* * *
We welcomed the New Year of 1997 together with Haweya. She had recently moved to a student house in Nijmegen, two and a half hours from Leiden, and had begun working for a degree in public administration there. A whole gang of us rented a house on an island off northern Holland for a couple of days. Haweya seemed tense around Marco’s friends, but she loved the long walks when the weather cleared. I remember her running along the beach one afternoon, chasing the gulls, her arms waving for joy. I thought she was fine.
But a few days after Marco and I moved into our new apartment, I received a call from Tamara. Tamara and Haweya liked each other and often met for dinner or a movie. Tamara told me she had called Haweya’s student house in Nijmegen to cancel an appointment, and one of Haweya’s flatmates told her that Haweya had been taken to the hospital.
She had been shouting in Arabic in her room, throwing herself against the walls and the floor; the police had had to smash down her door. Haweya was taken away in a straitjacket.
I went to the psychiatric ward in Nijmegen with Marco. My sister looked frightening. Her hair was wild, standing straight off her head; she’d been pulling clumps of it out all night long. Her face was almost unrecognizable, and she had a huge wound on her forehead from banging her head on the wall. She had black-and-blue bruises all the way up her legs and was heavily sedated. I asked, “Were you beaten?” Haweya said, “No. I was throwing myself on the ground all the time and I hurt myself.”
When I arrived she seemed calm, but as she told me what had happened, she started seeing things, things that were not there. She told me she was hearing voices. She became very blurry and began talking about Jesus in some kind of religious mania. As I sat there she began talking louder. She got up and began pacing from one end of the room to the other, faster and faster, chanting Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, louder and faster with every step. I couldn’t catch her, she just flung me away, onto the bed. She seemed to have enormous strength.
Two nurses came in. They held her down and gave her an injection and yanked me outside. They told me I had to leave. I could come back the next day to talk to the psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist said Haweya was having a psychotic episode, but she was responding well to medication. They would keep her for a week, for observation. Everything might be fine.
I went to see Haweya every day. Classes, translations—nothing else mattered. And after a few days she seemed to get better. She went back to wearing a headscarf, and she seemed not to remember what had happened. All she said was “I was a little off balance. Holland affects me this way.” She said she didn’t want medication; she was perfectly fine now.
After a week, a judge came to the ward to discuss whether Haweya should continue to be hospitalized against her will. She convinced him that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with her. I took her back to her flat and settled her in. But three days later, when I went to see her again, Haweya was visibly not all right. She kept muttering under her breath, she was talking loudly again, like a preacher. She took out Sayyid Qutb’s book and said “Ayaan, you must repent, return to Allah.” Suddenly she began taking off her clothes.
I yelled at her to stop, and she did, looking shamefaced. I said, “Do you realize you were whispering to yourself?” Haweya said, “Not to myself. There’s a voice in my head. It keeps on asking me to behave like a child, so I was telling it, ‘Now is not the right moment. When Ayaan is gone I will do it.’ ”
The next morning I headed straight to the Leiden library. I was trying to figure out what was going on. Over the course of the next few weeks I came to see that the voice was like a little Haweya. Her memories, her feelings about religion as a little child, her recollections of school and our parents were all swirling around inside her, mixing into her adult life as if they were real.
I saw that my sister was ill in her mind. Physical illness is easy to understand: you are sick, you take medicine. But mental illness is frightening: you can’t see the wound. Marco was a biologist, so he helped educate me in the chemistry of the brain. I talked to a psychiatrist. Rationally, I could understand it. I told myself, “It’s a chemical inside her that is unbalanced. My sister is not cursed. It’s not because she has been disobedient to Allah or to my mother.” But emotionally, I was devastated. My sister was disintegrating right in front of me, and all I could do was watch. I felt helpless, and guilty that I had not seen the signs and somehow prevented this illness by providing her with a stable, supportive environment.
Haweya was not made mentally ill by Islam. Her delusions were religious, but it would be dishonest to say they were Islam’s fault. She went to the Quran seeking peace of mind, but the unrest inside her was chemical. I think perhaps it had something to do with the limitlessness of Holland; she used to say it was like being in a room without walls. One time she told me, “I was so used to fighting with everybody for every little thing, and suddenly there is nothing to fight for—everything is possible.” In Europe, Haweya lost her road map, and the lack of guidance became unbearable.
Haweya hid her pills. She became delusional and raved. She thought she was cursed. Late one night she took a taxi from Nijmegen to Ede to see Hasna, the Somali woman who was a refugee in Ede. Hasna paid for the taxi and put her to bed, but next morning Haweya picked up Hasna’s baby daughter and refused to let her go. She tried to suckle the child; now she thought she was Mary, the mother of Jesus. Hasna called the police: there was no choice. They gently pried the baby away from Haweya and took her to the hospital.
She was placed in a padded room, where everything was gray and soft and only dimly lit. For a while I wasn’t allowed to visit her. They medicated her again. The drugs leveled her out, but they had side effects. She began walking jerkily, throwing her arms around. She got more medicine; she became lethargic, and slipped back into depression.
Haweya stayed in the hospital for six months. I visited her constantly. One time I found she already had a visitor, Yassin Moussa Boqor, the younger brother of the Boqor who had presided over the clan meeting about me in the refugee center in Ede. This man, who was a prince of the Osman Mahamud, greeted me courteously. He was there to check on Haweya on behalf of my father and the clan: the news had spread.
A few weeks later, the phone rang at my apartment. It was Marco who answered. He turned to me and I saw that he was crying. He said, “Ayaan, this is a special call.” I took the phone and my father said, “Abeh, Abeh,” in a voice like a little girl, as I used to.
I screamed, “Abeh! You’ve forgiven me!” I even flung the phone away. I screamed, and jumped, and did a little dance around the living room before I picked up the phone again.
My father said Yassin Moussa Boqor had told him how I had been looking after my sister. He had told my father that any man should feel blessed with such a child. In this country, so gray and cloudy and depressing, here was this young Somali girl, behaving so dutifully, working so hard, and studying. The prince had respectfully suggested that my father should forgive me.
His voice was tender. I was overwhelmed with joy; it was one of the happiest moments of my life. We avoided discussing the whole issue of my marriage and my flight; we wanted to say only good things to each other. My father told me he was living in Somalia again, with his third wife and his little daughter. He said he had everything he needed, but he obviously didn’t have his own phone. I said, “I want to call you and I want you to pick up the phone,” and I sent him the money to have one installed. After that I called my father at least once a month. He said we must pray to Allah to cure Haweya, but he told her also to take her medication.
Haweya seemed to improve. She was moved to the long-stay section of the hospital and was permitted to go out during the day. I threatened to have her committed again if she didn’t return at night as she was supposed to. Over the next few weeks, she seemed occasionally to recognize that she was ill. She said once, “Suffering is so lonely. Nobody can possibly understand what is going through my he
ad.” It broke my heart to hear it. But Haweya insisted that it was Holland that was making her sick. If she left Holland she would be all right. I knew that was nonsense. If Haweya went home to Nairobi she would stop receiving the medication that was preventing the terrible psychotic attacks.
When she was released from the hospital, in June, I moved Haweya into the flat I shared with Marco in the Langegracht. It didn’t go well. She had become extremely unpredictable, and I spent all my time persuading her to take her pills. Although Marco was supportive, he and Haweya fought all the time; both of them were very headstrong. I was torn between my translation jobs, my classes, and the sister I was nursing at home: there was barely any room in my life for Marco, let alone for my friends.
Haweya was determined to go home to Kenya. She phoned our mother, who agreed with her. Ma told me, “Of course Haweya went mad in that kufr country. Ayaan, you should come home, too, before you also go mad.”
My father, Johanna, and everyone else told me I had no right to prevent Haweya from going back, if that was what she wanted. In July, she left.
* * *
It was a relief to be able to focus again on my studies, although I felt guilty to admit it to myself. I had fallen behind; constantly traveling to Nijmegen took so much time, and so did my translation work, which I needed to pay for Haweya’s upkeep and to send money to Ma.
The classes in Leiden were small, and could be intense. The teachers used to lay out three or four theories on something abstract—charismatic leadership, or middle-class support for revolution, or the need for proportional representation—and ask us to analyze whether the data backed up the argument, whether there were gaps, and then form our own theories. If we couldn’t develop an alternative theory, they said we were incurious and not fit to become scientists. We had to devise a proper theory, with proper methodology; if not, what we said was dismissed as pub talk, not science. We were encouraged to read widely, outside the curriculum. I loved it, but it was hard to keep up with it all.
In September 1997 I became eligible for Dutch citizenship. I had been in Holland for five years. I could barely wait; in fact, I had registered my application months before. On a practical level, I wanted a Dutch passport so I could travel more easily; it was so difficult to move around as a refugee. I also still thought the authorities might find out I had lied and retract my refugee status. Once I became a Dutch citizen, I thought I would be safe from that. I had been a refugee all my life, since I left Mogadishu when I was eight. Now I wanted to become a real, participating member of a living democracy. I wanted to belong.
On August 21, 1997, I received a letter: five years, almost to the day, since I’d first received my refugee status in Lunteren, the queen of Holland had accepted my application to become Dutch. I would have to wait for two weeks to pick up my new passport at Leiden City Council.
When I got to the front of the line, my heart was pounding. “I’m here for my naturalization,” I told the dumpy blond woman behind the desk, and showed her my letter. She looked up and said, “Okay. You can pay over there.” The cashier took my money and handed me something: a Dutch passport. It had my photo in it, and my name, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a name that by now had come to seem normal. There was no speech, no lecture of my rights and obligations. Receiving it was the least momentous occasion in the world.
Marco and I had a party to celebrate and I told everyone, “I’m Dutch!” Nobody snickered exactly, but they looked at me strangely. It wasn’t that I was black and claiming Dutchness; that was fine. It was because being Dutch meant absolutely nothing to these people. If anything, my Dutch friends seemed uncomfortable with the symbols of Dutchness: the flag and the monarchy. These things seemed to them to hark back to the treacherous days of the Second World War. They saw nationalism as almost the same thing as racism. Nobody seemed proud of being Dutch.
* * *
At first, Haweya seemed to be doing well in Kenya. We spoke on the phone every ten days or so, and she seemed happy; she even talked about getting a job. Then in October, she clearly became ill again. On the phone, she rambled incoherently, lacing every conversation with religious ravings. She was hearing voices.
I suggested that she come back to Leiden, but she said she was afraid of Holland. Then, the next time I called, she said she wanted to come back to Holland but she’d lost her passport. She begged me to come and get her out somehow without one. She said Ma tied her up sometimes, and Mahad beat her. She wailed, “I’m wasting time, I’m getting older, I’m in a mess, I’m pregnant.”
After that, Haweya never came to the phone again. I spoke only to Ma, who told me Haweya was becoming more violent. Ma knew Haweya was pregnant. When I brought it up, she just said “Allah has willed it” with bitter resignation. I sent money.
At the beginning of December, I called again, and Ma told me Haweya was ill. She said, “If you want to see your sister alive, come now.” It was exam time in Leiden, and I didn’t take Ma seriously. I thought about going to Nairobi during the Christmas vacation. But I had fallen so far behind with my studies in the months I had been looking after Haweya. I ended up deciding that I must use the holiday break to finish writing several papers.
A few days after the New Year celebrations, on January 8, 1998, my father called, and it was the worst news of my life. “Haweya was taken by Allah to her final destination,” he said.
She had been sick for a week; then she died. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if someone had just sucked all the air out of the room. I burst out crying and my father said, “No, Ayaan. We must not cry for Haweya. From Allah we come and to Allah we return. She is with God. All of us still have to struggle through life on earth to attain what she has. She rests in peace.”
I just kept on crying. I took the first flight. When I left for the airport, I put on a black coat and a headscarf—the same outfit I had worn when I arrived in Europe.
About an hour before I landed in Nairobi, they buried Haweya. I never got to see her body, never got to say good-bye. Muslims must bury people within twenty-four hours. There might perhaps be a dispensation for a father or a husband. But my father didn’t come to the funeral—he was in Somalia—and nobody even thought about asking for a dispensation for me.
So when I came Haweya was already in the ground. I just sat in the squalid little room that my mother was now living in, on a filthy street in Eastleigh, and listened to her stories about living with Haweya for the past six months. I looked at the thin window bars, dented when Haweya threw herself at them, and the windows she’d smashed, still broken.
Ma and Haweya had lived here, in this awful place. This was where they slept, cooked, washed. It was the most depressing room imaginable. Decades of charcoal fires stained the peeling walls.
Ma told me how Haweya died. Her psychotic episodes had become much worse. Sometimes several men had to tie her down; Ma couldn’t even go near her. A doctor came to give her injections, and she seemed calmer. Then one night there was a thunderstorm. Haweya was standing at the window, watching the deluge. Suddenly she said she saw Allah in the lightning and ran out of the door. She ran barefoot into the road in the dark, sprinting across the potholes, and when Ma screamed for help, two Somali men ran after her. When they brought Haweya back, she was bleeding from her knees and from between her legs.
She died a week after her miscarriage. I suppose it was an infection. I don’t know if she even saw a doctor.
I was speechless, and horrified, and I was also frightened of my mother. It occurred to me that she might try to take away my passport and keep me in Nairobi. I went to sleep that night, on the mattress that had been Haweya’s, with my passport tied tightly around my waist.
When Haweya died, I prayed. I robed and bowed for prayer, as Ma told me to, for the sake of peace in the household, but those prayers were empty of content. More important, I sat by myself and begged Allah to give Haweya peace, because she had Hell on earth. The idea that she was now no longer in pain, but resting peacefully, was surp
risingly comforting.
* * *
My mother was bitter, a spent force. There was nothing left of the proud young woman who had left her family in the miyé to go to Aden, who married the man of her choice, and who struggled to save her family under dictatorship. Her dreams had turned into nightmares. My grandmother had left, to go and live with my mother’s youngest sister in Somalia. My mother was living in Eastleigh, a neighborhood she despised, in a country and a city she had always hated, and she was not on speaking terms with barely anyone in the community. Her family was no more: Mahad had disappointed her; one daughter had deserted her; and the other had gone mad, then become pregnant. That was my mother’s worst nightmare come true. It was much worse than Haweya dying.
On the afternoon of the next day, my mother began railing, “Why has Allah done this to me? How could your sister do this to me?” I couldn’t bear that, hearing Haweya being blamed for hurting Ma. I thought of all the abuse, all the beatings my sister received when we were little. It didn’t seem to occur to Ma that she might have had a role in what went wrong. I thought of how my mother had persuaded Haweya to leave her doctors and her medication in Holland and come back to Nairobi, to this ugly room, this utter squalor.
I tried to sit Ma down and tell her this. I wanted to have a real conversation with her, perhaps the first in my life. But there was nothing left of the towering mother I remembered. Ma not just thin now; she was worn, and I took pity on her. She was skin and bones, her legs were open scabs from the psoriasis, and she was so unhappy.
I had $1,000 with me, and I gave it to my mother. I said, “I want you to get out of this room immediately. I’ll send you the money. I want you to go to Somalia. Go to your brothers and sisters, your clan. There is nothing more in Nairobi. Haweya is gone, Mahad has no plans, and I won’t be coming back here. You have no friends, you’re fighting with everyone. You should leave.”
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