by J. L. Powers
Roble hooted. Nobody went to dugsi for fun. It was just what you had to do – that was all.
Amina dropped her eyes to the dirt. Keinan was still staring at her. She was glad he went to the same dugsi, even though they sat on opposite sides of the classroom – Amina with the girls, Keinan with the boys, all of them sitting uncomfortably on the floor. Amina’s back always ached after dugsi.
She walked alongside them quietly as Roble opened his book and started quizzing Keinan on different suras, chapters in the Quran. Keinan was smooth, the holy words rolling off his tongue. No matter what verse Roble asked him to recite, he knew it by heart.
‘Have you really already memorised the entire Quran?’ Roble asked.
Keinan grinned. ‘Yes!’
‘How did you do it?’
‘I’m just that good,’ Keinan said.
‘No, really, I want to know how you did it,’ Roble said.
‘When I was younger, my teacher tied me to the chair and wouldn’t let me leave until I could recite the portion he wanted me to learn that day,’ Keinan explained. ‘And that is how I memorised it.’
Amina was quietly horrified. She and Roble exchanged glances.
‘What?’ Keinan said. He looked from Amina to Roble. ‘At least I learned it.’
‘Aabbe doesn’t think our teachers should beat us,’ Amina said. ‘Not at school, not at dugsi.’
‘What’s he going to do about it?’ Keinan asked. ‘All the teachers do it.’
He was right. And even though Aabbe was opposed to corporal punishment, they knew they would never receive sympathy at home. Hooyo said the teacher wouldn’t beat them if they did what they were supposed to do. ‘You won’t be afraid if you’ve learned your verses,’ she liked to say. But Hooyo wasn’t there. She didn’t know that some teachers had favourites, and they might pick on you no matter how hard you tried. At their dugsi, the teacher would sometimes blindfold students who hadn’t learned their lessons and allow the other children to pinch them. They hadn’t told Hooyo that.
The boys started talking about Somaliland, the area to the north that had declared independence from Somalia back in 1991, when the country first fell into civil war. Somalia refused to recognise its sovereignty. It was often a more peaceful region than other parts of the country.
‘Some people say Somaliland has the happiest people in the world,’ Roble said.
‘Yeah, because the men chew khat all day long,’ Keinan joked. Khat was a herbal drug that some men chewed because it gave them brief bursts of euphoria. It stained their teeth green and sometimes made their eyes red. ‘If we did that all day, every day, in Mogadishu, we’d be happy too.’
The streets rang with their boisterous laughter. They had reached dugsi in a good mood but quieted down quickly and went inside silently, as they were supposed to do. As Amina turned to sit with the girls, she caught Keinan’s eye.
She sat down, her brain hazy with a happy glow, determined that even the teacher’s bad mood wouldn’t rob her of this.
Amina’s schoolfriends showed up at her house after dugsi, just as they’d promised. They knocked on the gate and Amina told them to wait while she asked Hooyo if she could join them.
‘We won’t wait long!’ Filad warned.
‘Oh, don’t say that,’ Basra said. Amina had always liked her even though they’d never become close. Basra was already so busy with other friends. ‘You know Amina’s the best poetry writer. We’ll wait as long as we need to. I want her on my team!’ She smiled at Amina and Amina hurried inside, happy that one of the girls really wanted her to come along.
Usually, Hooyo was a busy mother, cooking, cleaning, organising Aabbe’s studio as much as he would allow. She rarely stopped. She liked to keep active, now that she wasn’t working – a decision she had made because it was too dangerous to go back and forth to the hospital every day. But now, like most days, Amina found her sitting by the window, reading a book. The baby growing in her belly had made her tired and moody.
Amina sat beside her, hoping she was happy right now. ‘Hooyo, some of my classmates are outside wanting to know if I can go to Filad’s house for a while.’
Hooyo put her book down. She looked at Amina, slightly exasperated. ‘You should stay home, here, like a good girl,’ she said.
Amina waited to see how this would play out.
‘Always running around, playing with your friends.’ Hooyo clucked her tongue. ‘You are old enough to be married. Men don’t want a wild woman, always going here, always going there, never staying home.’
Amina silently appealed to her grandmother.
‘Khadija, you know Amina is a good girl,’ Ayeeyo said. ‘She’s not wild, she’s just spending time with other girls. You had more freedom when you were a girl than she does now.’
‘I had more freedom, yes,’ Hooyo said. ‘But Mogadishu was safe then.’
‘What was it like?’ Amina asked.
‘Oh! It was so serene and beautiful, before the war,’ Hooyo said, her voice wistful. ‘You have no idea what it looked like before so many buildings were bombed and started falling apart. We had the best architecture in the world – inspired by Islam and styles like you find in Iraq, Turkey and Italy.’
‘I wish I could have seen it,’ Amina said. She sometimes caught glimpses of the architectural beauty of pre-war Mogadishu, but it was rare.
‘I wish that as well,’ Hooyo said. ‘It was safe to walk the streets then. Some women were quite daring in the way they dressed.’
‘Did they wear headscarfs?’ Amina asked. She had heard from her cousins that some Muslim women in other parts of the world didn’t have to cover their hair when they left the house.
‘Some women did not,’ Hooyo said. ‘Some women even wore trousers – like men!’
Amina couldn’t imagine that.
‘Oh, tell her the truth, Khadija,’ Ayeeyo said. ‘You were one of those daring women.’
Hooyo sighed. ‘Yes. I loved this city when I was young. There were movie theatres and restaurants and it was safe to go sailing in the ocean.’
Amina tried to imagine her mother, young and glamourous, going sailing on a sunny spring day.
Mogadishu was nothing like that now, of course. Women didn’t have so much freedom.
‘You should let her go, Khadija,’ Ayeeyo said. ‘Her fate is already written by Allah. If she stays here just to be safe, she may meet danger right here in her own house.’
‘Besides,’ Amina said, ‘I don’t want to get married yet so who cares if men think I’m a little wild? I want to finish school and go to college, like you.’
Hooyo gazed at her daughter. In a rare gesture of fondness, she reached out and smoothed Amina’s headscarf. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘Amina, you may go, but be careful.’
‘Thank you, Hooyo!’ Amina was already running towards the front door.
‘And don’t go near a boy,’ Hooyo called after her. ‘Remember, if you touch a boy, you’ll have a seizure and die.’
‘Very funny, Hooyo!’ Amina laughed.
‘Why are you laughing? I’m serious. That’s exactly what will happen.’ But Hooyo was smiling. It was a joke, yet she meant it all the same.
The girls walked in a small group, seven altogether, to Filad’s house. Amina’s parents allowed her to go with the girls as long as they stayed in a group. There was safety in numbers, Aabbe had told Amina, though even a group wasn’t entirely safe either. They looked like a rainbow walking down the street, each girl wearing a different colour headscarf. Amina was relieved when Basra fell into place beside her. Since the other girls were all good friends at school, she would normally have been the odd one out.
Filad and Basra couldn’t have been more different, even though they were the natural leaders of the group. Filad was short and curvy, a few curly tendrils poking out of her purple headscarf, with a plain face and a bossy manner. Basra was tall and slender and very pretty, funny and loud, although she sometimes looked a little sad. The two gir
ls had been friends for a long time and Amina was a little jealous of the easy way they related to each other. She wished she had a good friend like that.
Filad’s loud voice rang out over the girls’ chatter. ‘Did you guys hear the news?’
‘No. What?’ Dhuuxo asked.
Basra chimed in, ‘Do you mean the news about Hodan getting married?’
Amina felt sick. Hodan was only fifteen. Though she herself liked Keinan, she wasn’t ready to get married.
Other girls liked growing up. It was just one more thing that made Amina feel different. A year ago, when the girls were thirteen, one of Amina’s classmates had to leave school and get married. Amina remembered going to the mosque for the ceremony and doing the traditional buraanbur with the other women at the wedding – stamping her feet, clapping, singing, trilling. She had eaten an entire plate of halwa, the candied jelly slipping spoonful by delicious spoonful from her tongue down into her belly. Then she’d suffered half the night with cramps because Hooyo and Ayeeyo didn’t normally let her indulge in such rich food.
‘Hodan! Getting married!’ the other girls exclaimed. ‘When?’
Filad looked disappointed that Basra had stolen her news but she recovered quickly. ‘She’s getting married next week and her husband is taking her to Kenya.’
‘So she’s leaving the country?’ Dhuuxo asked. ‘Lucky her!’
‘Does she already have family in Kenya?’ Saafi asked.
‘Her husband’s parents and sister are already in Nairobi,’ Basra explained.
‘Wow, she’s really starting a new life,’ Saafi said. ‘I wouldn’t want to leave my mother. I need her.’
‘Yeah, you need her,’ teased Basra. ‘You need her because you don’t know how to cook and no Somali man wants a wife who can’t cook.’
Saafi joined in the laughter at her expense. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I would always be running home to ask Hooyo how to make dinner.’
The girls kept chattering about the news and Amina let the words float above her head, just out of reach of her ears. She ran her hand along the cement walls as they passed. Concrete was such a strong material, yet still so vulnerable to bombs and guns.
‘Have you ever been to Filad’s house?’ Basra asked.
‘No,’ Amina said.
‘Don’t tell Filad, but when I was a little girl, I was scared of her mother.’ She kept her voice low but a grin on her face suggested that she wasn’t really sharing a secret.
‘Why?’ Amina’s restless eyes scanned the row of houses as they passed. This was a neighbourhood she had never marked with her work. She saw several buildings that looked abandoned and presented luring possibilities. She noted the blue tiles lacing the walls of one house with a flat roof. Maybe she could borrow just a tiny bit of blue paint and Aabbe wouldn’t notice.
‘You’ll see. She has really long ears and I thought she was the dhaagdheer.’ Basra erupted with laughter and Amina joined in. The dhaagdheer was a woman with excessively long ears who took children at night and ate them. As long as you were home before dark, you would be safe.
‘I used to run away whenever I saw people with long ears,’ Amina admitted, ‘even after Hooyo told me the dhaagdheer wasn’t real.’
‘Oh, not my hooyo,’ Basra said. ‘My hooyo used to scare me with lots of stories. But then, when my sister died, I realised there were scarier things in the streets of Mogadishu than anything Hooyo ever mentioned.’
‘Your sister died?’ Amina asked. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that! What happened?’
Basra paused for a second, then said, ‘She was murdered.’
Amina stumbled, reaching for a tall palm tree to steady herself. She looked at her classmate out of the corners of her eyes. How terrible! Why did Basra seem so calm?
‘So now I don’t see the point of being scared of the dhaagdheer.
’ ‘Are you scared of anything?’
Basra considered this. ‘Not really, no.’
‘You’re really brave. If my sister had been murdered …’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Basra said matter-of-factly. ‘You can’t stop bad things from happening. You just have to keep on living.’
Amina was amazed. She thought about all the things that frightened her: being killed, being kidnapped by al-Shabaab and forced to become the wife of a soldier, losing her family. She didn’t think she could be as calm as Basra.
‘But, after it happened, I cried for months,’ Basra admitted. ‘A river of tears! Sometimes I still cry. You never stop missing someone you love.’
At Filad’s house, the girls gathered in the living room. Filad’s mother served sweet cinnamon tea in pretty white cups, blue flowers etched along the edges. Amina sank her feet into the thick Persian rugs covering the floor, relishing the softness between her toes.
Quickly, they broke up into teams. Sometimes, they pitted one neighbourhood against another. One group would compose a poem and recite it – something lightly teasing and derogatory about the other neighbourhood or extolling their own neighbourhood’s virtues, or talking about what it meant to be Somali. Then the other group would counter it with their own poem. Today, Filad said two team leaders would choose the girls on their team.
‘I’ll be one team leader and Basra will be the other team leader,’ Filad said.
Nobody argued with her. They always did what Filad said.
Amina was Basra’s first choice. She joined Basra, flushed with pleasure to be selected so early.
When all the girls had been selected for one team or another, they settled back onto opposite sides of the living room. All the girls had been competing like this, writing and reciting poetry most of their lives. It was second nature to Amina and she loved it.
It was the other group’s turn first. Filad stepped up and began reciting a poem with a strong, rhythmic beat.
Girls of Mogadishu
We have grit, we have courage
Let’s fight it out
Amina listened to Filad chant and looked at all the girls gathered together in the room. They were so pretty. She had never heard Basra’s story before but she knew Filad had also lost a brother and cousins. What sadness did the other girls hide behind their smiles?
Filad finished and sat down, crowing loudly. ‘Now, let’s see what you girls can do,’ she told Basra’s group.
Amina jumped to her feet to go first. Lines of poetry were already forming in her head because of Basra’s story about her sister.
She began to chant the poem she had just created.
When the sun falls from the sky
And lies broken on the city street
What is left to fear?
We’ve lost much but we’ve survived
We are true Somalis.
The girls listened, nodding their heads and smiling. Amina could see their respect for her skill, even from the girls on Filad’s team. But she could also see the way they responded to the words. One girl nodded her head when Amina repeated the line, ‘What is left to fear?’ That girl had a story to tell. Everybody in the room had a story to tell.
Everyone but Amina.
As she stood there reciting, she realised she had been lucky all of her life. She had relatives living in all corners of the world, but except for her grandfather, Awoowe, who had died before she was even born, she had never lost a single family member to the war.
Roble came to fetch Amina early in the evening. They walked home together in the cool evening, a refreshing breeze blowing salt air from the ocean. Before going inside, Amina stopped by Aabbe’s studio, knocking gently on the door. His eyes were bright and alert when he opened it so she knew it was a good time to interrupt. ‘Come in,’ he invited.
She sat on the high stool he used when painting and twirled around on it, as though she were a little girl, telling him about her afternoon. She revelled in the details of the poetry competition, how she had beaten every girl in the room with the power of her words.
‘Ah-ha, you are a true Somali g
irl.’ Aabbe laughed, his deep, hearty laugh, the one she loved. ‘We Somalis, we are nothing but poetry and camels, camels and poetry.’
She joined in, partly because of the joke and partly because it was impossible not to laugh when Aabbe did.
Amina sometimes wondered whether she would be jealous if Hooyo’s baby was another little girl. What if Aabbe loved the baby more than he loved her?
‘We used to court girls with poetry,’ Aabbe told her. ‘We boys would make arrangements to meet after all the parents had gone to bed. Then we would go somewhere and make a big bonfire. If a girl looked outside and saw the bonfire, she knew she was being called to join us. And so the girls would come and we would meet them at the fire – the boys on one side and the girls on the other. And we would sing a song or recite poetry, and the girls would sing a song or recite poetry, and we would go back and forth like that. That was how we wooed. A boy had to convince a girl he could write poetry if he was going to win her heart.’
‘And your parents didn’t know you were sneaking out to meet girls?’
‘Of course they knew,’ Aabbe said. ‘We boys did it because our fathers told us that was what they did. They knew what we were doing in general, but never the specific night.’
‘So were you good at writing poetry?’
‘Sadly, no. But if the poetry didn’t work, we boys would wrestle each other. And I was very good at wrestling.’
Amina couldn’t help giggling at the picture of her father reciting bad poetry in front of a bonfire and then wrestling a boy, all to win the heart of a girl. ‘You were real country boys,’ Amina said. ‘The boys in Mogadishu would never do something like that.’
‘Yes, Roble and Keinan would probably sneer at how innocent we were.’ Aabbe sighed.
‘So, did you win Hooyo because you wrestled another boy for her?’ Amina teased.
‘I knocked another boy out with one pop to the face,’ Aabbe joked, mimicking the pop with his fist. Then he said, more seriously, ‘We met our first year in college. She was so beautiful and capable and smart. I knew she could do anything she wanted to if she just set her mind to it. Like you, Amina. You have that same crazy determination.’