Khadija introduced us. This was my cousin Mahmud, the son of my mother’s brother, Uncle Muhammad. Mahmud lived with Khadija when he was home from the army. His mother had died; he didn’t care for his stepmother, and so, when he was still a teenager, he had become a soldier. Khadija had no children—she was barren—so she had looked through the family’s children and selected Mahmud.
I politely gave Mahmud news of my mother, trying hard to hold my gaze against the obviously sexual interest in his eyes. This man was looking at me as a woman, quite openly; it was almost carnivorous.
Then Khadija asked me about Abshir. She had heard the talk, of course. I had no idea what to say, and blurted out, “I had feelings for him in that way, but now I don’t want to spend my life with him.” Which was at least the truth, although the truth about these things always somehow seemed to be impolite in Somalia.
Khadija’s manner abruptly shifted. She leaned over the table, her eyes glinting, and cooed, “But my dear, I have just the person for you!” Then she swept her arm over to the end of the table, where Mahmud was sitting. As he smiled, he seemed to be evaluating me, quite deliberately, from head to toe. Was I disciplined enough? Resilient enough? Proud enough? Or was I a weakling, chaotic, one who gives in easily and allows herself to be defeated by the harsh side of life? I felt undressed. But more than that, I felt exposed.
I passed muster. Khadija invited me over the following Thursday for dinner, and once again Mahmud was there. Halfway through the meal Khadija announced she was going to pray, left the room, and never reappeared. The meal went on, scrupulously politely, with both of us pretending nothing unusual was going on. Mahmud asked if I had ever been outside Mogadishu and offered to take me. I parried by inviting Haweya along, too. We called each other “cousin”: “my dear cousin,” “my very dear cousin,” “my lovely cousin.”
The next day Mahmud arrived in a car to take us to the country. Haweya had met him before—she had told me how handsome our cousin Mahmud was—and now her eyes widened when she looked at the way his shoulders filled his white shirt. “So, is he going to be your boyfriend?” she asked me in English, and again in English I answered, “Don’t be silly. That would be incest.”
Mahmud told Haweya to translate, and she did. He smiled again, showing his white teeth, and answered, “Not at all, my lovely cousin. Maternal cousins are perfect mates, I’ve been told.” Haweya almost licked her lips.
Mahmud was utterly gorgeous, the malest man I’d ever seen, and I fell in love with him. He was used to taking charge. Not refined; not a tortured intellectual, like Abshir. Mahmud quoted old fables and roared with laughter, and he flirted with me mercilessly.
When Mahmud looked at me I felt as if I were on fire. But he never made a sexual move, and he obeyed all the conventions. He absolutely exuded the impression that his loins were burning for mine, but he never once touched me. I was his cousin. Family honor was involved. Any kind of sexual contact between us would have been deeply improper—unthinkable. I thought about it constantly myself, but I couldn’t possibly make the first move.
We took to meeting every weekend at Aunt Khadija’s house. She peppered me with pronouncements on the horror of marrying men from strange families and the advisability of marrying a cousin: the family will always look after you; you are so close; you understand each other. She also told me it was a mistake to marry Osman Mahamud men like Abshir. They were too political, she told me, and too self-involved, and they marry second wives without even informing you. She never once mentioned my father, but I knew what she meant. And I was glad she did not mention him: for all the authority Khadija exuded, I wouldn’t accept any criticism of my father.
Aunt Khadija was still haughty, but far warmer to me now that I was caught in the web she’d woven. She hadn’t changed since the days when she married my father and mother: it was impossible to resist her wiles.
* * *
Mahmud had no more future in the Somali army; in fact, very soon there was going to be no Somali army at all. He told us that large groups in the army were defecting to the militia of their clans, smuggling weapons and stocks of ammunition along with them.
Alone among our close family, Khadija had supported Siad Barré all her life. The overthrow of his brand of communism was looming, and she saw this as the betrayal of Somalia’s only hope for a bright future. To Aunt Khadija, only communism could overcome the bitter divisions of Somalis by clan, and to reject it was only more evidence of the barbaric and narrow self-interest inherent in our clan system.
I kept to myself my own memories of communism: the long queues in the burning sun, the whispering in our house, the imprisonment of my father, the way I was beaten in school to sing songs in praise of Siad Barré. Instead, I asked her about the Brotherhood, to which I was still very sympathetic.
Khadija compared the Brotherhood to cancer, the sickness that my Aunt Hawo died of when I was small. She said the Brotherhood did not represent true Islam and had no knowledge of our Prophet, but though they were small, they would swell like the tumor in my aunt’s breast and eat our country from the inside until they finally destroyed us all. She told me to stay away from them.
Then Mahmud told us he had been given a prestigious award to study in Russia and would be leaving the country in a few days, perhaps for a long time. Before he left, Aunt Khadija informed us both that it was high time to make things formal. There was no big proposal scene, as in the West, with suitor on bended knee: Khadija handled the whole thing. She talked, I agreed.
In spite of our mutual attraction, Mahmud and I weren’t compatible in any way. Our conversations were never inspiring the way my talks with Abshir had been, or close and deep as they had been with Kennedy. I’m not even sure we liked each other much. I certainly hadn’t evaluated his suitability as a partner for the rest of my life. I was simply consumed with lust for him. That’s what it amounted to: a storm of hormones. I agreed to marry him just to be able to have sex.
Excision doesn’t remove your desire or ability to enjoy sexual pleasure. The excision of women is cruel on many levels. It is physically cruel and painful; it sets girls up for a lifetime of suffering. And it is not even effective in its intent to remove their desire. Even though I had been infatuated with Kennedy and Abshir, I was completely unprepared to deal with the force of my desire for Mahmud.
Mahmud wanted us to marry quickly, before he left. It would be like staking a claim: no other man could come near me. My brother would never agree to a quick wedding, though. Because I was Hirsi Magan’s daughter, by rights my marriage should be a big clan event. Mahad would insist that my father approve the match, and that could take months.
We would have to be married in secret, Mahmud said. He made the arrangements. The ceremony would take place the night before he left Somalia. A mutual cousin of ours, Ali Wersengeli, agreed to stand in as my guardian. I knew that wasn’t right—it should be my father or brother—but Mahmud said it would be all right. Khadija would smooth matters over with my mother’s family. As for my father’s family, they wouldn’t like it, but nobody could really oppose a marriage between maternal cousins. Even if we eloped without the proper authorization, it was clearly an acceptable match, and nobody could undo it.
Today, I know that we were risking all sorts of genetic abnormalities in our offspring, but we had absolutely no idea of such a thing. In Somalia, as in much of the Middle East and Africa, marriages between cousins are often seen as the safest unions possible: they keep the family wealth together, and any possible conflict will be quickly resolved by the couple’s relatives.
The night we were to be married, our nikah, the excitement of it caught me by the throat. I was twenty years old, and I was getting married in secret to the man I desired. I hadn’t even told Haweya; only Khadija knew. I spent the day drawing henna designs on my hands and feet. When Mahmud came to pick me up at Khadija’s house I was wearing a long red dress and high heels, the kind of clothes I had never even thought of wearing before,
and perfume. When I looked in the mirror, a grown woman looked back.
We went to a photo studio to be immortalized. Then we drove to the house of the qali who would perform the marriage ceremony. It was dark on the roads—once again, the electricity had been cut—so we parked and made our way by lantern down an alley. The sheikh was waiting for us outside the door of his house, in a white robe and white skullcap that shone out in the total blackness of the alleyway. My distant cousin Ali Wersengeli and another man I didn’t know were already there. It began to dawn on me that I was getting into something very serious, but it was too late to opt out now. My ankles were shaking as I stumbled down the alley in the darkness.
The qali nodded at us, then began asking the required questions.
“Are you Mahmud Muhammad Artan?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Ayaan Hirsi Magan? You are not required to answer, your presence is enough.”
I simply sat.
The qali recited Mahmud’s names and our respective ages. Then the qali turned to me and said, “Are you a virgin?” I kept silent, which was the appropriate answer, and he filled in “virgin” on the marriage certificate.
The qali pronounced that we were married according to the law of Islam, and then he asked us, “And the bride price is?”
We looked at each other—we hadn’t thought of it—and Mahmud said, “One Holy Quran,” the symbolic response. There was no one to pay a bride price to: I was a secret bride. Mahmud signed the document and asked for a copy, but the qali said no, it would have to be stamped and given to the authorities first. Ali would have to pick it up the following week.
There were grateful male handshakes and both the witnesses disappeared. I was now alone in a Land Cruiser with my cousin—my husband. I felt stunned by the enormity of what I had done, and stole a glance at him. He didn’t even look over at me. There was no touching now, either, not even one kiss. I knew what would be coming, though: it was my wedding night.
Mahmud swerved into the parking lot of the Hotel Arubo, the fanciest hotel in town. He hadn’t made a reservation, but he wanted to pay for a room with his wife. The reception clerk asked him for a marriage certificate; this was the growing Muslim Brotherhood influence. But Mahmud didn’t have one. He returned to the car, fuming, and cursing the Brotherhood. “I don’t know what is happening to this country,” he said. “Who are these people?”
It happened again at the next hotel, and then another. I ventured to wonder whether perhaps I should go in, and he yelled, “Have you lost your senses? Next morning there will be a poster of you calling you a prostitute: a woman with a man and no marriage certificate. Think of your name!”
The hotel he finally took me to must have been one of the cheapest places in Mogadishu, the kind of place where they didn’t check marriage certificates. The electricity still wasn’t working. We had to take a lantern to the room. A cockroach scuttled under the bed when the door opened. Mahmud handed me the lantern and looked into my face for the first time the entire evening. He said I could go into the bathroom and get ready.
I washed, mechanically, in the bathroom, which was filthy. Then I lay down on the bed, fully clothed: I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted everything to be wildly erotic, with me in the role of Marilyn Monroe or Lady Chatterley, but I didn’t even know how to undress. When Mahmud came back into the room he said, “Oh, you want to play coy?”
Coy was the last thing I wanted to play. I said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Take your clothes off, of course.”
So I did, awkwardly, woodenly. Nothing was happening as I had dreamed. I made an attempt at foreplay, like I’d read about in books, and Mahmud looked at me quizzically. “Hey, have you done this before?” he asked me.
I mumbled no, and let him get on with it. If I had lied and told Mahmud I had sexual experience, then perhaps we would have had foreplay; but then, of course, he would probably have divorced me. Because I admitted to being a virgin, there was no pleasure at all. Jawahir, Sahra, and all the other girls were right, I thought. Good girls are virgins who feel nothing at all.
It wasn’t rape. I wanted to have sex with Mahmud—just not this way. He gasped and shoved and sweated with the effort of forcing open my scar. It was horribly painful and took so long. I gritted my teeth and endured the pain until I became numb. Afterward Mahmud fell heavily asleep, and I went and washed again in the hideous bathroom. In every respect my wedding night had turned out exactly as Jawahir had described hers, a year before in Kenya.
Very early the next morning, Mahmud drove me back to Ibado Dhadey’s house. He was leaving for Russia that afternoon; I wouldn’t see him again. We bade each other adieu. I was on some kind of mental autopilot, but it must have seemed as though I were acting perfectly normally. Perhaps I was a little timid, but that may have seemed natural under the circumstances.
Ibado was frantic when I came in. I told her I had spent the night at Aunt Khadija’s, then went upstairs and washed, applying disinfectant to the cuts, just as Jawahir had done. I knew I never wanted to see Mahmud again. My scar hurt so much I could barely stand up, and I told Ibado I was ill. When Haweya came in, her face showed so much concern that I broke down and told her everything. I felt too bad about myself to carry the guilt alone. I had behaved abominably: I had given in to temptation, betrayed my family, and now I would be trapped forever by this man, by my own fault.
Haweya was perfect. She didn’t judge me; she seemed awed by the romance of the whole thing. When I told her how much I was hurting she cared for me. She told me she didn’t think the ceremony was legitimate. Ali Wersengeli couldn’t simply step in to act as my official guardian when my brother and father were both in the country. We both prayed to Allah not to let me become pregnant.
Ali Wersengeli came to the house a few days later to deliver a copy of the marriage certificate; he told me he had already sent the other copy to Mahmud in Russia. I put it away without reading it. By then I could sit up and walk, though the cuts were still painful. Two weeks later I got my period, and Allah’s benevolence was confirmed.
* * *
Inside the city, violence was quickly becoming so normal that people weren’t even very interested in reports of attacks unless they knew the person concerned. The soldiers were the worst: there was no money to pay them, and bands of soldiers would raid houses, preying on ordinary people. Occasionally there would be an outburst of gunfire, and children would run out into the street, responding to the sound of the bullets as if they were fireworks.
In the countryside, the rebellion against Siad Barré was becoming intense. The Macherten and the Isaq were fighting his army in the east and north; now the Hawiye revolt in the south was turning into open warfare, too. People openly sneered at Siad Barré and his weakened army. They said the Hawiye fighters had the city almost encircled; instead of Afwayne, they now called him the Mayor of Mogadishu because that was all the territory Siad Barré still held.
Halfway through October 1990, the telecom agency I worked at was closed down. It was becoming too unsafe for foreigners to stay in the country, and nonessential personnel of the UN were repatriated. One of them was my British boss. Listening to the radio in Kenya, Ma was becoming frantic. She insisted that Haweya and I come back to Nairobi.
A flood of nostalgia for Kenya washed over me. I missed the movies and books, I missed Halwa, and I missed my mother; it sounds odd, but I missed her moral honesty. I missed her clear sense of correct behavior, which I had expected to find in Somalia, and hadn’t. Instead, I had screwed up my life and my relationship with God. I felt ugly and confused, and when Ma summoned us home to Nairobi, I was relieved.
CHAPTER 8
Refugees
Haweya and I left Mogadishu in mid-November 1990, crammed onto wooden benches with about thirty others in the back of a pickup. We were accompanied by Qubqac, Ibado’s nephew and our second cousin once removed, who had some family over the border in Kenya. It was going to be a very long d
etour. The road to Kismayo on the coast of Somalia was already in the hands of the Hawiye rebels; it was far too dangerous to traverse. The only way for us Darod to make it safely out to Kenya was the long road up north to Baidoa, in the hills, and then west, across the desert. Even on this road, there might be bandits or stray members of the rebel armies, looking for adventure and crazy with qat.
A few hours’ drive out of town, we got to Afgoye, one of the main market towns of southern Somalia. The landscape became suddenly green. Along the river were fields of rice and orchards: papayas and guavas and plantations of bananas and mangos. The street stalls overflowed with food, and the meat was wonderful.
The people in Afgoye looked different, more like Kenyans. These were the descendants of slaves and peasants, the outcast Sab. They lived in the arable land that feeds the rest of Somalia, and yet these people were supposed to be inferior to us. They stepped off the pavement to let us by. One highborn Darod man from our pickup actually pushed aside an old Sab woman who didn’t move out of his way fast enough. It made me glad I was leaving. The open bigotry was one of the things I hated about Somalia. I had thought that belonging to a higher clan signified a higher morality. I didn’t see it as a justification for mistreating people on the basis of their physical characteristics and the quality of their blood. Yet whenever I protested about the blatant prejudice against people of the Sab clans I was called a communist.
When I thought about it, the attitude of the Sab themselves also exasperated me. In places like Afgoye and Baidoa they were in the majority: Why did they obey like this? What were they waiting for? Did they fear the airplanes of the higher clans, and the bombs? Or was it that they were dependent on the northern Somalis for money? Could they have truly internalized this idea of their own inferiority, this daily humiliation? Why didn’t they rise up?
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