CHAPTER 2

My Half Sister

Driving back to Heathrow Airport, I thought back to my first meeting with my half sister, Sahra, in Ethiopia in 1992, when she was eight years old and I was twenty-two and newly married, en route to Europe.

We had ended up speaking in sign language, smiling, holding hands, and misunderstanding one another. Sahra had been a charming little girl, with a bright child’s curiosity and my father’s way of being physically affectionate. She had sprinted about with the same kind of energy, enthusiasm, and playfulness as my sister Haweya. She was dressed that day in a sleeveless frock, torn and patched up in so many places that I could not help feeling a strong sense of shame that I did not bring her a new dress.

I was not sure whether the state of her frock was the result of poverty or simply acceptance of the Ethiopian approach to children. When we lived in Addis Ababa, most children were dressed in tatters and often seemed neglected by their parents. As a child I considered this Ethiopian neglect to be the epitome of freedom. I wanted to be left alone, to play as many hours of the day and night as I wanted to, rather than be put to work. Sahra’s mother seemed as indulgent as mine had been rigid and forbidding.

But it was not only Sahra’s frock that was tattered. The apartment was too. We were in a half room, separated from the other spaces by a thin cotton sheet that had once been white but now was stained by smoke and dust. The cement compound of the apartment building had once been smooth and even, but now, like many other shared compounds, it had cracks and large and small holes that were filled with little puddles of water. None of the tenants could afford to make repairs, and they did not work together to raise the money to maintain and clean the communal areas. By late afternoon fat mosquitoes zoomed and whined by my ears. I decided to marshal my best Arabic and Amharic to campaign for us to dry the puddles of water.

My stepmother had shrugged her shoulders in charming helplessness. “It is as Allah wills,” she said. “The puddles will dry when it stops raining. Allah brings the rains and Allah makes the sun shine.”

My father’s third wife accepted her life as it came to her. Like my mother, she was passive, but her passiveness was different from my mother’s. Both women were steeped in self-pity; both resigned themselves to their circumstances. But my mother cursed, scolded, screamed, demanded, and insulted those she blamed. Sahra’s mom smiled and chided; she cast her eyes down and seemed to be content. Whatever the next day brought was Allah’s choice, and she saw no point in defying events, her husband, or her God. Every sentence ended with Inshallah, “God willing.” That was her method of survival.

I did not have the energy or the linguistic skill to suggest that although we could leave to Allah such things as making rain and making the sun shine, perhaps we could dry the puddles ourselves. I had had malaria twice as a child and learned in health education and science classes both in Juja Road and the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School that the parasite that causes malaria lays its eggs in still water. To avoid getting sick we sprayed the mosquitoes and slept under nets, but we also had to dry out all the little puddles and pools of water that collected around our compound and even in the potholes in the streets around our house. We never succeeded in drying out the water in the neighborhood, of course, but as I grew up I dried our compound in Nairobi with a survivor’s zeal and preached to Somali relatives about invisible animals that bred in the water.

Little Sahra and her mother lived a very communal life. Throughout the day people walked in and out of the building and its compound. There was a large stone water pitcher in a corner of the courtyard, and men would come in, scoop some water out in the large aluminum ladle, and drink straight from the ladle. Women used the same pitcher to make tea and fill their cooking pots. At one point that afternoon someone said something about hygiene: “Wash your hands before you use the pitcher. We all drink from it.”

“What?” a young man responded with an awkward grin. “Wash hands with what? There is no water left.” Indeed, the metal ladle hit the bottom of the stone pitcher with a clank, indicating that it was empty, and the older ladies began pleading and crying out for the younger women to fetch more water. Concern about hygiene was lost in the hubbub.

Everyone was talking, a friendly clamor of gossip and criticism of the habash, the Somali word for Ethiopians. Every sentence that everyone spoke was punctuated with “Allah willing” or “For the sake of Allah.”

Sitting in the car that was driving me away from what was certainly the last time I would see my father, I thought about what had kept me away from my family, and from him, for so long: the rule that dictates that a man must command obedience from his women, from his wives and daughters—and they must submit to him. If a man’s women stray from submission, they damage him: his good name, his authority, the sense that he is loyal and strong and true to his word. This belief is part of a larger one that individuals don’t matter, that their choices and desires are meaningless, particularly if the individuals are women.

This sense of honor and male entitlement drastically restricts women’s choices. A whole culture and its religion weigh down every Muslim, but the heaviest weight falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders. We are bound to obey and bound to chastity and shame by Allah and the Prophet and by the fathers and husbands who are our guardians. The women along Whitechapel Road carry the burdens of all the obligations and religious rules that in Islam focus so obsessively on women, as surely as their counterparts in East Africa.

I still felt pained by the shame that I had cast on my father’s good name. Because I was an apostate, an unbeliever, because I now lived as a Western woman, I had hurt him and harmed him, even defiled him by my rebellion. But I also knew that my rebellion was necessary, was vital.

Sahra had taken the contrary path. She did not rebel. Magool had told me that Sahra was deeply religious and that she wore the jilbab, a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face. Sahra’s black shroud extended beyond the tips of her fingers and trailed on the ground; she sought with every word and gesture to express her submission to Allah’s will and to the authority of men.

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires—what small space in your life can you call your own?

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

As we drove down Whitechapel Road I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated, if not endorsed, not just by the British but by so many Western societies where the equality of the sexes is legally enshrined.

At the airport I phoned Sahra to tell her that I had come to see our father and was leaving again to go back the United States. “You are indeed the lucky one!” she said in Somali, laughing at her play on the meaning of my name, Ayaan, “fortunate.” “Ever since you spoke to him on the phone weeks ago, he has not stopped talking about you.”

We spoke a little about the family. I was careful not to say anything she might find offensive. I asked my sister why the hospital had registered my father under a false name, and she answered, “Oh, that’s the name he used when he asked for asylum in Britain.”

We talked about the hospital, and Sahra told me a funny story. When they took my father to the hospital, her mother told the nurses that she was his wife; then his first wife, Maryan Farah, had come, for she too now lived in England, and she told them that she was his wife. The whole staff seemed amused by the impossible number of people claiming to be his brothers and cousins. I chuckled. “They must think we’re all crazy,” Sahra said. I told her it was probably not the first time the hospital had seen such a thing.

Like her mother, every phrase Sahra spoke seemed to end with Inshallah, “If Allah wills it.” At first it sounded well-behaved and highly civilized, but after so many sighs of acceptance and Allah willing and Sahra’s showering me with Allah’s blessings, I am ashamed to admit that it began to annoy me. I started to distrust her: she was no longer the skipping, happy child I met in 1992.

Now, before our first real conversation was over, Sahra too began trying to bring me back to Islam, to persuade me to give up my adopted way of life and join her in tradition and the dictates of Allah. As I listened, I pictured her, this little sister whom I had met only once, sixteen years ago, who was now sitting with her mother and her baby daughter in a flat in a housing project, dressed in layer upon layer of dark cloth.

Sahra has lived in England for years, but she did not take the road that I took, the one that released me from obedience and tradition and took me to Holland and the freedoms of the West. Though geographically she lives in a modern society, she has held on to the old, grim childhood values that place piety and submission to authority above all others. In doing so she has locked herself into poverty, squandering the opportunities that freedom offers her. If I had not bolted from my family, if I had married the man my father had contracted me to, I would probably now be living in the Canadian equivalent of Sahra’s immigrant neighborhood. I might be living just like Sahra: conditioned to live in a prison within a society that is free.

“All you need to do is pray,” Sahra was saying, warming to her task. “You’ll see that Allah will open your heart, and your mind will follow.”

I forced back the urge to share with my young half sister the merits of Enlightenment philosophy, the basis for Western freedom that for her was just a short walk away. I felt emotionally drained, physically tired from the long succession of planes, and I wasn’t in London for a battle of ideas.

“Darling,” I answered, “I’ll think about it.”

*    *    *

During the next few days I spoke with Sahra often. She came to seem like a strange kind of mirror, dressed in her jilbab, just as I had once worn a jilbab in Nairobi years ago. I could so easily have shared her life. The ideas that had shaped her had shaped me too, and sometimes I wondered whether one can ever truly escape such all-encompassing mental programming.

Of all his many children, Sahra was the child with whom my father spent the most time, to whom he paid the most attention. She still lives the baarri way, the way I was meant to live, as every good Somali girl must. She is obedient and submissive, but she is also conflicted; on the one hand, she wants the approval of our father, her mother, and the community, but on the other hand, she also, surely, wants to lead the life that is led by other girls her age who live in England.

This sense of being conflicted must leave her in limbo. She starts a vocational course but doesn’t see it through; she begins English lessons but doesn’t complete them. She does this because if she were to finish those studies and get a diploma, she could then find a job. But that would surely mean working outside the home; she would be gone for hours and might have to mix with men. She might even find herself tempted to put on makeup and participate in the social life of an office. Such a life is too dangerous: it would attack her basic sense of who she is. Yet by not getting a diploma Sahra has to live with her own dependence. In this renunciation of her mind and skills, however, she derives a bizarre reward of approval for being submissive.

I have shaken off my dependence on that sort of approval. No longer a Muslim, I am relieved of the fear of hell and can choose to indulge in the sins of the world. Sahra has the beautiful certainties of belonging and the terrible submission of self. I suffer the loneliness of gratifying my individualism; Sahra, that of self-denial and submission to the group.

The weight of Sahra’s self-denial must be immense. These days in Britain, as all over Europe, Muslim women are demanding that they be allowed to wear the hijab at work. More and more wear the full niqaab, which covers even your face and eyes. These women believe that their own bodies are so powerfully toxic that even making eye contact with other people is a sin. The extent of self-loathing that this expresses is impossible to exaggerate, and it must be reawakened every time it meets the conflicting urge to work, to go out of the home, to encounter the outside world.

Sahra told me that she wanted to become a lawyer. How on earth did she think that would be possible? In England women lawyers are chic and powerfully feminine, unafraid to confront men. The British legal system in itself is blasphemy to a convinced Muslim, for it seeks to replace Allah’s laws with man-made ones. She also mentioned an interest in psychology. I wondered how she would fare with Freud while remaining loyal to Muhammad.

Learning the infidel language was surely sinful enough. I remembered a scene in a mosque in 1990, when my sister Haweya and I were briefly living in Mogadishu. It was during Ramadan, and we had joined the Taraweh prayers, a very long series of prayer followed by supplications. In the Mogadishu heat, sitting on hard sisal mats in the women’s section, Haweya and I were speaking to each other in English in between the supplications. The women around us expressed genuine shock that we would bring into such a holy place the language of the devil himself. They told us that our prayers did not mean a thing and would gain us no rewards in heaven, for by forcing them to listen to us speak the devil’s language we were affecting their own piety.

Our two worlds, Sahra’s and mine, coexist in the same city streets, but one is framed above all by the oppression of individuals, especially women, and the other glorifies individuality. Can those two sets of values ever be reconciled within Sahra, between her and her daughter, or on the streets of European cities? Will she ever understand that home is where she is, instead of an imagined past in a Somalia that is no longer even a whole country, riven as it is by war? For how long will Western societies, whose roots drink from the rational sources of the Enlightenment, continue to tolerate the spread of Sahra’s way of life, like ivy on their trunks, an alien and possibly lethal growth?

Perhaps Sahra had been there, among the crowd of women standing at the bus stop outside the hospital. She would have been under her jilbab, so I would never have recognized her.

Sahra’s baby daughter, Sagal, was born in England. She may grow up to be a successful, self-reliant career woman. With luck, good schools, patient educators, and personal resourcefulness and determination, this is possible—but not, I think, very likely.

How old will Sagal be when she puts on her first veil to walk down the city streets of the UK, and will she be “cut”—will her genitals be mutilated and sewn when she is five or six years old, like those of almost every Somali girl child? Our father had been against this barbaric practice, but my maternal grandmother had insisted on it for my sister and me. The threat to Sagal’s body and health from this practice might come from Sahra and her own grandmother rather than from the men of our family. Genital mutilation occurs in Britain (although it is illegal), just as it occurs abroad. In itself, it does not prevent a woman from developing an independent mind. But the scar may be a constant reminder of the punishments in store for the rebellious.

Sahra may choose to enroll Sagal in a Muslim school, where she will be isolated from the values that underlie success in Britain. Most of her fellow students will come from homes where English is a second language. Some of her teachers will have been selected more for their piety than their ability as educators, others for their willingness to cooperate with the norms of the Muslim school. Some teachers will have applied out of a strong sense of idealism; others will have been motivated by a combination of some or all of these factors. Education will be by rote learning and submission, not inquiry and an open mind.

Or Sagal may be sent to one of the local state schools. Given the ethnic mix of her immigrant neighborhood, these schools are likely to be made up of children from immigrant families, often polygamous or single-parent families, where English is unlikely to be spoken at home. These schools are often in areas that are unsafe for children, with drug dealers and menacing teenage boys on street corners, random and frightening violence. In such neighborhoods you see teenage girls tattooed and pierced, in clothing so scanty you sometimes wonder if they forgot their skirt or pants, and cheek by jowl with them, girls shrouded in black burkas that conceal their faces and eyes so that they look like a cross between Darth Vader and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If any sort of school can be worse than a Muslim school it is these schools in deprived inner-city areas. Teachers are beaten down into exhaustion and indifference by the discipline problems they face. Kids are either bullies or they are bullied; they take the initiative to be violent, or they suffer. Graffiti is the art, hip-hop the music, zealotry the faith. Kids who grow up in this environment are likely to have permanent language problems; they may be regarded as unemployable because they do not have a middle-class work ethic.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the immigrant community looks to religious schools in such areas; disgusted by state schools, where their kids drop out after receiving a substandard education, they seek an alternative and comfortable system of beliefs and morals that they understand. Yet the Muslim schools are easily as bad, for there the kids are brainwashed into a way of life that diminishes their chances of success even further. Such children will be altogether cut off from the society in which their parents have chosen to live.

It may be that Sahra and Sagal will manage to inch their way into the ranks of the British middle classes. A temporary job, a helpful friend, a scholarship—these things are possible. I think I could help. But I know that my offers of help will be rejected as un-Islamic, infidel and heinous. For is it not true that Allah will reward those who suffer in his name, those who endure pain and shame and mocking because they choose to serve him?

After all, entering the middle class of Britain or any other Western democracy is such a lowly goal compared with entering heaven, with its rivers, springs, and cascading brooks, and fruits and wines that are a thousand times better than those made on earth. Wrapped in her shroud-like jilbab, Sahra believes staunchly, just as my father did, that her suffering in this life will be richly rewarded in the hereafter. Her daughter may have to pay the price on earth. I only hope she finds a little window of escape, as I did.