“Dear forefathers, let me go,” Grandma said in a choking voice.
There was no reply. Then came a thump.
“Abokor, let me go.” Thump.
“Hassan, let me go.” Thump.
“Dear forefathers, let me go.”
Haweya and I were consumed with curiosity. We wanted to see these people. We opened the door, slowly. Grandma was lying on her back dressed in beautiful glittering clothes, as if it were the Ied festival. The room was full of the scent of smoldering frankincense, and she was hitting her chest with her hands, following each blow with the choked pleading. “Dear forefathers, let me go,” she gasped, as if she were being strangled.
Puzzled, we looked about. There was no one in the room, nothing that remotely resembled a forefather—not that we had ever seen one. I pushed Haweya back and shut the door as silently as I could, but we were mystified. A few days later, we began to act out the scene. We lay next to one another in bed and begged our imagined forefathers to let us go, in choking voices. Grandma burst into the room, followed by Ma.
“May you burn in Hell!” Grandma screeched at us. “May the devil snatch you!” She chased us around the room and threatened to pack her bags and leave. Ma had to punish us. She needed Grandma. My mother was always out of the house—and this, too, was because of Afwayne.
Siad Barré introduced a police state in Somalia and also tried to set up a pretend economy. He allied with the Soviet Union, so Somalia had to become a communist country. In practice, for ordinary families, this meant they had to wait in a series of long lines, for hours, under the merciless rays of the Mogadishu sun to receive limited amounts of basic food: flour, sugar, oil, sorghum, rice, and beans. There was no meat, no eggs or fruit, no vegetables, and no olive oil or butter. Any extras had to be smuggled on the black market.
Ma never told us when she was leaving on a trip. She was there, and suddenly she was gone, sometimes for weeks at a time. I discovered that there was a kind of pattern to her movements. My distant but somehow dependable mother would become miserable. “What should I do now, O Allah?” she would wail. “Alone with three children and an old woman. Do I deserve to be punished like this?” My Ma would cry, and my Grandma would speak to her comfortingly; I would climb onto her lap and pat her, which only made her cry more. Then she would disappear for a while to some far-off village, often traveling with one of her father’s cousins, a trader who had long ago sold his camels, bought a truck, and now transported food to the city.
Sometimes I would see her coming home on the back of a truck, just after sunset. Men dragged in sacks of food: rice, flour, sugar, and aluminum jars filled with tiny pieces of camel meat soaked in lard with dates and garlic. These unloadings were quick and secretive and were practically the only times we came into contact with any men at all. We were told to say nothing about the food, which was stored under the beds—otherwise our mother, and her cousin, too, could go to jail.
One time soldiers from the feared Guulwade brigade came to the house. Ma was out. They were Afwayne’s special guards—worse even than the police. A young man in a green uniform, with a gun, walked into our compound. Grandma was sitting under the talal tree. Startled and angry, she stood up. She was only a little taller than I was, but imperious. “You of lower birth!” she began declaiming. “Your gun won’t give you back your missing honor!” Grandma hated the government. “You’re only good for bullying old women, and children whose father your craven master has imprisoned!”
I ran inside the house, frightened. I could see there were at least three other uniformed men standing near our fence. The soldier made a move toward the house, and Grandma tried to block him off. She was much shorter than he was, but she had a fierce look about her; she stuck her neck out at him and jabbed with the long, sharp needle she used for weaving mats and baskets held tightly in her fist.
The soldier commanded her to get out of his way. “Coward,” Grandma jeered at him. Then he pushed her. She fell back and then ran at him with her needle. “Coward! Coward!” she hissed. For a moment he hesitated. He looked at his colleagues in the distance. I thought he might go. Then he pushed Grandma with force. She fell on the ground, on her back. He and the others came in and turned everything upside down.
Then they left. Grandma shouted after them, “Sons of prostitutes! Allah will burn you in Hell!” She looked exhausted, and the look on her face scared me enough to save my questions for some other time.
Much later that evening, Ma returned from her visit to my father in jail. She went there often. She cooked special food for him, choosing the most delicate parts of the animal, cutting the meat into tiny pieces the size of a thumbnail, marinating them and stewing them for days.
My baby sister, Quman, was born when I was three, but the only thing I remember about her is her death. There’s a picture in my mind of a tall man standing in the doorway, holding a bundled infant in his arms. Everyone was whispering Innaa Lillaahi wa innaa Illaahi raaji’uun—“ ‘From Allah we come and to Allah we return.’ ” I remember pulling Ma’s shawl and telling her that this man was trying to take away my sister; I remember my mother just chanting the same words over and over again, along with everyone else. Then, in my memory, the man leaves with Quman, who is screaming, and Ma follows him, her face blank with pain.
Years later, when I became old enough to understand what death was, I asked my mother why baby Quman had been screaming if she was dead. My mother said I had been the one doing the screaming. It had gone on for hours, as if I couldn’t stop.
There were so many funerals in my childhood. Aunt Khadija’s husband, our Uncle Ied, died when I was four. Never again would he drive up in his black car and bounce us on his lap, joking. Then Aunt Hawo Magan, my father’s sister, became ill. She was very affectionate, and if we chanted our lineage correctly she gave us candy and boiled eggs. Haweya and I were allowed to go with my mother to the hospital. When she died, I wailed inconsolably. “She’s gone. There’s nothing to be done about it,” my mother told me. “Stop crying. It’s the way things are. Being born means we have to die some day. There is a Paradise, and good people like Aunt Hawo find peace there.”
My mother’s oldest sister, who was also named Hawo, came to stay with us when she fell ill. She had something inside her breast that meant she had to lie down on a mat on the floor all day. I will never forget the endless, muffled groans of pain coming through Aunt Hawo’s gritted teeth as she lay there day in and day out. Grandma, Ma, and Ma’s twin sister, Aunt Halimo, took turns smearing malmal herbs on her chest. When this Aunt Hawo died, there was a great gathering of women at our house. They built several fires, and lots of women cooked and talked. Some of the women swayed and waved their arms over their heads, and screamed, in cadence:
Allah ba’eyey,
O God, I am eliminated
Allah hoogayeey
O God, I am devastated
Allah Jabayoo dha’ayeey
O God, I am broken and fallen
Nafta, nafta, nafta
The soul, the soul, the soul.
When they reached the third line the women fell to their knees in theatrical hysterics. Then they got up and clutched their throats and cried out in shrill tones “Nafta, nafta, nafta”—“ ‘The soul, the soul, the soul!’”
My mother was appalled, I could see that. “Such disrespect for the dead!” she hissed. “Isaq women! They have no sense of honor or manners! How can they abandon themselves so shamelessly!” Ma was mourning quietly, in a corner, as is proper among her own Dhulbahante, a subclan of the Darod. She was so engrossed in her grief for Hawo, and her mounting anger at the Isaq women, that she hardly noticed that Haweya and I were watching the whole scene in awe.
About a fortnight later my mother and grandmother caught us beating our chests and shouting, “O, Allah, I am eliminated! O, Allah, I am devastated!” all over the yard, and throwing ourselves on the sand. We cried, “The soul, the soul!” and burst into wild giggles.
My grandmot
her was outraged beyond all reason. She thought we were tempting fate, possibly even awakening the unseen djinns who were always present, waiting for just such a call to unleash their devastation. To make matters even worse, she felt insulted by my mother’s Darod snobbery about the Isaq. Those women were my grandmother’s clan mates.
* * *
When Ma was home with us, we had schedules. Breakfast and lunch, both nonnegotiable; a nap in the afternoon; then, while my mother cooked the evening meal, prayers to Allah to persuade our bad government to release our father and to show mercy to the dead. Then we were forced to eat and forced to have a bath, and finally we were forced to go to bed. When Grandma and Sanyar were in charge, we didn’t eat if we didn’t want to. We were largely ignored and behaved abominably.
I was fascinated by the radio, a square box with a handle. Voices came out of a circle of black holes. I imagined that there were little people in the radio and I wanted to prod them out with my fingers. So I pushed a finger into every little hole. When no people came out, I rubbed the radio against my ear and tried to persuade them to come. I asked Allah to help me. Nothing happened, so I filled the holes with sand. Then I stood up and let the radio fall onto the ground, hoping that it would burst open. That radio meant a lot to my grandmother. The first time she had seen one, she, too, had thought it was magic. In Somalia, the man who read the news on the Somali service of the BBC every evening was called He Who Scares the Old People. It was the one piece of modern life my grandmother knew how to control. So of course when I broke it she beat me.
One morning, when I was four or five years old, a truck came to our house, and instead of unloading food from it, my mother herded us children onto it. One of Ma’s cousins lifted us high into the air and dropped us into the flatbed with the sheep and goats. No one had told us we were going anywhere; no one thought to explain anything to us children. But after suitcases and pots and pans were loaded on with us, the truck started moving. I think possibly our Grandma had persuaded my mother that we would behave better if we were exposed to the beneficent atmosphere of the countryside. Or perhaps there was some trouble about my mother’s dealings on the black market.
The drive was noisy and bumpy. The adults complained and the animals bleated in horror. But it was an extremely exciting experience for us kids, and we loved every bit of it. After some hours, we fell asleep.
I woke up in a strange place, inside a house with walls made of grass mixed with mud and manure and smoothed onto a wooden frame. Mats covered the beaten-earth floor, and it was dark inside, without electricity. I went to look for Ma and found some strange women instead. The ground in front of the house was red dust and there was nothing around us except empty land with a few trees and a sprinkling of huts that looked like the one I had just woken up in.
We were in Matabaan, Ma told me when I found her, a village about eighty kilometers from Mogadishu, not far from the Shabelle River. Herders from the Hawiye clan lived there, and there was enough water to support at least some farmland on the sandy soil. My mother’s cousin, the trader, must have had contacts in this village, and I suppose Ma thought that here we would be safe and well-fed. At any rate, she told us that she was tired of Mogadishu, of smuggling food, and keeping secrets. Here, she said, we needn’t whisper any more, or hide from the government. She said, “Look how big this land is. We have everything we need, and you can run around as much as you like. Allah is going to take care of us.”
The longer we stayed in Matabaan, the more pleasant it seemed. Haweya and I went for long walks with Grandma, herding goats and sheep. But I was frightened of everything that moved—every insect, every animal. My grandmother would sometimes try to reason with me. “A wild horse that bolts at every moving thing stumbles and breaks its leg,” she told me. “As you run from your small insect you may fall onto this bush and die, because it is poisonous. You may fall onto this mound and die because it hides a snake. You must learn what to fear and what not to fear.”
When you’re on your own in the desert, you are completely on your own. Fear is sensible. In Matabaan my grandmother tried to teach us the rules of survival. With certain animals, she told us, it is best to run and hide—hyenas, for example, and snakes, and also some monkeys who don’t like to stray far from their families. With other animals, you must quickly climb a tree, choosing branches cleverly so they cannot follow you. If you encounter a lion, you must squat and avoid eye contact. Most times, she told us, a lion won’t come after a human being: only in extreme drought do they eat human meat. But lions will take your sheep or a goat, and if they do, you will be punished or left without food. Remember: most animals will not attack you unless they sense that you are afraid of them or that you wish to attack them first.
But my grandmother’s world wasn’t our world. Her lectures only frightened me even more. Lions? Hyenas? I had never seen such creatures. We were city children, which, to her nomad values, made us more inept than lowly farmers or the ignoble blacksmith clans.
Because I was entirely useless at manual crafts and herding, my only function in Matabaan was to fetch water from the large lake that lay about a mile from our hut. I went there every day with the neighbors’ children. We collected henna leaves along the way; we chewed them and used them to stain our hands with clumsy orange designs. In my pail, the lake water was brown with dirt, but once I brought it home, Ma would put a special tablet in it that fizzed. Afterward, you could see the bottom of the pail right through the water.
People washed their clothes in the lake and boys swam in it. Ma was always afraid that the Hawiye boys would drown Mahad, who couldn’t swim. Free to roam because he was a boy, our brother was now constantly away from the house. Ma never let Haweya and me stray in this way. Anyway, Mahad would not have taken us with him; he didn’t want his friends to know that he played with his sisters.
Mahad was increasingly conscious of his honor as a male. Grandma encouraged him: she used to tell him he was the man of the house. Mahad never asked permission to leave the house; sometimes he’d return long after nightfall, and Ma would get so angry she would close the fence. He’d sit by that fence, howling, and she would shout coldly, “Think of your honor. Men don’t cry.”
My brother was rapidly becoming the bane of my existence. Once, it was time for the Ied festival that celebrates the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. Animals had been killed for a huge feast, and we had new clothes. I had a shiny new dress with a big blue bow, stiff with lace where it swirled about my knees, and frilly socks and new black patent leather shoes. I pranced about proudly, avoiding the dust. I was second to be bathed and dressed; now it was Haweya’s turn to be scrubbed, and Mahad called me from outside.
“Ayaan, come and see,” he yelled.
I ran to him. “What?”
Mahad was at the entrance of the toilet. “Look,” he said, stretching out his hand to help me up onto the steps.
In Matabaan the toilet walls were just twigs strung together. In the middle of the beaten-earth floor there was a wide hole with two stone steps on either side. You were supposed to put your legs on these steps and pee or empty your bowels before an audience of large and hostile flies. Haweya and I were too frightened of the hole to manage this performance; besides, our legs weren’t long enough to stretch. So, under supervision from Ma or Grandma, we did our business in the bushes nearby.
Now, though, I climbed up and looked down the deep, dark hole of the latrine. The smell was vile, and large flies zoomed about. Suddenly Mahad ran behind me and pushed me in. I screamed as I never had before. The latrine was truly disgusting and also really deep, almost level with my shoulders. When Ma fished me out, I was in an unspeakable condition, and so were my new clothes. She began cursing Mahad loudly.
“May the Almighty Allah take you away from me! May you rot in a hole! May you die in the fire! What can I ever expect of you? You communist! You Jew! You’re a snake, not my son!” Ma had completely lost her temper. In a frenzy of rage, she grabbed Mahad and t
hrew him down into the loathsome latrine.
Now Grandma had to fish out Mahad, and a good part of the festive morning was spent restoring the two of us to cleanliness. I had to part with my dress and shoes. My hands were chafed and my foot hurt. It was decreed that I should not leave Ma’s side in case Mahad got hold of me. So later that morning, as Ma and Grandma cleaned the slaughtered meat together, I was sitting near them on the red earth.
“Mahad has no sense of honor whatsoever,” Ma said, in tones of profound disgust.
“He’s only a child,” said Grandma. “How can he learn about honor, when the only men he sees are the stupid Hawiye farmers?”
“He’ll kill Ayaan one of these days,” Ma said.
“It is her fault, Ayaan is doqon, as dumb as a date palm.”
“I am not dumb,” I retorted.
“You show respect for your grandma,” snapped my mother.
“Ma, he invited me to come and look, that’s all,” I wailed.
Grandma grinned. “So you went and looked?”
“Yes, Ayeeyo,” I replied, with the polite and respectful term and tone required when addressing Grandma.
Grandma cackled maliciously. “You see? She’s dumb, and only Allah can help her. Any child who’s lived five seasons should know better, Asha. You can curse the boy as much as you like, but Ayaan is stupid, and she’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”
Mahad had done wrong, but I had been unforgivably trusting, which meant I was fatally dense. I had failed to be suspicious. I deserved my grandma’s scorn. I was not allowed to talk back to Grandma, and Ma said nothing to defend me. I could only sob, and seethe.
* * *
We returned to Mogadishu, as inexplicably and suddenly as we had left. Adults never explained anything. They saw children as akin to small animals, creatures who had to be tugged and beaten into adulthood before they were worthy of information and discussion. In a way, my mother’s silence was understandable. The less we knew, the less we could betray to the Guulwade.