Abeh planned to live with us as much as he could; that’s what he told my mother. But my mother didn’t want to live alone in this foreign place. She didn’t want to live off charity and the borrowed kindness of other women’s men. She felt that my father had already given enough of his life, his money, and his family to the SSDF. She told him the SSDF was no better than Afwayne: it was corrupt, and inept, and rotten with clan backbiting. If we had to live in Nairobi, she wanted him to be there, too, providing for us. Perhaps he could set up a business of his own for a change, and let some other fighter’s family live off our charity.
To my father, the idea of giving up the fight against Siad Barré was anathema. Somalia’s destiny as a free nation—that’s what meant most to him. Throughout his life, our mother told us, we, his family, never came first.
Initially, we lived in a hotel run by Somalis in Eastleigh, a packed, noisy neighborhood where most of the Somalis in Nairobi lived. Then we found a flat near Juja Road, on the edge of Eastleigh, where fewer Somalis lived. The main difference between Eastleigh and Juja Road was that the two neighborhoods smelled different. Eastleigh carried odors with which we were familiar: delicious foods spiced with coriander and ginger, tea laced with cardamom and cloves; women who walked past us in dirha, flowing Somali robes, left behind a whiff of frankincense and strong perfume. Once in a while, a repugnant stench from the open sewer would drift over to mingle with these sweet fragrances.
In contrast, the Juja Road neighborhood was inhabited mainly by native Kenyans, who ate ugali, powdered maize boiled in water to become a hard ball. Ugali was eaten with sukumawiki, a vegetable with large green leaves that were cut into tiny pieces and boiled for hours, similar to col-lard greens. Sukumawiki carried a pungent, terrible smell that pervaded the entire neighborhood from midmorning to late at night.
Our apartment was three flights up a newly slapped-together cinder-block building, across the road from an empty field. My grandmother bought a sheep in the market and trained it to hop up and down the stairs. She grazed it in the field and let it sleep in the bathroom. It was a pet, really; we never ate it. Looking after that sheep made her feel less estranged and gave her something familiar to do.
My father enrolled us in an English-language school. Soon after, my mother coldly informed him that young girls would be safer and better cared for in their own home than out in some gaalo school among the unbelievers in the filthy country he had brought them to. My father exploded. He yelled that he would curse her straight to Hell if she took us out of school without his permission. Then, a few days later, he left for Ethiopia.
It was my father who took us to school on our first day. Each of us children had a different school uniform; mine was a gray pinafore with a white shirt underneath and a gray sweater. Once again, school was totally foreign. Our lessons were in English, but everything that went on in the playground was in Swahili. Again, I spoke neither. The first few weeks were a nightmare of loneliness and bullying, but I never told Ma. I feared she’d take us out of school altogether, and I wanted more than anything to be with other children, out of the house.
The bullying faded, in any case, as I learned Swahili. Haweya suffered from bullying far more than I did. She seemed to close up and become more ferocious under the constant teasing. She came home bruised and angry. It was easier for me to adjust to school; I just tried to become as invisible as possible.
Juja Road Primary School was clearly modeled on British colonial schools. We had assembly every morning, saluting the flag and chanting the Kenyan national pledge instead of singing “God Save the Queen.” Prefects checked our nails and school uniforms. The schoolwork was difficult, and if we didn’t understand, we were made to kneel in the sun outside our classroom. There was no taking us aside to explain something again. The math teacher, Mrs. Nziani, used to hit us for every mistake, with a black plastic pipe she called her black mamba. I would get hit again and again until my hand swelled. Finally I realized that I could take some of the ropes that my grandmother wove from the long grass in the field outside our house and trade them with a girl named Angela, to use for skipping rope; in return, Angela let me copy her math homework.
Numbers were a mystery to me. I was so far behind. It was only in Nairobi, at age ten, that I figured out anything at all about the way time is calculated: minutes, hours, years. In Saudi Arabia the calendar had been Islamic, based on lunar months; Ethiopia maintained an ancient solar calendar. The year was written 1399 in Saudi Arabia, 1972 in Ethiopia, and 1980 in Kenya and everywhere else. In Ethiopia we even had a different clock: sunrise was called one o’clock and noon was called six. (Even within Kenya, people used two systems for telling time, the British and the Swahili.) The months, the days—everything was conceived differently. Only in Juja Road Primary School did I begin to figure out what people meant when they referred to precise dates and times. Grandma never learned to tell time at all. All her life, noon was when shadows were short, and your age was measured by rainy seasons. She got by perfectly well with her system.
Once I had learned to read English, I discovered the school library. If we were good, we were allowed to take books home. I remember the Best Loved Tales of the Brothers Grimm and a collection of Hans Christian Andersen. Most seductive of all were the ragged paperbacks the other girls passed each other. Haweya and I devoured these books in corners, shared them with each other, hid them behind schoolbooks, read them in a single night. We began with the Nancy Drew adventures, stories of pluck and independence. There was Enid Blighton, the Secret Seven, the Famous Five: tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between girls and boys, trust, and friendship. These were not like my grandmother’s stark tales of the clan, with their messages of danger and suspicion. These stories were fun, they seemed real, and they spoke to me as the old legends never had.
Sometimes after school Haweya and I would sneak over to Juja Road Square, where an Indian shop sold ice cream, exercise books, ballpoint pens, and pan, a spicy coconut mixture that stained our lips red. But mostly Ma made us stay at home. She and Grandma were far from reconciled to letting us go to school. They didn’t trust the Kenyans to teach us anything; they rejected Kenya in every detail. But Haweya and I were like sponges, eager to absorb everything around us.
One time, I informed my mother that people had walked on the moon. Ma said it was nonsense. “The Kiristaan are so fanciful they could take an airplane to a mountain and think it’s the moon,” she told me. The day I came home and told her humans had descended from apes, she told me, “That’s the end of your school fees. Kenyans may have come from apes, yes. But not Muslims.”
Still, my mother kept us in school. My father had threatened to curse her, and having escaped one husband, she wasn’t willing to risk eternal punishment once again.
When my father returned from Ethiopia my parents fought all the time. Ma tried involving the clan, hoping some friendly man would influence Abeh to look after his wife and children properly; but of course no man would interfere in the private decisions of Hirsi Magan. Ma stopped eating and fell ill, moaning and swearing she would die. Abeh took her to the hospital, where they diagnosed anemia and prescribed vitamins.
After several months, Abeh found us a larger, nicer place to live, a house on Racecourse Road, in a neighborhood called Kariokor. But Ma had never wanted to be in Kenya in the first place; she wanted us all to go back to Mecca.
I don’t know what their final fight was about, but I overheard the last of it. He was on his way to the airport again. Ma told Abeh, “If you leave now, don’t come back.”
He didn’t—not for a very long time.
We moved into the new house in Kariokor without Abeh. At first my father used to call us occasionally, using the phone at Jinni Boqor’s apartment nearby. Jinni Boqor was an Osman Mahamud businessman who was supposed to keep an eye on us. He would send someone over to tell us our father had called and would phone again in an hour, and we would rush over there and stiffly shout at each other in Ji
nni Boqor’s living room. Abeh wrote us letters in the curly Osmaniya script he loved, but we could no longer read Osmaniya. I drew up the courage to write, in English, and tell him so. After that my father’s letters became fewer and fewer. One day, they stopped arriving altogether.
It was a miserable time. Every month my mother used to walk to Dayib Haji’s office to pick up three thousand shillings. In the beginning that was a lot of money; later, inflation reduced it to very little. Every month a truck would arrive from the storehouse of another Somali businessman, Farah Gouré, with sacks of flour and rice and oil. The clan was providing for her, but she was all alone.
Ma never told us that our father wasn’t coming back, but if I woke up in the middle of the night I often heard her crying. One night I walked in and put my hand on her cheek. Ma began to scream at me for sneaking up on her, and she hit me, yelling that I should go back to bed. After that I would just crouch at the door of her room, listening, wishing that in some way I could take away her pain.
As the years went by we all gave up pretending to each other that our father would return.
* * *
After barely a year in Nairobi, Mahad managed to win a place at one of the best secondary schools in Kenya. Starehe Boys’ Center was a remarkable establishment that gave a number of full scholarships every year to street children and to children whose parents could not hope to pay the fees. Only two hundred children were accepted every year. Mahad made it in because after only a year of speaking English, his grades were in the top ten of the Kenyan national exams. When he was accepted, my mother for once beamed with unadulterated joy. To show off, all Mahad had to do was walk around our neighborhood in his uniform, and all we had to do was walk proudly beside him. All the kids on our street wanted to go to Starehe, but nobody else had ever managed.
Mr. Griffin, Mahad’s headmaster, was the incarnation of benevolent authority, and his school was heaven, with sports facilities and a library. Mahad had a lot of trouble getting out of bed, however, so, to instill some discipline into him, Mr. Griffin agreed to accept him as a boarder. For a while there was a truce between us kids. Mahad came home only on weekends, which was fine by me, and he didn’t bully us as much.
When I turned fourteen my mother enrolled me in Muslim Girls’ Secondary School on Park Road. It was not a wealthy neighborhood, and this school stood out, clean and white, with a big metal gate and beautifully kept grass that we girls weren’t allowed to walk on. The first day, a Somali girl came up to me and introduced herself; she said her name was Amina. Out of mischief and a desire to find a protector in this new place, I said that was my name, too. For my next four years in school, everyone called me Amina: Amina Hirsi Magan.
I made another friend, Halwa, a Yemeni girl who lived near us. Halwa’s mother and her aunt each had nine children and lived next door to each other. I took to spending afternoons over there. It was like a tiny village, with lots of women relatives coming and going. Many of these relatives were staying for weeks or months; often, a mother from Halwa’s family village in the remote Hadramut in Yemen would arrive with daughters to marry, or simply for a visit. Again I saw the odd, bossy and indignant interaction between the rural miyé people coming to the magalo—rural visitors from the old world, with their old ways, suddenly crammed into the modern environment of town folk like Halwa’s mother and aunt.
Halwa wasn’t allowed out of her mother’s sight except to go to school, but once she was home she was free to do as she liked. She did no housework: there were women enough around the place. She had no bedtime. We swapped homework—I was becoming good at English, Halwa did my math—and watched TV a lot. Halwa’s mother invited me to go along on picnics to the Arboretum, a botanical park. Whenever I could, I went over to her house.
Walking back home from Halwa’s house in the late afternoons I would sometimes be overtaken by a swarm of street children heading to the center of town before it grew dark. They were utterly ragged and filthy, the older children all tugging or carrying a younger, even more gummy-eyed child. They traveled in flocks that could number several dozen; perhaps this was safer for them.
These kids lived off garbage heaps like the one at the end of our street. They were engulfed in the disgusting odor of rotting food and dead rats. I sometimes stopped and watched them picking out food and things to sell. They covered themselves in plastic bags when it rained and sniffed shoe polish out of paper bags until a film of black polish coated their faces. Thinking about these children’s lives made me feel both pained and incredibly lucky. I had a roof over my head and a mother, and when I got home there would be something to eat. Compared to these kids, I had nothing to complain about.
Still, the atmosphere at our house was heavy with reproach. My grandmother squatted balefully on her bed, miserable in our new environment. Again and again she told my mother the source of their troubles: a curse that had taken form when Ma left her first husband, long ago, in Aden. This deepened my mother’s moodiness. She developed great whirlwinds of sudden, random anger. She smashed furniture and plates. She broke two charcoal braziers because they wouldn’t light. Where she had been merely distant, and occasionally even kind, she began to beat us for the slightest misdemeanor, grabbing our hair, hitting us until she couldn’t lift her hand any more. She was tyrannical, unreasonable; she screamed a lifetime of frustration in our faces.
I knew it was not hatred for us but because she was so unhappy, and I pitied her. Our mother had been abandoned in a foreign country that she scorned, with three children to guide and no man to act as her anchor. Her daily life in no way resembled the life to which she aspired and that she felt she deserved. My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions—she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband and chosen my father—but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope.
Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, although she can’t have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent; and she was always depressed.
* * *
Even though my new school was called Muslim Girls’, many of the girls weren’t Muslim. Almost half the class were Kenyans, who were mostly Christians, although the Kikuyu also had another, pagan god. Kenyans were divided into tribes, which were very different from the clans in Somalia; the tribes looked different, spoke different languages, and had different beliefs, whereas all the Somali clans spoke the same language and believed in Islam.
Still, there were similarities. The Kikuyu saw themselves as warriors; having fought for independence, they felt their tribe had a right to rule. The Kamba earned a lot of money—they were traders—but the other girls said they were stingy; they had a saying, “If you marry a Kamba, you’ll starve to death.” The Luo considered themselves smarter than the others, and it was true that they worked hard and always did well at school.
Almost all the girls at my primary school had been Kenyans, so I was already more or less familiar with these differences. What was new to me at Muslim Girls’ Secondary was that more than half of my classmates were from the Arabian peninsula and South Asia. With these children, too, it seemed every ethnic group was clearly distinct and splintered along lines of class and tribe. The Indians had an inaccessibly complicated system of social classes, all of them unbelievers to Muslim eyes. The Pakistanis were Muslims, but they, too, had castes. The Untouchable girls, both Indian and Pakistani, were darker-skinned. The others wouldn’t play with them because they were Untouchable. We thought that was funny—because of course they were touchable: we touched them, see?—but also horrifying, to think of yourself as untouchable, despicable to the human race.
The Somali
s divided into clans and subclans, but there was also a new distinction between recent Somali exiles, who were the families of warriors, and older immigrants who had grown up in Kenya and whose grasp of the Somali language was poor. Some of the Arab girls had clans, as we did. If you were a Yemeni called Sharif then you were superior to a Yemeni called Zubaydi. Any kind of Arab girl considered herself superior to everyone else: she was born closer to the Prophet Muhammad.
On the school playground, the Somalis and Yemenis were close, and the Indians and Pakistanis were close. The Yemenis, Somalis, Indians, and Pakistanis played with each other and interacted, but in the hierarchy of Muslim Girls’ Secondary School, the Kenyans were the lowest.
These sharp fragmentations of the student body extended even to our lunch boxes. At lunch break we sat in the school garden, which was like a park with benches shaded by trees where we could eat. The Pakistani and Indian girls’ corner smelled of curry and bhajias. The Yemeni and Somali girls’ food had fragrances of coriander and ginger. The Kenyan girls carried ugali and ate it with sukumawiki, the food with the strongest smell of all.
If we got pocket money, the lunch boxes remained closed because we bought fish and chips served on a newspaper at the school canteen. Sometimes we bought cassava with chili and lemon, and green mangoes sold at the gate of the school. It was a strange scene, with all the girls extending money through the bars of the locked gate and the large, Kenyan mama on the other side enduring our yelling and serving each girl with a smile.
My mother was appalled by our contact with all these children. Perhaps worst of all, for her, was the specter of the Somali kids who had lost their language, who spoke only what to her was the Kenyans’ mongrel Swahili. My mother had her clan’s love of words. She insisted that we speak perfect Somali at home, mocking us mercilessly for the slightest slip. She began teaching us to memorize poetry, old chants of war and death, raids, herding, green pastures, herds of many camels.
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