Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  In 1992 I lived in an asylum-seeker center in Lunteren, a small village in the heart of Holland. It’s mainly farmland. The people are staunchly Protestant, of the Dutch Reformed Church. I felt I had been honored with the greatest gift that I could ever receive: I had been granted permission to stay in the Netherlands with what is called the A status. It permits you to move freely in the country, to worship freely any religion you choose, to profess any political creed you want. It meant I could escape the marriage that my father had contracted for me against my will. It also gave me access to the Dutch welfare state.

  Once I had received the A status, I had to go to the city council, meet a social worker, fill out forms, and be registered for an identity card. I could also apply for housing and to receive an unemployment allowance of 1,200 guilders per month. That seemed to me to be an enormous amount. (It was at the time roughly equivalent to $800.) It seemed a lot because money was something I didn’t know much about. Before arriving in Europe I had never managed money of my own.

  In the asylum-seeker center where I had lived while waiting to learn whether or not I would be granted refugee status in the Netherlands, I was given 150 guilders every three months to buy clothes, in addition to a stipend of 20 guilders per week. Every Tuesday I stood in line in the center, showed my pink card to the man or woman behind the counter, received two bright blue notes equal to 10 guilders each, and then waited for my girlfriends to do the same. We would then walk to the village of Lunteren, where, within minutes, my money would evaporate. Instead of two bright blue notes I would now be holding a plastic bag containing a jar of body lotion, perhaps shampoo, a bar of chocolate, and some oranges. The 20 guilders was meant to last me a week, but it was gone. Yasmin’s allowance would be gone too, and so would Dahabo’s. We were astonished that those 20 guilders, which were worth so much in the places we had come from, were not worth all that much in Holland. We gathered in new groups from many parts of the world and lamented about how little 20 guilders could buy.

  When I was given my 150 guilders to buy clothes, I bought a telephone card for 50 guilders, which seemed like a truly serious amount. I called my sister Haweya. Within minutes I heard a click and then a long tone indicating that my card was finished. At the time, the cost of an international call from Holland to Kenya was 4.95 guilders per minute. We had not even finished discussing the weather by the time my card ran out.

  Now that I had received my A status I would no longer have to live in the asylum-seeker center. I registered with the Ede City Council to be allocated an apartment where I could live with Yasmin, who had told the authorities that she was a minor. (This gave her an advantage when requesting residency.) I too had lied on my refugee application, and I was nervous about it. Not only had I invented a story of my involvement in the civil war in Somalia and neglected to point out that my sojourn there was brief, but also, in order to conceal my whereabouts from my relatives, I had altered my name and date of birth.

  While waiting to be allocated an apartment, I decided that I wanted to work. I found temporary jobs as a cleaner and in factory assembly lines. For every job I had to inform the center authorities that I was working and being paid for it. As a result I was not given any pocket money, and I was even supposed to give back some of the money I made, so that no matter what, even if I had worked five or six days a week, I had only 20 guilders per week of my own. I asked one of the social workers, “Why, when I work all day, am I not allowed to keep my money?”

  She patiently explained to me that I was receiving food and boarding and that those things were costly. So it wasn’t as if the authorities were confiscating my money, she said: I was contributing to my upkeep. The reward I got from working was that it fought back boredom, taught me Dutch, and helped me feel as if I were doing something useful. But there didn’t seem to be any connection between the hours I worked and the money I made. Surely my upkeep cost far more than the few guilders I earned doing odd jobs.

  Finally a letter came in from the housing agency informing me that I had been assigned an apartment and that the minor, Yasmin (who was actually my age), would be released to live in my care. For the first time in my life I had to deal with paying rent and utilities, cable, and telephone bills. I had to find furniture for the house. I hadn’t grown up in a country where the temperature was different between winter and summer; here, you paid for heating, so life in the winter months was more expensive than in the summer.

  I went to the social security office, where people were taking turns talking to the civil servants, who stood behind a long counter. After a little while I realized that I was supposed to pull a small piece of paper with a number on it from a pole at one of the two corners of the waiting room. As people finished their business with the civil servants, new numbers would appear on a screen, and each time the number changed I heard a loud ping. I was fascinated by the ingenuity of this. People did not have to line up as we did in Africa; they did not have to cut in line, shove, or otherwise act in aggressive ways to defend their place in line. You could take a seat while your piece of paper stood in line for you. It was even more impressive to me that the civil servants worked at such a speed that you never waited longer than ten or fifteen minutes.

  “Next!” called a blonde woman with a scarf around her neck and a tight smile on her thin lips.

  I went rushing to the counter. I said, “That’s me, Ali!”

  “Show me your ID,” she said.

  I was wearing a jacket with five pockets. I opened the zipper of my right-hand pocket and shoved my hand in, but the ID wasn’t there. I tried my left-hand pocket; my ID was not there either. I looked into the breast pockets, and finally found it safely tucked into my sleeve pocket, where always I kept some coins and a 10-guilder note for the bus in case my bicycle tire ran out of air. My jacket sleeve pocket was to me what a safe-deposit box was to the Dutch and the pillowcase was to my grandmother. I deemed my ID and my 10 guilders the most precious things I had on me, so that’s where I kept them.

  Always nervous before a government agent, I half expected the woman to tell me to go back to my country. I imagined her losing her temper and snapping, “What are you doing here? Get back! Go back home, go back to your parents.” Or that she would say in a conspiratorial tone, like so many officials I had encountered in Africa, “Have you got a present for me?”—meaning Give me a bribe.

  Instead she waited patiently for me to find my ID and hand it over to her. She looked at me, at the picture of my ID, at me again, and at the papers she had in a file that seemed to hold all the details on my case from the time I had asked for asylum. “Tell me your first name,” she said.

  “Ayaan.”

  “And your last name?”

  “We don’t have last names,” I said. “I can tell you my bloodline.”

  “Is it Hirsi?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “He is the son of Ali.”

  “Ali?” she asked, and nodded her head. “Good, come with me, please.”

  I walked around the counter and she led me into a small office. She took a seat behind a desk and asked me if she could fetch me tea, coffee, water, or anything else to drink. My nervousness must have shown on my face.

  “I am getting coffee for myself,” she said. “I don’t mind getting one for you.”

  “All right,” I said. “Coffee, please.”

  When she came back she smiled and said, “Congratulations, you now have an apartment in Ede. In order to furnish your place you’ll need some money. Do you have any savings?”

  “Savings?” It was probably the first time I heard the word. My grandma used to sew into her pillowcase money that she was given by my mother, her son, or my father. She never seemed to spend it. “What is that?” I asked.

  “Have you put any money away to spend later?”

  “We get only twenty guilders a week,” I said, “and mine always vanishes the day I get it.” This was how I felt about it. It wasn’t that I chose to spend the money; it just wal
ked out of my pocket.

  “So you haven’t saved any money?” she said.

  “No,” I murmured. I felt ashamed, although I didn’t know exactly what caused the shame. Everyone seemed to talk about money very bluntly in Holland, but it always made me uneasy. I was further embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t know the meaning of words like savings or anything at all about bank accounts or any of the related jargon she began using. The idea of setting aside money in a bank account that collected interest was completely foreign to me.

  “Okay,” she breezed. Her attitude toward me remained polite, warm, and friendly. She was not judgmental. But her next question almost made me choke on my coffee. “Did your parents save any money for you?”

  This was an incredible question that fully laid out the vast differences between Holland (and the West in general) and where I came from, the nomad culture. This woman took it for granted that most parents are able to save money for their children, putting it in a special bank account in their child’s name. “P-p-p-parents?” I spluttered.

  “Don’t you have parents?” she asked. “Where are they?”

  I was sweating; I could feel the sweat in my armpits. The more I tried not to be nervous, the more I thought it showed. I had told a lie when I asked for asylum, and it seemed to have gone well, because I received the A status. But I thought this was another test. At the time I did not realize that different agencies of the Dutch government do not communicate on these things.

  “Where do your parents live now?” she continued. “I see you have an A status. I know there is war in Somalia, that must really be bad for you.”

  I felt a sense of relief and delved into the story that I had rehearsed for months now about the civil war. She stopped me and said, “Let’s continue with the application.”

  “Application?” I asked, confused. I thought I already had an A status.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m talking about the application for a loan. You need a loan to furnish your apartment.”

  “Oooh!” I exclaimed. “I need to furnish my apartment.” Furnish … My … apartment. Three huge separate concepts were thrust at me all at once.

  “How much do you need?” she asked.

  “Just enough,” I answered warily.

  She said I could borrow anything from 1,200 to 5,000 guilders. “You don’t know what things cost, do you?” she went on.

  “No,” I agreed. “I don’t know how much things cost.”

  “Well, do you have friends?” she asked. “They could take you to the cheap stores.” At the word cheap I felt a deep sense of dishonor, a sense that I now was at the lowest rung of this society, that I had fallen low.

  “Yes, yes, I have friends,” I said. I couldn’t bear to say that I didn’t have friends.

  She continued to fill out the application. “When do you think you are going to pay back the money?”

  “Do I have to pay it back?” I asked. “I thought you were giving it to me.”

  “No, I am not giving it to you. It is a loan. L-o-a-n. It is a loan.”

  “What is a loan?” I asked. “Oooh, you mean a debt?” I was disturbed at the idea of owing a debt to an infidel. That would surely mean I would have to pay interest, which is un-Islamic and wicked. This was certainly an infidel trick.

  “Yes,” she said. “You would have to pay interest.”

  “But in my religion that’s forbidden!” I squawked.

  “You don’t have to do it,” the social worker counseled me. “In fact you should not take a debt at all, it’s not good for you. Your religion is wise. But you don’t have any furniture and you have an empty house and it will get cold soon after the summer. Do you want to think about it and come back sometime next week?”

  I said no, I did not want to think about it. I felt that this additional sin of participating in usury would not truly make any difference. I had already sinned so much. I had taken money from the infidel, I had slept in their camps, I had disobeyed my parents, I hadn’t been praying much, I had cut my hair short, and I wore trousers just like a man. I was certainly damned in any case. And it was cold, and I did want a nice apartment, and this lady was offering me a truly alluring amount of money, over $4,000. “I would like to continue with the application, please,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “The payback plan is this: as long as you have no job, you receive an unemployment payment of twelve hundred guilders. Every month we will subtract one hundred guilders from your unemployment allowance to cover the debts. We will do this for five years, until it is paid back. If you find a job, I or a colleague of mine will sit down with you and we can arrange for you to make a new payment plan. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling a little stupid.

  “Then sign here, please. And the date, then you are all set.”

  “But how do I get the money?” I asked.

  “Open a bank account and then let us know the account number.”

  I had never had a bank account. A volunteer caseworker from the Dutch refugee assistance organization had to take me to a bank to open one. The woman at the bank asked me if I wanted to deposit any money. I offered her the 10 guilders in my jacket sleeve. “Oh no, you can keep that,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  I received a little shiny blue card that said Giro. It didn’t work in cash machines—it was just a record of my account number—but I thought it looked terrific.

  The volunteer caseworker was very kind and very precise. He advised me that I should get a wallet instead of putting my money and documents in my jacket pockets. I was too embarrassed to ask him what a wallet was. We were speaking English, but wallet wasn’t a word I had ever looked up.

  Two weeks later, two good things happened. My 5,000-guilder loan arrived in my brand-new bank account, and the bank sent me a debit card. I could get money out of a machine in the wall along the road any time I felt like it!

  Yasmin and I were jubilant. I suppose we had both dreamed of becoming rich. Grandma and Ma used to allude to the possibility for my sister and me. But getting rich to us meant that we would marry wealthy men who would take care of us, as well as provide for Ma and Grandma. Thus becoming rich was connected to luck (you were lucky if a rich man proposed to you) but also to impeccable behavior as a very docile, baarri girl and a virgin whose honor and purity would stand above that of all other women.

  Now, thanks to Allah, Yasmin and I were rich. We talked about decor, about curtains and carpets and furniture. We said “pretty” and “beautiful” a lot, but never anything specific. The last time I had lived in a decorated house was in Addis Ababa when I was eight. Other than that, my mother’s idea of decor was to unpack our squat gambar, which are Somali wooden stools with cowhide seats, and lay thin mattresses on the ground. They were all-purpose: we sat on them and slept on them, and we ate on the floor. (In one house in Kenya we had a dining table and four chairs, but Ma broke them in a fit of anger.) Ma covered windows with sheets or long cloths from the street market.

  My family led a nomadic life even when we lived in cities. We moved often, and each time we rented a new house, finding windows was like a revelation. “Windows,” my father would say, pleased with himself. “Lots of windows. Noor. Light, lots of light, lots of light.”

  My mother would cut him short. “Daah, daah, daah,” cover, cover, cover. We would need curtains. My father would grimace. There would be a fight.

  “Why do you choose a house with so many windows if you don’t want to pay for the curtains?”

  “Why do you want to plunge us into darkness? What do you need curtains for? We have nothing to cover up. We are pure, we are Muslim, we are the children of Magan.”

  So curtains had always been an issue.

  Yasmin wanted deep burgundy, silk brocade curtains. She wanted lush carpets, sofas with cushions you could sink in so deep, chandeliers. Her wealthy urban grandmother had brought her up in Nairobi—Yasmin was also a Somali exile—and her situation had been the very opposite of
my relatives’. She would invest a lot of money, energy, and time in getting the right tint of curtain to match her upholstery.

  Brocade. Upholstery. What did I know? These were words from Jane Austen, and I was already living in the Alice-in-Wonderland world through the looking-glass, with a bank card and an apartment.

  A security guard who worked at the asylum-seekers center offered to drive us to furniture stores after his work hours. He asked us what our budget was, and when we told him he said he would take us to stores that were cheap. But we didn’t want to go there. Yasmin and I held our noses and said, “Oh, no, this is not who we are, we would like something more upscale.”

  He tried to reason with us: “You can’t afford it. You’re wasting your time.”

  “No, no,” we said. “That’s what we want, please take us to the upscale stores.” I had never been to any kind of furniture store, but I wanted brocade, upholstery, quality—nothing nasty and cheap; that would be low.

  So this dear man drove us from one store to the next, and at one point we settled on a sample piece of wall-to-wall carpeting that was black, pink, and purple. A salesman informed us that it would cost us 110 guilders per square meter.

  We were euphoric. “Yes,” we said in chorus. “This is what we want, this is what we want.”

  The expression on the face of our Dutch friend was incredulous. He just stood there, frozen.

  Then we fell in love with some wallpaper. It was white, with a pattern on it. There was no real need for it—the walls of our apartment were not falling apart—but I was genuinely fascinated by the idea of wallpaper. It reminded me of covering our textbooks in school. It seemed so grown-up, so rich.