by Hawa Abdi
“Hawa, do you see that house?” one of my friends asked. I’d never noticed, but it was modern, very beautiful, with an open first floor of only pillars and two other stories above. The front gate had been broken. “That house belongs to Salad Gabeyre,” she said.
As I understood the reality, I felt first relief, and then dread. When Mohamed Siad Barre had seized control of Somalia in 1969, the high-ranking army official Salad Gabeyre Kediye had been the operations chief of the coup. Aden and I had just met at the time; we’d heard on the radio from the Soviet Union that our president, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, had been assassinated by one of his own bodyguards, and that the military had taken full control of the parliament and the territory.
In the few years since Siad Barre had declared himself our president, a vicious power struggle had arisen among the leaders of the revolution. Now, in 1972, Siad Barre had sentenced Salad Gabeyre and two others to death for conspiring to overthrow the regime. The time had come: The radio had been calling on all Somali people to come out at eight o’clock the next morning to watch the execution. What we witnessed was not my arrest for malpractice; it was government troops invading the homes of their former comrades.
Many people attended the execution, although Aden and I refused. After the physicians’ meeting that morning, I looked out the window at the rain. Maybe the sky was crying for those very active, very educated men, I thought. Although for a while I expected that the strongest people of their clans would stand up in revenge, no one moved—no one even talked.
Soon after, a paper pinned to the gate of the John F. Kennedy school notified students that classes had been suspended by the order of the Somali government. It was a decree echoed across the country at the time, as citizens were required to use the newly established written Somali language. While we had spoken our mother tongue for centuries and still used it in our homes, we’d relied on the colonial Italian or English as a common written language for our schools and our businesses. Now, the nation’s educators were required to go to the rural areas to teach the people there how to write and read in Somali. One of our fellow doctors at Digfer became our language teacher, and we in the hospital also began writing that way. While the transition was at first difficult, the Somali language also uses the Latin alphabet; with a bit of practice, writing became no problem.
Years later, some people suggested that Siad Barre benefited from the language program by empowering uneducated members of his clan to run the government. It’s true that in those years, more and more people from the president’s clan rose to power, many of them without much education. I heard story after story of people imprisoned for suspicious activities, people beaten, even killed. It was hard not to intervene somehow, to say to some of the people I knew, “You are not right—why are you doing these things?”
Around the typical home in Somalia is a type of protection we call a dugaal, shielding our open courtyards from the threats of wind or wild animals. I always say that when you have your parents, you have your dugaal. But in Odessa in 1969, just a few months after we Somali students heard the news that our government had been overthrown, Asli brought a letter into my room, and that shelter disappeared.
“Guess what I have?” Asli asked, holding out a letter and teasing me with it. We students lived so simply in those days that the mail was one of our most precious commodities. Whoever picked up the mail for the group played this game with each recipient, making her guess who sent a letter and then pulling her onto their feet to dance and sing before the mail was handed over. “Get up!” she said. “If you want to get it, you have to get up!”
It had been almost two months since I’d heard anything from my family, and I had been worrying every day about my father’s health. When I’d returned to Mogadishu for Amina and Sharif’s wedding the year before, I was far enough along in my studies to recognize the symptoms of tuberculosis, which was common in our area, and very serious.
“You have a fever!” I’d shouted. He was also thin and pale, and he was trying to hide his coughing.
“Dottoressa Hawa,” he’d joked, “you come home and immediately make a diagnosis?”
We’d taken him to a hospital that specialized in tuberculosis. The examination was free, although the medication to treat his condition was not. For that, we’d used the $300 I had saved from my allowance and some small summer jobs. We hadn’t talked about what would happen when the medicine ran out.
I’d brought my student identification card to the Mogadishu hospitals, begging the doctors I saw for any sort of help. “Please, can you help me bring my father to the tuberculosis hospital in the Soviet Union?” I’d asked. They’d all advised me to go to back to school and to search for some help there.
The letter was from Amina. I begged Asli to read it.
“Sister,” read Asli, and then she stopped. I sat up and faced her, and she continued. “I haven’t gotten any answer from you after our father died.”
As she continued to read, the news flooded my body. The only thing I could understand is that Amina had sent other letters, and none of them had arrived. I wrestled the blankets out from under Asli, flipped onto my stomach, and stayed that way, heaving and crying, until I fell asleep somehow. Though she tried for a while to comfort me, I could not even feel her hands on my shoulders, her voice in my ears. I had failed my father, and still, my sisters were alone.
“Father, wait for me,” I’d cried at the airport as I’d hugged him, my cheek against his chest. “Wait for me! I will come back to you.”
I slept through the loud announcements the next morning and ignored the knocks on my door. “Tell them I’m sick,” I told Asli, who had brought me dinner that next evening. “Do not tell anyone what happened.” Maybe I would wake up from the dream, somehow, and my father wouldn’t be dead.
As the news of my loss spread, friends slid notes under the door, which my roommates piled up on the dresser next to Amina’s letter. When I was finally able to stand up, I threw away Amina’s letter and returned to bed, exhausted from the effort. Now there was no one. “We are waiting for you, Dottoressa Hawa,” my father had written to me, as a letter of thanks for a watch I’d mailed him from school the year before. But I had not been able to reach him in time.
My desire to protect my family had only grown as I returned to Mogadishu, and as I saw the way that our country’s politics were affecting the rights of our people, I became desperate to do something. A few months after the John F. Kennedy school closed in 1972, I decided to enroll in the law school, following in the footsteps of Amina’s husband, Sharif, who had begun a few years before. As I registered, I remembered what Sharif had told me when I’d returned to Mogadishu after my father’s death and told him about Aden. “Okay,” Sharif had said, “but if you want to marry, you should marry and live abroad. Things in Somalia have changed.” He hadn’t approved of the military rule, preferring to be free, independent, with the right to say whatever you wanted. “Finish your studies, search for work outside, and then, if you can help, send for us.”
I’d told him that I loved my country and my sisters, and I approved of the Soviet Union’s rule that when you finished university, you had to go back home. “I know what it’s like to live abroad,” I’d said, “but my life is here.”
Now, when I expressed my fears about the changing times, Sharif was already fed up. “I told you this would happen,” he said, “so now you can’t say anything.”
My law school classes met in the afternoons, so I was able to go to school after work: Most days, I came home from the hospital for lunch around 1:30 or 2 p.m., and then I would go to class from 3:30 until 7 p.m.. We were introduced to every type of law: international law, public law, private law, administrative law, as well as Sharia, or Islamic law. While I appreciated many aspects of Sharia—the business and commercial provisions are similar to modern law—I always argued with my professor over women’s rights.
According to Sharia, the groom’s family pays the bride’s family
before marriage. Since she receives her portion this way, she is not entitled to the same rights as her husband. That is why, if you are a woman and you are killed, your murderer would pay your family fifty camels, unlike the one hundred camels that would be owed for a man’s head. My professor tried to make this sound straightforward in class, but my personal experience had taught me otherwise.
As he lectured, I remembered the pain on my father’s face in 1962 after I returned to Mogadishu, after some time away, to learn that Ayeyo had died of a sudden infection. “Your uncles didn’t come for the burial,” my father had said. “They came the day after and took all the cows, all the goats.”
At the time I was so shocked by the sudden loss of my beloved grandmother that I hadn’t understood the significance of my father’s words; then, slowly, with his arms wrapped around his chest, he’d struggled to explain what my professor taught us so simply. In death, Ayeyo’s male relatives, no matter how distant, were entitled to more than we were, as her granddaughters. My mother had not left a will to defend the livestock she and my father had bought to raise on Ayeyo’s farm. “All our cows are for my mother,” she’d said. “She has nothing, except my children.”
So while my father had prepared Ayeyo’s grave, her nephews had arranged to sell her beloved herd. Just like that, my family’s small security, our hope to survive, was gone. In its place remained only one small wood-chewing goat, my half sister Faduma Ali’s, which my father had insisted be spared.
“Why don’t you do something?” I’d asked my father at the time. He had told me simply that he could not take back what had already been sold.
“Professor, how can I be half?” I argued now. “Fifty? Why? Why can’t I be one hundred?”
CHAPTER SIX
Awaiting a Life, Awaiting a Death
In May 1975, I gave birth to my Deqo—a quiet baby, as she is quiet now, with eyes just like Aden’s. I had been hoping to get pregnant for years, and when I finally held her in my arms, I understood what it meant to be a mother. Aden was a proud papa—some afternoons we would all go together to the market, where the women among the stalls would look at Deqo, look at Aden, and tell him, “No one can ask whether she is your daughter or not!”
At the time, the government granted working women four months of maternity leave—two months before the birth and another two months after the birth. It was one example of the way our government supported us, even though, in other ways, they constricted us. Siad Barre was a big supporter of women’s rights; under his leadership, Somali women were teachers and police officers and even construction workers, carrying iron and stone to transform our rapidly growing city. The year Deqo was born we saw the passage of the Family Law of 1975, which gave women equality in property rights and established that no man can divorce a woman without her consent. It was a revelation: For so many years, women were treated as subjects, as property that a man could throw out the door. Now a woman could report the action to the town’s orientation center, and a committee would come to defend her position.
Our government had also provided essential assistance during the long drought that began years earlier in Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia, and that became a devastating famine. In order to save thousands of people from starvation, our government took over portions of the rural area near the Shabelle and Juba Rivers, establishing refugee centers and cooperative farms. More than a hundred thousand people were resettled, transferred from the less-developed northeast part of the country to the south, where they received food and agricultural or fishing training.
Despite these successes, our international reputation hung in the balance as our association with the Soviet Union began to change. In 1974, after a revolution in Ethiopia, the Soviet Union began to support their new leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam. We’d long had a complicated relationship with Ethiopia, as their eastern region, the Ogaden, was once a part of Somalia. After the Soviets accused Siad Barre of backing a liberation movement inside the Ogaden in 1977, we went to war.
I cried when I heard the news about the war, knowing that the men on the front lines were my brothers—our friends from university. At first we feared that Aden would be sent to the battle, but he was allowed to continue working for a government transportation company inside Mogadishu. We came home every night to hear the news on the radio, as Somali soldiers, armed with heavy Russian artillery and tanks, pushed toward Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa.
At that time, my Deqo was a small child; I was newly pregnant again and worried about our future. We were at war with a nation that had built our very army; now, they were bringing troops from across the world—from Cuba to Yemen—to support the Ethiopian regime. As the fighting worsened toward the end of the year, Siad Barre issued an ultimatum to all of the Soviets living in Somalia: “Leave within twenty-four hours.” How we cried at Digfer, talking with our Soviet colleagues, who had worked by our sides for so many years. Though we tried to express our sorrow, it didn’t matter. Politics is a death game—after seventeen years, our best friends became our worst enemies.
One of our classmates sent to war was a man named Yusuf, who’d gone on to study logic and philosophy in Moscow and to work for Siad Barre’s regime. Yusuf was called to the front lines in Ethiopia, in what we came to call the Ogaden War, but one night he went out on his own, maybe to the bathroom, and he was shot. “We thought he was the enemy,” said one Somali man later. They called it an accident, but we all had our suspicions. There will always be part of a society that hates a tough and talented man; those who don’t have the power become jealous, and they will do everything they can to destroy him.
We had always known Yusuf would be successful. I remember him barging into my medical school dormitory room one day. “Hawa, what are you doing?” he’d asked when he saw I wasn’t dressed.
“I’m getting my breakfast in bed,” I’d told him, annoyed that this younger boy would challenge me, a medical student. “I want to relax today.”
“That is bourgeois,” he said. “You should get up, get dressed, and do your duty.” I’d laughed as he closed the door, but he’d inspired me to get up and work. That was Yusuf: He loved his country and spent his life searching for the thing to do immediately; he also pushed others, believing that people can do anything they put their minds to.
In 1978, when Ethiopia’s Soviet-backed military launched a surprise attack against the Somali troops, the teachers defeated the students, and Somalia lost the war. Thousands of people died, and the men who came back were physically and emotionally destroyed. Some of the members of the regime began to act as bandits—using their authority to steal from the poor, rural people, or favoring their own clan over another, more vulnerable group. We heard, time and again, of Siad Barre’s relatives guaranteeing their own private property over the national interest.
You know that from our earliest history, Somali society respected most the man who was able to mediate conflict between two groups. The more our president supported his own clan, the more deeply he destroyed his power and his reputation among his own people. This marked the beginning of our troubles, as the men who had been sent to war returned with only frustration and hatred. In time they would use that anger as a weapon, destroying everything that they had once fought to protect.
There is a shared understanding in my profession that doctors should not treat members of their own families, but when Amina became sick that year, soon after the birth of her third child, I forgot every rule I’d ever learned. For days, she’d felt pain in her right side that was becoming worse and worse. When her skin began to turn yellow, we feared it was hepatitis.
“I should be caring for you!” Amina wailed, gesturing to my growing belly, as Aden and I drove her to the hospital. I was due to deliver in a few weeks.
“Just rest,” I said. “There will be time yet for you to care for me.” Then, while she slept, I ran through the corridors, trying to find the internist on duty, knowing that when acute hepatitis got a hold of a person,
they had little chance to survive. The diagnosis was confirmed, and for the next seven days I was in hell, my world becoming smaller and smaller. We brought her to a different hospital, Medina, to consult with one of our best hepatologists, but she continued to suffer, refusing all the food we brought her.
In well-developed countries, doctors have different ways of treating liver failure; they can even put in a new liver sometimes. It was not the case in our time. My heart tore open again as I watched my sister suffer, and for those seven dark days, that hole got bigger and bigger. As a doctor, I knew that her condition was deteriorating, but when I sat down with her children at night, I could not tell them the truth.
As the yellow color moved into the whites of my sister’s eyes, I asked my colleagues to help me with my rounds. I sat with her day and night as she began to lose consciousness; I called for more opinions, more specialists. I stood with them as they nodded slowly to one another, regret in their faces. She died as we surrounded her, looking on helplessly.
Sharif was inconsolable about his wife’s death. Aden had to return to work, but I stayed in bed for days, relying on our helper to care for the children. None of us could find the right words, so a silence grew up around all of our family. At night, I would lie awake and say to myself: “What is your destiny? From your mother, you raised three children; now, from your sister, you will raise three more—two boys and a girl.”
I still mourn Amina, who was the sweetest, the calmest among us. She was the only one who truly understood me, and the only one who always believed that we could hold our family together. Asha and Khadija were like Sharif—digesting the news in their own way, and not coming to me for consolation. So as the first months passed, I was with the children alone, confined to our sitting room and a few small bedrooms.