I knew the procedure. A group of people read passages from the Quran and spit into a pail of water and sprinkle it on the patient. Or they spit on his bedcovers after every few passages. Not large drops but little lines of saliva, with the tongue quickly returning to the mouth after letting a little drop fall, a very particular kind of gesture.
I asked for news of Jacob. He was doing well in school, Mahad said; he was fine, healthy and cheerful. I tried to visualize him, ten years old, just a bit older than the son of some friends of mine. I saw him as tall like his father and strong-boned like his mother. I suppose I fantasized that Jacob was the one who would be able to break apart the restrictive shackles of our family and faith and attain the successes that his father and grandfather had not.
But Jacob would soon be a teenager. And I remembered all too well how tragically twisted Mahad had become during his teenage years in Nairobi, how he had squandered years that he should have spent studying in high school. I knew that nowadays radical Islamic cells were rife in Eastleigh, preying on the disadvantaged and disaffected, far more than when Mahad and I were young.
I found comfort in a conversation I had with Suban one day. As usual, she asked me for money, but she also asked me to send her clothes. When I asked her to describe what kind of clothes she wanted, she said skirts and blouses. This gave me hope, for I thought that if she were attracted to shrouding herself in a jilbab she would not ask for such clothes.
I began sending money to Mahad, and also to Suban. When Jacob left primary school I made arrangements for a friend to go to Nairobi to find a really good school for him, a school with a library and laboratories and good teachers. I offered to pay the fees. This went very well, and Jacob has been attending that school ever since. On the days when Mahad is not too depressed or too manic, he shows some interest in his son. Mahad told me that the boy is doing very well in school, that his reading, his English, his social skills are all excellent.
It’s important to me that Jacob get an easier initiation into modernity than Mahad had. I can’t influence his home situation. I can only imagine what it is like: confusing assignments, the nostalgic dreams of nomadic life, warlords as heroes, and a strong dose of Islam. He’s probably been taught how to do his ablutions, stand on a mat, face Mecca and pray five times a day. He’s been taught the ideas of sin, hell, and the hereafter.
I have no real strategy for protecting Jacob. I have tried, and failed, to persuade Suban to send him to me, so that I can bring him up in a Western environment. I fix my hopes for him on his schooling. I hope that they will teach him to have faith in life as it is now, on Earth, and help him develop coping skills that embrace modernity. I want him to discover thinkers and writers who will teach him how complex life is, that it’s full of predicaments, and that the art of living is finding your way through these predicaments. Life is not about projecting onto others your inability to cope, nurturing hatred and then going off either to self-destruction or to annihilate those who have been more successful than you.
I have hope in Jacob’s future—a future that is modest and that may contain fewer heroes and more loneliness than the future my brother had been led to aspire to, but one that is more humane.
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 a
ctivity 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.