My father bent down till he was level with us and he hugged us. He said, slowly, “If you go to a Saudi and do this”—and he clapped loudly in our faces—“it will cause the Day of Judgment, for the Saudis. They are sheep.”
“So it’s not the Day of Judgment?”
“A shadow has fallen over the moon,” he explained. “It is normal. It will pass.”
Abeh was right. On the Day of Judgment, the sun will rise in the west, but the next morning, the sun was safely in its usual place, fat and implacable, and the world wasn’t ending after all.
* * *
Our house in Riyadh had a balcony on the upper floor of the women’s section, where we slept. It was covered with a curtain and an intricate grille. We could sit there and look out into the street without being seen, and Ma sometimes did this for hours. One afternoon she was sitting there when she caught sight of two Somali men who were making their way to our house. When she recognized them, she made a strangled noise. Something was wrong.
The men knocked at the door and Ma said, “I know it’s bad news. Is it my son?” They said yes. My stepbrother, Muhammad, had been run over by a truck in Kuwait, and he was dead.
I had no memory of this older brother of mine, the product of the mystifying union of my mother with some other, alternate husband whom she hadn’t liked. My mother had told me stories about Muhammad. He had killed a scorpion that bit me when I was little: surely I remembered the scorpion, and Muhammad carrying me into the house? I didn’t. Muhammad had left Mogadishu when I was two or three years old, to live with his father in Kuwait.
But to Ma, Muhammad was to have been her savior. She would always say, “When I grow old Muhammad will come and rescue me from this life.” After she learned of Muhammad’s death, my mother went to her room, and a cloud of darkness and sadness fell over the house. Dhulbahante women came and attended to her and cooked for us, because Ma was frozen. It was as if she were in a coma, not crying, not shouting at us. She just lay there with a broken heart. All the adults told us, “Just this once be quiet and nice,” and for once we were. When my father came back from Ethiopia he, too, was as good as a house cat. He was affectionate to my mother, and called her Asha, and held her hand until finally she rose from her bed.
Abeh decided he should stage his political meetings at our house; that way, he could spend more time at home. Anywhere between five and twenty men would come to these meetings, and they would eat and talk until three or four in the morning. Sometimes their wives would come, too, and help my mother in the kitchen, but they were always far too sloppy for her. She needed help hosting all these people, and by now I was almost nine—old enough to work in the house.
These meetings happened almost every week. I had to clean and help prepare the food all afternoon, while Mahad, because he was a boy, played with the neighbors, and Haweya, because she was too little to do chores, pestered me. That was bad enough, but what I really hated was washing up after dinner, late at night, the dirty glasses and plates stacked across every surface. I had to stand on a little box so I’d be tall enough to wash the huge cooking pots; one of them was so deep I could climb inside it to scrub it. I remember how resentful I felt, and how sleepy.
One night I couldn’t bear it. I was so tired that I piled up all the dishes and stacked them inside the fridge—I just hid them. Then I quickly cleaned enough so that the kitchen looked nice. At dawn the next morning, when my father woke up for prayer, he opened the fridge to get a glass of cold water, and a stack of dishes crashed to the floor. The noise was enormous—it woke the whole household—and my mother raged into my bedroom. She hauled me out of bed to wash the dishes before school.
I cried and said it wasn’t fair. My father came in as I was finishing, and told me, “It isn’t fair, but it’s not a good idea to put the dirty dishes in the fridge. Just tell your ma, ‘I’m tired, I’ll do them in the morning.’” My father was kind, but sometimes he seemed entirely uncomprehending of my mother’s determination to instill responsibility and obedience into me, her eldest daughter.
* * *
One day in 1979 my father came home early and said we had been deported. We had twenty-four hours to leave the country. I never learned the reason.
Instead of going to school, we had to pack, while my Ma raged at my father with horrible anger. “It’s your fault,” she told him. “If you cared enough about your family this wouldn’t have happened. You trust everyone with your secrets.”
We went to the airport. My father said we had to get on the first flight out or the Saudi policemen would come to take us away. There was a plane leaving for Ethiopia, but Ma insisted we could not go to a non-Muslim country. The only other flight was to Sudan. Through the whole flight my Ma stared blackly at the sky.
When we landed in Sudan we weren’t allowed in the country. We spent four days at the airport in Khartoum. Finally we got on another plane, and this time it was indeed to Ethiopia. The evil unbelievers lived there, but we had no choice.
CHAPTER 4
Weeping Orphans and Widowed Wives
The first place we stayed in Ethiopia was an old mansion in the heart of the capital. It had chairs, which felt peculiar after a life of sitting on the floor. There were wooden floors and a Persian carpet and, intimidatingly, even servants to cook and clean. I think it was the first time I had ever seen a garden, with hedges and flowers and a little pond, and a gardener.
I suppose this mansion must have belonged to the Ethiopian government and was used to house visiting dignitaries. For in this country, my father was an important man. An official car came to drive him away to places. Meetings constantly took place downstairs; large, dark men smoked a lot and shouted at each other, sitting on gilt chairs in the formal dining room.
According to these men, all of them Somali exiles, the situation at home in Somalia was boiling over. My father’s opposition movement, the SSDF, was attracting huge waves of volunteers. People who made it across the border now were not coming to escape, but to prepare to fight. They were ready to die to take revenge on Afwayne. They still called him that. Siad Barré, The Big Mouth, the huge maw that crushed people.
In 1974, a revolution had overturned the Ethiopian monarch, Emperor Haile Selassie. A committee of low-ranking officers and enlisted soldiers known as the Derg took over, among them the brutal Mengistu Haile Mariam, who became Ethiopia’s next ruler. Siad Barré seized that moment to invade the Ogaden region, which Ethiopia claimed as its own but which was mostly occupied by Somali speakers, the Ogaden subclan of the Darod. The Ethiopian revolutionary leadership called for Soviet help, and the Soviets, abandoning Siad Barré, sent massive reinforcements to the Ethiopians. Siad Barré’s army was forced to retreat. Naturally, Ethiopia gave aid and shelter to the forces of Siad Barré’s opposition, my father’s SSDF among them.
In 1978, on the day that we left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, the attempted coup against Siad Barré’s government had been led by army officers who were all Macherten, like my father. To punish them, Siad Barré sent his army to destroy the Macherten lands. The troops burned settlements, raped women, and smashed the reservoirs that nomads had constructed to store rainfall. Thousands of people died of hunger and thirst. The government stole Macherten property and called it communism. With every new attack by Siad Barré, more volunteers poured across the border to Ethiopia, seeking to join forces with the SSDF and wreak vengeance.
By the time our family arrived in Ethiopia, the SSDF was an army, with a base of fighters on the border, at a place called Dirirdawa. Headquarters was a mansion just outside Addis Ababa, the capital city, behind a long high wall topped with broken glass and barbed wire, with a guard at the gate.
* * *
Abeh enrolled all three of us in school, which was taught in Amharic. We spoke only Somali and Arabic, so everything was completely foreign again for a little while. It wasn’t until I could communicate that I came to a startling realization: the little girls in school with me were not Muslims. They sai
d they were Kiristaan, Christian, which in Saudi Arabia had been a hideous playground insult, meaning impure. I went bewildered to my mother, who confirmed it. Ethiopians were kufr; the very sound of the word was scornful. They drank alcohol and they didn’t wash properly. They were despicable.
You could see the differences in the street. Ethiopian women wore skirts only to their knees, and even trousers. They smoked cigarettes and laughed in public and looked men in the face. Children were allowed to run around wherever they wanted.
Ethiopians were also much poorer than any kind of people I had ever seen, much poorer even than people had been in Mogadishu. Whole families of lepers—some of them children, with flies on their gummy eyes and stubs for limbs—implored us for money on the way to school. It was painful to walk past them. The worst, though, was the frighteningly empty, creamy gray eyes of the blind beggar down the road. I shuddered when I had to approach his corner.
Once, a woman who was walking ahead of us down a street in Addis Ababa simply spread her legs, squatted slightly, and pissed under her long skirt, right on the side of the road. My mother’s face contorted with disgust. She despised Ethiopia. But despite the beggars and the dirt, I adored it. The people were kind. The teachers didn’t punish anyone much. I had friends, for the first time. We never had to wear headscarves or long robes; we could run, and did run, for the first time in years. And I never had to wash the clothes or the dishes. It felt like being free.
After a few months, we moved across the city to the SSDF headquarters behind high walls. I don’t remember any kind of announcement: one afternoon we were simply brought there after school by Abeh’s driver. This building must have once been a palatial hotel, with its marble staircase and balustrade and seemingly endless carpeted corridors. We were housed in two bedrooms at the end of a corridor on the ground floor, and had a bathroom and a kitchenette.
At first our food was brought to us from the big kitchens by the Ethiopian cook. When my father was home the cook had to taste the food in front of us, to make sure it hadn’t been poisoned. We could go to the kitchen and run around the grounds, but if we were caught in the offices my father used to implore my mother to control us better.
Ma tried to make us stay indoors, but she couldn’t keep us there for long. The whole compound swiftly became ours to explore. To us, this was high adventure. Addis is green and lush—it rains often—and the grounds of the complex seemed huge. If we pestered the guard at the gate too much he used to dump us into the cracked old stone fountain near the entrance, which was so deep we couldn’t clamber out on our own.
Dozens of men in green uniforms came and went. When they were headed to the border, they carried guns. Most of them, though, were convalescents; they had been evacuated from the front, to the hospital, and now they were recovering from wounds and amputations. Some of the wounded men were friendly and played with us in the dirt.
After a few weeks Ma took out her charcoal brazier and began cooking our meals on the ground outside our rooms. Soldiers drifted by. Some of them would settle down to wait for my father to finish his evening broadcast for Radio Kulmis; these programs made his voice instantly recognizable to a whole generation of Somali exiles. We had evenings of poetry, which reminded us all of our Somali roots. Ma would cook chapattis and meat stewed with herbs, and the men would declaim lines they had memorized and compose apt replies. One of them was a great modern poet whose work Ma knew by heart, Khalif Sheikh Mohamoud.
It may be the Lord’s will that the Macherten be consumed like honey.
Like the wild berries in the plain of Do’aan, the Macherten have been devoured.
Hungry men yearn to bite the flesh of the prostrate corpses.
Weeping orphans, widowed wives are despoiled and stripped of their herds.
Humans must accept they are mortal, for Allah decrees it.
But it is hard to accept the gloating of the oppressor over the scattered bodies . . .
In Somali, the rhymes wail; they are hauntingly sad. After such evenings Ma would visibly soften. She told us stories of when she was little: watching great poets compete beside the fire in the desert, reciting more and more majestically until all concurred that a new, truly great poet had been found.
Most of these limbless, wounded men in Ethiopia knew they were not great poets, however, and felt their lives were over. There was a smell of failure about them, something not quite washed, stale with cigarette smoke and not enough sleep, and bitterness. The atmosphere was always thick with muttering. Everybody complained about Abdellahi Yusuf, the SSDF leader. He picked favorites, they said, stocking high places only with relatives from his subclan. Almost all the men who were not Macherten were leaving because of Abdellahi Yusuf. Those who remained grumbled about him.
Abdellahi Yusuf was an Omar Mahamud. My mother told us that the Omar Mahamud always think they should be in charge, but they always mess it up. Of course, my mother was married to an Osman Mahamud, so she would think that. With Somalis, everything is about your family: Osman Mahamud are arrogant. Dhulbahante are inflexible. The Isaq chew qat.
This is how it works. I am an Osman Mahamud, because thirteen generations ago, I had a forefather named Mahamud who had a son called Osman. In fact, Mahamud had three sons—perhaps more, but three were powerful enough to found subclans. Osman, the oldest brother, was a natural warrior, born to lead, which is why Osman Mahamuds are so arrogant—they feel an inborn right to rule. Isse, the youngest son, was a herder and a poet, and Isse Mahamuds, like my paternal grandmother, still do those things. Omar was the middle son, a perpetual malcontent, which is why the Omar Mahamuds never could manage anything.
So went the muttering. Because the wrong men were in charge of the SSDF’s logistics, there weren’t sufficient weapons. Ammunition didn’t arrive on time. Men we knew were killed: friendly soldiers who the week before had squatted down and played with us were pointlessly mowed down. There were massacres in which hundreds were killed or maimed. These were the kinds of conversations that my mother listened to as she cooked. My father had always presented his struggle as heroic; but to my mother, listening in, the reality seemed to be death and mayhem, the dream of an independent, free Somalia falling apart miserably as she watched.
There were hardly any Somali women on this compound. We were the only children. All the other leaders of the exiles’ army kept their families in Kenya, seven hundred miles to the south, where a huge community of Somalis lived. So my mother had to bring us up surrounded by only men. She hated that.
Some of the men expected her to make tea for them. Many of them chewed qat and left the old stalks around the place afterward. Once she caught Haweya and me drinking make-believe tea out of empty cups, waving cigarette butts in the air, and chewing old qat leaves. She flared up. “You can’t bring up young girls in a place like this!” she yelled at my father. “Do you think they’ll be children forever? How can girls grow up in a barracks, among men? What are you doing to your family?”
My sister and I thought it was a pity to spoil the little time we had with Abeh with these rows. I hated to hear my parents fighting. Although he never, so far as I know, lifted a hand to my mother, Abeh could get very angry. One afternoon we saw an ambulance arrive, and my father thundered into our rooms in a fury. Some man had raised his arm to hit him in an argument, he told us, and he had knocked the man down and broken his leg.
My mother became pregnant. She lost the baby, a little boy, who was stillborn. For several weeks, she was hospitalized and returned silent, bitter, unpredictably hostile.
After we had lived in Ethiopia for about a year, my father finally decided that my mother was right: we needed to be around other families. He would move us to Kenya, where most of the other exiled families lived. Ma didn’t want to go to Kenya; she wanted to move to a Muslim country. Kenya, too, was an infidel country. But the decision was Abeh’s to make.
* * *
That is how, by the time I turned ten, I had lived through three different po
litical systems, all of them failures. The police state in Mogadishu rationed people into hunger and bombed them into obedience. Islamic law in Saudi Arabia treated half its citizens like animals, with no rights or recourse, disposing of women without regard. And the old Somali rule of the clan, which saved you when you needed refuge, so easily broke down into suspicion, conspiracy, and revenge. In the years to come, clan warfare would sharpen and splinter and finally tear the whole of Somalia to pieces in one of the most destructive civil wars in Africa.
Of course, I didn’t see it that way then.
CHAPTER 5
Secret Rendezvous, Sex, and the Scent of Sukumawiki
We flew to Nairobi in July 1980. My mother loathed the idea; not only were Kenyans unbelievers, just like Ethiopians, but they looked different from us. To my mother, they were barely human. Ma told us that Kenyans were filthy and would infect us with hideous diseases. She said they were cannibals. She called them abid, which means slave, and dhagah, which means stones, and gaalo, another ugly word for infidel. My grandmother, who could navigate through the desert by the smell of fresh rain; whose nose could detect if a woman was pregnant; who would sniff the air and glance away scornfully and say someone was in heat—my grandmother said Kenyans stank. Throughout the ten years they lived in Kenya, the two of them treated Kenyans almost exactly as the Saudis had behaved toward us.
But my father chose Kenya because it was practical, a relatively wealthy country in those distant days; people said it was the safest place in Africa. In Kenya, my father had official refugee status: we could receive an education grant and living allowance from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He also knew that he could leave us there for part of the year, in the care of prominent members of the Osman Mahamud clan. There were many men who lived there who chose not to join the struggle as fighters, but who contributed funds and protected the families of men who did.
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