So Haweya had the abortion, and after she received her refugee status, she began attending proper language school. Something brightened about her for a while; my little sister’s sparky, quick wit began flashing through again. She could be charming, sharp, funny, stylish. But then she would slump again and stop looking after her clothes and her hair. Or she would turn on people; she could be very aggressive. She still wasn’t sleeping well.
* * *
I couldn’t register for the same course in social work as Ellen and Hanneke, although their college was in Ede. It was a Christian school: you had to acknowledge the existence of the Trinity to attend classes there. For me, at the time, that was absolute blasphemy. To associate Allah with other unities and say he had a child—you would burn in Hell for saying this. Allah is not begotten, nor does he beget. It was out of the question that I attend such a place.
I wanted to apply to a secular vocational college in Arnhem, but an official at Refugee Aid told me I wouldn’t be happy there: I should go to Driebergen, which was also a secular college but much more multicultural, a code word for ethnically mixed. Again, the advice was well-meaning but it was based on preconceived notions about where I, as an immigrant, would feel comfortable. And of course such advice only reinforced the immigrants’ urge to build enclaves.
When I went to Driebergen to apply, the administrator told me I would have to pass an admissions exam. There would be papers in Dutch, history, and civics. Reeling, I asked, “Where are the books to study for them?” The administrator said they had a class that helped students prepare for the exam. This preexam class lasted for four months: I could start in February 1994 and take the exam in June.
I went back to the government Labor Bureau and said I had found what I wanted to do. As I had dropped bookkeeping, could they now kindly pay for this precollege course in Dutch history? But the Labor Bureau refused: they couldn’t finance something that wasn’t authorized by the IQ test I’d taken. They said I would have to apply for a student grant, which I wouldn’t be eligible for until I was actually admitted to the college itself. So I paid for the preparation on my own.
It was nothing like school in Kenya. We sat in a circle and called the teacher by his first name. There was no “Good morning, Mrs. Nyere” in unison, and no uniform. If you failed the exams you got a second chance, which seemed a little foolish, but still, kind. And it was only three hundred guilders. For this, I didn’t mind scrimping.
The most fascinating class was history. Every week we discussed a chapter in the textbook, which covered not just Holland but the history of the modern world. Each country had a chapter, and I read every word of all of them. There was Germany: how it became a state, then the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War. The Russian Revolution: tsars, Bolsheviks, Stalin. The American civil rights movement, the Vietnam War. Each country had a life; it struggled and took form, systems rose and fell—it was like a story.
The book told a very romantic, optimistic view of modern history. There was a chapter on “Colonization and Decolonization,” which ended with prospects for a bright future for Africa. There was the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which brought an end to communism. There was the story of the United Nations. I was completely absorbed.
I realized this text was just an overview to give us a grip on what happened where. I wanted more. I wanted to study further why so many of the decolonized countries had fallen apart, and why the countries that I had lived in weren’t working.
That history book taught me Dutch. The civics class, on the other hand, was full of terms I didn’t understand, like municipality and upper chamber. I scraped through it. I failed the Dutch class by just one point: I still couldn’t write proper grammar. But because I had my Dutch equivalency exam, they let me enroll in Driebergen Vocational College anyway. By the skin of my teeth, I had made it.
* * *
I could start attending college in Driebergen in September. I applied for, and received, a student loan; then, at the end of August, I was called to an introductory weekend. The other girls—they were mostly girls in the social work course—were friendly and open, but they were much younger than I. At twenty-four years old, I was gawky, wore ill-fitting clothes, and cut my hair really short, like a boy’s.
I liked it that way. Looking after long hair, braiding and oiling it, was so difficult to do in Holland. Dutch hairdressers couldn’t understand my hair. With it shorn, I felt free of all the bother, and much more. I couldn’t feel anyone’s eyes boring into me. With no headscarf, with short hair and jeans, I was nobody’s thing. No Somalis attended the vocational college, so nobody felt he could tell me what to do. There were a few Moroccans and Turks, but I was not their responsibility.
I felt under intense pressure: I really had to prove to myself that I could make it. Social work didn’t appeal to me that much in itself—for me it was the simplest way to get into political science—but I was unexpectedly thrilled by the course in psychology. The idea of taking some distance from yourself, of thinking in a systematic way about who you are and how the mind is built up, gave me a whole new way of looking at life.
Meeting Freud put me in contact with an alternative moral system. In Nairobi I had had plenty of contact with Christianity, and had heard of Buddhists and Hindus. But I didn’t for one instant imagine that a moral framework for humanity could exist that wasn’t religious. There was always a God. Not having one was immoral. If you didn’t accept God, then you couldn’t have a morality. This is why the words infidel and apostate are so hideous to a Muslim: they are synonymous with immorality in the deepest way.
But here was psychology, a story with no religious roots. It was about drives, the passion to eat, have sex, excrete, kill, and how you mastered those drives by learning to understand them. When I read the first week’s assignment I thought, “Are they trying to make people become unbelievers?” But the material was fascinating. I recognized so much of myself and my family in it. I learned about Rogers and Skinner and Pavlov, and reveled in these theories about what makes human individuals tick.
I also found clear explanations of sexuality, which had tortured me so much as an adolescent. Gradually I began to see that the way I had been brought up didn’t work. Excision of my genitals didn’t eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease.
The Dutch apparently did things differently. They explained puberty to their children, and told them that sexual feelings would come along with the physical changes. Dutch teenagers were apparently expected to experiment with their sexual feelings, but they did so using their reason, with more information than I had ever dreamed was available.
I also took a class in child development, which was again entirely new to me. I wondered how I could be even vaguely balanced when my parents had paid attention to none of this: the cognitive development, the emotional security, the motor skills, the social skills, all of which were supposed to be vital to creating a well-formed human being.
I read that bullying could destroy a child’s self-confidence, making him withdrawn and antisocial, and remembered how pitilessly Haweya was bullied in primary school. It didn’t occur to me at the time to think of excision as a kind of a trauma, but I thought about the way Ma beat us. I didn’t want to judge my mother. I love her. Everyone I knew in Nairobi hit their kids. But to discipline us without ever explaining anything—according to the books, this was damaging, and wrong.
I made friends with Naima, a Moroccan girl in my class who cycled to Ede Station every morning and rode the same train as I to Driebergen. Naima was my age, and with her I felt something of the easy familiarity of being among the Somalis, with none of the sharpness of their disapproval. We cooked for each other, and her food was very much like mine. During Ramadan, both of us fasted. With Naima there was none of the punctuality
you had to observe with Dutch people, which was a relief, too.
Naima was married. She had come to Holland as a child and had lived here all her life. She didn’t wear a headscarf but was active in a Moroccan women’s group at her local community center, and they danced and ate together. When she took me there, it reminded me of being with Halwa and her sisters.
Naima came in one morning with a black eye. I asked, “What happened to you?” She said her husband beat her; she was totally matter-of-fact about it. Over the next few weeks she got beaten again and again. I told her she was mad to let him do it. I told her she could leave her husband. In this country, she could file for divorce.
But Naima knew that I understood why she couldn’t do it. Her husband was from her father’s village. She had not met him before they were betrothed. That was how she had always lived. Even in Holland, where it was easily possible, Naima felt she simply couldn’t just break away. Leaving her husband would mean leaving her family. It would shame them and leave her homeless. Where could she go? Where could she hide? I had managed to disappear in Holland, but Naima’s family lived here: they would find her.
Naima complained constantly, but it was about the Dutch. She was always insisting that shopkeepers looked askance at her because they were racist, and they didn’t want Moroccans in their shop. Personally, I thought they were staring at her bruises, and told her so. They never looked strangely at me, and I was far darker than Naima. She said it was different for me because I was a refugee, and Dutch people thought refugees were romantic. I thought this was illogical: How could anyone tell that I was a refugee?
But in the train, when the conductor came to check our student transport cards, Naima would fume that he had stared at her card longer than at the white girls’. She never complained about the violence and humiliation she suffered at home, only about Dutch racism. I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.
Naima was right about one thing: it didn’t seem fair to expect the same from her as from my Dutch schoolmates, who had nothing to do except study and worry about whether people liked them enough. Her circumstances were so much less nurturing.
I would read psychology books all afternoon and then look up at Haweya on the sofa. She seemed like an object case of every kind of neurosis there was. All psychology students feel this way about their flatmates, but not all of them are clumsy enough to say so. I did, though. I was always telling Haweya what I thought was wrong with her. I also told her she should stop therapy with Josée. I thought my friend Hanneke would be a far better choice.
Haweya felt assaulted by all of this. She felt that I was implying that she had some kind of mental illness. She switched counselors, but she thought Hanneke was too shallow to understand her. Soon after she began seeing her, Haweya stopped going to therapy at all. After that, she became impossible to live with. She stopped attending school and would sit all day on the couch, watching TV day and night, letting dishes pile up in the sink. Her dirty clothes were strewn on the floor. Sometimes she would barely look up when I came in. She used to cry for days about the way she had mistreated Ma, and how she would burn in Hell for it. Ma had not wished her good-bye, and Haweya had left telling her, “I hate you. From now on you are no longer my mother.”
I sympathized with Haweya, but we quarreled. I couldn’t stand the way she was living, lying on the sofa all day like some vacant life form. One time I got so angry I pulled the TV plug out of the wall and kicked the TV down the stairs. Haweya just stared at me, then locked the front door shut against me. She wouldn’t let me back in, though I pleaded.
I was barefoot, and it was cold outside, but I ended up walking to Johanna and Maarten’s house. Johanna and Maarten had been telling me for a long time that Haweya and I should stop living together. They knew how much we bickered, and they thought I was looking after Haweya too much, destroying my chances of doing well in school. They drove me home, and Johanna laid down the law to Haweya: she should move out.
Haweya liked the idea. There was a one-room apartment available in a building near where Ellen and Hanneke lived, ten minutes away by bicycle. We joked that this way no one would bother her about doing the dishes. We could invite each other over. Johanna lent Haweya the money to pay the guarantee on the flat; Maarten helped us move and built her new furniture.
After Haweya moved out, she went back to language school. She seemed to take charge of her life again. We saw each other often, in the beginning. She seemed to crave my company. It was almost as if we could be more friendly now that we were slightly apart. A Dutch girl moved into my flat; life became more peaceful.
* * *
In May 1995, Sylvia, the social worker at the asylum center, persuaded me to try to become an official Somali-Dutch interpreter. She said my Dutch was far better than most of the official interpreters she worked with, and the work paid well. The Immigration Service paid its interpreters forty-four guilders an hour, plus twenty-two guilders for time spent in transport, compared to the thirteen guilders an hour I earned at the biscuit factory. I was still attending vocational college at the time, but Sylvia said translating would be ideal: I could do it in my free time, after school.
I went to the Immigration Service headquarters in Zwolle and applied. They tested my Dutch (though not my Somali) and said I could try out the job for a couple of months and they would see how it went. They suggested I get a pager. Everyone at college thought I was so cool when the pager beeped and I had to rush off to a phone.
I bought myself some professional clothes: a black knee-length skirt, a long, tailored shirt, and some pumps. My first job was to translate for a Somali asylum seeker at a police station. For me, it was a momentous occasion.
It was just like my own experience asking for asylum, only now, less than three years later, my position had changed completely. The asylum seeker was a Darod man with a little beard and ankle-length trousers. When I came in, he scrutinized me and asked, “Are you the translator?” When I said yes, he sneered at me. He said, “But you’re naked. I want a real translator.” So I translated that, and the Dutch civil servant told the man, “I decide who translates, you don’t.”
The atmosphere had certainly shifted from my own courteous tea and coffee. It was all business. The Darod man tried to find out my ancestry, who I was, but the civil servant put a stop to it. Neither of them even looked at me while the interview went on. I was just a part of the process, like a typewriter. I found this soothing. Although the Somali man’s contempt bothered me, I knew I must learn to control my emotions if I was to become a professional. This was my work, a simple transaction, no different from packing boxes at a factory. And anyway, he needed me.
Afterward, the policeman handed me a form with the time I had worked and the amount I would earn all filled in. I walked out, thrilled.
My next assignment was in a reception center in Schalkhaar. I would be interpreting for a Galla woman who had lived near Afgoye. The Hawiye fighters had taken her and put her with other Galla women in a compound. They were there to be raped, although they also were made to cook and clean and get firewood for the soldiers. Telling her story, this woman began shaking. She spoke in small, short, quiet sentences, and as I tried to pass them on, I couldn’t control my tears.
I said to the civil servant, who was a woman, “I know I’m messing up. I’ve only just started working and I’m so sorry. I just need to take a minute to wash my face.” But when the Dutch woman looked at me, I saw she was crying, too.
The girl’s story was so horrible. She had become pregnant and given birth. The baby was always with her. Then one night one of the Hawiye soldiers picked the baby off her and threw it in the fire. He forced her to watch as the child burned.
She was thin. She said she was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but she looked over fifty. She kept talking about all t
he other Galla women with whom she had been kept captive. She had escaped when another Hawiye subclan took over the compound; she didn’t know what had happened to the others.
Two months later I went back to Schalkhaar for another job. That same civil servant caught sight of me and rushed over to tell me that the Galla woman had been given refugee status. We smiled and congratulated each other. Still, by then I knew how many others failed to get asylum in Holland.
There are so many different kinds of suffering in this world. Many times while I was working as an interpreter I wished someone would give these people a chance—especially the women, who could really make something of their lives here. But I knew when I was translating a story that would not qualify the person as a refugee.
I translated for men who had killed, who were clearly soldiers; I even translated for a man who was a notorious torturer in the Godka, Siad Barré’s torture center in Mogadishu. Now family members of the people he had tortured were hunting him down. I didn’t say anything: I was just the interpreter. I don’t know if he got in.
At the end of June, I took my first-year finals at the vocational college, and I passed. I had a propadeuse. Now I could claim my right to attend the oldest and finest university in Holland: the University of Leiden.
CHAPTER 13
Leiden
I could study political science in just three universities: Amsterdam, Nijmegen, or Leiden. In Nijmegen the courses didn’t interest me; it was all public administration—land use and waterways—and social geography. Amsterdam appeared chaotic: I had heard that students marked their own exams and demanded equality with professors. But Leiden, Holland’s oldest university, had rigorous standards. And when I visited the old city, with the tiny canals and flocks of students careering around on bicycles, I wanted with all my heart to be a part of it.
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