Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  The wedding happened in a town called Hudur, about sixty miles from Baidoa. This was the rainy season, so the animals were fat, and there was so much meat and milk at the wedding. Guests invited to the wedding were relatives and their own parents. Mom was in a mud hut all day with what they called the expert women, who told her stories about what would happen on the wedding night, and how she would want to be obedient to her husband, and how everything he says she must accept. It was a rented hut; they had to deposit goats to stay there. Neither of them had ever seen a banknote or a coin. At the same time my dad was in a neighbor’s hut with the men teaching him about the first days of marriage.

  On the evening of the wedding, six men walked with Dad to the hut where Mom was waiting nervously. Inside the hut were carved wooden ornaments called xeedho, which are decorations to celebrate the wedding, brilliantly patterned clay vessels known as dhiil containing milk, butter, and meat, and a soft cow leather for them to sleep on. After seven days, when their honeymoon officially ended, my dad was dressed in traditional clothes, a white cotton sheet that was wrapped around his waist as a skirt, another piece over his shoulders as a shawl, and seated outside the hut. Then two men held a dhiil full of camel milk and poured it all over him. This signified my dad was now a husband. The evening ended with Dad riding one of the camels as a celebration escorted by some men singing and dancing, but my mom stayed inside the hut, too shy to come out and see people after the wedding bed.

  My parents spent most of their early marriage walking through the bush with their herds, remembering places by the trees. They walked miles every day into no-man’s territory. No one stopped them or asked who they were. It was a peaceful time. To my parents, heaven was beyond the shiny stars they saw at night, and hell was under their feet. When my mom’s bare feet burned in the baking sun, she remembered God’s words that on Earth are samples of hellfire. They believed Earth was flat and that it was Allah’s land, they were only guests. It rains when Allah wills, it turns dry when Allah wills. Animals and humans die when Allah wills. “Inshallah!”

  In some ways the nomadic life is more like life in America than the way Somalis live in cities. In the bush Somali men and women work together, talk freely with each other, and even play games together. To survive on the land, a husband and wife must work as a team to make sure their animals are grazed well and that they all get back home by dusk. My dad had introduced my mom to several games like high jump, sprint running, and chasing dik-diks, the little antelopes not much bigger than a cat. Mom loved all those games. They would hold sticks five feet high, then take turns jumping over them. Mom learned to jump and land without stumbling. She said Dad never beat her at this game. Mom was shy and respectful to her husband, but when it came to games and fun, she was a fierce competitor. They sprinted together across the bush, leaping over thornbushes while chasing the fast dik-diks.

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  Bay region is famous in Somalia for growing corn, beans, rice, sesame, papayas, mangoes, and the tree that produces frankincense resin. Most of that resin is bought by the Catholic church in Rome, but my parents knew nothing of Rome or Christianity. To them the most amazing place in the world was the Isha Baidoa waterfall. It was like their vacationland. Isha means “eye,” and the water flows from a crack high in the rock that looks like an eye. My mom still believes that eye belongs to an angel. During their nomadic travels they stopped twice a year to shower under the water falling from the angel’s eye.

  The city of Baidoa is called Baidoa the Paradise for both the nearby waterfall and the fertile red soil. The farms of corn and masago, a type of grain, grow right inside the city, among the mud houses and the mango and banana trees. In the center of town is the huge Afar Irdoodka market, where people come from all across the country to buy and sell food, medicinal herbs, and supplies. Everywhere in that city, donkeys loaded with supplies are moving toward the market.

  The Rahanweyn tribe live in Baidoa and on all the land between and surrounding the Jubba and Shabelle Rivers. The word “Rahanweyn” translates into “large number.” There are so many of them, spread across the bush. To most of the other Somali tribes the Rahanweyn are looked down on because they are mostly nomads and poor and have nothing to do with politics. Also, the dialect the Rahanweyn speak, called Maay, is dismissed as the speech of beggars and the lower class because it is not comprehensible to most other Somalis. It is different in sentence structure and is complex to outsiders. So for centuries the Rahanweyn lived their own life, on land belonging to no one.

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  My parents’ courtship and wedding happened sometime in the 1970s. Soon after the wedding, in 1977, a terrible drought hit Somalia. The rains of Dayr and Gu never came. The corn withered. The red clay land around Baidoa turned parched and bare, its wide cracks littered with skeletons of the animals. Those that survived were thin and dying. The nomads knew it was God’s choice but could not understand why he would do this, because they were not sinful people. They decided Allah wanted the animals for himself and was taking them away. My parents, who had been so proud of their herds, watched their wealth wiped out in front of their eyes. Daraanle, my mom’s favorite camel, turned thin and then died silently.

  Droughts were a part of life for nomads in Bay region, but new forces in the world, from far beyond the land between the rivers, would make this drought different. That same year Somalia attacked Ethiopia in a war over control of the Ogaden territory, a part of Ethiopia that is populated mainly by ethnic Somalis. Somalia deployed troops to the border, and the tanks and military vehicles that left Mogadishu passed by my parents. My mom stood there, eyebrows raised, watching these strange moving things. My parents had never seen anything like tanks, they had never even thought about such a thing as a government or an army. They didn’t know it, but under the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, the founder of the Supreme Revolutionary Council, Somalia had amassed the largest army in Africa. Siad Barre was a general who had taken over the country in 1969, then cleverly used the Cold War to extract support from the Soviet Union. But none of this meant anything to desert nomads, who looked in the sky and prayed for rain.

  The 1977 war, known as the Ogaden War, was the bloodiest ever between two African nations, with tens of thousands of casualties. The Somali army unleashed its heavy weaponry and Soviet-trained soldiers against the Ethiopians in a massive attack over the border. Somalia had Soviet T-35 and T-55 tanks against Ethiopia’s older Italian tanks from World War II. In the beginning the Somalis advanced deep into Ethiopia, almost capturing the capital, Addis Ababa. But the Soviet Union also supported Ethiopia, which had a Marxist military regime, and tried to stop the war. When Siad Barre refused to back down, the Soviets abandoned Somalia and sided with Ethiopia, a much larger country. Then the war became global when China, Yemen, North Korea, Romania, and other nations got involved supporting either side. With the Soviet Union supplying the Ethiopian Air Force with advanced MiG-17 and MiG-21 jets and other weaponry, the Somali army was pushed out of the country and defeated in 1978. Siad Barre was furious; he expelled all Russians from Somalia. Wanting a buffer against a Soviet-backed Ethiopia, the Americans rushed into the vacuum and began to give military help to Somalia. If not for the American support, Siad Barre might have been driven out of power for his needless and costly war. Instead, he was able to build up his army again.

  All these shifting alliances and power plays meant nothing to my parents. But the result—a small country with millions of guns and simmering resentment against Siad Barre for causing so much misery—would soon change their lives forever.

  Meanwhile, the 1977 drought was the worst in Somali recorded history, wiping out lives and displacing tens of thousands of nomads. As the animals died, some nomads started moving. The nomads moved everywhere, mostly toward Kenya and Ethiopia. Some moved to the nearest cities with fishing and other opportunities. And so my parents decided to try for
a better life in Mogadishu. After fifteen days of walking and begging rides, Nur Iftin and his wife, Madinah, set foot for the first time ever in a city with movie theaters, traffic lights, houses made of bricks, and citizens who spoke a nearly unintelligible dialect.

  And statues! There was a bronze statue in the center of Mogadishu, high on a white stone column, of a colonial-era freedom fighter holding a rock. The statue was named Dhagaxtuur, which means “stone thrower,” and it honored the rebels who fought the British with stones after World War II. My mom stood there waiting for the bronze man to throw that rock. Only a week later she realized it was not a real person. The green and red taxicabs that parked everywhere, the portraits of Siad Barre that hung on every street, caught them by surprise. They would later learn that you weren’t supposed to say Siad Barre’s name without adding the word Jaalle before it. Jaalle was a new word in the Somali language invented by Siad Barre, which roughly meant “führer” or “leader.”

  My dad’s half brother Hassan, who already lived in Mogadishu, gave my parents a room in his house in the Waberi neighborhood. A mile from their house, to the east, was the Mogadishu airport and the beautiful green waters of the Indian Ocean surrounding it. But civilization sickened my mom. She missed the animals, her parents, the stories, the land, her freedom. She had not slept in weeks due to the sound of the airplanes taking off and landing. She kept looking up and wondering how on earth those things are made. Her first visit to the ocean made her remember stories from her parents, including one about something called a whale that can swallow a whole city. She worried about whales, and she wondered where the ocean ends. Using a toilet, going to a movie, and riding a bus were the strangest things to both my parents, probably the way so many things about America seem strange to me, like snow, cooking on a stove, or obeying traffic laws.

  One thing that frustrated her more than anything else was buying milk and meat. In her nomad life these things were abundant; now she had to pay for them with money. Her first visit to the slaughterhouse brought her to tears. The meat dangled on hooks, flies landing on it constantly. Loud men with sharp knives yelled at everyone who stepped into the slaughterhouse, waving their knives in the air and promising the freshest meat. My mom was an expert on camel meat, and she could tell this meat was not fresh, but she didn’t dare to question the scary butchers with their long knives and strange dialect.

  During the drought many nomads moved to Mogadishu. The city people made fun of them. My mom remembers other women asking her to make sounds of animals. They were mocking her, but animals were her favorite subject so she was happy to make their sounds for the neighbors, especially the sound of her favorite goat, Eseey, which means “brown.” The city women, who wore nicer clothes, did not want to be seen with Mom on the streets. To them she was a little embarrassing. They mocked her dialect, looking down at her whenever she said something in Maay. She was called Reer Baadiye, “the bush woman.”

  The neighbors said her house smelled like goat pee, from her clothes. To Mom the smell of goats and camels was like the perfume of her homeland, and it smelled like freedom. Also she had learned only a handful of verses from the Koran that her parents had taught her, just enough to pray five times a day. But the city women, who had studied at madrassas, knew the whole Koran. They played a sort of competitive religious game called subac where they would sit in a circle and recite the Koran like a round-robin. Each person would have to recite the verse that follows the last person’s verse; to forget any verse would mean embarrassment. But none of those women could jump or run like my mom. They were too fat from all the city food, and they avoided sunshine so they would get lighter skin.

  The women of Mogadishu were circumcised as children, but nomads don’t practice female genital mutilation. So this was even more pressure on Mom. She was made to feel unclean by the neighbors. Eventually, she relented and bravely subjected herself to the cutting. Three neighbor women took her to the house of Hawa, a woman famous in Mogadishu for doing this. Of course there were no painkillers. Hawa usually circumcised little girls who didn’t know what was coming and could be distracted for the cutting, like my brother with the airplane at his surprise circumcision. But of course my mom knew, like I did after seeing my brave brother. And so like me at my circumcision, Mom had to be held down as Hawa worked with that Topaz razor blade for some fifteen minutes while my mom screamed. Once Hawa declared that everything bad had been removed, the other women began ululating in joy. Hawa cleaned up with some warm water and sent Mom home. My dad, who knew of the procedure and approved, had to stay away from her for a few months.

  It makes me so angry when I think about it. In my job as a medical interpreter in Maine, I often tell new Somali immigrants that they cannot mutilate their daughters in this country, which surprises them. This terrible custom is rooted in ignorance and will only change with education.

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  By now my dad had started making some money fishing, which eventually allowed him to rent a room with my mom and leave Hassan’s house. Some of the men would go out in boats with big nets while my dad stayed on Uruba beach, waiting for them to return. When the fishermen came back with their nets full, Dad would carry the huge heavy fish, some as big as a person, on his shoulders. He would carry those fish a mile to the fish market at Geel-Laq beach. Some days he would make that trip dozens of times. After a whole day of that hard work he was supposed to get paid one Somali shilling, but he still didn’t know much about money or coins and was often cheated.

  At that time there were still Italians in Mogadishu. Before independence came in 1960, Somalia was two colonies: British Somaliland in the north and Italian Somaliland, including Mogadishu, in the south. So there was a long history of Europeans in Somalia, and in the 1970s and 1980s many still came to do business. They stayed in the big Uruba Hotel, today in ruins, where the women would sunbathe in bikinis. It was the first time Dad saw white people, and he couldn’t believe they walked around almost naked. When he told my mom, she couldn’t believe it either; she had to come and see for herself. Even then she didn’t believe they were real people until she saw them actually breathing. Mom in her nomad life had heard stories about gaalo, the infidels. They are not Muslim, they are all white, and they are not clean. But she didn’t know they had no clothes. She stayed away from the unclean white people she saw at the beach. She wondered, what are they doing here, and why don’t they pray five times a day?

  Everywhere in Mogadishu, my dad stood out in the crowd with his strong body and height. He had cut his long nomad hair short and shaved his nomad’s beard, but he left his dark mustache and woolly sideburns. This look was very fashionable in Mogadishu in the early 1980s, especially if you also wore bell-bottoms. He would go out and strut around town. In that Uruba Hotel was a nightclub where dancers stripped and alcohol was served. There were more nightclubs than mosques in Mogadishu back then, all places where you could dance to funk music like on the American TV show Soul Train and drink at a seaside bar. Some Somali men and even some women (without a head scarf and wearing lots of jewelry) went to clubs to mingle with the Italian, British, and American businesspeople before the civil war. Eventually, my dad did go to the Uruba Club, though he never told my mom. He saw Somali women dancing with white men, which in a few years would become punishable by death. Today those clubs are rubble in the sand, a few broken pillars rising from the debris like the ruins of ancient Rome.

  The fishing and dancing might have gone on for my dad until the wars came, but then one day he did something that changed his life. He jumped.

  It was nothing to him, just jumping over a thorn fence, like he jumped in those games with my mom in the bush. But this jump was seen by a friend of his half brother Hassan who knew a lot about basketball. That game had become very popular all over Africa, and Somalia had leagues, amateur and professional, that competed against each other and other countries. Hassan’s friend said t
hat because my dad was so tall and could jump so high, he should try out for the national basketball team. But Hassan wanted his half brother to join the military, like himself. At that time under Siad Barre, Somalis were very patriotic; joining the army was considered a noble career. My dad had already gone through basic military training, which was mandatory for grown men in the city, and he was fine with being a soldier. Besides, he knew nothing about basketball, had never even held a ball. But Hassan’s friend wouldn’t give up. The Somali national team had been losing a lot of games, and they were recruiting new players. Having a winning team was another part of the patriotic spirit in the country.

  So my dad tried out for basketball and was a natural. He towered over his teammates. He could jump higher and had strong hands from working with animals. His herding skills also made him very agile and gave him stamina. It didn’t take long for him to get used to handling the ball. Soon he was nicknamed Nur Dhere, Tall Nur, and he was helping Somalia win games. Soon he stopped carrying fish and started making a lot more money playing basketball. The world changed swiftly for my parents. They learned how to identify and count shilling notes and coins and how to buy things like clothes, curtains, window shutters made of wood, a carpet over their dirt floor, a cupboard, and a shelf. Things only rich people had. My dad also learned to read and write Somali, which was unusual because nomad men and women were mostly illiterate.

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  By the time I was born, my parents had become the honored basketball family in the neighborhood. They were famous all over Mogadishu. Dad was traveling a lot outside the country, bringing medals home. He had a shortwave radio in the house and would listen to songs by famous Somali singers. My nomad parents had a lot of good things happening, but my mom missed everything in the nomad world. She thought that city life was hard and resented having to stay inside a house all day, cooking and cleaning, instead of herding her goats across the landscape, while Dad was out playing basketball. She was worried that her kids would grow up in Mogadishu not knowing anything about the life of nomads. The few women friends she made, like Maryan, had nothing in common with her. They all talked about popular Somali music and shows. Instead, she would entertain herself around the house by humming her favorite nomad songs.