There is little romance in Somali poetry. Even the lesser, women’s poems do not mention love. Love is considered synonymous with desire, and sexual desire is seen as low—literally unspeakable. To Haweya and me, these poems lacked the seductive power of the stories our classmates lent us.
At Muslim Girls’, a dainty Luo woman called Mrs. Kataka taught us literature. We read 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps. Later, we read English translations of Russian novels, with their strange patronymics and snowy vistas. We imagined the British moors in Wuthering Heights and the fight for racial equality in South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country. An entire world of Western ideas began to take shape.
Haweya and I read all the time. Mahad used to read, too; if we did him favors, he would pass us the Robert Ludlum thrillers he picked up from his friends. Later on there were sexy books: Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Cart-land, Danielle Steele. All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas—races were equal, women were equal to men—and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me. Even our plain old biology and science textbooks seemed to follow a powerful narrative: you went out with knowledge and sought to advance humanity.
* * *
After school, Ma began insisting that I do all the housework. At first we were all supposed to share the chores, but Mahad only sneered when Ma told him to clean his room, and Haweya point-blank refused. It was my job anyway: I was the eldest daughter. That was my destiny.
The floors had to be washed by hand, the clothes—even Mahad’s filthy socks—scrubbed perfectly and hung out to dry. Every night I had to knead the chapattis for the next morning’s breakfast. I had to accompany Ma on constant errands to act as her translator: whenever she went to the doctor for her headaches, her psoriasis, a mysterious pain in her womb, or when she had to pay the electric bills or pick up the mail. Every time, we had to walk, because Ma said the rattling Kenyan buses stank, and also because she simply didn’t know how to navigate them.
Haweya pitied me. She always said, “Just refuse.” But I couldn’t—I wasn’t like my sister. When we were disobedient, we were beaten. My mother would catch me, pull my hair, fix my hands behind my back with rope, and put me down on the floor, on my belly. She tied my hands to my ankles, and then with a stick or a wire she would beat me until I begged for mercy and swore I would never do it again. I couldn’t stand the pain of Ma’s beatings, and for as long as I could remember, a sense of responsibility had been drilled into me. I should be helping my mother.
Other children were punished, too. All the children I knew were sometimes beaten by their parents. But not everyone got tied up, and it didn’t happen to them every week, as it sometimes did with me. I was punished far more often than Mahad. But Haweya was punished most of all.
Yet Haweya seemed immune to pain. She took the worst beatings my mother could hand out but refused to relent. Haweya simply would not do the housework—the cleaning, the washing of all the clothes and sheets by hand, wringing them out and hanging them straight in the sun. Haweya would just yell and yell, a ball of fury twice as strong as my mother. As time went by, it became too much trouble to beat her.
We had report cards every term. Haweya’s and Mahad’s reports glowed, but when Ma looked at mine, she always said, “I have three children and one of them is retarded.” It wasn’t fair. It was true that I was slower than Mahad and Haweya, but I had so much housework to do that I often didn’t have time for homework. I knew, though, that if I complained, Ma might take me out of school altogether.
* * *
Mahad was the man of the house now. Strangely, I think that Mahad was actually relieved when my father left. Abeh always disapproved of his laziness and the way he bullied and bossed us. If we didn’t do what Mahad wanted, he hurt us so much that even brave Haweya did his bidding. Ma never interfered with this; if anything, she encouraged Mahad’s authority.
Mahad was about fifteen, and as a boy he didn’t have to mind my mother as much as we did. He used to walk home from Starehe Boys’ School on Friday afternoons, and sometimes he didn’t turn up until long after nightfall. He had discovered the lure of the streets. If Ma yelled at him, he simply ignored her. If she hit him, he walked out of the house. After my mother bought padlocks, Mahad climbed the high fence around the gate to escape. He slicked his hair with gel until he looked like Lionel Ritchie. He listened to Michael Jackson on a battered tape deck he had somehow laid his hands on; my mother called it “devil music” and threw the tape out of the window. Mahad hung out on corners with Kenyan boys, and when he came home he stank of cigarettes and cologne.
On such evenings, Ma would drag me around the neighborhood to look for my brother. Ma complained about the choking odors of sukumawiki and beer, but we tramped from one family’s house to the next. The Kenyan parents of Mahad’s friends had big glass mugs of beer on their tables, and they always offered a glass to Ma. She would huff, “I am a Muslim!” indignantly, and lecture them. The jovial Kenyan fathers used to laugh at her and say things like “Leave your boy to walk around, he will work things out.” Ma would stomp out, and I would cringe at her rudeness.
These evenings were long and mostly fruitless: looking for Mahad was like combing the whole desert for one lost camel. But if I refused to go out looking with her, if I said “My homework is more important,” I would be punished.
* * *
When I was fourteen I got my period, without even knowing menstruation existed. I had no older sister, and my mother never discussed anything to do with sex. In one class, when I was twelve, all the girls got the assignment to go home and ask our parents what the moon meant. Probably the moon meant menstruation to some Kenyan tribe, and when they went home with this question, presumably they received some kind of explanation. But when I told Ma of our school assignment and asked her what the moon meant, she pointed at the sky and said, “There it is. And if the slaves don’t know that, then why am I sending you to their school?”
So I was mystified. The next day the teacher, who was male, wrote up a bunch of diagrams and some words on the blackboard, and there was a lot of giggling. Perhaps menstruation was one of the words, but I couldn’t tell you. I had not the first idea of what the whole thing was about.
Two years after that episode, I woke up on a Thursday morning with blood running down my legs. There was no cut on my thighs, and I couldn’t figure out why I should bleed. It continued all day, enough to fill my underpants, and I didn’t have that many underpants; so I washed them out and hid them behind the boiler to dry. I kept bleeding all the next day, too, and by now there were four or five underpants balled up behind the boiler and the pants I was wearing were wet. I was worried—I thought there was a cut inside my belly, that I might die—but I didn’t tell my mother. I knew that what was happening to me was shameful, though I didn’t know why.
Then Haweya, who used to sneak around and spy on me, found the stash of stained underwear. She came into the living room waving them. My mother howled and screamed at me, “Filthy prostitute! May you be barren! May you get cancer!” She started to hit me with the ball of her fist. I ran for refuge to the bedroom that Haweya and I shared.
Then Mahad came in. I will always be grateful to Mahad for this; he told me, “Listen, Ayaan, this is normal. It will happen to you every month. It is because you are a woman and you can get pregnant.” He gave me ten shillings and said, “This is all the money I have, but if you go to the grocery store it will buy you three packages of Stayfree. It is a little padded paper towel that you put inside your underpants to catch the blood.”
I asked him, “When did this happen to you, and where is your Stayfree?” But Mahad told me, “I don’t have this happen to me because I am a man.” It was the first time in years that Mahad had acted toward me as a friend and confidant rather than a bully.
A few days later my mother simmered down; perhaps my grandmother calmed her. She sat me down and told me that this was my burden as a woman, and that fr
om now on I would have to sew rags into cloth towels and wash them out. I didn’t care; I had my Stayfree.
There was no further discussion. In our household, the whole subject of what was between your legs was taboo. I knew what I needed to know about sex, and my mother knew that I knew it. I was a Somali woman, and therefore my sexuality belonged to the owner of my family: my father or my uncles. It was obvious that I absolutely had to be a virgin at marriage, because to do otherwise would damage the honor of my father and his whole clan—uncles, brothers, male cousins—forever and irretrievably. The place between my legs was sewn up to prevent it. It would be broken only by my husband. I don’t remember my mother ever telling me these things, but I knew them.
In the months after I first got my period, I educated myself. I read through the chapter on human reproduction in our biology book that Mrs. Karim had carefully skipped. I attended the optional class on “grooming” that the district nurse gave every year. She told us we could now get pregnant and taught us about contraception and the basic biology of wombs and embryos. She did not explain how the sperm got to the egg; there was just this sperm. It didn’t help me much.
I did know that sex was bad. Sometimes in the evenings, when I tramped with Ma through the neighborhood searching for Mahad, listening to her never-ending complaints about the foul odor of sukumawiki, we came across people making out in alleyways. The nights were dark in the side streets; we could barely see these couples before we were practically on top of them. When this happened Ma would grab me by the hair and yank me down the alley and beat me, as if I had been the one engaged in sex, and scream, “Tell me you didn’t look at anything!”
Haweya and I were entering the danger zone, the time of our lives when we should not be permitted out of the house without supervision. About a month after my first period, Ma decided we girls should stop attending Quran school. We had been attending a Somali-style Quran school, with boys and girls mixed, fifty kids of every age crammed into a room with one ma’alim, teacher. The ma’alim really didn’t notice who was learning and who was just moving their lips, and he never seemed to notice, either, that a lot of meaningful eye contact was going on there every Saturday. I could see it out of the corner of my eye.
In addition, Haweya and I got up to an unforgivable amount of mischief on the way to Quran school. One afternoon we developed a game with two other Somali girls. We’d talk to some random small child on the street, take his hand, and walk a few blocks, then deposit the child in front of a house, ring the doorbell like crazy, and run away. When the people opened the door they’d look out, mystified, at adult height, find no one, and then catch sight of an unknown small child who was far too little to reach the doorbell. They’d be so bewildered, and there’d be such a ruckus of women looking for their children and the baby screaming. It doesn’t seem funny to me now, but at the time this game made us all weak with laughter.
One day those fat, screaming mothers followed us to Quran school and told the ma’alim “It was that one, and THAT one.” That night we were punished beyond endurance. And from then on, Ma hired an itinerant preacher to come to our house every Saturday to teach us the Quran.
This itinerant ma’alim was young and ragged, straight from the most rural depths of Somalia. He taught us the Quran the old way. You opened chapter one of the Quran, got your long wooden board, wrote it down in Arabic, learned it by heart in Arabic, recited it by heart, washed the board with reverence because it was now holy, and did it again. You did this for two hours, and every mistake earned you a rap on your hands or legs with a thin, sharp stick. There was no discussion about meaning. Often we had no idea what the words meant: we were learning a text in a language that I only barely remembered, and most other children didn’t even begin to understand.
It was boring and tiresome. I already had so much to do on Saturday. I had homework. I had to deal with my hair: hours of shampoo and coconut oil and braiding by my mother into ten or eleven tight rows so it would lie flat another week. Then I would have to wash my school uniforms, and because my mother begged me, I would wash Haweya’s and Mahad’s as well. I also had to clean my part of the house. And then, because this new ma’alim did everything the old Somali way, I had to make ink before every lesson, scraping a piece of charcoal into powder with a broken piece of rough stone roofing tile, carefully dribbling milk and water onto the powder in a jam jar.
One Saturday Ma beat me because I didn’t finish the washing or cleaning and hadn’t washed my hair; I had done only my homework. Also, I was being argumentative and talked back to her. When the time came to make the ink I was already furious with the injustice of it all. I told Haweya, “You know what? I’m not going to do this anymore. Bring a book and we’ll lock ourselves in the bathroom. You just stay quiet, so you won’t get beaten.”
When the ma’alim arrived, there were no boards, no mats, no ink, and no children.
My mother came to the bathroom door and cursed us. The ma’alim tried to make us come out, too, but we said no. We were insolent. “People stopped writing on wooden boards five hundred years ago,” we told him. “You’re primitive. You don’t teach us religion properly. You are not our relative and you should not be in our house without our father’s permission, and according to the Quran you should leave.”
Finally, my mother told the ma’alim she had to go out, so he couldn’t stay in the house. She paid him for the month and told him not to come back. He said, “Your children need discipline, and I can help you. But if you wish, we will leave it in the hands of Allah,” and he left. My mother left, and then my grandmother went out to visit some of her Isaq relatives. And she left the gate unlocked.
Haweya and I slowly emerged as we heard the others leave. We watched the ma’alim walking down Juja Road toward Eastleigh. We realized we were free to go, and Haweya zipped out to a friend’s. I was feeling guilty, and also worried about the scale of the punishment that would inevitably ensue, and so I began cleaning the house, doing the chores I hadn’t done that morning. Then I remembered that the gate was still open; I ran out in the yard to close it.
Just as I was closing the gate, a hand came down on my wrist. The ma’alim was back, with another man. He must have walked all the way to Eastleigh and brought this man back with him, because he could not be alone with girls in a strange house. They dragged me inside and the ma’alim blindfolded me with a cloth and started to hit me with all his strength with a sharp stick, to teach me a lesson.
Because I had been washing the floor I was wearing only an undershirt and skirt; my arms and lower legs were bare, and the lashes were really painful. Suddenly I felt a surge of rage. I tore off the blindfold and glared at the ma’alim. I really wanted to stand up to this man. He grabbed my braided hair and pulled my head back, and then he shoved it against the wall. I distinctly heard a cracking noise. Then he stopped. There was this uneasy quiet, like something had gone wrong. And then the ma’alim picked up his things and left, along with the stranger he had brought with him.
My whole body was burning and swollen from the lashes and my nose had begun to bleed. For a little while I just held my head. Finally I went to close the gate and took a cold shower to make it hurt less. I felt so giddy that although I wanted to make the fire and cook, I just couldn’t. I just lay down in my bed, and nobody woke me.
The next thing I knew it was Sunday morning, and when I went downstairs my mother said, “There’s something about your face.” I told her I didn’t care. She began listing my chores—do the washing, this and that—and I refused. I answered back. I was impossible. By the end of the day she had lost her temper completely: she was going to tie me down and teach me a lesson.
Normally she would grab me and then tell me to lie down on my belly on the floor and hold my ankles, so that she could tie me up for my beating. My mother used to beat us only on our arms and legs. But now I refused to lie down and hold my ankles as I should. She pulled my hair—on the side where I was hurt—but I didn’t care any more
. I wouldn’t do it. She bit me and pinched me and called my grandmother to help her—and everything, by this time, was hurting—but I wouldn’t get down. I didn’t cry: I looked at her, full of hate, and told her, “I’m not going to take this anymore.”
Ma demanded that Mahad help her get me down. I told him, in English so she wouldn’t understand, “Please don’t do it. Yesterday she beat me and I was beaten by the ma’alim. Now they are beating me the same way. I do all the work here and it isn’t fair.”
Mahad said, “I’ll have no part in this,” and he left. Now Ma was even more angry, because she felt betrayed. At around midnight she and Grandma finally managed to get me down. They tied me up, and I said to my mother, just like Haweya always did, “Go on. Get it over with—kill me. And if you don’t do it now, I’ll do it myself when you’ve let me go.” My mother beat me—really beat me—and then she said, “I’m not going to untie you. You can sleep on the floor tonight.”
Around three in the morning Ma came back in from her bedroom and released me, and I fell asleep. At eight it was time to go to school. I was blurry and off balance, and just before lunchtime I fainted. Someone brought me home, and I slept some more, and then my mother went out. I went into her bedroom and opened the drawer that was full of all kinds of medicine. I took a huge mug of water and started swallowing pills. I probably took forty or fifty of them.
Later, the doctor said they were mostly vitamin pills, but at the time I didn’t know that—I wanted to die. I was in pain, physically, mentally, and socially. Our life seemed to have unraveled. Everyone was unhappy. My mother gave us no sense of security or direction; she was using me to vent all her anger and pain, and I had to face facts: my father was never going to come back.
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