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 sc
hools 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.
CHAPTER 3
My Mother
My father died a week after I went to see him at the hospital. Just before he died, he slipped back into unconsciousness. The machines kept him alive until the doctors pulled the plug. I knew it was going to happen, and yet when I found out I still felt a pain that was primeval in its intensity.
I would have to stay away from the funeral. All day long I imagined the scene in his apartment: all the women of the clan coming by, sitting on the floor, drinking tea, telling stories, consoling each other, wailing, and waiting for the men to return from the cemetery where they buried him.
I found myself walking around my apartment in America, obsessively cleaning, trying not to think. I could have gone to see my father earlier; I couldn’t ignore the choice I had made. I could have canceled my trip to Brazil or my trip to Australia and just flown to him after that first phone call in June. I could easily have called and canceled my commitments, but I didn’t go to see him because it wasn’t convenient, because my sense of belonging had shifted away from my duty to my father, away from the smells of Somalia and Nairobi, to a new tribe.
I had made a selfish choice. I did not go because I could count on my hands the number of times I had spoken to my father since I had wriggled out of his grasp sixteen years before, and every time the conversation was the same: a sermon that was not just monotonous, but dismaying.
Even after I fled from my father and his plans for me, I had still looked up to him as a leader, as someone who had acted against the injustice and tyranny in Somalia, who had fought to bring his family, tribe, and nation into a democratic, modern system of governance.
The first cracks of my disenchantment came in 2000, when I met him in Germany, where he had gone for an eye operation. It was the first time I had seen him after eight years of exile. I was still studying at the University of Leiden, bursting with all kinds of ideas, longing to see him again yet afraid of what he would say to me. Even so, when my father began talking about Islamic law, making what seemed to me weak, even silly arguments, I was almost speechless. This was my father. He was still a brilliant thinker and leader, invincible and strong, so I made excuses: this couldn’t possibly be the real man. After that meeting, however, every conversation ended the same way; even when we last spoke on the phone, before I had gone to Brazil, I had wanted to stop myself feeling disappointed at how inconsistent his ideas and beliefs were, how irrational.
Just as I had lied about my identity when I sought asylum in Holland, my father too, it seemed, had lied to cheat the asylum system so that he could live in Britain. The tribal hero, the preserver of the culture of Islam and the clan, took handouts from the unbelievers on a false pretext, with a fake passport, though, unlike me, he had nothing but contempt for their values and way of life. Before he died he had even applied for and received British citizenship, not because he wanted to be a British subject but because of the instrumental benefits of free housing and health care. At the same time, he continued to lecture me never to be loyal to a secular state; he repeatedly urged me to return to the true faith. If I had stayed with him for a week he would have trapped me in a week-long lecture. He would have asked me to reunite with the family—his wives, their daughters, some of whom probably think I should be put to death and who certainly consider me a whore.
We who are born into Islam don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy. (Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad elevated it and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live happily, in union. Polygamy creates a context of uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the other wife getting? Who is the favored child? Who will he marry next, and how can we manipulate him most efficiently? Rival wives and their children plot and are often said to cast spells on each other. If security, safety, and predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for power.
My grandmother, a second wife herself, used to say that our family was too noble to feel jealousy. Nobility in Somali nomadic culture is synonymous with self-restraint, with resilience. A higher-status clan is more self-conscious, hence more stoic. Expressions of jealousy or any other kind of emotion are frowned upon. My grandmother said she was lucky, and people called her spoiled, because after her older cowife died her husband didn’t take another wife for many years, until my grandmother had had nine children. Even then, he only married again because eight of those children were girls.
My grandmother had thought her position was safe, because even though she had given birth to daughter after daughter, for years her husband did not marry another wife. And then he did marry again. And that third wife, to my grandmother’s enduring shame, gave birth to three boys. My grandfather had a total of thirteen children.
There was nothing my grandmother could do and nothing she wished to say, so she did not protest. But after that, the worst in her came to the fore: she became mean and petty, exploding with temper at her children, who took the brunt of her anger.
Long after I was an adult, I realized that it was jealousy that finally drove my grandmother to walk away from her husband. After my grandfather’s new wife had her second son, my grandmother could no longer contain her shame and envy, and she left their home in the desert, ostensibly to look after her adult children, which included my mother.
My mother’s story was similar. Even though she was my father’s second wife, from the day she learned that my father had married a third woman and had another child, Sahra, my mo
ther became erratic, sometimes exploding with grief and pain and violence. She had fainting episodes and skin diseases, symptoms caused by suppressed jealousy. From being a strong, accomplished woman she became a wreck, and we, her children, bore the brunt of her misery.
Of my father’s six children who made it to adulthood, three have suffered mental illnesses so severe that they can barely function. My sister Haweya died after three years of depression and psychotic attacks; my brother Mahad is a manic-depressive, unable to hold down a job; one of our half sisters has had psychotic episodes since she was eighteen. Aunts and uncles on both sides of my family have cases of Waalli, or generic “madness,” as they call all mental problems in Somali.
Perhaps polygamy invites madness, or perhaps it is the clash between aspiration and reality. All my relatives desperately wanted to be modern. They yearned for freedom, but once they found it they were bewildered and broken by it. Obviously mental instability has biological factors too, but it is also affected by the culture we mature in, the tactics and strategies of survival we develop, the relationships we have with others, and the unbearable dissonance between the world we are told to see and the world in which we actually live.
As I spoke with Magool after my father’s death, it occurred to me that the message that Abeh had tried so desperately to tell me on his deathbed was probably that I should look after his wives: his first wife, who also lives in England; his second wife, my mother, who lives in Somalia; his third wife, Sahra’s mother; and his fourth wife, a woman whom he married in Somalia after Sahra was born and with whom he had no children. I had almost forgotten about the fourth wife’s existence.
I pondered this for some time, something I had never permitted myself to do while he was alive. My father had hurt so many people, as he married women and fathered children and then left them behind, more or less untended. Judging my father by my adoptive Western standards, I found that he had failed in his duties toward his wives and children.