The child told his side of the story: a kid stuck his tongue out at him and called him a bad name, so he beat him up. Doing this was completely congruent with his upbringing. In Somalia, you attack. You hit first. If you wait to be hit, you’ll only be bullied more. I was taught that, too.
Having heard the kid’s story, the parents said, “See: the other child started it!” The teacher, who was a young woman, said, “But this other child didn’t hit.” And the parents, in chorus, exclaimed, “You don’t wait to be hit!”
I had to ask to be released from the rule of strict translation so I could explain things. I told the teacher, “Where we come from, aggression is a survival tactic: we teach our children to hit first. You will have to explain more.”
The teacher looked at me as though I was mad. She explained that if all the children were allowed to hit each other, then it would be survival of the fittest: the strongest would bully the others. And the parents nodded. This satisfied them, because they wanted their child to be the strongest.
Finally, I said to the parents, “Look, in Holland, if you hit people, then they think something is wrong with you. Here, they solve disagreements by talking. If your son continues to hit, he will be taken to a place where the children are mentally unwell, to be treated for an illness.”
So then they listened. They made all sorts of agreements and arrangements to meet again. When the meeting ended, all three of them said how illuminating it had been for them, to see that such an unusual culture could exist.
I cycled home thinking, “This is why Somalia is having a civil war and Holland isn’t.” It was all there. People in Holland agree that violence is bad. They make a huge effort to teach their children to channel aggression and resolve their disputes verbally. They had analyzed conflict and set up institutions to regulate it. This was what it meant, to be citizens.
I wasn’t strong enough to think all these things through just yet. I didn’t feel ready to step back and ask myself why so many immigrants—so many Muslim immigrants—were violent, on welfare, poor. I just absorbed the facts. But I was beginning to see that Muslims in Holland were being allowed to form their own pillar in Dutch society, with their own schools and their own way of life, just like Catholics and Jews. They were being left politely alone to live in their own world. The idea was that immigrants needed self-respect, which would come from a strong sense of membership in their community. They should be permitted to set up Quranic schools on Dutch soil. There should be government subsidies for Muslim community groups. To force Muslims to adapt to Dutch values was thought to conflict with those values; people ought to be free to believe and behave as they wish.
The Dutch adopted these policies because they wanted to be good people. Their country had behaved unspeakably in Indonesia, and didn’t (much) resist Hitler; in Holland, a greater percentage of Jews were deported during the Second World War than in any other country in Western Europe. Dutch people felt guilty about this recent past. When massive immigration began in Holland, which wasn’t until the 1980s, there was a sense among the Dutch that society should behave with decency and understanding toward these people and accept their differences and beliefs.
But the result was that immigrants lived apart, studied apart, socialized apart. They went to separate schools—special Muslim schools or ordinary schools in the inner city, which other families fled.
At the Muslim schools there were no children from Dutch families. The little girls were veiled and often separated from the boys, either in the classroom or during prayer and sports. The schools taught geography and physics just like any school in Holland, but they avoided subjects that ran contrary to Islamic doctrine. Children weren’t encouraged to ask questions, and their creativity was not stimulated. They were taught to keep their distance from unbelievers and to obey.
This compassion for immigrants and their struggles in a new country resulted in attitudes and policies that perpetuated cruelty. Thousands of Muslim women and children in Holland were being systematically abused, and there was no escaping this fact. Little children were excised on kitchen tables—I knew this from Somalis for whom I translated. Girls who chose their own boyfriends and lovers were beaten half to death or even killed; many more were regularly slapped around. The suffering of all these women was unspeakable. And while the Dutch were generously contributing money to international aid organizations, they were also ignoring the silent suffering of Muslim women and children in their own backyard.
Holland’s multiculturalism—its respect for Muslims’ way of doing things—wasn’t working. It was depriving many women and children of their rights. Holland was trying to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus was empty. The immigrants’ culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants’ integration into Holland. Many Muslims never learned Dutch and rejected Dutch values of tolerance and personal liberty. They married relatives from their home villages and stayed, inside Holland, in their tiny bubble of Morocco or Mogadishu.
I worked every day as an interpreter, before class, after class, on weekends. At night I translated documents, often reports on children with suspected learning disabilities. The child would be three years old, not talking, unable to play with educational toys like blocks and puzzles, did not recognize a pen. The mother would be young, uneducated, barely able to speak Dutch. There were medical reports on battered women or social workers’ recommendations that children should be removed from their parents’ homes. Twenty-five cents a word made seventy-five guilders a page. I could easily have quit school and made a very good living as a Somali interpreter for the rest of my life, but I didn’t think of it for one minute.
* * *
I was worried about Haweya. While I was picking my way through my textbooks in Leiden, dictionary in hand, Haweya seemed to be falling apart. She could be charming, but her mood swings had become much more intense. They made her seem harsh and hostile, and many people were afraid of her.
At first, Haweya’s guilt over her abortion seemed natural to me. She told me Allah would never forgive her: she had killed, not once, but twice. But then one day when we went out together, she put on a headscarf. She told me, “I have to be careful in this country. It’s Godless. It will turn us into unbelievers.”
I said, “But Haweya, you were never religious before.” She told me, “It’s true, but I need to become religious now, because otherwise I risk losing my religion completely.”
Haweya thought she was going to Hell. Perhaps the dissonance between what she saw and what she thought she should believe was so severe that she couldn’t stand it. Perhaps she couldn’t deal with individual freedom. Perhaps it was simply a reaction to her abortion. At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on; I thought this must be some kind of phase.
Haweya began praying every day. She had exactly the same questions as I did: Why was it that Holland could give its people so much better a life than any Muslim country we had seen? But Haweya answered those questions by going back into religion. She started reading Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, Islamic thinkers I had once devoured in Nairobi. Haweya had not been in the Brotherhood as I had, or seen the misery I translated every day, and she sought her answers in the Quran.
To me, seeking answers in the Quran had only led to more questions. Once I told her, “I don’t think you’ll find the answers to your questions there.” She turned on me: “Are you saying Allah doesn’t have the answers and you do?” I became confused. I wasn’t in any way challenging Allah. I couldn’t do that.
I told her, “Look at Holland: it’s not perfect, and the Dutch complain a lot, but it’s orderly, it’s humane, it’s prosperous, everybody seems to be basically happy. And we from Muslim countries are pouring into places like Holland, so you must admit they must be doing something right. If you want to do things as Allah says, then look at Iran. Want to live there?”
“Iran is Shia,” Haweya said.
“So
, did you prefer Saudi Arabia?” I asked. I said the Quran might be God’s truth, as a spiritual guide, but it seemed to me that, in terms of building governments, it was the Godless, Western theories that gave better answers.
Haweya told me I had become kufr. It had started with the language and the way I dressed, and now it had reached my brain. I was a traitor. She made me feel horribly guilty about the way I had abandoned prayer and my obedience to Allah. She described my Western ideas as a sort of virus that was slowly destroying my moral values.
But the more I read Western books, the more I wanted to read them. The more I learned about government, about the development of the individual, about systems of thought like social democracy and liberalism, the one the product of the other, the more I preferred things this way. The concept of individual choice improved people’s lives so visibly, as did equality between men and women. I was enamored of the idea that you should think precisely and question everything and build your own theories.
I was not blind to the disadvantages of all these freedoms. I felt the loneliness and sometimes even the emptiness of our lives. It was sometimes tiresome to have to find out everything by myself, instead of relying on the comfortable, clear lines of doctrine and detailed rules. At times I, too, feared the limitless freedoms of Holland.
So I understood why Haweya was fleeing into religion. But I saw the joy in living in the West. Here I could satisfy my curiosity. When I felt interested in something, I could try it, and was wiser for that. I could draw my own conclusions.
Haweya did like the efficiency in Holland, and that she didn’t have to pay bribes. She thought it was wonderful to be able to say no: “No, thank you, I’m not coming.” “No, I won’t be there tonight.” She used to say, “This is the one great thing here. They are frank, they are honest.”
But mostly she existed on welfare. She wasn’t well. She had no discipline. My sister wanted contradictory things: to be a good, practicing Muslim and to be a news anchor on CNN, but she couldn’t get out of bed. There were months when Haweya didn’t seem to wash her clothes or clean her dishes. She would grow plump, then scarily thin. Showering once a day seemed to cost all her energy. Sometimes she would lie in bed for three days on end without getting up. Suddenly she would have a series of bright months, in which she could be generous, interesting, tell funny stories. She would have energy, attend class, impress her teachers. But just as suddenly she could turn rude, harsh, low, and would sink back again into lethargy and outbursts of crying.
By the early months of 1996, Haweya began saying things like “Please turn the mirror to the wall.” I would ask why, and she would say, “When it faces me I see things in it.” I would yell at her, “Stop making yourself crazy, get a grip on yourself,” but she started sleeping with the lights on. She would call me to come and see her—she needed me now, right away—but when I arrived, after traveling for hours, she would dismiss me, saying, “I can’t bear company now, so go.”
* * *
I wasn’t a hermit in Leiden. I saw my friends in Ede quite regularly, and gradually made new ones. Geeske was a first-year political science student, like me, and had a vivid energy. She used to take me to the cinema and student cafés, which were more relaxed than the pubs in Ede, though no less crowded and smoky, but now that I could understand people, I enjoyed them more. People sat outside and ate and listened to music.
It became a kind of joke that I didn’t drink alcohol. The first time I finally did, I felt woozy and the room swayed. There were no thunderbolts of any kind, but it was far too late to cycle home to Chantal’s place, and I had to stay the night with another friend of mine, Evelien. When I woke next morning I felt I had crossed a horrible line, from stretching Allah’s rules to really breaking them.
I didn’t think Chantal liked me coming home late to her house, and I felt awkward about inviting friends there. Meanwhile, Geeske lived with sixteen other students in a vast, run-down old canal house, and she was always talking about how much fun it was living there. When a room in her student house became free, Geeske suggested I apply for it. She told me I would never understand Holland if I didn’t experience student life properly.
There was a whole selection procedure. All the people who lived in this house got together to interview the candidates over a bottle of wine. They asked us what kind of music we liked, what we liked doing on vacation, what were our hobbies, what kind of student jobs we had. I said my hobby was reading and I had never been on vacation. All these kids were young, all of them were white, and most of them had lived in the same house all their lives. They asked me where I’d lived, and just listing the countries—Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya—I saw their eyes widen. When I said I was an interpreter, one boy said, “Wow, you must earn a ton of money.” I said yes, I did.
Geeske was frantic that her housemates would find me boring, or weird—or worse still, old—but she lobbied them so hard that they chose me anyway. So I moved into a tiny room in a Dutch student house, a place I would share with boys, where there would be alcohol, perhaps even drugs. I armed myself with courage.
I moved to Geeske’s student house in March 1996. Before I fell asleep that first night, I had managed to get all my furniture into my new room, except for my desk, which Chantal had given me. It was large, old, and beautiful, and it wouldn’t fit in the door. So the next morning I got up early to try to take it apart with a screwdriver. I was underneath this desk, in my yellow pajamas, when everyone headed off to class. One, an older boy called Marco, put his head under the desk and introduced himself as he headed out.
At lunchtime, when Marco reappeared, I was still under there, still in pajamas. In between I had done three phone translations, but of course he didn’t know that. He said, “It can’t be true! This is unbelievable! Get out of there,” and he got the whole thing neatly taken apart in fifteen minutes. Then he moved it into my room, put it back together again, and admired my computer. Then my phone rang for another translation.
As he left, Marco invited me to have dinner with him that evening in the kitchen. He explained that the people who lived in the student house often shopped and cooked together, to save money. “At last there’s someone interesting in this place,” he said, smiling. “I was tired of all these eighteen-year-old know-it-alls.”
Marco was a year older than I, and he worked; he was a reporter for a Dutch science magazine. He had lived in this student house as a biology student; after he graduated and found a job, he stayed on, though he wasn’t supposed to. Rents in Leiden were very high. Marco, like so many Dutch people, loved traveling. He spent all his spare cash on long journeys to exotic places like Egypt and Syria. We took to having dinner together several times a week.
I went on working, but it was more fun now that I was surrounded by other young people. Still, I knew I was strange to them. I would emerge from my room and tell the others what I had just translated—announcing to someone that he had HIV, counseling a woman who had been beaten—and my housemates would be mesmerized. To them, the lives I came in contact with were on another planet. Almost all my housemates had grown up in the same town as their grandparents, sometimes even in the same house. They had very limited experience of the unpleasantness of the world.
Another thing about these kids fascinated me: everything was about the self—what they liked, expressing their style, treating themselves to something they felt they deserved. There was a whole culture of self that I had never known in Africa. In my childhood, the self was ignored. You pretended to be obedient, good, and pious for the approval of others; you never sought to express yourself. Here people sought their own pleasure, just because they felt like it.
* * *
Marco was handsome, with light brown hair and big blue innocent eyes; there was always a smile in the corner of his mouth. We were interested in each other—not quite just friends—but neither one of us made a move.
One summer afternoon my friend Tamara came to visit me, along with her mother, who w
as visiting from Canada. The weather was so surprisingly lovely that I invited them up to the roof terrace of our student house and suggested we eat there. Coincidentally, Marco had a friend over, too, and he also had hit on the idea of a rooftop picnic. (These picnics were forbidden, but we ignored that.)
We all ended up eating together, in an improvised private feast. As the evening progressed Marco and I kept getting closer to each other. The attraction between us, which had been latent for months, flared up and released a kind of energy that caught the others, too. Tamara’s mother pulled out her camera and took a photograph of us. We posed; Marco put his arm around my shoulder and drew me to him. I still have that photo: it looks so natural, as if we had already been together for a thousand years. And it felt so wonderful—surprising and good.
We didn’t kiss or anything. We just held hands for a moment and stayed close to each other, talking, all evening, as more friends of Marco’s turned up: Giovanni, Olivier, and Marcel. But the next day, Marco invited me to a friend’s place down the road; he was looking after someone’s cat while they were traveling. We bought some groceries and cooked there. We both knew something would happen.
Marco was tender and patient. At first I felt frozen. I felt that Allah and the two angels were in bed with us, too, judging me. I was sinning. But it didn’t feel like sin. As the months went by I grew certain that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this man; I trusted him. Eventually I managed to peel the angels off my shoulders and pry them out of our bed.
Marco and I almost never spent a night apart for five years. We were inseparable. We were equals, we laughed together, we were all the other needed. Midway through 1996 I registered at the housing corporation for an apartment, and after only six months I received a letter informing me that I was eligible to rent a flat on the Langegracht, in central Leiden, for only 800 guilders. Marco and I decided to move in there together. We could pick up the keys on January 1.
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