If you are a Somali woman you must learn to tell yourself that God is just and all-knowing and will reward you in the Hereafter. Meanwhile, everyone who knows about your patience and endurance will applaud your father and mother on the excellence of your upbringing. Your brothers will be grateful to you for preserving their honor. They will boast to other families about your heroic submission. And perhaps, eventually, your husband’s family will appreciate your obedience, and your husband may one day treat you as a fellow human being.
If in the process of being baarri you feel grief, humiliation, fatigue, or a sense of everlasting exploitation, you hide it. If you long for love and comfort, you pray in silence to Allah to make your husband more bearable. Prayer is your strength. Nomadic mothers must try to give their daughters this skill and strength called baarri.
For years, my ma had been perfect. Her virtue had been legendary, her work habits impeccable. Partly it was her nature: my mother found strength and comfort in clear-cut rules and the dead certainty that if she were good, she would go to Paradise. I think, though, that she also feared her father might curse her if she disobeyed. A father’s curse is the worst thing that can happen to you, a ticket straight to Hell.
But after her father died, my mother defied her husband. She turned away from him with the full force of the scorn she had stored up for so long. She refused even to speak to him. Finally, he agreed not to contest her claim for a divorce. The Kuwaiti judge granted her seven more years with her son. When he was ten, Muhammad would return to live with his father; till then, my mother was permitted to bring up her son alone.
* * *
When my mother was growing up, Somalia didn’t exist. Although all the clans spoke the same language, albeit different dialects, they mostly lived in separate territories and saw themselves as distinct. The territory that is now Somalia was divided between the British and the Italians, who occupied the country as colonizers, splitting it in two. In 1960 the colonists left, leaving behind them a brand-new, independent state. A unified nation was born.
This new country, Somalia, had a democracy, a president, a flag, an army, even its own currency: sepia banknotes with dignified portraits of farm animals and people working in fields, like no scene my mother had ever witnessed. People who had always lived deep in the rural areas began streaming to the country’s new capital, which the colonizers called Mogadishu. They thrilled to the idea of building one nation, great and powerful. So many hopes would be dashed in the coming years by the clan infighting, the corruption and violence into which the country, like so much of Africa, fell. But my mother couldn’t have guessed what would happen, so, like so many others, she packed her bags, took her son and the dowry her husband had given her when she married him, and returned to Somalia, to Mogadishu, the capital, where she had never been.
For the rest of her life my grandmother berated my mother for this decision. Mogadishu was not Darod land. It was not even Isaq. It was deep in Hawiye territory, where my mother didn’t belong. My grandmother always said that my mother’s ex-husband must have cursed her, causing this foolhardy choice. Or maybe a djinn was let loose by my mother’s bare-faced defiance of the marriage made for her by her father. My grandmother hated the hard cement houses, the narrow streets, the lack of a horizon in Mogadishu, and she hated knowing that her family was no longer safe in the Darod lands in the north. But once again, my mother departed from the traditions of her parents. And once again, she was following her half-sister, Khadija Artan, who had settled in Mogadishu with her husband.
Khadija was a striking woman, as tall as my mother and just as lean. She had taut, angular features, hawklike eyes, and a domineering manner. Her voice was powerful and her gestures dignified and elaborate. My grandmother loathed her. Khadija was bold; she wore long Western dresses that went down to her ankles but were held slim against her body with zips and buttons. She also draped cloth of the rural goh and the urban dirha around her. But Khadija’s gohs and dirhas were made of the choicest fabrics, expensive silks and chiffon instead of the basic cottons, and the way she wore them made other women seem clumsy and inadequate. Khadija held her hair high in a turban of cloth. She was modern. She was ecstatic about independence, the politics, and nightly discussions on the street. She positively bustled with self-importance through the new capital city.
Although she was married (and well married, too), Khadija was barren: a terrible destiny. Some people said it was because she was a witch and strong-willed. My grandmother muttered that it was a curse for disobedience and waywardness. If there was a curse, Khadija managed to ignore it.
Khadija counseled my mother to buy a plot of land opposite a trucking business owned by her husband’s oldest son by a previous wife. It was a new neighborhood, and now that Mogadishu had become the capital, Darod had begun moving in there. This area, Hoden, was cleaner and healthier than the center of town, where the graceful old Italian buildings were surrounded by filthy, densely packed streets. The roads were unpaved in our neighborhood, and not many houses had electricity; our house never did. But Ma bought the land. She moved into Khadija’s place and began planning to build her own house.
My mother’s idea of a house emerged in fits and starts, as materials became available. There were just two big rooms, with whitewashed cinder-block walls and a cement floor. The area in front of the main door was also cement; the rest was sand. Building this house took a long time. Everything was painted white, except the doors and shutters, which were green, the color my mother felt was appropriate for a proper Muslim door. The cooking fire was outside, under an awning, beside a tall talal tree, where a man might spread his mat in the shade on a hot afternoon.
Khadija was a busybody, always directing other people’s destinies and arranging marriages. My mother was young, and she didn’t have much to do; it would not have been proper for her to work. Khadija suggested that she leave little Muhammad with her and go out, perhaps attend a literacy class. A young man called Hirsi Magan had just returned from a university in America, and he was teaching ordinary people in Mogadishu to read and write.
That young man, Hirsi Magan, would become my father. When I was little, he was like a hero in a fable to me, only a little more real than my grandmother’s werewolves. My father’s older sister, Aunt Hawo Magan, used to come to our house and tell us stories about him, how he grew up in the northern desert. Their father, Magan, had been a legendary warrior. His name meant “The Protector”—or more specifically, “The Protector of those he conquered”. Magan was an Osman Mahamud, from the Darod subclan that always claimed the right to conquer and rule over other peoples. Magan had fought for King Boqor, who ruled the Macherten lands near the sea, and then around 1890 he switched allegiance to Boqor’s rival, Kenaidiid, who was a younger man and more eager to wage war and lead raids. (Boqor, Magan, and Kenaidiid were all cousins.)
Kenaidiid and Magan led their warriors through the southern lands of Senag and Mudug, which were occupied by smaller clans, including many Hawiye. The Hawiye were passive people, mostly farmers, and they had no army. Magan despised them. There is a story that he once had Hawiye villagers gather stones into a circle and then herded them inside it to be killed. Then he commanded his warriors to take the women and settle there, on Hawiye land, north of Mogadishu. According to my grandmother, the Hawiye in the Mudug region never forgot the name of Magan.
My father grew up in the northern desert, the son of Magan’s last and youngest wife. She was twelve or thirteen when she married the old warrior, who was close to seventy. My father was Magan’s youngest son, and the old man doted on him. When Magan died, my father was raised by his older brothers, some so old they already had grandchildren. They took him riding across the desert almost before he could walk.
Magan’s sons were rich and powerful traders and warriors. My father grew up well cared for—bright, self-assured, pampered. He became friends with an older man, Osman Yusuf Kenaidiid, the grandson of the Kenaidiid whom his father had served. Magan ha
d always mocked this man; he was quiet and covered his mouth with a cloth, because words are not something you should waste; they should come out of deep prior reflection.
Eloquence, the use of fine language, is admired in Somalia; the work of great poets is praised and memorized for miles around their villages, sometimes for generations. But few poets or people had ever written down any Somali words. The schools the colonizers had left behind were simply too few to educate a nation that now consisted of millions of people.
Osman Yusuf Kenaidiid was learned. He had invented a script to write down the sounds of the Somali language for the first time. People called it Osmaniya. It was slanted and curly and ingenious, and my father set about learning it.
Osman was a good tutor, and he had many connections with the Italian colonists who ruled southern Somalia. My father, his protégé, began attending a school in Mogadishu, the Italians’ colonial capital. He joined the Somali Youth League and had heated discussions about the future, when the colonial powers who ruled over the great Somali nation could be cast off and one country formed, to dazzle Africa. He learned Italian, and even went to study in Rome for a period: this was a rare opportunity for a Somali, but Magan’s descendents were wealthy. He married a woman, Maryan Farah, from the Marehan subclan of the Darod.
Then my father decided to attend college in the United States: Columbia University, in New York. He was inspired by America. He used to say, “If they can achieve what they have after only two hundred years, then we Somalis, with our endurance and our resilience—we can make America in Africa.” My father insisted that his wife, Maryan, join him, and she began studying there, too. Their infant daughter, Arro, born in 1965, was left behind in Somalia with her grandmother.
When he graduated from Columbia with a degree in anthropology, he returned to Somalia, like many other privileged young men, to help shape the future of their nation. Maryan had failed her course; he required that she stay in America until she completed it. It seemed only natural to him to proceed to the new nation’s capital, Mogadishu.
My father thought that if a bold new nation were to be established, then the people must become literate. He started a campaign to teach people to read and write. To set an example, he himself went to teach in one of the classes.
In Somalia, language is precious. It is all that binds the warring clans into what passes for a single nation. People flocked to Hirsi Magan’s literacy class in Mogadishu. He was dark-skinned, long-nosed, with a high forehead; my father had the charm of a rather intellectual crooner. Though he was not tall, he had a presence. People loved to be around him; all his life, they listened to him with respect.
My mother was a graceful, clever poet in her own right, and became one of his best students. She learned quickly. One day she even dared to contest the way her teacher pronounced a Somali word, flicking back her shawl with haughty disdain. It was daring of her, and surprising. She was beautiful, too, slim and tall, with a back as straight as a young tree.
My father was attracted to my mother’s clever tongue and her inflexible opinions. The attraction was mutual, and, of course, Khadija encouraged them.
* * *
My parents married in 1966. My mother knew that my father was still married to his first wife, Maryan. But Maryan was in New York, and my father did not inform her of his new bride. Maryan learned of it when she returned to Somalia, of course. I don’t know precisely when that was.
There was always a strong electricity between my father and mother. They teased each other, challenged each other. In a culture that disapproved of choosing your own partner, they chose each other: their bond was strong.
* * *
In October 1968 my brother, Mahad, was born. My parents finished building the house on the land my mother had bought in Mogadishu, and moved in, bringing with them my older stepbrother, Muhammad, who was six. My mother quickly became pregnant again, with me, and my grandmother came to Mogadishu from the desert to help her through the last few months of pregnancy.
My father was bold, learned, popular, born to rule. He ran for Parliament from the northern town of Qardho but lost the election. He spent vast amounts of his own money funding literacy campaigns and invested in a sugar factory. He was involved in a project to build a dam in the north so people could have water all year round, instead of watching the river drain away into cracks in the sand.
On October 21, 1969, the government was overthrown in a coup. Twenty-three days later I was born, on November 13, six weeks too early and weighing a little more than three pounds. Perhaps my parents were happy. My father must have dandled me on his knee from time to time; I don’t remember. Mahad says he can remember our father from those days, but they are only glancing recollections: Father was so often out of the house.
My sister, Haweya, was born in May 1971. A few months after that, my father’s first wife, Maryan Farah, gave birth to my stepsister, Ijaabo. There was some sort of dispute, and my father and Maryan divorced. And then, in April 1972, when I was two years old, my father was taken away. He was put in the worst place in Mogadishu: the old Italian prison they called The Hole.
CHAPTER 2
Under the Talal Tree
I used to try to imagine my father when I was little. My mother, when I asked her, only told me that we had never met. Afwayne, who was a real monster, not like the kind in grandmother’s stories, had put my father in jail. Afwayne, Big Mouth, was what everyone called the president, Siad Barré. There were huge portraits of him in every shop and every public space in Mogadishu; he had a huge mouth, with big, long teeth. Sometimes Afwayne’s special police burst into houses and took people away. They tortured them into admitting something terrible, then they killed them. Even I knew that. The adults in my house all went suddenly still when we heard the executioner’s rifle in Tribunka Square.
Siad Barré had become the vice commander of Somalia’s army at the time of Independence, in 1960, and later became an advocate of Marxism after training with Soviet officers. He was a Marehan, a small subclan of the Darod, and of very humble background. The exact circumstances of the coup are not very well known; it’s not clear whether Barré ordered the assassination of the president, or whether he simply took power in the aftermath of the president’s assassination. His regime was a classic Soviet client state, with a single party, single trade union, a women’s organization, and young pioneer groups. A great deal of money was spent on weaponry rather than on development, but still, there was a conscious investment in schools, whether to educate children to adore the regime or simply to educate them.
Every night till I was six, as my mother stood over the charcoal brazier, we children knelt in a semicircle and begged Allah to free our father. At the time, this didn’t make an enormous amount of sense. My mother never took the time to really tell us about God; he just was, and he minded the prayers of little children most of all. But although I tried my best to pray hard, it didn’t seem to be working. When I asked Ma why Allah hadn’t set my father free yet, she just urged us to pray more.
Our mother could visit our father in prison, but only my brother, Mahad, was allowed to go with her. Haweya and I had to stay at home with Grandma. We were too little to go out with my mother, and we were girls; Mahad, in every way, came first. Our brother was always angry when he came back from these visits, and my mother made him promise not to tell us anything about them: we might stupidly let some information out, and the secret police might hear.
Once, as he was walking out of the jail with my mother, Mahad attacked the huge cardboard portrait of Afwayne hung at the entrance. He must have been about six. “He was throwing stones at it and yelling,” Ma told my grandmother when she came home that night. “Thank Allah, the prison guard was from our clan.” Ma sounded as if she couldn’t help admiring Mahad’s warrior spirit. But the guard could have accused her of teaching her son to oppose the government, to be an “anti.” I knew that were it not for Allah and the protection of the clan, Haweya and I could have been
sitting alone under the tree that night with my grandmother, begging Allah to free our mother and brother from prison, too.
Allah was a mystery to me. One of my first memories, from when I was perhaps three years old, is of watching my grandmother engaged in an inexplicable performance. She was crouching facedown on a mat in her bedroom with her nose on the floor. I thought that she was playing some kind of game with me, so I pranced around and made faces at her, poking. She ignored me, and continued bending up and down, muttering things that sounded maddeningly strange. I couldn’t understand it. Finally, when she had finished, she turned around to me with a very scary look on her face. “Bastard child!” she cursed, hitting me and biting my arms. “Let Almighty Allah take you away! May you never even smell Paradise!”
My cousin Sanyar, the thirteen-year-old daughter of my mother’s twin, extricated me from my grandmother’s fierce grasp and took me outside. Sanyar helped my grandmother look after us when Ma was out. She was kind and explained that I had disturbed my grandmother in prayer, which was like talking to God, the most important moment of an adult’s life.
I was startled: I knew for sure there had been nobody but Grandma and me in that room. But Sanyar said I was too little to understand. When I grew up, I would feel Allah’s presence.
* * *
My grandmother’s vision of the universe was complex. A whole cosmology of magical entities existed alongside the one God, Allah. Djinns, who could be male or female, lived in an intermediate sphere adjoining ours and could be counted on to bring misfortune and disease. The souls of wise men and dead ancestors could also intercede with God on your behalf.
Another afternoon, when we were a little older, Haweya and I were fooling around under the talal tree when we heard Grandma talking. She had taken to her bed, suffering from some bout of pain, and we knew better than to disturb her. We crept over to the door of the room to listen.