Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  “Yes, mother,” I said, thinking of the words of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell: “When I die I shall rot.”

  “So tell me,” she asked, and I knew she was fighting back tears—I had grown up with her eternal sense of abandonment and self-pity. “What is it that makes you question the Almighty? Why are you so feeble in faith? What are you committed to, then? What happened to you? Are you bewitched? How can you doubt him? I can bear everything, but I can’t bear the thought of you forsaking Allah and inviting his wrath. You are my child and I can’t bear the thought of you in hell.”

  I thought, I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny. He is arbitrary and incoherent. Faith in him demands that I relinquish my responsibility, become a member of a herd. He denies me pleasure, the adventure of learning, friendships. I am feeble in faith, Mother, because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman—because I don’t want to be like you. What I said was “When I die I will rot.”

  I instantly regretted it. It was like torturing her to say such things, even though it is what I believe to be true. Ma was not interested in my thoughts or my answers. Her queries didn’t seek affirmation, only obedience. She wanted me to lie to her.

  So I again said I was sorry. “Mother, I will try, I promise to try my best,” I murmured. This was hypocritical, and I knew it.

  At first I called my mother every day, then once every two days, and then every weekend. My conversations with her grew ever more unbearably depressing. Eventually I ended up calling her perhaps once a month.

  Our talks were always strained. Ma wanted forgiveness from God. I wanted forgiveness from her. She wanted forgiveness for herself because, since I had strayed, God might want her to pay in the hereafter for doing a poor job of teaching me his commandments. As long as we talked, we served each other by soothing our own images of ourselves, preserving each other’s pride. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her any details of my life; everything I said would be interpreted by her as irreligious, blasphemous, or immoral. I would try to avoid the subject of religion, but that is not easy in the Somali language, where all greetings and farewells are beset with Allah’s will, mercy, and blessings. In every conversation my mother deployed every kind of tactic she could to try to persuade me to return to her strategy for survival—belief in Islam—even though to me it was the root cause that had made her life so miserable in the first place.

  I found myself falling back into my old habit of punctuating her sentences with appropriate noises that would convey that I was listening, though in fact I zoned out until I could interrupt her with a question. After a while, a typical phone conversation with her would go like this:

  “Hello, Ma. It is Ayaan.”

  “Assalaamu-alaika.” (May Allah bless you.)

  “How are you, Mother? Did you sleep well?”

  “Allah is merciful. He takes care of me. I sleep well and eat well because the Almighty desires so. And you, Ayaan, are you praying?”

  “Not yet, mother.”

  “You have abandoned your mother and you have abandoned God. Does it not matter to you? Please, just wash, just stand on the mat, bow your head. Who knows what Allah will inspire.”

  I would feel shame and guilt, and anger at my own shame and guilt. How easily I fell back into the habit of seeking to assuage my mother’s anger. So I would try to deflect the conversation: Had she received my latest bank order to pay for medicine and food? Then I would try to race away. “Mother, I just called to greet you, I have to run, I will call you when I have more time.”

  “What are you pursuing? What is chasing you? Remember to pray and thank Allah …”

  “Ma, I have to go.” Talking to her, I always find myself implicitly obeying the Somali rule that a child cannot end the conversation. I can’t just hang up. I have to wait for her to indicate that I can go.

  “Haste is bad. Why did you call me if you have no time? You have distanced yourself from Allah and from us, you are on the edge, you must come back, you must pray …”

  “Ma, I have to run, to work, please let me go.”

  “Go then, my child, may Allah bless you and protect you from the jinn and from Satan.”

  “Amin, amin, amin, you too. ’Bye.” I would hang up feeling inadequate, a failure.

  I felt like a failure because talking to her stirred in me the dormant feelings of guilt and duty to serve and obey my parents. As long as I was not in direct contact with Ma or other relatives, or people from our culture, I could suppress these sentiments. But having heard her voice and learning of her plight in her remote village in Somalia, I felt the pangs of guilt cut through my soul. Ma also knew how to work me, from when I was a little girl. As she continued to complain about how she had been abandoned and neglected by my father, Mahad, and Haweya, about the civil war, about her skin ailment, her age and general malaise, I tormented myself with “What if” questions. What if I had been resourceful enough to send her money, called her, sent her pictures, just let her know that I cared, that I was her daughter?

  I wondered if I had been “good.” Duty was the most basic virtue I was indoctrinated with as a child. But I knew the answer. It was clear to me that from the perspective of my upbringing, by her own standards, I had failed my mother.

  It was difficult to contain the flood of nostalgia that overwhelmed me after my father died. My memory, mysteriously, marks the colors of places for me, so that recalling even just those colors can be soothing. My mind still harks back to colors, long after forgetting the stories and the streets and even the people.

  I remember the off-white sand in front of our house in Mogadishu and the blue of the cloudless sky, the houses painted white with shutters that were sometimes blue but mainly green, a whole spectrum of weather-beaten green paints. The bougainvillea were an explosion of purple, pink, crimson, and all the shades in between, in the bright, hot, and unrelenting sun. I remember the yellow-green of the papaya tree and the brown blotches on the flanks of the white goats, and how you could tell them from sheep, even across a great distance, because the sheep’s heads were black and their bodies white. I remember the cobalt blue of my first school uniform and the yellow of the shirts of the boys who terrified me. The bright colors of the shawls and draped garments worn by the women and the darker hues of gray and green of the sarongs worn by the men are as fresh in my mind as if I had seen them only yesterday. I remember the stark palette of grays, whites, and blacks in Saudi Arabia, then the suddenly clanging, clashing colors when we moved to Kenya. My memories of Holland are a series of dim but lovely harmonies, muted cream-colored stone and mild green fields and gray skies.

  In the weeks and months that followed my father’s death, it was the season that in America they so poetically call fall. Outside my window in the house I was visiting in upstate New York, tall trees, which I was told were oaks and maples, filled the landscape. Almost as I watched them, their large leaves seemed to shift color, some maroon, some yellow and red. Then they fell so that the ground became a vast, beautiful carpet, embroidered with designs in gold, brown, and deep oxblood.

  The sky is of a different blue in America, not as sharply bright as the one above Mogadishu and not as dim and gray as the sky above Leiden. I yearned for the warmth of a fireplace where I could stare at the flames that so resemble the beauty outdoors, where I could warm my toes and think about what it would be like if I were still encircled by my family.

  When my sister Haweya died in 1998 I wanted to die too. I felt that all the compromise solutions that I had patched together to enable me to negotiate a successful life in a modern country alongside the ancient values we had been taught made me a worthless, spineless person. I thought that the best of us had been taken, and that I didn’t deserve life if she could not have it.

  When my father died I did not so much miss him as I missed the illusion of certainty, the childish feeling that I was beloved. I longed for a structured, stable life, one in which my goals and the behavior required of me w
ere consistent. In a way, I understood fully what Sahra and others saw in religion, which is the chance to be like a child again, protected, taken by the arm and told what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do—to take a break from thinking.

  * * *

  I felt remorse at my alienation from Sahra and the rest of my family. Sahra may be downtrodden from an objective standpoint (or, at any rate, from mine), but she doesn’t feel that way. She has a daughter and a husband; she is protected from loneliness. She belongs. She has the certainty, the strength, the clear goals that stem from belief. She was with my father through his old age and death. I was not.

  I was thirty-eight years old and I was only beginning to truly understand why people want to belong somewhere, and to understand how difficult it is to sever all ties with the culture and religion in which you are born. Outwardly I was a success. People wrote articles about me, they asked me what books I was reading and what I thought of Barack Obama. My speeches received standing ovations. But my personal life was a mess. I had escaped from my family and gone to Europe because I hadn’t wanted to be trapped in marriage to a virtual stranger I didn’t like. Now, in America, I felt rootless, lost. To be a nomad, always wandering, had always sounded romantic. In practice, to be homeless and living out of a suitcase was a little foretaste of hell.

  I stared at the black-and-white photograph of my grandmother that hangs on my living-room wall. I felt a stab of pain and avoided her piercing eyes, but her words had jabbed their way into my mind: The world outside the clan is rough, and you are alone in it.

  CHAPTER 4

  My Brother’s Story

  Ma told me that my brother Mahad, who lived in Nairobi, was badgering her for my phone number. She hadn’t given it to him. She warned me that if she did, he would ask me to help him get a visa to Europe or America, and she begged me not to do it. She had a terrible fear of losing him to the infidel countries, which, in her mind, had driven Haweya to madness and death, and me to far worse: to apostasy, immorality, immortal doom. The West had taken her daughters, and Mahad was all she had left. She asked me to send him money so that he could come live with her in northern Somalia.

  I wondered what complex and conflicting emotions Mahad felt when he heard that Abeh had died. When my little sister Haweya and I were small, our brother seemed to us to have the key to a privileged connection with our father. When Abeh had languished in a prison in Mogadishu, Mahad had visited him. Ma always took her eldest son to places she would never allow her daughters to venture to.

  Then Abeh escaped, and we girls were at last allowed to participate in the adventure. We fled Somalia and moved to Saudi Arabia when Mahad was ten, I was eight, and Haweya six and a half. In Saudi Arabia we would at last meet our father, ma said. But when we begged Mahad for details about Abeh, he assumed a pompous, professorial tone and described a figure of mythical proportions: hugely tall, infinitely strong, impossibly understanding and good.

  I wondered out loud whether Abeh walked or floated. Mahad said I was foolish. Mahad always told me how foolish I was. He used the word doqon—“gullible, dupe”—and it hurt. But I was too excited by the prospect of meeting Abeh to dwell for too long on bad feelings.

  “Oh, Mahad,” little Haweya interrupted, “will he lift me up on his neck, like our uncle?”

  “He might,” Mahad replied. “Come here, little one, let me lift you on my neck.” He bent down, and clumsy Haweya clambered onto his back, tugging his hair. Mahad began yelling.

  Ma came in; we were making too much noise, again. The two-bedroom flat in Mecca was hot, far too hot, and too small for us. We were used to a house in Mogadishu, with a yard to run in and a talal tree to climb. Ma was afraid that we would annoy the neighbors so much that we’d be evicted from the apartment. She used to order Mahad to take charge of his younger sisters and keep us quiet. Now Haweya had pulled his hair a little too hard and he was making the noise. She let him have it. “You’re letting me down again,” she cried. “I am on my own. Must I look for food to keep you from howling at night, or must I keep you from behaving like animals? You tell me.”

  Mahad entreated, “But she pulled my hair.”

  “How did she reach your head?” Ma snapped.

  “She wanted to know if Abeh would put her on his neck.”

  Ma screamed as if there was fire throughout the building, “You wa’al bastard child. All three of you are cursed—monsters, cursed! I hope death finds you in lumps. May the ancestors tear you to pieces!”

  Mahad, his voice shrill and desperate, pleaded, “Ma, this one wanted to know if Abeh walks on air and this one wanted to climb on my neck. What do you want me to do?”

  Kicking off her shoe, Ma hurled it at his head and raced toward him menacingly. “What I want from you is to be a man, you traitor. I want you to be a man. You are such a weakling, defeated by two girls! How will you ever stand up to men? How will you wrestle? How will you honor your forefathers, fight a lion, earn your share of she-camels? It is my tragedy, my unfortunate fate that I have but one son and he is incapable of even keeping his sisters under control. How will you ever lead an army? Control a battalion? Rule a people? You can’t manage two little girls—what are you good for?”

  Mahad ran off to the bathroom, fighting tears.

  Neither Mahad nor Haweya nor I had ever seen a lion. I had seen camels, also cows, goats, sheep, lizards, and a reptile called abbeso that terrified me into such a fit that to this day the thought of it keeps me from looking up what it might be called in English. But I certainly didn’t know the difference between he-camels and she-camels. Mahad may have had an inkling, but I doubt that he ever got close enough to a camel to tell its sex.

  For a rare moment I felt grateful to be a girl. I would never have to wrestle lions, real or imagined.

  Mahad, having more freedom than we did, was exposed to all sorts of adventures, but he also had to face much worse trials than we did. In Saudi Arabia the law requires women to hide and never step outside without being escorted by a male guardian. Our mother leaned on Mahad, her ten-year-old, to act as that legal male guardian for her whenever our father was away, which turned out to be most of the time. She indulged him with luxuries she would not have wasted on girls, but she also ordered him to take responsibility not only for his behavior but also for Haweya’s and mine. He acted as Ma’s interpreter from Arabic, which we learned in school, to Somali. He was expected to decipher the world for her, to protect her and us, though he was only ten. Sometimes he heard the Saudi men say lewd and ugly things to Sometimes they called her abda (slave) and other times aswad (black). Mahad would pretend not to hear them; he never translated those words.

  It would be an understatement to call Mahad’s relationship with Abeh troubled. But from the instant Abeh finally arrived in Saudi Arabia, my father adored me, indulged me, forgave me my mistakes, cuddled me and stroked my hair. He let Haweya climb on his neck, tug his hair, and sprint back and forth in the tiny flat, screaming the ancient battle cries that our grandmother had taught us. Abeh’s attitude to Mahad was just the opposite of this indulgence. He showed little physical affection. He ordered Mahad to stand up and raise his chin and look him in the eye. He expected Mahad to be impeccable in manners, in dress, in prayers, in helping Ma.

  Mahad could never fill Abeh’s shoes. When he failed to meet our father’s lofty and often vague demands, Abeh would glare at him. Abeh humiliated Mahad and often slapped him across the face.

  When we moved to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, one of my father’s relatives came to visit us. He drove a white Toyota pickup. He left his key in the ignition to greet my parents before seeking a parking space. When we saw him coming into the house with extended arms, Mahad slipped past him and ran to the pickup. He started the engine and hit the accelerator, then the brake, knocking his head on the steering wheel. The car responded to Mahad’s handling with screeching noises that attracted the attention of the adults, who were engaged in elaborate exchanges of greetings.
Ma stepped outside without her black hijab and screamed in shock. She yelled that Mahad had hit his head. My father strode out of the house, opened the door of the truck, pulled Mahad out, lifted him with both hands, and threw him on the ground. Then he kicked Mahad. He removed his belt with one clean swing and started lashing my brother, now helpless on the ground.

  As always when Abeh hit Mahad, Ma threw herself at our father, screaming curses, begging Allah to make him barren, and appealing to our ancestors to paralyze him. She started beating my father on his back and shoulders, first using her hands, then throwing her shoes at him. Father hurled a few words of contempt at Mahad—something about honor—and then went back into the house to attend to his relative.

  Mahad was writhing in pain, doubly humiliated because not only we, the girls, were watching, but so were the little boys from the neighboring homes. He did all he could not to cry, then gave up and howled like an animal.

  Every evening Abeh would order us to wash, brush our teeth, put on our nightclothes, pray, and go to bed. Haweya and I would usually obey, but Mahad used this routine to try Abeh’s patience in silent mutiny. He would go into the bathroom, lock the door, and stay in there for hours. My mother would listen for the sound of running water and hear none. No one knew what Mahad did in there, but he would not turn on the shower. Meanwhile our bedtime was being delayed. Ma would stop my father from breaking down the door. After what seemed like hours, Mahad would emerge as dry as when he went in, dressed just as before. My father and mother would argue loudly; Ma would call my father names, and Abeh would retaliate by calling Mahad names. They were disgraceful names: comparing Mahad to a girl, calling him a coward, threatening to whip him with the belt, saying he was not his son.

  Sometimes, just before prayer time, if Abeh was home he would spit at Mahad, “You filthy boy—or maybe I should call you a girl—did you do your ablutions?”

  Mahad would look down and press out of his lips, “Yes, Father.”