Desert Flower

by Dirie, Waris

  “Ah, too much,” I’d respond with a bored look and a wave of my hand.

  “Well, come, come, come, how much you wanna pay?”

  “Two fifty.”

  “Oh, no, no, no! Now come on…” At this point I’d make a great show of walking away and talking to the other vendors with keen interest, always in direct view of my target. And then I’d go back and pick up where I left off, arguing until one of us got tired and gave in.

  My sister constantly mentioned her concern for our mother; she worried that since I’d run away, Mama was stuck doing all the work alone. Whenever she brought up this subject, it was as if the sole blame for the situation rested on me. I shared her worry over Mama, but Aman never mentioned that she’d run away, also. Forgotten memories of our childhood years together came back to me now. Much had changed in the five or so years since I’d last seen her, but to Aman I was still the same goofy little sister she’d left behind; meanwhile, she would always, always be the oldest and the wisest. It became clear to me that even though we looked alike, our personalities were nothing alike. I grew resentful of her constant bossiness. When Papa tried to marry me off to the old man, I ran away because I thought there had to be more to life. And cooking, washing, and taking care of babies something I’d already had plenty of with my little brothers and sisters was not what I had in mind.

  One day I left Aman’s to find out what else fate had in store for me. I didn’t discuss it with her; I didn’t tell her I was leaving I simply walked out one morning and never came back. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I didn’t know then that I’d never see her again.

  Mogadishu

  While I was living with Aman, she took me to visit some of our other relatives who were living in Mogadishu. For the first time in my life, I was able to meet some of my mother’s family. She grew up in the capital with her mother, four brothers, and four sisters.

  I’m grateful I got to know my grandmother while I was in Mogadishu. Today, she’s around ninety years old, but when I first met her, she was in her seventies. Granny is a complete mama. Her face is light-skinned, and shows that she’s a tough cookie, a woman of character and strong will. Her hands look like she’s been digging in the earth so long that they’ve developed crocodile hide.

  My grandmother grew up in one of the Arab countries, but I don’t know which one. She’s a devout Moslem, prays five times a day facing Mecca, and always wears a dark veil over her face when she leaves the house; she’s covered up from head to toe. I used to tease her: “Granny, are you okay? You sure you know where you’re going? Can you see through that thing?”

  “Oh, come, come, come,” she’d bark. “This thing is completely see-through.”

  “Good so you can breathe and everything?” I’d laugh.

  Staying at my grandmother’s house, I realized where Mama got her strength. My grandfather had been dead many years, and Granny lived alone, taking care of everything by herself. And when I went to visit her, she’d wear me out. As soon as we got up in the morning she was ready to go. She’d start in on me right away: “Get going. Come on, Waris. Let’s go.”

  Granny lived in a neighborhood of Mogadishu that was a good distance from the market. Each day we’d shop for food, and I’d say, “Come on, Granny let’s take it easy and ride the bus. It’s hot and the market’s too far from here to walk.” “What!? Bus! Now, come, come, come. Let’s go. Young girl like you, wanting to take the bus. What are you complaining about? You’re getting lazy these days, Waris. All you children today I don’t know what’s wrong with you. When I was your age, oh, I’d walk for miles and miles..” girl, are you coming with me or not?” So off we went together, because if I dawdled, she was obviously going to go without me. On the way home, I’d come trudging along behind her, carrying the bags.

  After I left Mogadishu, one of my mother’s sisters died, leaving nine children. My grandmother took care of these kids, raising them just as she did her own. She’s a mama and she did what had to be done.

  I met another one of her sons, Mama’s brother Wolde’ab. I had gone to the market one day, and when I returned, he was sitting at my grandmother’s with one of my cousins on his lap. Even though I’d never seen him before, I ran to him, because suddenly here was this man who looked exactly like my mother and I was desperate for anything that reminded me of Mama. I ran to him, and since I also look very much like my mother, it was a wonderful but strange moment, like looking in some sort of crazy, distorted mirror. He had heard that I’d run away and was staying in Mogadishu. As I came closer to him, he said, “Is this who I think it is?” That afternoon I laughed more than I had since I left home, because not only did Uncle Wolde’ab look like my mother, he had her silly sense of humor. The brother and sister must have been quite a team growing up, cracking everyone in the family up till they cried, and I wish I could have seen them together.

  But it was to Aunt L’uul’s home that I went the morning I ran away from my sister’s. Shortly after I arrived in Mogadishu, we had gone there together for a visit. The day I left Aman’s, I decided that I would go to Aunt L’uul’s house and ask if I could stay with her. She was my aunt by marriage, since she was married to my mother’s brother, Uncle Sayyid. However, she spent her days raising their three children alone, as he was living in Saudi Arabia. Because the economy in Somalia was so poor, Uncle worked in Saudi and sent money back home to support his family. Unfortunately, he was away the whole time I lived in Mogadishu, so I never got to meet him.

  When I arrived, Aunt L’uul was surprised, but she seemed genuinely glad to see me. “Auntie, things aren’t working out very well between Aman and me, and I wondered if I could stay here with you for a while.”

  “Well, yes, you know I’m here by myself with the children. Sayyid is gone most of the time and I could use a hand. That would be nice.” Immediately I felt relieved; Aman had grudgingly let me stay with her, but I knew she didn’t like the situation. Her place was too tiny, and she was still a relative newlywed. Besides, what she really wanted was for me to go back home, to ease her conscience about running away from Mama all those years ago.

  Staying first at Aman’s, then Auntie L’uul’s, I got accustomed to life indoors. At first, the confinement of living in a house seemed strange to me having my view of the sky blocked by a ceiling, the space I could move around in limited by walls, the brush and animal smells of the desert replaced by the sewage and carbon monoxide smells of a crowded city. Auntie’s place was somewhat bigger than Aman’s, but still not spacious by any means. And even though the facilities offered me new luxuries keeping warm at night and dry when it rained they were primitive by contemporary Western standards. My respect for water continued, as it remained a precious commodity. We purchased it from a vendor who transported his wares through the neighborhood by donkey, then we stored the water outside in a barrel. The family dipped it out sparingly for bathing, cleaning, making tea, cooking. In the small kitchen, Auntie prepared meals on a camp stove using bottled gas. In the evening, we sat around the house and talked by kerosene lamps, as there was no electricity. The toilet was typical of this part of the world: a hole in the floor where the waste fell and remained stinking in the heat. Bathing meant carrying a bucket of water in from the barrel outside, and sponging off, letting the excess run down the hole into the toilet.

  Soon after I arrived at Auntie Uuul’s, I realized I was getting more than I’d bargained for when I asked for a place to stay. I was also getting a full time job as babysitter for her three rotten children. Well, I guess I couldn’t really categorize the little baby as rotten, but its behavior distressed me all the same.

  Each morning Auntie got up around nine, and right after breakfast she gleefully left the house to visit her friends. Then she spent the entire day with these women, gossiping endlessly about their friends, enemies, acquaintances, and neighbors. Eventually she meandered back home in the evening. While she was gone, the three-month old baby cried constantly, wan
ting to be fed. When I held it, it started sucking me. Every day I would say, “Look, Auntie for God’s sake you’ve got to do something. The baby’s trying to suck me every time I pick it up, and I don’t have any milk. I don’t even have any breasts!”

  “Well, don’t worry. Just give him some milk,” she said pleasantly.

  Besides cleaning the house, and taking care of the baby, there was a nine-year-old and a six-year old to look after. And these two were like wild animals. They had no idea how to behave, because obviously their mother never taught them anything. I tried to rectify this situation immediately by whipping their ass every chance I got. But after years of running around like hyenas, they were not going to become little angels over night.

  As the days passed, I got more and more frustrated. I wondered how many more of these hopeless situations I was going to have to go through before something positive happened. I was always looking for a way to make things better, push myself forward, and find whatever that mysterious opportunity was that I knew was waiting for me. Every day I wondered, “When is it going to happen? Is it today? Tomorrow? Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?” Why I thought this, I’ve never known. I guess at that time I thought everyone had these voices inside them. But as far back as I can remember, I always knew my life was going to be different from those around me; I just had no idea how different.

  My stay with Aunt L’uul reached a crisis after I’d been there about a month. Late one afternoon, as Auntie was off making her rounds of the gossip mill, the oldest child, her nine-year old daughter, disappeared. First I went outside and called her. When she didn’t reply, I started walking through the neighborhood looking for her. Finally, I found her in a tunnel with a young boy. She was a strong-minded, inquisitive child, and by the time I caught up to her, she had become very inquisitive about this little boy’s anatomy. I marched into the tunnel, grabbed her arm, and jerked her to her feet; the boy took off running like a frightened animal. All the way back to the house I whipped my cousin with a switch, as I had never been so disgusted with a child in my life.

  That evening when her mother came home, the daughter cried about the spanking I had given her. Aunt L’uul was furious. “Why are you spanking this child?” she demanded. “You keep your hands off my baby or I’m going to beat you up and see how you like it!” she shouted, and came toward me menacingly.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know the reason I spanked her, because you don’t want to know what I know! If you had seen what she did today, you would say she’s no daughter of yours. This child is out of control she’s like an animal.” My explanation did not make matters any better between the two of us. Suddenly after leaving me a thirteen-year-old girl to cope with three children under the age of ten, her daughter’s welfare was of major importance to her. My aunt came at me shaking her fist, threatening to beat me for what I’d done to her little angel. But I’d had enough not only from her, but from the whole world. “Look, you’re not going to touch me!” I screamed. “If you do, you’re going to wind up bald-headed.” This ended any discussion of anyone beating me, but I knew at this point I had to go. But where would I run to this time?

  Raising my fist to knock on Aunt Sahru’s door, I thought, Here you go again, Waris. Sheepishly, I said hello when she answered the door. Auntie Sahru was Mama’s sister. And she had five children. This fact, I felt, did not bode well for my happiness in her household, but what choice did I have? Become a pickpocket or beg for food on the street? Without going into details about my departure from Auntie L’uul’s, I asked if I could stay with her family for a while.

  “You have a friend here,” she said to my surprise. “If you want to stay with us, you can. If you want to talk about anything, I’m here.” Things were off to a better start than I’d imagined. As expected, I began helping around the house. But Auntie Sahru’s oldest daughter, Fatima, was nineteen years old. The majority of the responsibility for running the house fell to her.

  My poor cousin Fatima worked like a slave. She got up early each day and went to college, then came home at twelve-thirty to cook lunch, returned to school and came back again around six in the evening to make dinner. After dinner she would clean up, then study late into the night. For some reason her mother treated her differently, demanding much more from her than she did from any of the other children. But Fatima was good to me; she treated me like a friend, and at that time in my life I certainly needed one. However, the way she was treated by her mom seemed unfair to me, so I tried to help my cousin in the kitchen at night. I didn’t know how to cook, but I tried to learn by watching her. The first time I ever tasted pasta was when Fatima made it, and I thought I was in heaven.

  My responsibilities were largely cleaning, and to this day Auntie Sahru says I’m the best cleaner she ever had. I scrubbed and polished the house, which was hard work. But I definitely preferred cleaning to babysitting, especially after my adventures of the past few months.

  Like Aman, Auntie Sahru continued to worry about my mother, and the fact that Mama was left without any older girls to help her with the work. My father might help with the animals, but he wouldn’t lift a finger to help with the cooking, or clothing, or making baskets, or taking care of the children. This was woman’s work, and Mama’s problem. After all, hadn’t he done his part by bringing home another wife to help? Yes, he certainly had. But I, too, had been worried about this issue since the dark morning when I last saw my mother. Whenever I thought of her, I remembered her face in the firelight the night before I left, and how tired she’d looked. While I was running across the desert looking for Mogadishu, I couldn’t get these thoughts out of my mind. The journey had seemed as endless as my dilemma: Which would I chose my desire to take care of my mother or my desire to be rid of the old man? I remember collapsing under a tree at dusk and thinking, Who’s going to look after mama now? She’s going to look after everyone else, but who’s going to look after her?

  There was no point in turning back now, however; it would simply mean I had gone through all the hardships of the past few months for nothing. If I went back home, a month wouldn’t pass before my father started dragging around every lame, decrepit fool in the desert who owned a camel, trying to marry me off. Then not only would I be stuck with a husband, I still wouldn’t be there to take care of my mother. But one day I decided that a partial remedy for this problem was to earn some money and send it to her. Then she could buy some of the things my family needed and wouldn’t have to work so hard.

  I set out to find a job, and began looking all over the city. One day my aunt sent me to the market to do her shopping, and on the way home I passed a construction site. I stopped and watched the men carrying bricks, mixing pits of mortar by tossing in shovels of sand and stirring in water with a hoe. “Hey,” I yelled out, ‘do you have any jobs?”

  The guy laying bricks stopped and started laughing at me. “Who wants to know?”

  “I do. I need a job.”

  “Nope. We don’t have any work for a skinny girl like you. Somehow I don’t think you’re a bricklayer.” He laughed again.

  “Hey, you’re wrong,” I assured him. “I can do it – I’m very strong. Really.” I pointed at the guys mixing the mortar; they stood there with their pants hanging down to their buttocks. “I can help them. I can bring all the sand, and mix as good as they can.”

  “Okay, okay. When can you start?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Be here at six and we’ll see what you can do.” I floated back to Auntie Sahru’s without touching the ground. I had a job! I would be earning money real cash! And I would save every penny and send it to Mama. She’d be so surprised.

  When I got to the house, I told Auntie my news. She couldn’t believe it. “You got a job where?” First of all, she couldn’t believe any girl would want to do this kind of work. “And exactly what are you going to do for these men?” she asked. Second, she couldn’t believe the boss would hire a female,
especially me, as I still looked half starved. But when I insisted it was true, she had no choice but to believe me.

  Once she believed me, she was angry that I planned to live with her, yet instead of helping out with the household chores, I’d be working for someone else. “Look,” I said tiredly. “I need to send Mama money, and in order to do that, I have to get a job. Either it’s this one, or a different one,

  but all the same, I have to do it. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  The next morning my career as a construction worker began. And it was horrible. I struggled carrying back-breaking loads of sand all day; I didn’t have any gloves, the bucket handle cut into my hands. Then, along my palms, I developed enormous blisters. By the end of the day the blisters had burst and my hands were bleeding. Everyone thought that was the end of me, but I was determined to come back the next morning.

  I stuck it out for a month, before my hands were so torn up and sore that I could barely bend them. But by the time I quit, I. had saved the equivalent of sixty dollars. I told my auntie proudly that I had saved some money to send home to Mama. Recently a man she knew had visited us; he was soon heading out into the desert with his family and offered to take the money to my mother. Auntie Sahru said, “Yeah, I know his people; they’re all right. You can trust them to take the money.” Needless to say, that was the end of my sixty dollars. After all that, I found out later that my mother never saw a penny of it.

  When I retired from construction work, I started cleaning house for my aunt again. Not long after this, I was working one day as usual, when a distinguished guest arrived: the Somalian ambassador to London. The ambassador, Mohammed Chama Farah, happened to be married to yet another aunt, my mother’s sister Maruim. As I dusted my way around the next room, I overheard the ambassador talking to Auntie Sahru. He had come to Mogadishu to find a servant before he began his four-year diplomatic appointment in London. Instantly, I knew this was it. This was the opportunity I had been waiting for.