“There was once a young nomad who married a beautiful wife, and they had a son,” my grandmother would begin. The three of us knew to settle down instantly and pretend to be occupied with something; the slightest interruption could break her mood, and she would growl at us and go back to weaving the thin strips of dried grass that she sewed night and day into large, elaborate matting.
“The rains didn’t come, so the nomad set out to walk across the desert, looking for pasture where he could settle with his family. Almost as soon as he began walking he came upon a patch of green young grass. On it was a hut made of strong branches, covered with freshly woven mats and swept clean.
“The hut was empty. The man went back to his wife and told her that after just one day of walking, he had found the perfect place. But two days later, when he returned to the pasture with his wife and baby, they found a stranger standing in the doorway of the hut. This stranger was not tall, but he was thickly built, and he had very white teeth and smooth skin.”
Haweya would shiver with pleasure, and I with fear.
“The stranger said, ‘You have a wife and child. Take the house, you’re welcome to it,’ and he smiled. The young nomad thought this stranger was remarkably friendly, and thanked him; he invited the stranger to visit any time. But the wife felt uncomfortable around the stranger. The baby, too, cried as soon as he cast eyes on this man.
“That night an animal sneaked into their hut and stole the baby out of his bed. The man had eaten well and slept heavily; he heard nothing. Such misfortune. The stranger visited the nomad and his wife to tell them of his sorrow. But when he spoke, the wife noticed that there were tiny pieces of red meat between his teeth, and one of those strong white teeth was just a little bit broken.
“The man stayed on with the couple in the house. For a whole year, the grass stayed green and the rains came, so there was no reason to move on. The wife had another baby in that hut, another beautiful son. But again, when the child was barely one season old, an animal came in the night and grabbed the baby in its jaws. This time the child’s father ran after the creature, but he was too slow to catch up.
“The third time, the nomad caught up with the creature, and struggled with it, but the animal overpowered him. Again, it ate the baby! Finally, after her third baby was eaten, the wife told the nomad she would leave him. So now that stupid nomad had lost everything!
“So what have you learned?” my grandmother would shout at us. We knew the answer. That nomad had been lazy. He had taken the first pasture he found, even though there had to be something wrong with it. He had been stupid: he had failed to read the signs, the signals, which the baby and the woman had instinctively felt. The stranger was really He Who Rubs Himself with a Stick, the monstrous being who transforms himself into a hyena and devours children. We had spotted it. The nomad had been slow of mind, slow of limb, weak in strength and valor. He deserved to lose everything.
My grandmother’s stories could be chilling. There were stories about an ugly old witch woman whose name was People Slayer or People Butcher, who had the power to transform herself, to adopt the face of someone you liked and respected, and who at the last minute lunged at you, laughing in your face, HAHAHAHAHA, before she slaughtered you with a long sharp knife that she had been hiding under the folds of her robe all along and then ate you up. My grandmother told us tales from when she was young, of the bands of fighters who raided the desert, stealing animals and women, burning settlements. She told us about all the unrecorded disasters of her life and her parents’ lives: the pandemics of plague and malaria and drought that left whole regions barren of life.
She told us also about her life. The good times, when the rains came and made everything green, when streams of water suddenly raced through the dried riverbeds and there was milk and meat in abundance. She tried to teach us how that led to decadence: how when the grass grows green, herders become lazy and children grow fat. How men and women mix, in singing and drumming at twilight, and how that erodes their watchfulness, so that they fail to spot danger. Such mingling, she warned us, leads to competition, conflict, disaster.
Sometimes in my grandmother’s stories there were brave women—mothers, like my mother—who used their cunning and their courage to save their children from danger. This made us feel safe, in a way. My grandmother, and my mother, too, were brave and clever: they would surely be able to save us when our time came to face the monsters.
In Somalia, little children learn quickly to be alert to betrayal. Things are not always what they seem; even a small slip can be fatal. The moral of every one of my grandmother’s stories rested on our honor. We must be strong, clever, suspicious; we must obey the rules of the clan.
Suspicion is good, especially if you are a girl. For girls can be taken, or they may yield. And if a girl’s virginity is despoiled, she not only obliterates her own honor, she also damages the honor of her father, uncles, brothers, male cousins. There is nothing worse than to be the agent of such catastrophe.
Even though we loved her stories, mostly we ignored my grandmother. She herded us around, much as she did the goats that she would tether to our tree, but we were more unruly. Stories and squabbles were our pastimes; I don’t think I even saw a toy till I was eight and we had moved to Saudi Arabia. We pestered each other. Haweya and Mahad ganged up on me, or Haweya and I ganged up on Mahad. But my brother and I never did anything as a team. We hated each other. My grandmother always said this was because I was born just one year after Mahad: I stole Ma’s lap from him.
We had no father, because our father was in prison.
I had no memory of him at all.
* * *
Most of the adults I knew grew up in the deserts of Somalia. The easternmost country in Africa and one of the poorest, Somalia juts into the Indian Ocean, cradling the tip of the Arabian peninsula like a protective hand before dropping down the coast to Kenya. My family were nomads who moved constantly through the northern and northeastern deserts to find pasture for their herds. They would settle sometimes, for a season or two; when there was no longer enough water and pasture, or if the rains failed, they picked up their hut and stacked their mats onto camels and walked, trying to find somewhere better, to keep their herds alive.
My grandmother learned to weave dried grass so tight you could carry water for miles in one of her pitchers. She could make her own small domed house out of bent boughs and woven mats, then dismantle it and load it onto a nasty-tempered transport camel.
When my grandmother was about ten years old, her father, an Isaq herder, died. Her mother married her uncle. (This is a common practice. It saves a dowry and trouble.) When my grandmother was about thirteen, that uncle received a proposal for my grandmother’s hand from a wealthy nomad named Artan, who was about forty years old. Artan was a Dhulbahante, which was a good bloodline of the Darod. He was widely respected, skilled with animals, and a good navigator: he could read his environment so well that he always knew when to move and where to go to find rain. Other clan members came to him to arbitrate their disputes.
Artan was already married, but he and his wife had only one child, a daughter who was a little younger than my grandmother. When he decided to take another wife, Artan first chose the father of the bride: he must be a man from a good clan, with a decent reputation. The girl must be hardworking, strong, young, and pure. My grandmother, Ibaado, was all that. Artan paid a bride price for her.
A few days after Artan married her and took her away, my grandmother bolted. She managed to walk almost all the way back to her mother’s camp before Artan caught up with her. He agreed to let her rest for a bit with her mother, to recover. Then, after a week, her stepfather took her to Artan’s camp and told her, “This is your destiny.”
For the rest of her life, my grandmother was irreproachable in every way. She raised eight girls and one boy, and never was there a whisper of gossip about their virtue or their work. She instilled willpower and obedience and a sense of honor in her ch
ildren. She grazed animals, fetched firewood, built fences of sticks laced with thorn branches. She had hard hands and a hard head, and when her husband hosted clan meetings in his role as a clan arbiter, she kept her girls safely apart from the men and the singing and the drums. They could listen only from afar to the poetry competitions and watch as the men traded goods and tales. My grandmother showed no jealousy toward her older co-wife, though she stayed out of her way; when the older wife died, my grandmother tolerated the presence of her haughty stepdaughter, Khadija, the girl who was almost her own age.
Artan had nine daughters and a young wife. Guarding the honor of his women was of paramount importance. He kept them well away from any other nomads, roaming for weeks to find a place with pasture and no young men. They navigated endlessly through the remotest deserts. As we sat under the talal tree outside our house in Mogadishu, my grandmother often told us about the beautiful emptiness of sitting in front of a hut she had built with her own hands, staring into the vast, never-ending space.
In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious. The British and Italians claimed to be ruling Somalia, but this would have meant nothing to my grandmother. To her there were only the clans: the great nomad clans of the Isaq and the Darod, the lesser Hawiye farmers, and, lower still, the inferior Sab. The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person’s skin had burned off.
My mother, Asha, was born sometime in the early 1940s, along with her identical twin sister, Halimo. My grandmother gave birth to them alone, under a tree. They were her third and fourth children; she was about eighteen, leading her goats and sheep to pasture when she felt the pains. She lay down and bore forth; then she cut the umbilical cords with her knife. A few hours later, she gathered together the goats and sheep and managed to bring the herd home safely before dark, carrying her newborn twins. Nobody was impressed by the exploit: she was only bringing home two more girls.
To my grandmother, feelings were a foolish self-indulgence. Pride was important, though—pride in your work, and your strength—and self-reliance. If you were weak, people would speak ill of you. If your thorn fences were not strong enough, your animals would be raided by lions, hyenas, and foxes, your husband would marry another, your daughters’ virginity would be stolen, and your sons seen as worthless.
In her eyes, we were useless children. Bred in a cement-block house with a hard roof, we had no skills of value. We walked on roadways; the road in front of our house wasn’t paved, but still, it was a marked passage in the dirt. We had water from a tap. We could never have found our way home after herding animals through the desert; we couldn’t even milk a goat without getting kicked over.
My grandmother reserved particular scorn for me. I was terrified of insects, so in her eyes I was a truly stupid child. By the time her daughters were five or six, my grandmother had already taught them every major skill they would need to survive. I lacked all of them.
* * *
My mother told us stories, too. She had learned to care for her family’s animals, and herded them through the desert to places that were safe. The goats were easy prey for a predator; so was a young girl. If my mother or her sisters were attacked by men out in the desert it would be their own fault: they should have fled at the first sight of an unknown camel. If they were ever captured they were to say, three times, “Allah be my witness, I want no conflict with you. Please leave me alone.” To be raped would be far worse than dying, because it would tarnish the honor of everyone in their family.
If the invocation to Allah had no effect, my grandmother taught her daughters to run around behind a man, squat down, reach between his legs under his sarong, and yank his testicles hard. They were not to let go. He might hit or kick, but they were to tuck in their heads and take the blows on their backs and hope to hang on long enough to cause the attacker to faint. This move is called Qworegoys, and the women of my grandmother’s family taught it to their daughters just as they taught them to make thorn-bush fences to protect the hut from hyenas.
I remember one afternoon when Haweya and I were small children, watching my grandmother rubbing sheep fat into a long coil of woven rope before she steeped it in the plant dye that would make it hard and black.
“A woman alone is like a piece of sheep fat in the sun,” she told us. “Everything will come and feed on that fat. Before you know it, the ants and insects are crawling all over it, until there is nothing left but a smear of grease.” My grandmother pointed to a gobbet of fat melting in the sun, just beyond the talal tree’s shadow. It was black with ants and gnats. For years, this image inhabited my nightmares.
* * *
When my mother was a child, she was always dutiful, always obedient. But as she grew up, the world began changing. The old traditions of the nomads were shifting as modern life lured them to villages and cities. And so, when she was about fifteen years old, my mother walked out of the desert. She left her parents and her older sisters and even her twin sister behind her, and began walking. Then she got on a truck and went to the port city of Berbera, and she took a ship across the Red Sea, to Arabia.
Khadija had preceded her. Khadija was her older stepsister, the child of her father’s first wife. Another of my mother’s older sisters made the trip, too. I don’t know what led them to do it; my mother rarely confided her private emotions. But it was the 1950s, and modern life was jabbing its sharp elbows into the farthest parts of the world. My mother was young, after all, and I think perhaps she simply didn’t want to be left behind in the desert when all the young people had left for the city.
My mother went to Aden, where Khadija had already settled: a big city, a center of Britain’s colonial rule over the Middle East. She got a job cleaning house for a British woman. She learned about forks and chairs and bathtubs and cleaning brushes. She loved the strict rituals—cleaning, folding, ironing—and the elaborate paraphernalia of settled life. My mother became even more scrupulously attentive about such matters than the woman she worked for.
Although she was alone in Aden, without parental supervision, my mother was supremely virtuous. She was determined that nobody would ever have grounds to gossip that she, Asha Artan, had behaved improperly. She never took a taxi or a bus for fear of being seated beside a strange man. She shunned the Somali men who chewed qat and the girls who brewed tea for them and joked around as the buzzy euphoria of the short, fat little leaves got them talking and laughing. Instead, in Aden, my mother learned to pray in the proper Islamic manner.
Living in the desert, my grandmother had never really had the time to pray. Among the nomads, women weren’t expected to. It was men who spread their prayer mats on the sand five times a day and faced Mecca, chanting the Quran. But now, on the Arabian peninsula, where the Prophet Muhammad received Allah’s revelation, my mother learned the ritual ablutions. She learned to cover herself with a plain cloth and pray—standing, sitting, prostrating, turning right and left: the ballet of submission to Allah.
In the desert, nomad women were not covered. They worked, and it is hard to work under a long veil. While my grandmother herded and cooked, she draped herself in a roughly woven long cloth, the goh, leaving her arms, hair, and neck bare. In my grandmother’s day, men were commonly present while women breast-fed their children; if there was anything arousing about seeing a few inches of female flesh, the men never showed it.
My mother had no protector in Aden—no father, no brother. Men leered and bothered her on the street. She began wearing a veil, like the Arab women who robed when they left their houses in a long black cloth that left only a slit for their eyes. The veil protected her from those leering men, and from the feeling of vileness it gave her to be looked at that way. Her veil was an emblem of her belief. To be beloved of God, you had to be modest, and Asha Artan wanted to be the most proper, most virtuous woman in the city.
* * *
&nb
sp; One day my grandfather Artan came to Aden. He told my mother that he had received a request for her hand in marriage and had accepted. My mother was about eighteen; she could not defy her father. So she stayed silent. A virgin’s silence is the proper answer to a marriage proposal; it signifies a dignified consent.
So my mother married this man, whose name was Ahmed, although she disliked him on sight: he was too short and too dark, and he smoked, which to her was as bad as chewing qat. Ahmed was a Darod, as she was, and of the Harti, too, like her; but instead of being a nomad Dhulbahante, like my mother, he was a trader, a Wersengeli. My mother therefore looked down on this man, although he was wealthy.
This Wersengeli man moved my mother to Kuwait, where she was mistress of a big house with a tile floor, hot running water, and electricity. The first thing my mother did was fire all the maids: nobody could clean the house well enough for Asha Artan. She set about creating an exemplary household. She had a son and called him Muhammad, after the Prophet, the proper name for an oldest boy.
Then her father, who was an old man now, died, and my mother did something extremely surprising: she told her husband that she wanted a divorce.
Of course, my mother had no right to a divorce under Muslim law. The only way she could have claimed one was if her husband had been impotent or left her completely indigent. All the members of her clan in Kuwait told her she was being ridiculous. Her husband was wealthy, and although he could have afforded several wives, he came home to her every night. What more could she want? If she divorced, my mother would be used goods—no longer a virgin. And besides, they argued, she would get a reputation that she was not baarri.
A woman who is baarri is like a pious slave. She honors her husband’s family and feeds them without question or complaint. She never whines or makes demands of any kind. She is strong in service, but her head is bowed. If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. She is a devoted, welcoming, well-trained work animal. This is baarri.