—that’s where you belong.”
Mahad’s tears would glide out of his eyes and down his cheeks. He would stand and watch my father turn away and leave the room. The next morning Abeh would shake Mahad awake and drag him to the bathroom sink, where he would tower over him as Mahad did his ablutions. Or Abeh would demonstrate how to go about it quickly. Wash your hands, clean your mouth by gargling three times, then your nose. Abeh cupped his hand, filled it with water, and carried it quickly to his nostrils, then inhaled deeply—an act that, when Mahad tried it, had him sputtering, coughing and sneezing like a drowning lamb.
After a series of scoldings and insults, Mahad would be led to the prayer mat, where Haweya and I would be waiting for him. Then we would all steal back into bed; prayer was at 5 a.m. and we didn’t have to leave for school until 7. At that time, again, my father would have to shake Mahad awake, order him to brush his teeth, wash his face, put on his uniform, and get ready, and to do it all quickly. Mahad never did. Just as we’d be about to leave for school, Father would catch sight of Mahad on a wooden stool, half dressed, clutching both socks in his hands and dozing off, mouth slightly open, eyes closed, head tilted to one side and looking like it would drop off his neck.
Abeh would sneak up, put his face on the same level as Mahad’s droopy one, slap him, and order him, “Wake up, woman!” He’d catch Mahad’s breath and shout, “The smell of your mouth is foul, you didn’t brush your teeth. You are not my son, you are indeed a wa’al, a bastard child.”
As Abeh pulled Mahad from the stool, Ma would intervene. She would somehow find her way between the two, and after Abeh gave in she would help Mahad put on his socks.
When Abeh was absent for weeks on end, I would pine for him. Haweya would ask loudly for him. Ma would cry that she was alone and let down by her husband. But Mahad never asked for our father. He ran around with the boys on the block. Whenever Ma announced that Abeh was on his way home, I pranced and jumped about in joy. Mahad’s face fell into a brooding scowl, a look that didn’t leave his face until Abeh’s departure.
Other than school, Quran school, and a few visits to relatives, Haweya and I virtually never left the house. We were not allowed to dress up and go out. We were stuck inside, bored senseless in the hot, small flat in Mecca, and later in the much roomier house in Riyadh. But Mahad would dress up and go out with my father to manly locations, such as the mosque or the souk or to some formal Somali lunch or dinner.
The Friday prayer was another source of sibling rivalry. Every Thursday night that our father spent with us, Ma ironed my father’s and Mahad’s thaubs, the long, white shirt-like robe that Saudi men wear. She set out their imamah headscarves and black igal cords, and during dinner Abeh would instruct Mahad on how to behave and whom he should greet. Ma would call Mahad her prince and tell him that how he behaved would reflect on Abeh’s good name and our own.
Haweya and I begged to go with Abeh to the beautiful mosque, to listen as the men gathered outside to talk politics and tribal affairs and washed at the communal taps and bent in unison. We vowed that we would put on our best faces and not bring shame to the family. The answer was always the same: a girl’s honor was best preserved at home.
Every Friday morning we watched Mahad and Abeh leave and felt deprived of the world outside the door that shut in our faces. The world outside was for men. We were born girls. It was Allah’s choice. Our role—or mine really, for Haweya was too small—was to help prepare the elaborate Friday lunch. We would serve it after the men filed out of the mosque and walked to the tribunal of justice, known as Chop-chop Square. There men and boys would take their seats and watch the sinners being punished with stonings, floggings, amputations, or beheadings. Abeh rarely lingered there, but Mahad, in passing, saw enough.
Mahad never had an appetite for lunch on Fridays. He was not cheerful or excited when he returned from the weekly visit to the mosque and Chop-chop Square. He became more silent and brooding. His behavior toward Abeh grew steadily worse. It was as if he deliberately sabotaged every simple instruction. He also became more violent to me, and even to Haweya, for whom he had always had a soft and protective spot. He would beat us. As small children we had often fought, but now his kicks and punches were much crueler, and he had even begun throwing things. It was as if he had lost all sense of restraint.
Other little boys whom we met while growing up were just as terrified of their fathers as Mahad was of Abeh. The sons of Somali relatives who came to visit us, and those whom we visited, were full of awe for their fathers and older men in general. Our Saudi and Palestinian neighbors in Riyadh and Jeddah were the same. The boys would go out in packs and play on the streets until a father showed up. Then they would all freeze and glide back into their homes with drooping heads. A father’s authority was established through physical violence and harsh scorn for any mistakes his son made. Alternately, the boy would be praised—mainly by the women, but sometimes also by the fathers—in terms that seemed, even to us, unrealistic and overblown.
For instance, Abeh would tell Mahad, “You will rule a people. You will undo the oppression in Somalia. You will be a just ruler.” Mother would call him a prince and refer to him as the Chosen One. She told him that her father had been a judge and that his grandfather had conquered lands and people, so Mahad’s destiny was to be a great leader.
Mahad would respond with excitement. He could imagine becoming a prince. The Palestinian ten- and eleven-year-old boys that he played with, refugees from the Israeli conflict, were also told that they would be heroes who would more or less single-handedly drive the evil Jews out of their land. When the boys went outside they played a game of war, driving out evil Jews, until they were called in to lunch or to prayer or told to make less noise.
At school, Mahad’s reports were outstanding, but his Saudi teachers said that he chose to stand apart and did not care to join in group games. At first Mahad used to tell us girls to explain to Mother that in school he was called “black slave.” Abeh’s response was, “You must give the boy who calls you abid a good reason never to do it again.” He would tell Mahad that he, Abeh, had personally defeated large numbers of men in combat, and he would try to teach Mahad how to fight. He would head-butt Mahad, and Mahad was not allowed to show pain or cry even when Abeh butted his little head with his own heavy one.
After a time Mahad stopped telling our parents what was going on at school. When we were eating he would pick up his plate and throw it across the room, accompanied by a gut-wrenching cry. He would beat his fists on the table repeatedly. He would pick fights with other boys. His academic results remained excellent, but his brooding was interspersed with violent rage that he mostly took out on me. Then for months he would be so passive that he had to be physically carried out of bed, and only after a great deal of prodding and scolding would he do anything at all.
We left for Ethiopia, where there was no suffocating Saudi segregation of men and women. In Ethiopia men and women mixed freely, as did boys and girls at school, and this made us much happier. The happiest person of us all was our father. Abeh was completely in his element. The building where his Somali opposition movement was headquartered was huge. There were hundreds of rooms, some for soldiers, others for politicians and intellectuals who contributed to the exile radio station that they used in order to lure more men out of Somalia to join our cause. Father was at the top of that hierarchy. He spent hours in meetings discussing strategy, finding resources, keeping up the morale of the soldiers. He also composed stories called “The Source of Healing,” which he broadcast on the radio every week.
The least happy person in the whole of Ethiopia was my mother. To her the Ethiopians were sinners (because they were not Muslims), and they were of inferior class and heritage. They were also at war with Somalia. (Abeh was also at war with Somalia, but somehow this did not amount to the same thing. He was opposing a dictator, according to her, while the lowly Ethiopians were our nation’s most ancient enemy.)
Mahad, Haweya, and I were really quite happy with the change. Mahad in particular could mix with Somali men of our clan, who looked like him, who spoke our language and did not call him abid. Being the son of my father, he was treated respectfully by them. They were kind and indulgent. My mother put a lot of effort into feeding those young men food that they hadn’t had for a long time—lamb, rice, various kinds of spaghetti, spices like coriander and ginger—which reminded them of home.
Most of these young men chewed qat, a drug. They would sit together in a circle, drinking dark tea with lots of sugar, holding twigs and sorting the leaves, throwing away the dry ones and slipping the softer, juicy ones into their mouths. They made pouches in their cheeks, quite openly sucking in the juice of this drug. Certainly Mahad, and often Haweya and I too, were present to witness these gatherings.
Ma reproached our father: “Look what you’ve done! You have exposed your only son to addiction. He is going to copy these men. He is going to get addicted to qat.”
Abeh would attempt to calm her. “Mahad is my son. He is a Magan. Don’t underestimate my son. He will never do anything like that. In the entire Magan family, no one chews qat.”
Ma would list the Magan offspring who did, in fact, chew qat. She would plead to return to Saudi Arabia, for it was clear we could not return to Somalia. “Our name, the traditions of our ancestors, no longer protect us from these evils,” she would remind Abeh. “I sought protection in the house of God. I wanted us to live in Mecca, where we are reminded to pray five times a day, where we can stay pure. You brought us to an evil land. These people never wash. Did you see yesterday, I was walking with my mother and this woman suddenly crawled on the sidewalk and she urinated! She did it before us! In this country, they drink alcohol and they fornicate more than Faadumo Artan’s he-goats. Mahad is our only son. He is going to be corrupted here. This place is too big. I run after him, but he outruns me. He’s almost twelve; soon he will be taller than I am.”
Mahad now had a choice of more than ten bathrooms to hide out in. The buildings were very long, with lots of rooms. When he was ordered to take a shower, he would say, “Yes, I will go to the one in so-and-so’s room.” Ma would be exhausted and Abeh would be at some late-night meeting, so Mahad would run out and he wouldn’t get back until we were all asleep, or perhaps not until morning, sleeping wherever he liked. Ma was torn between involving my father and dreading the severity of his punishment of Mahad. Most of the time she elected not to involve Abeh. In the morning a driver would arrive in the Land Rover that took us to school, and Mahad would be in the front seat, still wearing the same uniform he had worn for days, looking as if he hadn’t even taken it off to sleep. His eyes were red, encrusted with sleep, there’d be stains on his cheeks from where his drool had dried. His hair, which he refused to have cut, had now grown to a huge afro, and because he slept on one side his bed-head made it appear that he had sloppy cotton candy where a nice, round afro should have been. He often lost his shoelaces or his schoolbag; his breath was truly vile.
All of this disorder reflected badly not only on Mahad but very much on my father. The driver, Haile Gorgeus, would look at Mahad with contempt, occasionally forbidding him to enter his car in such a state. Ma would come, balancing lunch boxes, and catching sight of Mahad would scream at the top of her lungs. He would cry and beg, “Please, please, don’t tell Father.” Ma would beg the driver to wait while she rushed Mahad back into our rooms, where she and my grandmother would strip him and scrub him themselves, though he howled in pain and shame. My grandmother would hold him by his hair and brush his teeth until his gums bled.
The three of them wove a conspiracy to conceal these events from Abeh. Haweya would wander off, driving Haile Gorgeus crazy, and immaculate little me, goody-two-shoes, would prattle to whoever would listen, “We shall be late to school.”
Mahad would reemerge clean, red-eyed, and grouchy as hell. He would demand total silence in the car. It was complete tyranny. And we were, indeed, often late to school, but none of us told Abeh. We were all part of the conspiracy to protect the prince, our older brother.
Mahad bonded with some of the young soldiers of Abeh’s exile army before they were sent into combat on the Ethiopia-Somalia border. Some of them didn’t come back; others returned missing a leg, or both legs, or an eye. Some lived only a short while before dying from their wounds. Haweya and I were not allowed to go to funerals, but Mahad was obliged to attend. When Haweya and I grew up, we would become wives and mothers; when Mahad grew up, he would have to go to the front lines of battle. If his destiny was to be a leader, he would send his men to their deaths. But no one starts as a leader; everyone starts as an ordinary soldier, and Mahad didn’t seem to be able to accept this idea.
Mahad’s academic reports remained perfect. He was by far the brightest of us children. He picked up the Amharic language with ease. His speech, his writing, his grammar, his handwriting, his grades in math, geography, sciences—all were excellent. But his teachers in Ethiopia, like his teachers in Saudi Arabia, complained that he was silent and brooding.
When my mom gave birth to a stillborn baby, the house was engulfed in sadness. My mother’s unhappiness grew until it filled the entire household with a silent, bitter hostility. Finally Abeh gave in and agreed to move us out of Ethiopia.
When we moved to Kenya, Mahad was a month shy of his twelfth birthday. I was ten. Abeh was absent most of the time. He would walk out of the house after the morning prayer, at sunrise, and rarely returned before we were all in bed again. Sometimes he left on trips for a week at a time. His relationship with Mahad continued to deteriorate; his relationship with Ma was even worse.
Abeh wanted us all to attend the Nairobi Muslim Girls’ Primary School, a misnomer, because the primary section of that school was coed. It cost a huge amount of money, and you had to pass an admission exam and an interview to get in. Abeh took all three of us to take the exam. Only Mahad passed. He obtained not only excellent marks but compliments on his behavior during the oral interview. Haweya was told that she was promising; she could come back and take the exam again next year. I failed utterly, having performed poorly in every subject. On the morning we received the results, Ma whacked me on the head and scolded me with the insults I had long ago become used to. But Abeh’s behavior toward me did not change. He hugged me, stroked me, and called me his “only son.” He played chess with Haweya and me. He took us out on a boat. His behavior to Mahad also did not change; he told him that although he did well on the exam, he could have done better. According to my father, Mahad stood in the wrong way, made the wrong eye contact, held his pencil wrong. Nothing Mahad could do was worthy of being Abeh’s only son.
Abeh began to visit Ethiopia for longer periods. On the rare occasions he was with us, he never wasted a moment to tell Mahad that he must be the man of the house. “You are in charge. Your sisters will soon become women. If they shame the family, it’s your responsibility. They will take away your honor. If your mother spends one unhappy night in her bed, it’s your responsibility. Be there for her. Listen to her. Obey her. Do not bring her undue trouble.” Mahad nodded and nodded and nodded. If he didn’t understand what Father was asking of him, he didn’t express it. If he felt it was unfair that Father made huge, adult demands on him, he didn’t express it. He just kept nodding and saying, “Yes, Abeh. Yes, Abeh. Yes, Abeh.” Mahad was obliged by Father to stand in a sort of military pose as these conversations occurred: feet shoulder-width apart, hands folded quietly in front of him, eyes up, staring blankly between Abeh’s eyes. It was unclear to me whether Mahad even registered what Father was asking of him. Every time we saw Abeh, he drilled Mahad in this way. Finally, after a last, terrible row with my mother, Abeh left for Ethiopia. Mahad was almost thirteen.
Abeh didn’t return for ten years. After he left, Mahad’s problems with authority became far more visible. One day he came home in a brooding frame of mind, head down, kicking stones, and threw himself on the mattress, arms and legs wide, which my grandmother, who had come with us to Kenya, considered to be very disrespectful. She chased him off the mattress. He went into a corner and pulled out a novel and started reading it. On the cover of the novel was a longhaired white woman in a bikini with her legs wide open; her face was held by a man, also white, who was staring deep into her eyes. This picture offended my grandmother even more than Mahad’s pose on the mattress, and she went screaming for my mother.
After Abeh left, the quarrels between Mahad and Mother and Grandmother became a constant part of our lives, as irritating and inevitable as the dust in the streets of Nairobi.
After the usual scolding and shouting and name-calling, Mother offered Mahad food that he refused to eat.
MA: What’s the matter? What happened?
MAHAD: I think I’m going to be expelled from school.
MA: Why? What have you done?
MAHAD: I got ninety-seven percent on my math test.
MA: Surely you’re not going to be expelled for getting ninety-seven percent on your math test? You’ve done much poorer in the past. (Ma had no idea what school grades meant. To her, any mistakes meant you were doing badly.)
MAHAD: It’s different this time. I burned the school.
Ma threw shoes. She called upon her ancestors. She lamented her fate. “Your father left me! May the ancestors curse him! May they curse you! May Allah paralyze you!” She picked up the plate of food she had been trying to cajole Mahad into eating and launched it across the room. I watched, dreading the mess I would later have to clean up. On the other hand, I was entranced with the idea of burning the school. What did it feel like? What was it like, to be expelled from school? It was the most horrible thing that could happen, I thought. My ears burned to hear more. But beyond all the drama, I knew I was witness to a tragic fact: Ma now had no authority at all over Mahad. Abeh was gone and, if this expulsion meant Mahad would not go to school anymore, then he was going to grow up on the streets like a vagabond.
Ma retrieved her shoes and set off to get the relatives. The next few weeks were spent talking to the school authorities and collecting money to compensate for the classroom that Mahad had set alight. Mahad wasn’t allowed to come back to class, but all the persuading and the bribing resulted in a compromise: he would be allowed to take his final exams, the important passageway to a good secondary school.
When my mother’s anger and disappointment over the incident subsided, it became apparent why Mahad had set the school on fire. His math teacher, a woman, had scheduled a mock exam in preparation for the finals. This teacher had suffered many disputes with Mahad. He would not listen to her; he would talk during class; he was surly and disrespectful. When he got his mock exam results and found that he had received a score of 67 percent, he walked up to her desk and demanded that she adjust his marks. The teacher sent him away. Mahad persisted in trying to show her that his sums were correct. She refused to look at them and ordered him to go away. He went to his favorite teacher, a man with a great reputation; this teacher looked at the numbers and told Mahad he was right, he had actually earned 97 percent on the test.
Mahad showed the headmistress the discrepancy between his sums and the marks he received. The next day the headmistress told him, “I do not have the authority to intervene. You have to work this out with your teacher.” Mahad then went back to his math teacher, who again sent him away, scolding him for being disrespectful and disobedient. The day after, he conspired with another student who, just like Mahad, had problems with authority in general, particularly in having a female teacher boss him around. One day, when the lessons were over, they forced open the teacher’s closet in their classroom and set everyone’s exam papers on fire.
When the time came for his final exams, once again Mahad performed an academic miracle. Thousands of Kenyan children took the exam, but although Mahad had been speaking English for only two years—and for three months had not attended school or done any kind of schoolwork—he emerged among the top ten students in the nation.
Because Mahad’s results were so good he applied to the best schools and was accepted into most of them. My mother settled on Starehe Boys’ Center and School, a school that was started by an Englishman for children who lived in the streets; to cover the operating costs, smart children from wealthy families were also admitted. Kids like Mahad from low-income families but who had very high academic scores were allowed to pay less tuition.
All our relatives, my mother, and our religious leaders kept reminding Mahad, Whatever happens, don’t give up our culture and the glorious, millennial customs of our ancestors. Meanwhile the Kenyan educational authorities were “Africanizing” the school curriculum. Mahad’s reading list shifted from English classics, like Dickens and Trollope, to African writers like Chinua Achebe. These authors were obsessed with the awful manner in which British colonialism had disrupted the lives of their ancestors. Ironically, however, Mahad read about Achebe’s tribe and ancient customs in English, the language of the imperialist oppressor whom we were supposed to condemn. Mahad routinely achieved top marks in English. He was drilled to wear a school uniform (with a tie), obey the school prefects, and play cricket and rounders, foreign sports. Everything he did and excelled at earned him a paradox of extreme praise for academic achievement and extreme contempt for betraying his tribal customs and religious dogmas.
At first Mahad was a day student, but because he was always late to school, our mother, together with the headmaster, decided to make him a boarder. Then he began cutting school for days at a time, though my mother thought he was attending. His teachers didn’t notice his absences at first. He had joined some other kids who were playing truant. No word ever reached me of their doing anything particularly bad; I think they spent their days just hanging out, talking about girls and plotting how to get into discos. At home Mahad berated and lectured Haweya and me: we must maintain strict morality, we must remain virgins. When we asked him why he spent time with bad girls, he said, “That’s just how it is. Some girls are bad for us boys to amuse ourselves. Some girls are honorable and they get married.”
Ma wanted three things from Mahad. First, she wanted him to help her discipline Haweya and me. This cooperation was most often expressed in tying us up and beating us. I hated him for the pain he was causing me, but watching him hurt Haweya was unbearable. Haweya was always being punished for going outside the house, staying up late reading novels, and coming home late from school. As she grew older, she also developed an interest in going to discos. Ma induced Mahad to hunt her down and bring her home, where he would call her a whore and tie her down and beat her. I would be punished for neglecting to complete the housework, the cooking, cleaning, tidying up, washing the clothes, and doing the grocery shopping. I was also punished for annoying Grandmother. I memorized her lines of curses and lamentations and I would stand in front of her, wiggle my bottom, and pretend to be her, repeating her verses. I also hung out with my friends in school, then came home late and lied that I had been in the mosque.
The second thing Ma wanted from Mahad was to stay in school. She told him the worst thing that could happen to her was for him to drop out. It would mean she was a complete failure, as a mother and as a woman. Only his destiny was significant—not hers, and certainly not Haweya’s or my own. She tried to indulge Mahad by making him good food, sometimes by bribing him with a bit of money. Unfortunately none of that helped. Mahad skipped class so often that his headmaster called Ma to school and said he had no choice but to expel him.
Ma began spending days and nights searching for Mahad in dark alleys, on the streets. She went knocking on the doors of boys she thought were his friends, asking to search their houses for her son. Sometimes she solicited the help of male Somali relatives. For days all we did was look for Mahad. When he emerged from these long hiding periods, Ma would get him into the house and put huge padlocks on the door so he was unable to leave. Then, when she wasn’t paying attention, he would climb over the wall, despite the shards of glass that were fixed to the top to deter thieves.
In one incident, Ma caught him right on our driveway as he was sneaking out. She threw herself at him. Mahad, now fifteen and almost as tall as a man, kept pushing forward. Ma threw herself on the ground, clutched at his ankle, cried and screamed; she would not let him go. Stiff with embarrassment as the neighbors came out to watch what was happening, Mahad conceded and went back into the house. He stayed as long as Ma played watchman, but in a few days he left again.
The third thing Ma wanted from Mahad was to be pious: to read the Quran, pray, and one day perhaps even become a religious leader. I was beginning to be attracted to the teachings of Sister Aziza, an Islamic studies teacher at my school. I was covering myself in a hijab and praying more; looking back, I see that slowly but surely I was subscribing to the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood, a jihadi movement. But Mahad was more attracted to the lures of the street. He became a chain smoker; there were rumors that he drank beer and perhaps even hard liquor. (At the time I didn’t know the difference.) There were also rumors that he was chewing qat.
It was common knowledge that boys like Mahad, who had dropped out, whose fathers were absent, and whose mothers had no authority over them, grew up to be men with no jobs, no wives, no children. Sometimes they were lucky and their parents arranged a marriage for them, to keep them clothed and housed and fed and off the streets. But the marriages always broke down. There were hordes of such lost young Somali men in Eastleigh, a neighborhood in Nairobi. They spent most of their days sleeping in cramped rented rooms and their evenings chewing qat. Then, with borrowed money, they looked for prostitutes. Some of them were involved in crime; they made the streets unsafe.
Some of these young men later repented and joined the Muslim Brotherhood. They would go to Saudi Arabia on Islamic scholarships and come back as preachers of what we would now call radical Islam. Their own story was compelling, for they had been saved from evil, Westernized behavior when Allah showed them the straight path. My mother actively tried to bring Mahad in contact with these agents. But nothing seemed to work.
As Mahad sank deeper into the mire, Ma’s next strategy was to mobilize the clansmen one more time and have him sent to Somalia. At the age of about seventeen he set off to meet our paternal uncles and aunts, and even traveled to Ayl, on the northern coast, which had just been captured by my father’s opposition army. He wasn’t just Mahad any more: he was Hirsi Magan’s son—if not a prince, then at least a man with a long and honorable bloodline and a lofty destiny. He deserved to rule. Surely he wouldn’t betray the clan and himself by remaining a street boy.
While in Somalia Mahad regularly sent my mother letters written in beautiful English. I read them to her, translating them as I went. I ached with sadness that he had dropped out of school. Mahad was so gifted; he could have become a writer. Unfortunately no one had prepared him to set realistic goals and work for them. From his early days, his head was filled with vague notions of honor, wrestling lions, and conquering peoples, goals that bore no relationship to his reality and that only confused his sense of himself.
Then Haweya also dropped out of school, and in 1990 she and I were sent to Somalia too. When I saw Mahad again he was tall and handsome, with a new air of confidence about him. He had enrolled as a student at a Somali-American business school, which I think was paid for by the United Nations, because we were refugees. He said he was thinking of starting a business with some of our relatives. But although I saw him talking to a lot of different people, I never saw him actually do any business; we certainly saw no sign that he was making money.
Both Haweya and I had done secretarial training, and we found employment with the United Nations within a month of our arrival in Mogadishu. We were hired to type, take shorthand, and answer the phone. Our jobs paid relatively well. Mahad neither sought nor found a job with any local or international organization. He didn’t know how to type or take shorthand or file, and he refused to learn, believing that the work we did was beneath him. It was also beneath him to do any kind of manual labor. He had chosen the path of business, but he didn’t want to become a lowly apprentice. Many of our relatives were in the transport business, but no one had started out as an executive; most of them had begun as long-distance drivers or mechanics. Mahad didn’t want to do any of that. As bright as he was, he would have learned fast, but emotionally he was unprepared and undisciplined. His sense of self was both terribly fragile and completely grandiose. He felt, I think, that he could not risk taking a servile position as an apprentice. A prince doesn’t do that.
We make our sons. This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the firstborn son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people—women—to maintain the other group’s self-image. Instead of learning from experience, instead of working, Mahad engaged in a variety of defense mechanisms involving arrogance, self-delusion, and scapegoating. His problems were always somebody else’s fault.
Trouble was brewing in Somalia: the civil war was about to erupt.In November 1990 my mother, who was still in Nairobi, demanded that Haweya and I return, because she had heard so much about girls being raped by gangs of militia. Mahad played the part of guardian very well. He arranged for meetings with our male relatives and successfully raised enough money to send Haweya and me to Kenya by road. He found a male relative, our nephew, to act as our guardian en route. About a month after we arrived in Nairobi, Mahad showed up too, and right after him came a whole stream of refugees.
One of them was our uncle, and he wanted Mahad to take him to the border between Somalia and Kenya to look for his family. That was a clansman’s duty. But Mahad dragged his feet, said “Tomorrow.” Because I could no longer stand his procrastination, I volunteered. When my uncle accepted my offer, to Mahad it was like being kicked in the gut. It reminded me of my father calling him a girl, telling him to hide behind his mother’s skirts, where he belonged. When our uncle and I were out on the border, searching for his wife and children, Mahad showed up. He had been driven to come by the obligation of honor and the shame that would be heaped upon him by the gossiping tongues of the Osman Mohammud clan if he didn’t fulfill his duty.
A few months later my father came to Nairobi. Haweya and I had not seen him in ten years, and I, for one, was overjoyed that he was back. But the tension between him and Mahad was palpable. Mahad always boasted that he would stand up to Abeh, but when push came to shove, he yielded without a word. Father would wake us up at five to pray. Mahad had always lain in bed until noon; he never got around to doing anything until four or five in the afternoon, and even though Ma prodded and begged and pleaded with him every single day to pray, he never did. But when Abeh sang the call to prayer at dawn, Mahad jumped up as though he had been stung by a wasp, rushed to the bathroom, performed his ablutions, and stood on the prayer mat alongside our father, just like when he was a very young boy. And, just like Abeh, he sat down for about an hour and read from the Quran before he went to bed.
To avoid these rituals, Mahad developed the habit of sleeping in hotels and sometimes in the homes of his Kenyan friends. But he never stood up to my father. He never told him, “No, I’m not going to pray” or “Leave me alone, I’m going to sleep in.” He did not dare.
Another time, Mahad encountered Abeh near the large mosque in the city center of Nairobi. Mahad was walking with one of his friends, a Kenyan, and apparently both of them were smoking. As soon as Mahad saw Abeh, he folded the burning cigarette in his hand, shoved it quickly into his pocket, and as it burned a hole through his trousers, he stood in front of my father with a stoic expression.
My father never tired of telling this anecdote, and every time he did he called Mahad a coward and demanded to know why he did not just face up to him like a man. If a man is doing something he knows he shouldn’t do, he should be brave enough to stand up and defend himself.
When my father arranged my marriage to a distant relative who lived in Canada, Mahad saw how unhappy I was. He talked about how he was going to stand up to Father and convince him to change his mind. I believed him; I was so desperate that I thought Mahad truly would help me convince Father that this marriage was wrong for me. But when the occasion presented itself, Mahad said absolutely nothing. He wouldn’t even bring up the subject. My father would then go on and on about what a wonderful match he had made, and Mahad would just nod.
So I left. I made my own life in Holland. I learned from the sporadic letters Haweya sent that Mahad had found and secretly married a good woman, Suban, who was tall, beautiful, of a prominent clan. She was a refugee. Her family had been wealthy in the past, but now, because of the civil war, they were destitute. This was fortunate for Mahad, for it meant that he wouldn’t have to pay a very high bride price, perhaps even none. Haweya hinted that Abeh approved of the marriage, but she said Ma was opposed: the girl wasn’t good enough. I think Ma hated her because she felt Suban had taken Mahad away. Ma always wanted her son to marry a girl of the Dhulbahante clan. But perhaps, like some mothers all over the world, she would have hated any woman who married her son.
Mahad postponed disclosing the marriage to my mother until Suban was pregnant.