But I didn’t die, and the next day I had to go to school again. One of my eyes had burst a blood vessel, either from the ma’alim beating me, or my mother. I just told the other girls to leave me alone.
That Tuesday, Aunt Jim’o Musse came to visit my mother. Aunt Jim’o was the sister of Abshir Musse, one of the other prominent men in the SSDF. My father and Abshir and Jim’o felt close because their mothers were Isse Mahamud. When I came home from school Aunt Jim’o looked at me, and her voice changed. “Ayaan, what is it?” she asked. “Are you all right?” I said, “I have a headache, and I have this swelling, here.” When Jim’o Musse touched the left side of my head she looked worried. “Who has done this to you?” she said. “We have to get you to the hospital.” There was a lump like an overripe tomato, and she thought that if she pressed it with her finger she might go right through the skull, it was so soft.
My mother ran in and said, “What’s wrong? Who hit your head?” By then I was utterly drained. I said, “On Saturday, when you left, the ma’alim came back, and he hit me, and on Sunday you finished the job.” My mother began crying and wailing, “Now there’s this, on top of everything else—what have I done to deserve it all, Allah?”
Aunt Jim’o Musse was a top-flight Osman Mahamud, so she mobilized the clan. “Hirsi Magan’s daughter is probably going to die,” she told them. “She has a huge wound on her head, and we have to get her to the hospital.” The next morning men came and drove me to Nairobi Hospital, which was absolutely the finest hospital in Nairobi but very expensive. An Italian doctor ordered X rays. My skull was fractured, and a huge amount of blood had collected between my head skin and my skull; it was compressing the brain, and I needed an immediate operation. They shaved off my hair, which was horrible; I had an enormous scar and had to stay in the hospital for twelve days. The clan paid.
It was while I was in the hospital that I saw for the first time that my mother did, truly, love me, deep in her heart, and that all the abuse wasn’t really directed at me, but at the world, which had taken her rightful life away. I confessed to her that I had taken the pills, and every time she visited she would cling to me and tell me she loved me and cry. I had never seen her so vulnerable.
After that, she didn’t beat me again for several years.
* * *
When I went back to school, things were different. Girls I used to know had left; when I asked about it, people shrugged and said they had probably gone to be married. This had happened before, from time to time; even in primary school, one girl left because she was betrothed. Somehow, though, I had never really noticed it before.
Now I saw that Latifa, one of the Arab girls from the coast, had suddenly disappeared from our classroom. According to Halwa, one Saturday afternoon Latifa’s father told her that she was never going back to school; the time had come for her to prepare to become a woman. A classmate had been invited to Latifa’s wedding, and she talked about it. The groom was older, from Mombasa; there had been lots of presents. Latifa had looked frightened; she had cried, and her tears stained the dress she wore, which had been stiff and white.
One after another, girls began announcing that they were leaving school to get married. Mostly they told the teachers about it, too. It was perfectly respectable. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in authority to prevent these children from being taken out of school to marry total strangers, even though most of the girls were reluctant and some were petrified. One girl was forced to marry her uncle’s son, her cousin. A fifteen-year-old Yemeni classmate told us she had just been betrothed to a much older man; she wasn’t happy about it, but, she added, “At least it’s not as bad as for my sister—she was twelve.”
Zainab, a talkative Yemeni girl with round cheeks pockmarked with acne, never came back from the Christmas vacation of 1985. I met her a year later at a festival at the Muslim community center, next to school. She was pregnant, dressed in black, suddenly ugly and fat, with someone else’s toddlers in tow. Zainab said she almost never left the house without her mother-in-law. She pleaded for news of school. There seemed to be nothing left of her jokiness, the spark and mischief of the girl who used to fool around with us in the corridors.
I was invited to the joint wedding of Halwa’s sisters Siham and Nasrien, who were seventeen and nineteen and had finished school. Women from both sides of the match came to Nairobi from all over Kenya, from Yemen, from Uganda. Before the ceremonies began, all of these women had to inspect the brides. We all filed past Siham and Nasrien, who were lying stiffly on cushions on the floor, with their faces and torsos covered in a green cloth but their arms and legs bare. Every woman gasped at the beauty and ingenuity of the girls’ henna designs, though in reality, of course, they were inspecting the merchandise.
The next day the women congregated in a rented hall and feasted and danced—women only. The brides sat on a sofa in pink lace dresses, with makeup like a magazine photo, motionless, like perfect little dolls.
On the final night the feast was in another large hall, and men were present; they ate and talked on the other side of a long, high partition that divided the room, leaving only a raised dais visible to everyone. On the women’s side were tables with thousands of pastries and different dishes. I remember thinking I had never eaten food so delicious. After the feasting, the women began ululating, and the brides arrived, in Western dresses, with their faces covered. The two grooms walked up to the dais and lifted their brides’ veils, then sat down stiffly. They seemed awkward, straight from Yemen. It was like a scene from Saudi Arabia.
Nasrien had met her husband-to-be briefly, during the preparations. She seemed less nervous, resigned to the whole thing. But Siham, who hadn’t met the man she was marrying, was pale, and trembled. They left a little later, with the closest members of the family. I knew from Halwa that there would be bloody sheets, and more celebrating.
“What if you don’t bleed?” I asked Halwa. “That would mean you’re not a virgin,” she whispered. We looked away from each other quickly. Such a thing was unthinkable.
Halwa herself had been betrothed when she was about nine to a cousin she had never met. She didn’t want to marry him, but she knew that one day it would happen. Your parents decided these things for you. If your father was kind—and rich—then maybe he would find a husband for you who was also kind and rich. If not, well, that was your destiny.
Love marriages were a stupid mistake and always ended badly, in poverty and divorce; we knew this. If you married outside the rules, you didn’t have your clan’s protection when your husband left you. Your father’s relatives wouldn’t intercede on your behalf or help you with money. You sank into a hideous destiny of impurity, godlessness, and disease. People like my grandmother pointed at you and spat at you on the street. It was the worst thing you could do to your family’s honor: you damaged your parents, sisters, brothers, and cousins.
But the allure of romance called to us from the pages of books. In school we read good books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and Daphne du Maurier; out of school, Halwa’s sisters kept us supplied with cheap Harlequins. These were trashy soap opera–like novels, but they were exciting—sexually exciting. And buried in all of these books was a message: women had a choice. Heroines fell in love, they fought off family obstacles and questions of wealth and status, and they married the man they chose.
Most of my Muslim classmates were steeped in these cheap paperbacks, and they made us all unhappy. We, too, wanted to fall in love, with men we imagined in our bed at night. Nobody wanted to get married to a stranger chosen by her father. But we knew that the best we could do was simply stave off the inevitable. Halwa’s father allowed all his daughters to finish school before marrying them off. Halwa used to beg her father to let her off the hook even after she had finished school. She used to tell me sometimes that I was lucky: with my father away, no one would make me get married before I finished my first round of exams, at least.
* * *
I turned sixteen, an
d a new teacher arrived to teach Islamic education. Religious education was a compulsory subject at Muslim Girls’, and it was divided into two sections: Islamic and Christian. The Islamic class, which we naturally attended, was dry and dull, the least spiritual class you could imagine. There was no analysis, no ethical discussion, just basic, neutral historical information; we learned lists of battles and revelations by the Prophet, following a curriculum for the national exams.
But Sister Aziza was different from any other teacher we had ever had. For one thing, she wanted to be called by her first name, Sister Aziza, rather than Miss Said. For another, she was veiled. Not just with a headscarf, which many teachers wore; Sister Aziza cloaked herself in full hidjab. Thick black cloth fell from the top of her head to the tips of her gloves and the very limit of her toes. It was spectacular. Her pale, heart-shaped face stood out against a sea of black. Sister Aziza was young and beautiful—light-skinned and fine-nosed—and she had a smile in her eyes. She never shouted the way other teachers did.
The first thing Sister Aziza asked was, “How many of you are Muslims?” The whole class put their hands up, of course. We were clearly Muslims, had been since birth. But Sister Aziza shook her head sadly, and said, “I don’t think you are Muslims.”
We were startled. Not Muslims? What could she possibly mean? She pointed at me. “When was the last time you prayed?” I quaked inwardly. It had been over a year since I had ritually washed myself and put on the white cloth and prostrated myself for the long ritual submission to God. “I don’t remember,” I mumbled. Sister Aziza pointed to other girls in the class. And you? And you?” All but a few said they couldn’t remember either.
We were not true Muslims, Sister Aziza sadly informed the abashed and suddenly silent classroom. Allah did not look on us with delight. He could see into our hearts, and He knew we were not dedicated to Him. The goal of prayer was awareness—constant awareness of the presence of God and the angels—and an inward submission to God’s will that permeated every thought and action, every day.
Sister Aziza reminded us of the angels we had learned about in school in Saudi Arabia, who hovered above each of our shoulders. On the left and on the right, they recorded our thoughts, intentions, and ideas—bad and good. Even if we did cover ourselves and pray, that was not sufficiently meaningful for God. What counted was the intention. If your mind strayed—if you were doing it for the wrong reasons—God and the angels could look in your heart and know.
We had heard all about Hell. That was what Quran school was mostly about: Hell and all the mistakes that could put us there. The Quran lists Hell’s torments in vivid detail: sores, boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels, the everlasting fire that burns you forever, for as your flesh chars and your juices boil, you form a new skin. These details overpower you, ensuring that you will obey. The ma’alim whose class Haweya and I now had to attend on Saturdays used to shriek out the taboos and restrictions, the rules to obey, spitting sometimes with the excitement of it: “You will go to Hell! And YOU will go to Hell! And YOU, and YOU—UNLESS! . . . ”
Hell in the Quran has seven gates. The heat and pain of burning are endless. The thirst is intense and causes so much pain, so much more than any thirst does on earth, that you start wailing for water. The searing juices from your burning body are thrown into your mouth. You long for Heaven, and this longing goes on forever and ever. This intensely harsh, desertlike Hereafter was much more vivid to us than Heaven. In the Quran, Heaven was a cool climate, with breezes and delicious drinks; this was pleasant, but rather vague.
Sister Aziza believed in Hell, there was no question about that. But she didn’t emphasize fear, as all the other preachers did. She told us it was our choice. We could choose to submit to God’s pureness and light and earn a place in Heaven, or we could take the low road.
Her classes were compelling, but I didn’t become an instant convert. And what was so great about Sister Aziza was that she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind if we didn’t wear white trousers under our skirts to hide our legs. She didn’t mind if we didn’t pray five times a day. She told us God didn’t want us to do anything—not even pray—without the inner intention. He wanted true, deep submission: this is the meaning of Islam. “This is how Allah and the Prophet want us to dress,” she told us. “But you should do it only when you’re ready, because if you do it earlier and you take the robe off again, you’ll only be sinning more. When you’re ready for it, you’ll choose, and then you’ll never take it off.”
* * *
Often Mahad brought two of his best friends home with him on weekends. Both were Kenyans, but Mahad didn’t want to tell Ma that he had only Kenyan friends; she wouldn’t have let two Kenyan kids into the house. So Mahad cooked up a story that his best friend, who was in reality named Kennedy, was a Somali boy called Yusuf, from eastern Kenya, where they don’t speak Somali anymore. My mother didn’t mind that so much, and at least having a friend at home kept Mahad inside her four walls. (She tolerated the other friend, who was called Olulo. His features were so Kenyan that there was no way Mahad could pretend he was Somali.)
When the boys came in late in the evening I would often be busy preparing the dough for the next morning’s breakfast, and I’d cook them up some dinner. Yusuf was cute, and kind to me, and those evenings were fun—making jokes, being teased. In the beginning Yusuf and I were never alone together, but gradually we began bumping into each other in the kitchen. He began coming over even if Mahad was out, claiming he was looking for him. He used to joke with me that his name wasn’t really Yusuf, it was Kennedy, and he was Kenyan. I didn’t believe him, of course. Yusuf was interested in me; I knew it, and liked it. There was no touching—nothing was said, or done—but every so often a meaningful stare made my knees tremble.
Sister Aziza never actually told us we should robe as she did, or not to go to the cinema or talk to boys. She just read through the verses in the Holy Quran, using an English-Arabic edition, so we could understand it. Then she talked about them. She said, “I’m not telling you to behave like this. I’m only telling you what God said: avoid sin.”
I knew precisely what Sister Aziza meant when she talked about sinning. Sin was the feeling I had when I was with Yusuf. The sudden, tingling awareness, the inner excitement. At night I thought about how much I would like to marry Yusuf when I grew up. I tried to put it in a context where this feeling would not be sinful.
One evening Yusuf asked if I’d like to go to the movies with him. My heart pounding, because this was clearly forbidden, I said yes. We agreed to meet in Uhuru Park, the big park in downtown Nairobi; that way nobody from the neighborhood would see us. I wore a short dress—at least, it seemed short to me: knee-length. And I used deodorant for the first time. It felt wanton.
I took the matatou, the rattling Kenyan minibus, by myself. There he was, by the lake, where he said he’d be. We had an hour before the film would begin. As we walked around, talking, Yusuf fumbled for my hand. My heart thudded so hard when he touched me I thought people must have heard it.
We sat on the grass and talked about Yusuf’s family, and Kisii, where his family lived, and his brother’s house where he stayed on weekends in Nairobi. He asked me to call him Ken, which still seemed like a joke. I still didn’t know he was really Kenyan, though it wouldn’t have made any difference to me. I wouldn’t have minded what he was. Ken asked, “How do you feel about me?” and I said, “I really like you.” He said he really liked me, too, and we started to kiss.
It was my first kiss. It was wonderful, and went on for a long time. That’s all we did: held hands, kissed, and then we went to the cinema and he took me to the bus stop and went away. And all the way home I felt I was floating.
Ken and I didn’t see each other very often. I could escape my mother’s surveillance only once in a while, and even when I did, I knew that any Somali person who walked past could report us, so we couldn’t relax our guard very often. But the feeling of kissing was
the best I had ever felt in my life. I told Ken, “You know I can’t sleep with you,” and he said, “I know. You’re Somali and you have to remain a virgin. I love you very much and I will wait for you. We’ll get married.” It was completely mutual, completely innocent, and it felt so good.
But I also knew that it was evil. I was living on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honor; and there was Sister Aziza and God.
* * *
In the classroom, Sister Aziza listed the seductions of Satan: the desire to look beautiful and attract men; the thrill of having fun; and music and evil books. She knew about these things. Sister Aziza was an Arab Kenyan, from the coast, and after she left school she was a stewardess and a bank teller in Nairobi. For both jobs, she told us, she had to dress in pumps and Western dresses and fix her hair.
But that life had been too empty for her. She found that what she truly wanted was to become a good Muslim, so she went to study in Saudi Arabia, in Medina. Her faith had become deeper, straighter, more pure. She had cast aside ignorant practices, such as praying to saints. She had returned to the true faith at the source of Islam; this was why she had chosen to cover herself, to seek the deeper satisfaction of pleasing God.
As women, we were immensely powerful, Sister Aziza explained. The way Allah had created us, our hair, our nails, our heels, our neck, and ankles—every little curve in our body was arousing. If a woman aroused a man who was not her husband, she was sinning doubly in God’s eyes, by leading the man into temptation and evil thoughts to match her own. Only the robe worn by the wives of the Prophet could prevent us from arousing men and leading society into fitna, uncontrollable confusion and social chaos.
She was strict about obedience and hygiene. Every month, Sister Aziza told us, we must shave our underarms and pubic hair to make ourselves pure. We must purify ourselves after our periods. Womanhood was both irresistibly desirable and essentially filthy, and all these interventions were necessary to earn Allah’s pleasure.
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