Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Ma threw shoes. She called upon her ancestors. She lamented her fate. “Your father left me! May the ancestors curse him! May they curse you! May Allah paralyze you!” She picked up the plate of food she had been trying to cajole Mahad into eating and launched it across the room. I watched, dreading the mess I would later have to clean up. On the other hand, I was entranced with the idea of burning the school. What did it feel like? What was it like, to be expelled from school? It was the most horrible thing that could happen, I thought. My ears burned to hear more. But beyond all the drama, I knew I was witness to a tragic fact: Ma now had no authority at all over Mahad. Abeh was gone and, if this expulsion meant Mahad would not go to school anymore, then he was going to grow up on the streets like a vagabond.

  Ma retrieved her shoes and set off to get the relatives. The next few weeks were spent talking to the school authorities and collecting money to compensate for the classroom that Mahad had set alight. Mahad wasn’t allowed to come back to class, but all the persuading and the bribing resulted in a compromise: he would be allowed to take his final exams, the important passageway to a good secondary school.

  When my mother’s anger and disappointment over the incident subsided, it became apparent why Mahad had set the school on fire. His math teacher, a woman, had scheduled a mock exam in preparation for the finals. This teacher had suffered many disputes with Mahad. He would not listen to her; he would talk during class; he was surly and disrespectful. When he got his mock exam results and found that he had received a score of 67 percent, he walked up to her desk and demanded that she adjust his marks. The teacher sent him away. Mahad persisted in trying to show her that his sums were correct. She refused to look at them and ordered him to go away. He went to his favorite teacher, a man with a great reputation; this teacher looked at the numbers and told Mahad he was right, he had actually earned 97 percent on the test.

  Mahad showed the headmistress the discrepancy between his sums and the marks he received. The next day the headmistress told him, “I do not have the authority to intervene. You have to work this out with your teacher.” Mahad then went back to his math teacher, who again sent him away, scolding him for being disrespectful and disobedient. The day after, he conspired with another student who, just like Mahad, had problems with authority in general, particularly in having a female teacher boss him around. One day, when the lessons were over, they forced open the teacher’s closet in their classroom and set everyone’s exam papers on fire.

  When the time came for his final exams, once again Mahad performed an academic miracle. Thousands of Kenyan children took the exam, but although Mahad had been speaking English for only two years—and for three months had not attended school or done any kind of schoolwork—he emerged among the top ten students in the nation.

  Because Mahad’s results were so good he applied to the best schools and was accepted into most of them. My mother settled on Starehe Boys’ Center and School, a school that was started by an Englishman for children who lived in the streets; to cover the operating costs, smart children from wealthy families were also admitted. Kids like Mahad from low-income families but who had very high academic scores were allowed to pay less tuition.

  All our relatives, my mother, and our religious leaders kept reminding Mahad, Whatever happens, don’t give up our culture and the glorious, millennial customs of our ancestors. Meanwhile the Kenyan educational authorities were “Africanizing” the school curriculum. Mahad’s reading list shifted from English classics, like Dickens and Trollope, to African writers like Chinua Achebe. These authors were obsessed with the awful manner in which British colonialism had disrupted the lives of their ancestors. Ironically, however, Mahad read about Achebe’s tribe and ancient customs in English, the language of the imperialist oppressor whom we were supposed to condemn. Mahad routinely achieved top marks in English. He was drilled to wear a school uniform (with a tie), obey the school prefects, and play cricket and rounders, foreign sports. Everything he did and excelled at earned him a paradox of extreme praise for academic achievement and extreme contempt for betraying his tribal customs and religious dogmas.

  At first Mahad was a day student, but because he was always late to school, our mother, together with the headmaster, decided to make him a boarder. Then he began cutting school for days at a time, though my mother thought he was attending. His teachers didn’t notice his absences at first. He had joined some other kids who were playing truant. No word ever reached me of their doing anything particularly bad; I think they spent their days just hanging out, talking about girls and plotting how to get into discos. At home Mahad berated and lectured Haweya and me: we must maintain strict morality, we must remain virgins. When we asked him why he spent time with bad girls, he said, “That’s just how it is. Some girls are bad for us boys to amuse ourselves. Some girls are honorable and they get married.”

  Ma wanted three things from Mahad. First, she wanted him to help her discipline Haweya and me. This cooperation was most often expressed in tying us up and beating us. I hated him for the pain he was causing me, but watching him hurt Haweya was unbearable. Haweya was always being punished for going outside the house, staying up late reading novels, and coming home late from school. As she grew older, she also developed an interest in going to discos. Ma induced Mahad to hunt her down and bring her home, where he would call her a whore and tie her down and beat her. I would be punished for neglecting to complete the housework, the cooking, cleaning, tidying up, washing the clothes, and doing the grocery shopping. I was also punished for annoying Grandmother. I memorized her lines of curses and lamentations and I would stand in front of her, wiggle my bottom, and pretend to be her, repeating her verses. I also hung out with my friends in school, then came home late and lied that I had been in the mosque.

  The second thing Ma wanted from Mahad was to stay in school. She told him the worst thing that could happen to her was for him to drop out. It would mean she was a complete failure, as a mother and as a woman. Only his destiny was significant—not hers, and certainly not Haweya’s or my own. She tried to indulge Mahad by making him good food, sometimes by bribing him with a bit of money. Unfortunately none of that helped. Mahad skipped class so often that his headmaster called Ma to school and said he had no choice but to expel him.

  Ma began spending days and nights searching for Mahad in dark alleys, on the streets. She went knocking on the doors of boys she thought were his friends, asking to search their houses for her son. Sometimes she solicited the help of male Somali relatives. For days all we did was look for Mahad. When he emerged from these long hiding periods, Ma would get him into the house and put huge padlocks on the door so he was unable to leave. Then, when she wasn’t paying attention, he would climb over the wall, despite the shards of glass that were fixed to the top to deter thieves.

  In one incident, Ma caught him right on our driveway as he was sneaking out. She threw herself at him. Mahad, now fifteen and almost as tall as a man, kept pushing forward. Ma threw herself on the ground, clutched at his ankle, cried and screamed; she would not let him go. Stiff with embarrassment as the neighbors came out to watch what was happening, Mahad conceded and went back into the house. He stayed as long as Ma played watchman, but in a few days he left again.

  The third thing Ma wanted from Mahad was to be pious: to read the Quran, pray, and one day perhaps even become a religious leader. I was beginning to be attracted to the teachings of Sister Aziza, an Islamic studies teacher at my school. I was covering myself in a hijab and praying more; looking back, I see that slowly but surely I was subscribing to the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood, a jihadi movement. But Mahad was more attracted to the lures of the street. He became a chain smoker; there were rumors that he drank beer and perhaps even hard liquor. (At the time I didn’t know the difference.) There were also rumors that he was chewing qat.

  It was common knowledge that boys like Mahad, who had dropped out, whose fathers were absent, and whose mothers had no authority over
them, grew up to be men with no jobs, no wives, no children. Sometimes they were lucky and their parents arranged a marriage for them, to keep them clothed and housed and fed and off the streets. But the marriages always broke down. There were hordes of such lost young Somali men in Eastleigh, a neighborhood in Nairobi. They spent most of their days sleeping in cramped rented rooms and their evenings chewing qat. Then, with borrowed money, they looked for prostitutes. Some of them were involved in crime; they made the streets unsafe.

  Some of these young men later repented and joined the Muslim Brotherhood. They would go to Saudi Arabia on Islamic scholarships and come back as preachers of what we would now call radical Islam. Their own story was compelling, for they had been saved from evil, Westernized behavior when Allah showed them the straight path. My mother actively tried to bring Mahad in contact with these agents. But nothing seemed to work.

  As Mahad sank deeper into the mire, Ma’s next strategy was to mobilize the clansmen one more time and have him sent to Somalia. At the age of about seventeen he set off to meet our paternal uncles and aunts, and even traveled to Ayl, on the northern coast, which had just been captured by my father’s opposition army. He wasn’t just Mahad any more: he was Hirsi Magan’s son—if not a prince, then at least a man with a long and honorable bloodline and a lofty destiny. He deserved to rule. Surely he wouldn’t betray the clan and himself by remaining a street boy.

  While in Somalia Mahad regularly sent my mother letters written in beautiful English. I read them to her, translating them as I went. I ached with sadness that he had dropped out of school. Mahad was so gifted; he could have become a writer. Unfortunately no one had prepared him to set realistic goals and work for them. From his early days, his head was filled with vague notions of honor, wrestling lions, and conquering peoples, goals that bore no relationship to his reality and that only confused his sense of himself.

  Then Haweya also dropped out of school, and in 1990 she and I were sent to Somalia too. When I saw Mahad again he was tall and handsome, with a new air of confidence about him. He had enrolled as a student at a Somali-American business school, which I think was paid for by the United Nations, because we were refugees. He said he was thinking of starting a business with some of our relatives. But although I saw him talking to a lot of different people, I never saw him actually do any business; we certainly saw no sign that he was making money.

  Both Haweya and I had done secretarial training, and we found employment with the United Nations within a month of our arrival in Mogadishu. We were hired to type, take shorthand, and answer the phone. Our jobs paid relatively well. Mahad neither sought nor found a job with any local or international organization. He didn’t know how to type or take shorthand or file, and he refused to learn, believing that the work we did was beneath him. It was also beneath him to do any kind of manual labor. He had chosen the path of business, but he didn’t want to become a lowly apprentice. Many of our relatives were in the transport business, but no one had started out as an executive; most of them had begun as long-distance drivers or mechanics. Mahad didn’t want to do any of that. As bright as he was, he would have learned fast, but emotionally he was unprepared and undisciplined. His sense of self was both terribly fragile and completely grandiose. He felt, I think, that he could not risk taking a servile position as an apprentice. A prince doesn’t do that.

  We make our sons. This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the firstborn son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people—women—to maintain the other group’s self-image. Instead of learning from experience, instead of working, Mahad engaged in a variety of defense mechanisms involving arrogance, self-delusion, and scapegoating. His problems were always somebody else’s fault.

  Trouble was brewing in Somalia: the civil war was about to erupt.In November 1990 my mother, who was still in Nairobi, demanded that Haweya and I return, because she had heard so much about girls being raped by gangs of militia. Mahad played the part of guardian very well. He arranged for meetings with our male relatives and successfully raised enough money to send Haweya and me to Kenya by road. He found a male relative, our nephew, to act as our guardian en route. About a month after we arrived in Nairobi, Mahad showed up too, and right after him came a whole stream of refugees.

  One of them was our uncle, and he wanted Mahad to take him to the border between Somalia and Kenya to look for his family. That was a clansman’s duty. But Mahad dragged his feet, said “Tomorrow.” Because I could no longer stand his procrastination, I volunteered. When my uncle accepted my offer, to Mahad it was like being kicked in the gut. It reminded me of my father calling him a girl, telling him to hide behind his mother’s skirts, where he belonged. When our uncle and I were out on the border, searching for his wife and children, Mahad showed up. He had been driven to come by the obligation of honor and the shame that would be heaped upon him by the gossiping tongues of the Osman Mohammud clan if he didn’t fulfill his duty.

  A few months later my father came to Nairobi. Haweya and I had not seen him in ten years, and I, for one, was overjoyed that he was back. But the tension between him and Mahad was palpable. Mahad always boasted that he would stand up to Abeh, but when push came to shove, he yielded without a word. Father would wake us up at five to pray. Mahad had always lain in bed until noon; he never got around to doing anything until four or five in the afternoon, and even though Ma prodded and begged and pleaded with him every single day to pray, he never did. But when Abeh sang the call to prayer at dawn, Mahad jumped up as though he had been stung by a wasp, rushed to the bathroom, performed his ablutions, and stood on the prayer mat alongside our father, just like when he was a very young boy. And, just like Abeh, he sat down for about an hour and read from the Quran before he went to bed.

  To avoid these rituals, Mahad developed the habit of sleeping in hotels and sometimes in the homes of his Kenyan friends. But he never stood up to my father. He never told him, “No, I’m not going to pray” or “Leave me alone, I’m going to sleep in.” He did not dare.

  Another time, Mahad encountered Abeh near the large mosque in the city center of Nairobi. Mahad was walking with one of his friends, a Kenyan, and apparently both of them were smoking. As soon as Mahad saw Abeh, he folded the burning cigarette in his hand, shoved it quickly into his pocket, and as it burned a hole through his trousers, he stood in front of my father with a stoic expression.

  My father never tired of telling this anecdote, and every time he did he called Mahad a coward and demanded to know why he did not just face up to him like a man. If a man is doing something he knows he shouldn’t do, he should be brave enough to stand up and defend himself.

  When my father arranged my marriage to a distant relative who lived in Canada, Mahad saw how unhappy I was. He talked about how he was going to stand up to Father and convince him to change his mind. I believed him; I was so desperate that I thought Mahad truly would help me convince Father that this marriage was wrong for me. But when the occasion presented itself, Mahad said absolutely nothing. He wouldn’t even bring up the subject. My father would then go on and on about what a wonderful match he had made, and Mahad would just nod.

  So I left. I made my own life in Holland. I learned from the sporadic letters Haweya sent that Mahad had found and secretly married a good woman, Suban, who was tall, beautiful, of a prominent clan. She was a refugee. Her family had been wealthy in the past, but now, because of the civil war, they were destitute. This was fortunate for Mahad, for it meant that he wouldn’t have to pay a very high bride price, perhaps even none. Haweya hinted that Abeh approved of the marriage, but she said Ma was opposed: the girl wasn’t good enough. I think Ma hated her because she felt Suban had taken Mahad away. Ma always wanted her son to marry a girl of the Dhulbahante clan. But perhaps, like some mothers all over the world, she would have hated any woman who married her son.

  Mahad postponed disclosing the marriage
to my mother until Suban was pregnant.

  CHAPTER 5

  My Brother’s Son

  I didn’t see Mahad again until after Haweya died in 1998. I was living with my Dutch boyfriend, attending the University of Leiden, working toward a master’s degree in political science; I had a job as a translator and had applied for Dutch citizenship. Mahad was still in Nairobi. Although his wife, Suban, was expecting a child at any moment, he was living in my mother’s apartment.

  Haweya was buried while I was in midair between Amsterdam and Nairobi. Mahad’s son was born ten days after she died, barely a week after I arrived back in Kenya.

  When Mahad came home and told my mother, “Ma, Suban has given birth,” my mother’s face was stone cold. She did not move a muscle.

  “Ma, I have a boy, I have a little boy,” Mahad said.

  Ma turned her face away; her eyes filled with tears and her lips quivered. She told Mahad, “He is not yours, he is a bastard child.”

  Mahad did not know whether Ma was sad, angry, and confused because of Haweya’s death, or whether she was just being her usual difficult self.

  When I went to visit the new baby, he was barely three days old. Suban was trying to soothe him by holding him to her breast, but he curled his little red, wrinkled face away from her nipple; he squinted and cried.

  My visit to Suban was a secret of sorts. When I mentioned to Ma and Mahad that I wanted to see his baby and meet his wife, Ma erupted. “Did you say you wanted to betray me, like Haweya betrayed me? Like your absolutely good-for-nothing brother betrayed me?”

  I knew that Ma did not approve of Mahad’s choice of wife; Haweya had told me that. But I thought it was natural for a woman to welcome her grandchild, a grandson, into the world. Instead Ma pouted on her mattress, draped in her garbasaar robes, crestfallen and gaunt. She had always been thin, but now she looked so emaciated that every time I looked at her I was overcome with pity and guilt.