Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Having studied the rhetoric of radical Islam, and having tried as a young woman to live according to its principles, I know that the same three themes are the yardsticks by which Islamists measure what they consider the decadence and moral turpitude of the West.

  My cousins, like so many individuals in a globalized world—including myself—are caught between the two worlds. They were never prepared for life in the West. European and North American societies have been fundamentally reshaped by the values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shifted the balance of power from the collective to the individual. During these hundreds of years, thinkers and activists developed and refined ways of allowing as much individual liberty as possible within the realms of these three urges without sacrificing the common good. (Who determines the “common good” shall forever remain a subject of debate, in open societies as in all others.)

  These three passions lie at the center of Muslims’ journey from tribal life to Western societies that are based on the values of the Enlightenment. Immigrants from traditional societies that have been dominated for centuries by the bloodlines and values of clan and tribe make the physical transition to the West in a matter of hours. Often they have been driven to look for a better life when home has become a nasty, unwelcoming place. Yet both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

  Ladan, Hiran, Hassan, and Anab, like me, succeeded in coming to the West with personal high hopes of a better life, and at least in the case of Hassan, with the additional hope of success for his father, his aunt, our uncles, my mother, and a host of siblings and cousins. We were resilient and resourceful; we were survivors, even (in the case of Anab) a warrior. But their lack of clarity about where they stood on the core issues of sex, money, and violence—their failure to recognize that where they live geographically must change where they stand ideologically—has led them to human tragedies of disease, debt, and death. I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind.

  Ladan and Hiran grew up in families from a merchant clan. Their families were among the wealthiest in Somalia, with international business interests. Because of their wealth and commercial ties to foreign countries, these families could purchase the gadgets of modernity. These girls were used to having a car, televisions, videos, and other modern possessions.

  The circle of people with whom they interacted in Somalia followed Western fashions and proclaimed (almost too loudly to be true) their Western attitudes. Ladan in particular spent much of her teenage life with female role models who knew more about Valentino, Armani, Prada, Gucci, and Chanel than chapters in the Quran or the sayings of the Prophet. They conducted a grim competition about who looked sexier, because Western fashion is about displaying the female body.

  Ladan and Hiran wore makeup, styled their hair, and even mixed with boys. Yet their modernity was only skin-deep. Their fathers were both very successful and frugal, yet they allowed their daughters the trappings of Western culture. Even so, they didn’t educate them about how to make money, let alone save or invest it. And their apparent ease with the visible markers of a Western lifestyle did not translate into a stable sense of identity or a coherent, resilient approach to the vicissitudes of life.

  Many Westerners entertain a general belief that non-Westerners who have grown up in large cities with wealth and cultural ties to Western countries are better prepared for life in modern societies. But Ladan and Hiran did not grow up with a complete set of moral values, either Islamic or Western. They looked modern; they played the part and dreamed the part, but they were not anchored in Western sexual mores. They indulged their desires as if they were indeed Western young people, but they did not escape the culture of shame. They buried their shame under elaborate layers of secrecy and hypocrisy; they hid, even from themselves, the bare, bold fact that they were having sex.

  * * *

  As I heard about the troubles of my family, I was once again filled with a sense of guilt and regret. But this was different from the earlier guilt I had felt at escaping my arranged marriage and from my regret at betraying my father and compromising his honor; it was different from the guilt I had felt at putting my mother in a position where she was blamed for what I had done. I no longer had that old, constant remorse, that constant guilt about what I could have done for my family in those years of silence and anger, after I had fled from my clan to a society that was free, informed, and affluent, to a new world in which I had learned to survive.

  Now my guilt stemmed from a new feeling: that I should have shared some of those tools of survival with the closest members of my family. Instead of cutting them off, I should have called them more often. If I had kept up with Hiran and Ladan, perhaps I could have helped them to shed their religious and clan convictions—to learn about contraceptives, for example, and face up to their sexuality, instead of pretending (even to themselves) that they weren’t really having sex and thus taking no precautions.

  My actions were selfish, but they were not malicious. They were selfish because I had chosen to improve my life, pursue happiness in my way. They were treacherous because, in achieving my personal goals, I was aware that I was disregarding long-held traditions of my family and religious edicts.

  One evening, about three months after my father’s death and after conversations with my mother and Magool, I sat down to dinner with an American couple who had become very close friends of mine. While I ruminated over the ruins of my family, we talked about the books of Edward Banfield, who maintained that the tightly inward-looking focus of traditional societies impedes their members from progressing in the modern world, for it prevents them from making bonds outside their clan.

  Afterward I asked myself, What is it about our Somali culture that holds us back? Perhaps part of it is that we do not have much to call culture anymore. There are no Somali historians, few authors, few if any artists of any kind. The old ways are broken, and the new ways involve only violence and disorder. As a tribe we are fragmented; as clans, scattered; as families, dysfunctional.

  Slowly I sought reconciliation with my family, and yet with every renewed tie I felt more alienation and more sadness at how far and fast our family had regressed. Haweya, gone. Mahad, a shadow of himself. Hiran, broken. My half sister, Sahra, denying modernity, choosing to entomb herself in her veil. Ladan, unaware of the volumes of books, videos, and DVDs on parenting, now preparing to bring another child into the world, oblivious of the risks to which her addiction and poverty expose her daughter. My conscientious cousin Hassan, spending his money to prop up people invested in outdated values.

  I wanted to tell Hassan, Save your money, buy a home, get an education—above all, rethink the values of our grandmother, and teach your children new ethics. Help them develop the tools to be successful and get ahead in America. Our grandmother was disciplined and resolute, but her lessons about traditions and bloodlines cannot carry us through this new landscape. If we try to hold on to them we will break apart, for the old ways have failed. Even Somalis can learn to adopt the values of a liberal democracy.

  One evening, staring at my grandmother’s photograph above the fireplace in my apartment, I began thinking about her first voyage away from the lands of her ancestors. She must have been only about forty when she crossed the Red Sea in a dinghy, traveling from the port of Berbera, in Somalia, to Aden. Her husband’s third young wife had just had her second son. Shame and jealousy burned within her and propelled her out of the desert with her youngest daughter, who was still not married.

  I imagined her, afraid perhaps, but excited
by the motion of the sea and the challenge of the unknown. Perhaps, secretly, she desired to escape the monotony of the nomadic life, a life with a very short span, vulnerable to natural disasters and war.

  My grandmother used to talk to the dead. She talked with our forefathers, calling them by name. Many a time she warned us not to cross them, not to bring down their fury. As I stared at her photograph, I realized that I no longer feared my forefathers, and I marveled at that. I looked at her dark, piercing eyes, so full of judgment and accusation, and in my mind I spoke to my grandmother. And then, because my literacy has robbed me of my grandmother’s flawless memory, I did as I always do when something is important: I pulled out a notebook.

  It began as fragments, part English, part Somali. It was not a conscious composition, like an article or a manuscript. I had no clear idea that what I was writing was a formal farewell, a statement of adieu to every family tie I had ever known and to all the bequests my clan, tribe, religion, and culture had ever bestowed on me. But gradually it dawned on me that, just as she would have done, I was talking to my forebears. I was writing my grandmother a letter.

  CHAPTER 7

  Letter to My

  Grandmother

  Dear Grandmother,

  I do not wail for your passing. You were ready to go. Ma said you kept asking your forefathers to take you. Your legs refused to carry you. Your joints jammed. When straight, they hurt you to bend them; when bent and curled for a few minutes, they refused to straighten. They creaked with effort. Your side ached from sitting and from lying down. Your skin creased into folds hard to clean; the sweat collected in them and you itched. Your long, thin, and lovely fingers curled inward into stiff and crooked branches. You scratched the itch in your side with them, but the nails cut you instead. Your ears refused to serve you any longer; your eyes wouldn’t see anymore. Your daughters and granddaughters comforted you as best they could, but they could not ease the pain of old age.

  I do not wail for your passing, but I am filled with a sense of guilt: I wish I too had been there for you. You held me in my childhood when I was in pain; you whispered words of consolation in my ears as I was shaken by the fevers that attack a body so young it doesn’t know how to defend itself. You called in the help of your forefathers on my behalf; you chided me not to give in; you took me to the witch doctor, who took your money and your sheep and burned wounds in my chest with a long blacksmith’s nail he held with tongs. That hurt me more than the fever, Grandmother, and I still have the scars. They are a symbol of your love for me. It was not the witch doctor but you who spurred me to fight the demons in my blood and recover.

  I am sorry, Grandmother, that I was not there in your old age as you were there in my childhood. I would have summoned the spirits of my new world. Here, they have salves to cleanse and soothe the itch in folded skin; they have hearing aids; they have walking sticks on wheels to help you roll smoothly along the road. They have all these props and more, and painkillers. I am sorry, Grandmother, for abandoning you when I could have been a source of comfort in your old age.

  I have lived with the infidels for almost two decades. I have come to learn, appreciate, and adopt their way of life. I know that this would make you sad. Before he died Father tried to convince me to change my mind, and Ma does the same every time I speak to her on the phone. I think, at first, you would do the same as my parents, and tell me to respect the traditions of our fathers and forefathers. But I have this odd feeling that you, Grandma, would come to see my point of view.

  Still, I do not wail for your passing.

  Gone with you are the rigid rules of custom. “Repeat after me: I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, who is the son of Magan, who is the son of Guleid …” Gone with you is that bloodline, for better or for worse, and gone is the idiot tradition that meant you cherished mares and she-camels more than your daughters and granddaughters.

  When a boy was born into the family you rejoiced. Your eyes twinkled, you smiled, and with a burst of energy you would weave impossible numbers of grass mats to give away as gifts. As you wove you would tell us your warrior legends—about courage, resistance, conquest, and sharaf, sharaf, sharaf. Honor, honor, honor.

  When we heard news of the birth of a girl in the family you clicked and pouted and sometimes sulked for days. Squatting under the talal tree in Mogadishu, on the huge straw mat, you wove, your fingers orange with henna, working away with your muda needle. You would chase us away and speak of ominous events. Then, when you had been quiet for days, you would tell us endless tragedies of the misfortunes that befall a family of too many girls—gossip, betrayal, bastard children, and a’yb, a’yb, a’yb. Shame, shame, shame.

  You squinted and clenched your teeth as you wove the grasses tightly into mats and bowls, cursing if ever the pattern was even remotely wrong. Grandma, you were so diligent and you preached the same diligence to us. “Here, girl, sweep this dust. Shake the mats. Go milk the goats. Light the fire. Fetch more water. Clean the meat, chop and cook it. Pick the rice.” I hear your endless orders still, today. You taught us to memorize our father’s bloodline instead of the ABCs. You will be sad, very sad, to learn that Abeh is dead and there is only one son, my brother Mahad, to carry on the bloodline. And although Mahad is over forty he has only one child, Jacob, who was born two weeks before Haweya died, almost eleven years ago.

  Jacob cannot be taught his culture by his elders, because the lessons they will try to teach him are no longer valid in the time and place in which he lives. Those lessons will seem even more fragmented and nonsensical to him than they did, long ago, to me.

  I am far away from the shade of the talal tree now. Like hordes and hordes of our relatives and fellow Muslims, I have settled, forever, in the land of the infidels.

  I find it hard—as I always did—to explain to you what countries are. I remember putting my school atlas on your lap in Nairobi when we came to live in Kariokor. You were deriding Haweya and me about getting too close to our Kenyan schoolmates; you called them slaves. I told you that we need to respect people in whose country we live. You were puzzled by this word country, just like you were puzzled by the idea of a country called Somalia. You asked how the proud sons of the great clans, Isaq and Darod, could accept some invisible line that they were not allowed to cross. You pushed the atlas off your lap and said that, through tricks and magic illusions like these pictures, the infidel convinced people who belonged apart to accept silly fences and imaginary borders. You insisted that we remain loyal first and foremost to God and the bloodline.

  Grandma, countries do exist. But your instinct about the disunity of the proud sons of Darod and Isaq was right. There is no Somalia. We are famous now for lawlessness and vicious violence; we are known as bandits of the sea and for our religious zeal, our will to kill and die for nothing.

  Everywhere today Muslims live in trying circumstances. Most Muslim countries are ruled by violence and threat; they fail to produce goods and minds of quality. There is no union in such countries, no sense of making a better future.

  But in the Qurbe, the lands of the white infidels, life is different. Here, flags represent real union. You taught me to admire strength, to learn and to keep an eye open for strategies of survival that work. Grandmother, the infidels’ strategies for survival work better than ours.

  Remember how the milk ladies in Mogadishu would crouch for hours, tugging and pulling and squeezing between the legs of those grouchy cows to get as much milk as they could? How I wish you were with me the day I visited the farm in Holland where Ellen, my first Dutch friend, grew up. Her family had fewer cows than the Hawiye milk maids, but they were much fatter and more patient. When it came time for them to be milked, Ellen’s brother unhooked thin tubes, like the ones we used when we ran water from the storage barrel to our bucket. He attached them to the udders of the fat cows while they grazed on hay. Then he turned on an electrical switch, like the one we used to turn on the lights in Saudi Arabia. And to my amazement and wonder the tu
bes sucked and transferred the sweet milk from their swollen udders to the empty pails. Within the hour Ellen’s brother had more milk than all the women in the markets of Hodan and Hawlwadag.

  The wonders of the infidel are not limited to the milking of cows. I see firsthand their way of life and think that if you had had the chance, like me, you would have been glad to witness it and grateful to learn a few of their tricks to keep you alive.

  The secret of a Dutchman’s success is his ability to adapt, to invent. The Dutchman’s approach to solving problems encourages him to bend nature to his wish rather than the other way around. In our value system, Grandma, like the thorn trees, like the baobabs, like dawn and dusk, we are all set firmly as who or what we are. We bow to a God who says we must not change a thing; it is he who has chosen it. When our people wandered through the desert from oasis to oasis, we did not create permanent wet spaces, we didn’t bend rivers and lakes to our will or dig deep into the earth for wells.

  Grandmother, do you remember when you traveled from Sool, in the Dhulbahante lands, across the sea, to Yemen? You must have walked several days to the road, wondering what you would find there. Perhaps you paid a man with a cart or a truck to take you across the desert to the port of Berbera. Then you crossed the sea on a small boat. You voyaged in a time machine. You sat in a magic boat that carried you to a different era. You did not realize it, but you had sailed, all at once, hundreds of years into the future.

  You were not alone in this adventure. Thousands of others also moved from their huts built in the shade of thorn trees, from their springs, wells, and oases and the routines of millennia, from their kith and kin, from their gods, their spirits, their narrative of what life is, what to look forward to, and what pitfalls to avoid. Thousands from all corners of the world made the same sudden leap into the future.