From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  But her attitude toward the new baby made me feel confused and angry. Ma had just lost a child; Mahad and I a sister. Why would she be upset about the arrival of a new life?

  “As always, off you’ll go to air my shame to other women,” she ranted.

  I protested; all I wanted to do was to see my brother’s baby. But Ma cut me off. “That boy is a wa’al, a bastard, he is not Mahad’s child. The harlot gives herself to any man who throws her a shilling.”

  Mahad broke in. “Stop it, Ma, please, Ma, I beg you.”

  “May the almighty Allah take you both!” she cried, shaking. “He took away Haweya to protect me from her shame.”

  I was aghast. This was a jolt back into reality, hearing Ma curse and writhe in self-pity like this. I had been gone for over five years. I had forgotten or repressed the memory of her vindictiveness, her resentment, her ranting, which when we were young had usually been directed at me. Clearly she had found a new scapegoat: Mahad’s wife, Suban.

  Mahad had suggested that I should sneak off to see Suban and the baby, so as not to upset our mother while she was mourning the death of her daughter. I thought it ironic and bizarre that he felt he could not celebrate the birth of his son.

  Now, as I sat on a mattress across from Suban, watching her lament her fate in a raised voice that had her newborn squinting with displeasure on her lap, I marveled at the similarity between Ma and my sister-in-law: both tall and thin; both burning with resentment. It must be difficult to cope with having a baby for the first time, particularly in such circumstances. But the sense of despair Suban felt at being let down by my brother caused in her the same anger and confusion that my mother felt when my father neglected his responsibilities to her and his children. And her response was the same: placing the responsibility for her own destiny on external factors.

  “Ayaan, I hold you and your family responsible for abandoning me,” she began. “You are here now in Nairobi, not for me, not for your only male heir—you are here because your sister died. And what have you brought me? What have you brought for your nephew? You came from a rich country and yet you come here empty-handed.

  “Do you know how your mother treats me?” she continued. “Do you know of her campaign to separate me from your brother? She thinks she hurts me, but she’s hurting your nephew, your bloodline. Allah the Almighty is my witness, I shall always tell this boy, my son, about your mother’s machinations.”

  Her voice grew louder as she explored the possibilities of revenge she had in store for the Magan family. “I have on my lap the only male who carries on the name of Hirsi Magan,” she screamed. The baby wriggled and twisted his head from side to side. Still glaring at me, she tried to pop her nipple into his mouth. He cried even more loudly.

  The room was dimly lit with a feynoos, the paraffin lantern most commonly used by Somalis. There was a switch and a lightbulb fastened to a wire hanging from the roof, but I surmised that the electricity had been turned off. In the flickering light I could see that the paint was peeling from the walls in some places. The floor between Suban’s mattress and the mattress I sat on was cement, painted in red; this paint too was peeling in some places. In one corner of the room was an iron charcoal brazier with a pot of tea on it, and to keep the odors of food and diapers suppressed Suban had set up a dab-qaad, or fire-carrier, a domed piece of pottery pierced with air holes that held embers of frankincense.

  The room was tiny, almost a closet, with one minuscule window; the ceilings were blackened from the cooking smoke. There was no need at all to shout; in that small space, I could hear her very well.

  Suban caught my eye as I glanced around the room. “I grew up in a villa in Mogadishu,” she said, sounding suddenly desperately pathetic. “If any of you Magans ever came to us, my father would honor you, treat you like kings. Look at this miserable room where your brother and mother have put me. I would not put animals here. I gave your brother my honor, my womb, I bore him a son. And you—my cousin, my sister-in-law—you are rich. I know the story. You drive around in a fancy car; you make money from the misery of the refugees in Holland, translating for the infidels. And yet you did not bother to bring the little boy anything. You are rich and you do not share a penny.”

  Sitting across from Suban, I thought of the reports I translated for the parents of Somali children living in Holland. These reports were compiled by Dutch psychologists and pediatricians working for the social services to analyze children with developmental problems. Some had motor difficulties because their harassed mothers penned them into cribs or harnessed them to prams and buggies for far too long. Others were understimulated in their cognitive and social development, particularly their faculty of language. Many of these children had first been introduced to toys and writing and drawing implements when they arrived in school at the age of four or five. They had not been groomed to take on the challenges of living in a modern world. Their parents had failed to provide proper tools.

  How would my tiny nephew fare under his mother’s care? Her complaints of my mother and Mahad’s neglect were justifiable. Suban was barely literate, but seemed strong, resilient, able to cope. But like my mother, Suban did not speak any language except Somali, and like Ma she despised the Kenyans. Where would this baby go to school? Suban had grown up with servants, Somali Bantus, known as Sab, who commonly worked almost as slaves for the higher clans. Would she be able to care for her son? And how would he fare in Nairobi, without a proper father? It was not likely that Mahad would be much of a protector and guide.

  Mahad and Suban disagreed on everything, from whose fault it was that she got pregnant to the name of their child. Mahad had chosen the name Ya’qub; Suban wanted to call the baby Abdullahi, slave of Allah. She had my mother’s fanatical religiosity and adherence to Arabic names and all things Arab-related.

  As I held my wriggling nephew in my arms, it came to me for the first time that, viewed from the perspective of many generations, my family was hurtling backward instead of progressing. My grandfather Magan had earned his nickname, The Protector of Those He Vanquished, by conquering and annexing land that belonged to other clans. My father, his son, was able to adapt from the life of a legendary Somali warlord to that of a modern leader. He read Italian in Rome and English in America and went back to Somalia to contribute to building a nation. But his only son, Mahad, was a dropout from school, unable to earn a living. Mahad’s own son would be brought up in this tiny, cell-like room in a Somali enclave of Nairobi, where the roads seemed to have dissolved, leaving large potholes filled with dust in dry weather and mud in the rain.

  In the past none of this would have struck me as unusual. Now, though, to my newly Dutch eyes, the whole neighborhood was a festering cauldron of disease and poverty. I returned to Ma’s house on foot. Eastleigh was bursting with new inhabitants, refugees who were still pouring out of Somalia or the huge refugee camps along the border. They brought lice, scabies, and tuberculosis.

  The night after I visited Suban, Mahad had told me that he was going to divorce her. I asked him why. I thought he was going to tell me, “I don’t love her, I hate her, I don’t want to be with her.” I expected him to say, “She’s a bad woman, spiteful and malicious and I can’t bear her.” Instead he said, “She promised not to get pregnant, and she got pregnant.”

  I was shocked. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I told her how to count the menstrual cycles,” he said. “I told her the day they came, the day they ended, and when she could get pregnant. And she promised me, she was going to observe this. She betrayed me.”

  I found it difficult to control my rage at Mahad’s attitude. I told him how irresponsible he was being, that he had a healthy baby boy with a woman who was of our clan. I said, “You just wanted to have a good time with her. Now, as always, you don’t want to take responsibility—you are letting that poor girl down and you are letting your baby down.”

  Mahad was clenching his fists and his jaw. The last time he hit me was in 1
986, before he went to Somalia. I thought he might hit me again. He did not; he just walked away.

  This was not the right time for a fight. I had to avoid trouble. Mahad and my mother could take away my passport if they wanted to. They could keep me in this terrible place to teach me a lesson, and without my passport I might never be able to go back to my life of freedom in Holland.

  * * *

  After a few weeks in Nairobi I returned to Holland, to my job translating for Somali refugees and immigrants interacting with the Dutch social services. I saw many Somali mothers with babies who looked just like Mahad’s son, who had been abandoned by men just like my brother. They were tormented by mothers-in-law just like my mother, and like my family they were all focused backward, to a mythical past of life as nomads in the Somali desert. They would tell their little children about Somalia’s heroes, about milking camels, and to hate other clans. They would emotionally blackmail their children not to become “too Dutch,” to speak Somali instead of Dutch and not give up their culture.

  These children performed poorly in school. As part of their evaluations they were given puzzles to work out; they were required to say “please” and “thank you” and to behave properly at the dinner table. In Holland these are important indicators that children are well-adjusted. But all the Somali children I translated for, who in their homes certainly ate on the floor, with their hands, flatly failed these tests. That meant they would not go to a normal school; they would go to a “special school” for “remedial learning.” The Dutch government would spend a lot of money on coaching them to catch up.

  There seemed to be a pattern of such disconnects between the expectations of the parents and the reality of the children in many immigrant families in Holland—not just Somalis, but also families from Morocco, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Yugoslavia. I was amazed that officials in so many different institutions—social workers, schoolteachers, the police, child protection services, domestic violence agencies—all assumed that there was some deep cultural puzzle that they did not understand. In itself that was not a bad assumption, but then they proceeded to protect these puzzling cultural norms. This was the advice they received from anthropologists, Arabists, Islamologists, cultural experts, and ethnic organizations, all of whom insisted that these behaviors were something special and unique and worth preserving in these homes.

  I worried about my brother’s child. How could he ever become successful in the modern world with the familial strife around him?

  After a short interval, just as he had led me to expect, Mahad divorced Suban. With all his notions of noble upbringing and family honor, with all his lofty illusions of becoming a prince, he couldn’t even act with integrity in his own personal life.

  I decided to convince my mother to go back to Somalia. She had always complained that my father had deprived her of the company of her family and forced her to live among foreigners. She wanted to go home, so I told her I would pay for her to go. She would be with her brother and his children, her sisters and their children. She would go back to the sounds and smells of the Dhulbahante lands where she was born.

  Even though I encouraged Ma to return to her place of birth, which lies far removed from the constant unrest in Mogadishu, I worried about this move. Ma was used to the luxury of living in a large city. Nairobi is not the best city in the world, but there you are protected from the worst of the weather and, most of the time, you have electricity and running water. There are doctors. You buy milk in packs; you do not milk the cows yourself. You do not have to slaughter animals for meat; you buy it. To get to my mother’s apartment in Nairobi, you had to walk up four flights of stairs, without an elevator. But there was no threat from wild animals, like snakes and scorpions and other reptiles. She had a toilet and a bathroom.

  I said all of this to Ma. She told me, “I want to go back. I am alone, lonely. I want to be with my family.”

  So in 1998 I paid for her to make the long journey to Las Anod with an escort, and she left. Suban and Mahad were already divorced; according to Shari’a law, all Mahad had to do was get a couple of his buddies and pronounce the talaq, the declaration “I divorce thee, and Allah is my witness.” But now, at least, Suban could not complain that Ma was interfering between her and Mahad, and Mahad could not complain that was he was being held hostage by our mother. I thought I had fixed the problem.

  During this period Mahad and I corresponded a little. He would phone or write lists of demands specifying the consignment of clothes I should send him and the business contacts I should make. He was imperious, ranting; his temper seemed always on the brink of explosion. He would explain at length that he was planning to get together a militia to defend the Somali coast from polluters. At five guilders a minute, these were expensive calls, and I remember them well. Although his pride was based on no visible achievement, Mahad often used the term honor. “Think about our name,” he would scold me, telling me that I was obliged to help him in the name of family honor.

  A few months after my mother left for Puntland I received a phone call from my father, who was in another part of Puntland at the time. His voice was sad. “Ayaan, my child, this time I am calling about Mahad.”

  I felt the tears shoot to my eyes and a sensation of total helplessness. I thought Abeh was telling me that Mahad had died. Instead he said, “Mahad has lost his mind. It is worse than being dead. He is tied up in ropes. I have prayed to Allah to make him well again.”

  From what my father told me in further telephone conversations, it appeared that Mahad was suffering from manic depression.

  Of the three of us siblings, it was Mahad who should have succeeded in life. He was the brightest; he had by far the most opportunities; above all, he had the right to succeed. He was continually encouraged to think of himself as the biggest, best, most incredible being. Even as a child, Mahad was always highly sensitive to the requirements of honor. He would brood about the misdeeds of his sisters, and beat us. But as soon as a visitor showed up, whether a Kenyan or the most noble of our clan, he would be charming, reserved, and go to great lengths to demonstrate our family’s refinement and superiority.

  After the Somali civil war, however, Mahad saw that our father’s aspirations for Somalia’s future had become irrelevant. Our mother was abandoned and bitter; our sister had gone mad and died after multiple abortions; and I was living out of wedlock with an infidel. Having always aspired to greatness and wealth without ever developing any skills or holding down a job that would have enabled him to achieve them, Mahad must have seen all this as the failure of our family. Our family honor was in ruins. And since everyone had always told Mahad that it was up to him, the only boy, to uphold and defend the family’s honor, perhaps he believed that this failure was ultimately his fault, that he couldn’t live up to the aspirations and the duties of a good Muslim son.

  My nephew’s life was going to be in the hands of his mother. I thought that I had fixed the problems between the adults responsible for this young boy, but now Mahad would not be in any position to help his son. There seemed to be nothing I could do, at least not from Holland.

  I continued to maintain sporadic telephone contact with my father and my mother. Despite my fears, Ma seemed to be thriving in her village in Puntland. The money I sent her was enough to pay for her upkeep and her food. Sometimes she shared it with her relatives. Her nieces brought her water, carrying it in pails and jerry cans from nearby wells. They also swept her front yard, fetched her charcoal, and cooked for her. She said she was never alone. At night she sat with her brother and sisters and their children, and they talked about their childhood and the different directions that their lives had gone, about the civil war and the things that had brought them back to their place of birth. All around them was desert, scrub, sheep, and stretches of unpaved roads on which merchants traveled in trucks, bringing in sugar, rice, and other staples.

  Ma told me that Mahad was sick because he was bewitched by Suban. Sometimes she said
he was bewitched by my father’s first wife. Mahad spent long periods in the hospital, and longer periods holed up in a room in Eastleigh, barely supporting himself, let alone his child. Abeh said Suban was angry and lonely and that she had sent the little boy, hardly two years old, to Qardo, near the northern tip of Somalia, where Abeh was living. The little boy first responded to the name Abdullahi, but after he was put in my father’s hands he was called Ya’qub. I decided to call him Jacob. I begged Father to send him back to Nairobi so that he could go to a proper school. After a while Abeh persuaded Suban to take the boy back.

  Between 2001 and 2006 my family broke off all contact with me. I had no idea how Mahad’s young son was faring, no idea whether he was even attending school. In 2006 I reestablished contact with Mahad, who was still living in Eastleigh, the Somali neighborhood in Nairobi. His health and state of mind were precarious. Some days he seemed fine, and at other times he would be delirious, saying he heard voices. At such times he would rarely leave his bed. Although they were divorced, Suban visited him regularly, washing his clothes, cooking his food, calling relatives when Mahad became ill.

  After Abeh died, I got back in contact with Mahad. His voice wasn’t the same; it was slurred and slow, as if his tongue were too large for his mouth. The first conversation was one long monologue: I had abandoned him; I didn’t care about him; this is what success does, it estranges you from family; it alienates you from religion—a long list of accusations. The two concrete things he wanted from me were money (which I sent) and a visa for resettlement in America (which I didn’t send).

  Mahad refused to acknowledge his mental illness. I asked him if he were seeing a doctor. I begged him to go and get medicine. But he insisted there was nothing wrong with him. “I just talk to myself, that’s all,” he said. “I lie down and rest a lot. But they read the Quran over me and it makes me feel better.”