He believes it was at their third or fourth encounter that he proposed marriage. From the start, the meeting was flat and without energy. After barely fifteen minutes, conversation was running dry. It came to him that his extemporizing had lost whatever value it once had, that he had nothing to offer now, that this meeting might well be their last.
“I want to marry you,” he said.
She smiled at him. “You are how old?” she asked. “Nineteen, twenty?”
“One of the two,” he replied.
“You are a boy. You are not ready for the responsibility of marriage.”
“How can you say I am not ready? There are five boys living in my room. I pay the rent. I buy food for dinner every night. They all chew mira into the early hours of the morning, and I am the one who provides money for the mira. To marry you would make me richer. I would be supporting one other person instead of five. You say I am too young, but what you are saying just makes no sense.”
He remembers her crossing her legs and resting her chin on the ball of her hand. She was silent for a moment, and then she began asking one question after another. She wanted to know what time he went to sleep and when he got up in the morning; how often he prayed and whether he was scrupulous about washing before praying. She combed through the minutiae of his work; she wanted to know how he earned every birr. Then she wanted also to know how he spent every birr, how much he saved. When he told her that almost half of what he earned was spent on mira, she shook her head and mumbled under her breath. Her questions seemed like tests: “If you were to spend less on mira and save more,” she asked, “what would you be saving for? How would you eventually spend the money?”
They met again a few days later. Foosiya sat upright and alert, her legs crossed, her back ramrod straight. Once more, she pinned Asad to his chair with a volley of questions. These were more freewheeling than her last inquiries. How did he come to live in Addis?
Asad was thrown by these questions. It was understood in Bole Mikhael that everyone’s past was off-limits; people lived together in the present and kept their histories behind closed doors. Asad stared out of the window and felt that the world outside was familiar; the world here in this room with Foosiya was deeply strange.
The inequality of the exchange unnerved him. He thought of how he might formulate a few questions about her.
“Why are you in Addis?” he asked. “Alone, with no family. What made you leave your family and come here?”
In my car outside his shack, Asad shrugs in frustration and laughs.
“Some things are hard to translate,” he says. “What she said was that she needed a change. We Somalis do not go on holiday like you do. We do not knock off at Christmastime and go and see relatives like South Africans. We live in the same place day in and day out. So, sometimes, someone will just decide to go and live in another place for a few months and say, ‘I needed a change.’ That is what Foosiya said.
“But then, later, when I knew her much better, I asked again, and she said she went to Addis because she was hoping to get to Europe or America. And I said, ‘So which was it: a change or a new life?’ She busied herself with other things, like she had not heard me.”
They met again the next day. Asad had barely sat down when Foosiya announced that she would marry him. It was just a question now of Asad making contact with her father in Somaliland and formally asking for permission. Asad nodded and smiled and found that he had nothing to say. He left almost immediately. Outside, the sunlight seemed much too bright. He stumbled home, barely conscious of where he was going. He was nineteen or twenty years old. If all went well, he would be sharing a bed with a woman who had humiliated him, who had angered him, whom he wanted to hurt and upset, and whom he did not begin to understand. He knew, also, that his impending marriage would prove nothing less than a scandal. Everybody wanted to marry Foosiya. Everyone had undressed her with his tongue or, at the very least, with his thoughts. And she had chosen this kurai, this young Ogadeni boy barely off the street. What was she doing? What were her motives?
Making contact with Foosiya’s father proved difficult and laborious.
“First, I had to meet with Isaaq people living in Addis,” Asad says. “They were not close family of Foosiya’s but connected enough for their opinion to be important. I had to meet with them, talk to them. Then they phoned Foosiya’s family to give their opinion. Then I had to phone Foosiya’s father. I would arrange a time to phone the father, but he was not there. Another time, he is still not there. I was frustrated. The marriage was not at risk. I knew from the way these Isaaq cousins of hers were behaving that the family was happy. In those times, you are happy if your daughter gets married: she is away from home; she moves around; she can get a bad reputation. You worry.”
Finally, after several failed attempts to contact Foosiya’s father, it was arranged that he would speak to one of her elder brothers who lived in the Somaliland city of Burio. The conversation was brief and cursory. The line was not very good, and neither man could make out much of what the other was saying. The brother’s voice was just audible enough for Asad to hear him give his consent.
“The wedding was in 2003,” Asad tells me, “I think in July. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. I wanted just to pay an imam to do the ceremony, maybe buy some new materials for the house; that’s it. I was not sure I would be married very long. So why spend a lot of money?
“But in my culture, others are in charge of the wedding, even though you are the one who pays. Yusuf was in charge. He said I must buy a suit. I said, No, that is too expensive. Eventually, they took me off to some Somali sellers. We bought black shoes, black pants, a white collared shirt, all secondhand. I rented a black jacket. Then I was told we must buy fruit; we must buy meat. We must hire a person who is going to video the wedding. When I arrived at the ceremony there were so many people. Not just Somalis. Lots of Ethiopians. Other Ethiopians. It cost me six hundred dollars in the end. Before that day, I had never even spent sixty dollars on one thing, never even twenty dollars on one thing.
“That six hundred dollars was spent for other people, for curious people, for people who wanted to talk about this strange wedding. The beautiful older woman marrying the kurai.”
—
On the night of the wedding, the young men with whom Asad shared a room cleared out. Before they left, they washed the floor and the walls. They removed all the mattresses but one. It lay ceremoniously in the very center of the room, dressed in new linen. It was as if they had cleaned the room, not just of the signs of their own presence, but of all the lurid conversations they had ever had there; as if the place had to be expunged of its boyishness so that it might be inhabited by a man and a woman.
The only woman’s body Asad had ever touched and observed was Yindy’s, in the tent their neighbors had made in Dhoobley, some eleven years earlier. Asad had been a prepubescent boy then, and he had seen Yindy’s body only to clean it.
Broaching the question of Asad’s wedding night is awkward. It is not something I can casually toss into the confined space of my car. It is something to wait for, something that will arise in the course of another discussion. That other discussion is female circumcision. I had just interviewed a young white doctor; she was in her midtwenties, I think, and worked in the obstetrics ward of a public hospital not far from where Asad lived. What she had seen of Somali women’s genitalia had filled her with indignation; during the course of our interview she had grown angry and shouted into my voice recorder.
Now, in the car, I recount the doctor’s words as well as some of her fury. Asad listens carefully, the expression on his face quite neutral.
“Did the doctor explain to you carefully about Somali circumcision?” he asks. “They do not only cut the clitoris; they also do the skin around the vagina. They use strong string from a tree to stitch the vagina closed, leaving a hole so small all you can fit into it is your baby finger. If it happens when you are five years old, then for the next
twenty years, until you are married, it is sore every time you pee. When you menstruate, the blood stays inside, and you get infected. But the women are ashamed, and they will not tell you.
“Foosiya had these problems after we came to live in South Africa. She was too ashamed to say. I would get home, and she was not there, and neighbors would say, ‘She has gone to the clinic.’ I would follow and find her there, and she would not want to talk about it. I only found out because she spoke no English, and the doctor needed a translator. I asked the doctor why this infection comes back all the time. The doctor asked when she was circumcised. She did not remember exactly. She also had kidney problems. The doctor said that to remain healthy a woman must be clear and clean, but with this circumcision the blood stays and mixes with the urine, and the kidneys get infected. Walking out of the clinic, I say to Foosiya, ‘You must tell me.’ She says, ‘There’s nothing you can do, so why must I tell you?’ ”
I take notes and say nothing, but he knows what my silence is asking of him. He is free either to answer or to change the subject.
“Opening that hole is a big business, brother,” he says. “You can’t open it with your finger. You can’t take your wife to the clinic, because it is shameful if you cannot open your wife with your penis. You need to push and push, night after night. The day of your wedding, a big problem begins. It was like that with me and Foosiya. It was very painful. It took a long time. But Foosiya would not have a single discussion about it. It was weird, brother. When I tried to talk about her terrible pain, she turned her head away. We had to pretend it was not there.
“It is cruel. I will not allow my daughter to be circumcised. Not my daughter, and not anyone who gets advice from me.”
It strikes me that if he married Foosiya to take revenge, the task of opening her vagina offered ample opportunity.
“You married Foosiya to hurt her,” I say. “Is this—?”
“No, brother,” he interrupts. “No, no. You are there naked together, exposed to each other, and one of you has this terrible pain. It is not right. It is an injustice. I think maybe it was when we were alone on the first night that my feelings for her began to change.”
North or South
The day after the wedding, the boys moved back into Asad’s room, and the newlyweds moved out. Asad’s landlady had a grandmother who lived in a room in the house. The old lady gallantly agreed to give it up and share a bedroom with her great-grandchildren so that the newlyweds could have their own space. As a wedding present, she waived the first month’s rent. With the money he saved, Asad bought a bed, a bedside table, a cupboard, and new curtains. He kept paying for his old room, now occupied solely by his friends. He had become the breadwinner in an eccentric household, his dependents consisting of a wife and a group of unemployed, mira-chewing young men all older than he was.
On the third morning after the wedding, Foosiya rose early and walked unannounced into Asad’s old room. Five young men lay there, fast asleep. She took a spoon and hit it against the door to wake them. Once she was sure she had an audience, she began to speak. While her husband was paying for the roof over their heads, she said, and for the food on their table, they were to follow her rules.
She would cook three meals a day, she announced, and attendance at meals was compulsory. A person who persistently missed meals would be evicted. Second, she would wash all their clothes, but on two conditions. First, they were to stop sharing clothes. They had reached the point where they did not know whose clothes belonged to whom. Adult men didn’t behave that way. They knew what was theirs and what wasn’t. Second, she said, it was time to end this business of one’s girlfriend washing one’s clothes. In fact, the girlfriend business must end entirely. Either you were married to a girl, or you went about courting her in the proper way. This in-between business was unhealthy. It led to disrespect of young women. The Somali women in this city, Foosiya said, were far from home. Many were here without their families. To be a woman alone in a foreign city was not easy. Such a woman should command special respect.
Finally, Foosiya said, her husband would no longer spend the money he earned on mira for them. He was going to be saving as much money as he could so that they could plan their future. And even if they managed to find somebody else to buy their mira, they could not bring it there. If they wanted to chew mira at home, they had to find somewhere else to live.
Foosiya went back to her own bedroom and asked Asad a long series of questions about how he earned his income. He was asked to estimate how much came from helping people acquire documents, how much from helping people settle into Addis, and so forth. When she was finished asking questions, she made a pronouncement: Asad was to cut ties with Yared. He was not the main source of his income, he did not need him, and he was not the sort of person a good Muslim man spends his time with.
“There are no gangsters in Addis,” Asad explains to me, “not like here in South Africa where you have people who kill you, then never think about you again. The closest you get to a gangster in Addis is a taxi driver. They are undercover people. They are involved in all sorts of business, aboveboard, below board. Foosiya did not like Yared. She would look at his filthy vest and the way he walked with his arms showing their muscles. She just stared with her strong green eyes, and she was not thinking good thoughts.”
Each member of the household responded to Foosiya’s presence in his own way. Some were angry and challenged Asad to manage his life by his own lights. Others, like Yusuf, took to Foosiya immediately and reformed themselves, cutting mira out of their lives and falling gratefully into the rhythm of her days. Most kept chewing mira but not at home; they would wander off after dinner to feed their habit out of sight. If they were unable to rise for breakfast the following morning, they would find their dirty clothes returned to them unwashed.
Asad refused to cut ties with Yared. He liked the big man, and he especially liked the money he earned by working for him.
“It was an unreasonable demand,” Asad tells me. “It would have made us poor, which would not have been good for Foosiya either.”
But aside from this one moment of dissent, Asad was simply dazed. His life had been snatched from him and was now being refashioned in her hands, and he watched in amazement.
“Something was going on that took me a while to understand,” Asad says. “She was the wise one. She was the one deciding how things should be. But it didn’t seem like that. She was so respectful toward me, so polite to me. Even when she was angry, she never failed to be respectful. So maybe she was molding me, but she was molding me into the sort of man a woman respects. You understand, brother? I didn’t feel she was taking over my life. I felt that I was for the first time becoming the sort of man who takes over his own life.”
Their marriage was built over the ensuing weeks by two cycles of labor, one performed at night, the other during the day. After dark, they would persist in the bloody business of consummating their marriage. Asad would turn off the lights, close the curtains, and come to Foosiya in pitch darkness. She would not permit him to see her face in pain. He experienced it only in the shuddering of her body and in her dulled moans.
They set about the task with grim purpose, both now of the same mind about what they were doing. They were not tearing open a cavity in which Asad might pleasure himself or take his revenge. They were parting the entrance to the womb in which Asad was to deposit his seed. For as time passed, it became clear to Asad that he wanted to settle with Foosiya and father her children. His idea of marrying her in order to hurt her, perhaps even to ruin her, seemed, already, embarrassingly boyish and wantonly cruel. She was offering him something infinitely richer than the quick satisfaction of revenge.
But what was she offering him? Today, Asad struggles to put words to the unsettling ideas he began to entertain in the weeks after his wedding. They were at once about the past and about the future.
“Something happened when I knew that I was going to have children with Foosiya,
” he says. “The best way I can explain it: I started having regrets. Why did I not go to school? Why did I leave driving trucks? Why did I not stay in Kenya where I maybe would have found my family? For the first time, I saw that my life was a series of decisions. I saw that each decision decided who I was going to be from now on. That is a big realization, brother. I felt dizzy and had to sit down. It is the sort of realization that can make you fall over.”
—
Asad had kept some vital information to himself. He did not let Foosiya know, for instance, about the small wooden box he had begun to keep, about the money he added to it every month, and about his plans to go to South Africa. As he began to commit to her, so his South African plans receded. He had always imagined going alone.
He kept filling his wooden box with money. And he kept its existence a secret from Foosiya. Quite how or when he would put it to use, he no longer knew. He and Foosiya would stay in Addis for a while. They would have children here. And then they would see.
But no sooner had he put his South African plans on hold than they beckoned again, this time for quite different reasons.
Asad and Foosiya were married in August or September 2003. Around this time, the political currents that streamed through Addis began to grow rough and nasty. The Ethiopian government had for a long time had an uneasy relationship with the student body at the Addis Ababa University, and with the city’s youth more generally. And it was also in perpetual conflict with several insurgencies in its borderlands, some Oromo, others Somali, all supported by the Ethiopian government’s bitterest foe, Eritrea. In late 2003, the currents of these various conflicts kicked at the foundations of Asad’s life. He thought that he could read them in ways that other Somalis could not. And what he read scared him.
A Man of Good Hope Page 14
