by Hawa Abdi
I cried on the road to Martini hospital, remembering that one of our neighbors in Mogadishu had died there, while her family was asleep at home. “Hawa, you must believe in these doctors,” said my father, after my mother was placed in a ward of forty-five beds. “They are trained to help.”
I defied their orders immediately, crawling into bed with my mother. “I will stay with you,” I promised, and for the three months she was there, I did. Every morning at seven o’clock, I would bring her some tea before I went off to school, updating my friends on her condition before losing myself to the lessons of the day. I would come back after school, around 4 p.m., and stay as long as I could. Since she loved films, I saved my small spending money to buy her magazines—beautiful photos of Italian and French women; from her pillow, she had fantasies of a glamorous faraway life.
Sometimes the Italian doctors tried to explain to me that they were going to give my mother injections or draw her blood; otherwise they ignored me unless they were asking me to leave—my least favorite time of the day. I earned the pity of two Somali nurses whose eyes looked past my small body, hidden under my mother’s blanket, as they continued their rounds. These women, I discovered, knew everything—how to measure blood and medicine, to listen to the heart or hold the abdomen in order to identify where my mother’s problems lay. Though there was no pain medication at the time to help, they seemed pleased when they could tell us something to comfort us.
When the hospital staff finally cast me out each evening around nine o’clock, I scooped up the tea containers and began my walk home through the quiet streets, searching and searching my mind for some small way to help. I could think of none.
When my mother didn’t seem to improve, the doctor discharged her. “Take her to your house, read some Qur’an to her, get her to eat more,” he said. “When she gains weight, you can bring her back here, and we will try to treat her again.”
The neighbors and relatives came to our home from all over, bringing food and incense, reading the Qur’an around the clock, and separating into small groups in our courtyard to talk or to pray. Without my sisters, I was alone, forced to make one pot of tea after another, and to listen to my family’s false reassurances.
Although I prayed always, always asking for an answer from my God, God was not hearing me. Ayeyo prayed as well, crying, “Leave this daughter, God, I want that she will bury me!”
One early morning, a week after we returned, I crawled onto my mother’s bed and touched the part of her stomach she had been rubbing. I knew she had been growing weaker; I gripped on to the place she felt pain and pressed down, hard, which had worked in the past. “Oh Ma,” I said, realizing that my best efforts did not make any difference. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep even one more night with you.”
Our cousins came into the bedroom around eleven o’clock that morning, to read the Qur’an. “I’m not going to die in this room,” my mother said weakly, “I want out.”
“Dahabo,” said an uncle, “you have to stay in your place.” As I was a child, I couldn’t say anything.
“Please bring me outside to the courtyard, where people can sit.” So a group of my cousins, strong and young, prepared some kind of bed and carried my mother through the door.
“Where is Hawa today?” my mother asked when she was first set down. I was beside her, but I could not answer, I am here, Mama. I began to cry, but my voice made no sound. She looked up to one side, and I ran around her bed, to stand between the wall where she was looking and her eyes. But she immediately closed them, and without opening her mouth, she took her last breath.
There is some part of the Holy Qur’an, when a person is dying, that is read; they say it helps people pass away. My voice returned in a big cry—waaaaaaah!—and the uncle reading the scripture slapped me hard across the face. I saw a bright light and fell down. “Don’t cry,” he said to me while Ayeyo cried with a loud voice. Still I remember that voice.
We didn’t have a telephone, but the news of my mother’s death traveled fast on the wind of a dozen gossiping aunties. Six people held my mother’s body as we walked to the gravesite, an hour away from our home in Mogadishu.
On the way, we passed an old woman of Ayeyo’s age, who stopped us on the road. “Who are you carrying?” she asked.
“Dahabo,” said my cousin.
“You are carrying Dahabo, and Salaho is left alive?”
Hearing her given name, Ayeyo spoke up for the first time. “God is deciding who will die first,” she said, “and who will die after.”
I did not return to school for some time after that, but when it was finally time, I arrived very early, holding a few coins for my breakfast and waiting for the gates to open. My teacher at the time was young and active; before I’d left, we had begun to study biology. “I want to study the human body,” I told him when he finally opened the door. “I want to find out what killed my mother.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Paradise in the World
More than a decade later, I moved from my small apartment in Hodan to a big new villa in the same neighborhood, so we could all be together. One early morning, when I was reading a Cosmopolitan magazine and drinking juice, Amina came out into the sitting room. She’d just finished bathing; her skin gleamed and she’d woven her wet hair into braids. “I’m feeling pain now,” she said calmly, smiling, while the rest of us scrambled to take her to the maternity ward at Digfer.
The most qualified midwives welcomed us, but I still paced the halls, thinking of every possible complication, every bit of pain that I had witnessed with my own eyes. God is great: At four o’clock, the child was born—a strong baby boy they named Kahiye. We returned home, and for the next forty days we observed the umul, the traditional rest period following the birth of a child. There, in the beautiful villa’s rooms, which were full of light all day, we gave Amina nutritious food like soup made from the head of the goat, and we offered her new clothes and henna for her hands and feet.
One afternoon soon after, I was making rounds in the hospital when a laboring woman from the rural area was brought in with what we call prolapse: One of the baby’s hands had come down first, instead of his head. I felt panic as I examined her, for the hand had fallen on the sand somehow, and everywhere was very dirty. When I touched the hand, though, I could see that the child was alive—he took my hand.
What to do? The woman’s family had come from 200 kilometers, in a rented car, from a place where there was no telephone or no other means of communication. To try to bring the hand back into the uterus somehow, to turn the child for a proper delivery, would risk sepsis, which could be fatal. For more than thirty minutes I sat quietly, trying to carefully disinfect the hand. Then I guided the hand back into the birth canal, so we could deliver the child through a Cesarean section.
We were successful: The child was born healthy! I prescribed an antibiotic, so his mother would recover as well.
That night, I shared the story with my sisters; we all shook our heads, amazed by what was possible. Celebration surrounded us those days, after Kahiye’s birth, for we were also preparing to celebrate my wedding. Those evenings after dinner, we discussed the plans, selecting a Western-style white dress and veil like the one Amina had worn, renting the same hall, and choosing a big cake for us to cut.
I knew it was the right time for me. I’d met my future husband, Aden Mohamed, as a student in the Soviet Union, and I’d accepted his marriage proposal with a full heart. While many marriages in Somalia were arranged, Mogadishu was becoming a modern city, and like Amina before me, I had made my own choice. In the last days of February 1973, when it was time to make the marriage contract, I stood up to give my consent; the only tears that would be shed that day were tears of joy.
We were married that March, during one of the hottest dry seasons on record, in a hall filled with 120 people who had come to wish us well. Amina was so happy that day, running to make sure that we slaughtered enough sheep and goats to feed ev
eryone, while young Khadija’s only concern was putting down one record after the other—the tango, and rock and roll, especially the “Hippy Hippy Shake.”
After the party, one of my girlfriends from university and her husband drove us in the direction of Lafole to an open-air restaurant called Bar Ismail, owned by a Somali man who had lived in America for many years. He set up a beautiful table in the garden for us, under the trees. He served pollo al diavolo, some fried potatoes, and champagne and beer for all, although my girlfriend and I declined. When we finished our meal, he came to sit and toast us. “It’s their wedding night,” said my girlfriend. “Give them some advice!”
The man looked at Aden with a smile. “Try to give her what she wants,” he said, “and try to avoid what she doesn’t want.”
“And for Hawa?” asked my friend’s husband.
“My advice is for her to give the guy what he wants, and to avoid what he doesn’t.” We laughed at the simplicity of the statement, and by the time we got back in the car later, all the tension and worry of the event fell away. The next thing I felt was a slap on the knee. “It’s your wedding night!” my friend shouted. “Wake up!” But I was too happy in my new life, too comfortable in the bouncing backseat, to open my eyes.
It wasn’t until I met Aden that I finally understood what my father had meant when he’d talked about loving my mother. He’d refused to marry after she died, even though my sisters and I had begged him to do so: “Please, give us a brother,” we’d said, eager for another man in our family to support and protect us.
“I have had, in my life, the most beautiful horse,” my father had said. “I would never accept a donkey.”
Just four years earlier, Aden was also a Somali student like me. He had lived in Odessa, Ukraine, near my medical school, and had studied engineering at a nearby military academy. He and two of his friends came one day to visit my cousin Asli, who lived in the dormitory room next to mine. I was with her, studying. And although they stayed in the room for only a half hour—long enough to invite us to the wedding of two fellow Somali students—I could not stop staring at Aden. He was quieter than the others, with kind eyes and a welcoming face. He was tall and handsome, and unlike so many Somali boys I had met at university, he was shy and respectful: He didn’t try to shake my hand or talk with me aggressively. He didn’t ask any questions of Asli or of me, other than a simple, “How are you?”
When they left, I asked Asli about him.
“Ah!” Asli said. “That one? He just sits there without doing anything—one day, I think, you will regret it.” But many of my other girlfriends sympathized with him, so I decided that maybe Asli was contrary—Aden was handsomer and calmer than her husband.
Three days later, at the wedding of the two students, I walked over to Aden and his friends without thinking twice. We spoke easily. He told me about his family, who was from the north of the country. His parents had divorced before he was born, and his mother died when he was young, like mine. I told him about my family, and about my wish to return to Somalia. That was his wish, too, he said.
Until then, I knew love only through the memory of my parents’ relationship and the stories from my roommate Lena, a beautiful Ukrainian girl who spent an hour each day in front of the mirror instead of doing calisthenics. I suppose I also had the role model of a very outspoken Asli, who, even as a married woman herself, was so much freer than me. “Should I be like you, kissing your husband openly in public?” I asked her once when she was teasing me about being reserved. “Should I walk up to these boys and say, ‘I’m attracted to you, I love you,’ as you would?”
“Should you stay closed in this room, thinking and studying?” she asked. “You are just wasting your time.”
“I have responsibilities,” I said.
“I am a wife and a mother,” she said, “but still, I do everything I want. That way, when I am older, I will have no regrets.”
With Aden, though, I began to understand that when love is shared, it is a bit of paradise in the world. Though we were reserved in public, we were always together on Saturdays and Sundays, talking, talking, talking, wherever we went. As we got to know each other at the restaurants in Odessa or at the cinema, in a group of friends, I allowed myself to imagine a future in Mogadishu with him. I didn’t say anything, though, for fear of getting hurt.
On our way back from seeing a film one afternoon, we stopped in a public garden to talk. “I don’t want to bother you,” he said, taking my hand. “I want to marry you.”
I was so happy to hear his words, but I knew that I had to be honest with him if our relationship was going to work. In our day, engagement and marriage were close to the same thing: It meant that you found one room and lived together. I knew I loved Aden, but I’d made the decision long before that I would become a doctor before I would become a wife. “I don’t want to believe any man until I have my own credentials and my own money in my hand,” I told him.
Aden knew this about me, like he knew so many things; he knew that my father’s small salary was not enough to support our family, and that I saved as much money from my three-ruble daily allowance as I could, to send back home.
“Okay,” he said. “I will wait for you.”
We continued on together in the same way, growing closer and stronger, until he graduated. At dinner the night before he left, I gave him some money I’d saved, which I asked him to take back to Amina. We said a tearful good-bye outside my door, but when I sat down on my bed, I knew that I needed to see him again. So I bought a big flower from a local shop and went to find him at the airport.
He was surprised to see me there. “I love you,” I said when I gave him the flower. “I couldn’t see another man in front of me if there were thousands.” I knew we were close when we were in the same place; I needed to test to be sure that the feelings would stay when we were far away. According to the Holy Qur’an, men can have up to four wives, but for me it was different. When people had told me that Aden had the right to marry four, I always told them that he had the right to marry only me—no other woman.
“You can’t have anyone else,” I told him that night. “If you become different, I will stop loving you.”
“As long as you’re alive,” he said, “I will never go to another woman.”
I returned to my dormitory that night with perfect faith that, even with distance and time between us, he would keep his word.
CHAPTER FIVE
Friends and Enemies
When we were first married, Aden worked as an officer in the Somali Marines, and we were given free housing in an area called Secondo Lido, right by the seaside. Our villa was old, built by Italian engineers with quality stone, a charcoal stove, and a chimney. Because of Aden’s position, we had amenities that were uncommon at the time, including two indoor toilets and a telephone. It was a very beautiful place; instead of the sound of traffic, we listened to the waves.
Since Amina and Sharif’s family was growing, Asha and Khadija came to live with us; the nation’s best schools were in Mogadishu, so Aden’s brother and sister came as well, from the north. We hired a cook to help with meals and divided everyone into two rooms—one for girls and one for boys. I knew Aden’s family didn’t approve of the way the boys did housework alongside the girls, but it was my decision. We had come from the Soviet Union, where everyone was equal.
Aden and I usually ate on our own, after the others, and then we’d walk down to the beach for a bit of privacy. As we sat, watching the moonlight dance off the whitecaps and light up the white buildings stretching out along the coast, we talked about our family—Asha was studying biology at the university and Khadija was quickly becoming a headstrong teenager with a rebellious streak. We’d caught her dressing up and going to the nightclubs, and while I tried to stop her, it was no use. Once, out of frustration, I’d locked her out, refusing to respond even as she’d banged on the door and cried.
Some evenings I told Aden about the internal politics at the
hospital. “Doctors are like roosters,” I said one night, laughing. “They get jealous when they see another one.” If you were not well liked by the senior doctors, if you didn’t go along with what they said, exactly as they said it, they could transfer you to an external district in one of the rural areas with nothing but forceps and a prescription pad. While I was still technically a resident, I was determined to fight to stay in Mogadishu, with the specialists and the international visitors. I knew that if I was sent to the rural area, where I could not perform any complicated procedures, I would return knowing nothing.
We discussed national politics as well, our concerns and criticisms drowned out by the crashing waves. We knew that speaking ill of the government meant a risk of jail or other punishments. Some of our colleagues were party leaders, carefully watching how the staff was talking, how they were working. It was hard sometimes, living with the idea that there were people going after you, to see what you are doing, with whom you’ll talk.
A few months before we married, I was on duty one day when an American Embassy car hit a frail old Somali woman. They brought her to us when I was in the emergency room, so I treated her wounds, which were not serious. Later, during my break, a tall, well-dressed, middle-aged man with brown hair walked up to me. “How’s the patient?” he asked me. He was American. I became filled with panic, realizing that he was talking about the old woman.
“She’s okay,” I said, wondering who the man was and how he had known that I had treated her. An unsettled feeling started in my head and moved down to my stomach.
At the time I was enrolled in an after-work English class at the John F. Kennedy English Language Center in Mogadishu. I went to class as usual that night, but when a group of us walked out afterward, we discovered that a huge line of military men holding guns blocked us in. Beyond them sat a row of police cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing. As we waited for information, I ran through the day’s events in my head, convinced that something had happened to the woman hit by the American car and that the police had come for me.