I have never condemned my father or allowed myself to feel real anger toward him. But if I had gone to his side and spoken truthfully to him before he died, I might have had to open an emotional closet I have nailed shut. Now that he was dead I felt contempt for myself, and I was filled with regret for everything he and I might have done differently.
* * *
I grew closer to Magool in the weeks after my father’s death. My young cousin had grown up smart, independent, a free spirit, tough and yet compassionate, with a no-nonsense attitude toward life. Now she was the suddenly my only precious link to my extended family. Magool had lived with me for over six months in the Netherlands in the early 1990s. Unlike Sahra, she adopted the Western values of individual responsibility in matters of life, love, and family. Because everyone in her environment had tried to convert her back to Islam, she knew how annoying the process was and never tried to convert me. Magool was also my connection to the Somali bloodline to which, whether I liked it or not, I still belonged.
One day I asked Magool for news of my mother, and she told me a story that surprised and pleased me.
All those long years after my father had left my mother alone in Kenya with three children, Ma had refused to say more than a word or two to him. Her mute, awful anger lay between them even before he left us; her silence filled our house on Park Road in Nairobi, until he could no longer bear it. When he came back to Kenya ten years later, she turned away from his outstretched arms and ignored his endearments, even in the presence of family and friends.
After I fled my family and my father moved to London, Ma followed the news about him closely, Magool told me. When she learned that he was dying and suffering, she believed it was because his soul was not being allowed to depart quietly and in peace. My father’s kidneys failed, then started functioning again; he would breathe on his own for a while and then had to be hooked up to the ventilator again. Ma saw all this not as the effects of leukemia or the septic infection that was raging through his body and killing his organs but as a sign of, a prelude to, the explicit tortures of the grave that loom so large in Islamic teaching.
In the hell described in the Quran, flames lick the flesh of the sinful; burning embers will be placed under their feet, their scalps will be scalded and their brains boiled. These tortures are endless, for as their skin is burned it is replaced and burned again. In the suffering of my father on his deathbed, my mother believed, Allah and his angels were giving him a taste of the punishments to come for his wrongdoings.
I imagined my mother must have asked herself whom my father could have wronged more than he had wronged her. Who else had he abandoned, cheated on, dragged to foreign countries? Who but she had gone hungry and watched her fatherless children fall away and betray her after he departed? Who could possibly have suffered more than she because of the sins of Hirsi Magan Isse? My mother felt she held the keys to my father’s last chance for salvation before the grave, so she resolved to act.
Perhaps she thought that by doing good she might be forgiven for her own sins. Or perhaps it was because she truly loved him. (This is what I tell myself.) Maybe her sense of ethics and justice, of being the daughter of a respected judge among the nomads, never deserted her, or maybe her act was all about power. Whatever her reasoning, my mother decided to register at my father’s deathbed like his other wives. Her presence was different from theirs, however. She cajoled Magool, the daughter of her younger sister, into going to the hospital on her behalf to deliver a message.
I am not sure how, but Magool had grown friendly with my half sister, Sahra. She found out from Sahra that my father was in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and also found out which ward he was in. Then she went to see him with a message from my mother. Unlike me, she did not talk at first, but hovered quietly for a few minutes, until she felt comfortable enough to whisper his name. Magool said that he opened his eyes and raised his head to see who she was. Making eye contact with him, she then delivered the message my mother had made her memorize:
Dear Uncle Hirsi,
I am here on behalf of Asha Artan Umar, the mother of your children. She wanted me to convey to you that she forgives you for any ill will that has come to pass between the two of you. She seeks forgiveness from you for any wrongdoing on her part and she wishes you an easy passage to the hereafter. She prays fervently for your admission into paradise and for Allah’s mercy on you between now and when you meet Him.
When Magool related this story to me, I asked her how Abeh had responded. “I don’t know if he heard me,” she answered. “He lifted up his head for a second, and then his head fell back on the pillows. He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them again. I am assuming he heard. At least that is what I told your Ma.”
“What did you tell her, exactly?”
“I told her that he heard me, that I could see he understood. I’m not sure he really did, but she is old and lonely and it will do her good to know that the father of her children got her message.”
I don’t remember my mother being in a forgiving mood too often, but I knew how much this would mean to her, and it made me feel better too. Regardless of her motivation, my mother’s message to my father was gracious and timely, and it surely brought her some peace.
One afternoon, less than a week after my father had passed away, Magool phoned me. “Ayaan, Abaayo,” she said, using an endearment that is best translated as “dear sister.”
“Yes, Abaayo, dear, what is it?” Is there more bad news? I wondered.
“Abaayo, Ayaan …”
“Uhhhmm, Abaayo Magool.”
“Abaayo Ayaan.”
“Abbbaaayyo. Yessss.” I tried to contain my irritation but failed.
“Will you do me a favor, Abaayo, please, Abaayo?” Magool asked me. “Just this once?”
“Abaayo, what is it?”
“Please, Abaayo, just say yes first?”
I hesitated. I had no idea what Magool would ask for, and I didn’t want to commit to something I could never deliver. From the old days I knew that Somali relatives ask—no, demand—money, immigration papers, the smuggling of people and goods; they request to be allowed to camp in your home for three days only, which stretch into forever. All this is preceded by floods of endearments of “dear sister” and “dear cousin” and all the special Somali words for every inflexion of relationship that lies beyond and in between.
“It depends, Abaayo,” I responded. “I will say yes if what you ask won’t compromise my safety, if it is legal, and if I can afford it.”
Magool laughed. “No problem, Abaayo.”
I was now more intrigued than irritated. “So?”
“Abaayo, phone your mother.”
I was silent for a few seconds, taking the time to find the right response, and when I spoke again my voice was so soft that she asked me to repeat what I said. “Magool, I don’t know if ma wants to talk to me anymore.”
“Abaayo”—the compassion in Magool’s voice was plainly audible now—“I will give you her phone number. Yes, she wants to talk to you. She is all alone now. My ma was with her until a few months ago. Now my mother has gone to Tanzania with my brother. Your mother is all by herself and she asks after you all the time. Please, call her. Promise me you will call her.”
At first I felt a jolt of childlike excitement. Then I felt fear; I dreaded the confrontation that would be bound to occur as soon as I spoke with my mother. But that was soon overcome by the sense of duty she had inculcated in me, and the guilt of having neglected her. My father had just passed away. What if my mother was taken ill? Would I ever see her again? I knew the answer: my mother is in Somalia and I am an infidel who would be killed instantly on arrival. I would not be present at her bedside.
But at least I could talk to her. And so I tried the number Magool gave me. I got an out-of-order signal, a busy signal, a recorded female voice telling me in English and Spanish, “All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.” Magool had
warned me that getting through to Somalia was hard and advised me to keep trying; I called so often, whenever I had a little free time, that it became a habit. I had almost come to believe that Magool had deluded me and the line would never work when finally, one afternoon, in the front seat of the Land Rover of a friend of mine who was driving me out of town to buy furniture for an apartment I had just rented, I connected to the phone line in my mother’s dirt-floor house in Las Anod, a place located between Somaliland and Puntland, two autonomous regions in what was once Somalia.
“Hello,” said a soft voice on the other end. (This greeting came to us Somalis when the British introduced the telephone to our country; ever since, Somalis say hello when they pick up a phone.)
“Hello, hooyo, Ma. It is me, Ayaan.” I held my breath, certain she would curse and hang up on me.
“Hello, did you say Ayaan?” Now I was certain it was my mother. I hadn’t recognized her voice at first.
“Hooyo, mother, mother. Yes, it is Ayaan. It is me. Please don’t hang up.”
“Allah has brought you back to me. I am not going to hang up.”
“Mother, how are you? Do you know that Father just passed away?”
“I know that. You must know, my daughter, that death is the only thing that is certain. We are all going to die. What credit for the hereafter have you built for yourself?”
I sighed. My ma had not changed. It was as though the five years in which she and I hadn’t spoken had never been. Her voice was the same, with its echoes of her Dhulbahante clan, and so were her constant references to death, to the hereafter, and her expectations and demands, her evident, manifest disappointment in me, her oldest daughter. I made an attempt to change the subject: “Ma, I think it was gracious of you to send Magool to forgive him on your behalf.”
“Did she pass on my message?” she asked me eagerly. “What did he say?” My mother was desperate to know how Magool had handled it; she must have heard gossip about Magool’s ungodly life, for she also wanted to know whether her messenger to his hospital bed was appropriately dressed.
“Ma,” I replied, “Magool is a responsible and honorable young woman. She did exactly as you said. She told me that Abeh responded, that he understood her, and I am sure you can be comfortable that it was not too late.”
“Ayaan, did you go and see him?”
“Yes, Ma, I did. I am happy I did. It was tough.”
Our conversation went on like this, stiff and tense, almost like strangers speaking, but with ripples of unspoken meanings and fears. Ma filled me in on the details of my grandmother’s death, in 2006, “around the time that Saddam Hussein was tried and executed,” as Magool had said. Grandmother had become deaf, Ma told me, and she grew smaller and more immobile, until one day that mighty, fearsome force of will stopped breathing.
She told me a little about her own life since then. She was living alone in Sool, a district in what was once the land of the Dhulbahante, her nomad clan of camel herders. I paused for a moment to imagine it: a little hamlet of cinderblock buildings, unpaved roads, thorn bushes, and endless dust. She would have to fetch wood to make charcoal for the brazier. Perhaps she was comforted by being among her ancestral people.
Then my mother turned the conversation back to what I was doing to invest in my hereafter. “Do you pray and fast, and read the Quran, my daughter?”
It took me so long to think of a good answer that she asked if I was still there. I decided to tell her the truth. “Ma, I don’t pray or fast, and I read the Quran occasionally. What I find in the Quran does not appeal to me.”
As soon as I said the words I regretted it. Predictably, she flew into a rage. “Infidel!” she cried. “You have abandoned God and all that is good, and you have abandoned your mother. You are lost!”
Then she hung up on me.
I was shaking and trying not to cry. To my friend Linda, who had been sitting beside me in the driver’s seat, the whole conversation had been a series of weird emotional noises in the strange sounds of the Somali language. Now, baffled, she looked on as I raged and tried not to cry in her front seat.
“My mother never listens and she never did listen to me,” I burst out. “Should I lie to her? Why does she want me to deceive her? Isn’t that just self-deception? What will she gain from my telling her that I pray and fast? You know, listening to her trying to frighten me into believing that dead people will all stand up on just one day and traipse around and be tried in a giant tribunal, and separated into the good ones and the bad ones—it’s just insanity!” On and on I went, sounding pretty much like my mother, ranting.
Linda, clutching the steering wheel with one hand and trying to calm me down with the other, implored me to listen to her. “Ayaan, please, try to empathize with your mother. She’s all alone …”
“My mother is scared. It’s worse than being alone: she’s frightened,” I said. “She believes in a God who has her paralyzed in fear. She is worried that her God is going to torture me in my grave and burn me in my afterlife. These are not fairy tales to her, she believes them to be as real and true as the red lights we are approaching now, and it is the only thing that matters to her. She will never give up on it.”
Linda slowed down and pulled over, and then she let me have it. She told me that, as a mother, she could feel my mother’s pain. She told me that even though she had hung up on me, I should call my ma right back.
So I did.
I was almost certain the call wouldn’t get through, and that if it did, Ma wouldn’t answer. I thought she would be seething, feeling sorry for herself and cursing me. But she answered the phone, and before she had a chance to berate me I yelled at the top of my voice, fearful that she would interrupt me or cut me off, “Hooyo, I am sorry I hurt you—I am sorry that I don’t pray and fast—I promise I will work hard at attempting to let it all in—I will go into the Quran with an open mind. Please forgive me …”
“Stop rambling and listen,” Ma broke in, louder. “I want you to listen.”
I caught my breath and asked her one more time not to hang up.
“I am not going to hang up,” she told me. “You are the one who disappeared for all these years, who left me alone with only your poor brother Mahad, who, you know, is sick. Your sister died, your father left me, and my mother passed away. You are all I have. I am not going to hang up on you.”
“Ma, I am really sorry,” I stammered. “I want to help. I have some money for you. I want to send it to you. How do I do that? I don’t know of any Hawala enterprises here in the U.S. who can transport money safely to Somalia. Besides, many of them are being investigated by the U.S. government for helping al Qaeda …”
“I don’t want to talk about money,” my mother said. “Allah is the giver and taker of life and of nourishment. I want to talk to you about Allah. He sustains me; he sustained me all the time you were gone. I want you to listen. Are you listening?”
Dutifully, I answered that I was listening, though I pursed my lips.
“I am displeased that you gave up your faith in Allah. Do you remember when we were in Somalia, you got a fever, you had malaria. I thought I was going to lose you. I had lost Quman, your youngest sister, a few months before. I was desperate, so desperate to keep you, and I begged Allah, and he let you live.
“Do you remember the airport in Jeddah, when your father did not show up? You children were too young to understand it then, but the Saudis almost put us on a plane back to Somalia, where our escape would have been discovered, and all of us might have been put behind bars. I prayed to Allah, prayed for his mercy. I understood that he was testing me and I never lost faith in him.”
I wanted to say that it was thanks to the inefficient if terrifying Saudi bureaucracy, plus sheer luck, that we made it out of Somalia. All those secular factors combined had saved us from being caught, not her one-sided conversation with Allah. But all I did was purse my lips some more and say, “Hmmm, yes, Mother.”
“Do you remember our lives i
n Ethiopia? You and Mahad got lost one day and all the Somalis were predicting the Ethiopians would bring you back cut into little pieces. I prayed all night and you were both brought back to me healthy and alive. Throughout those low hours of desolation I never lost faith in him.”
I remembered, acutely, Ma’s prejudice against Ethiopians, how even after they brought us back safely she never lost that narrow-mindedness. Do please get to the point, I thought.
“I gave birth in Ethiopia to a dead baby. I wept and wept and went through it all without once losing faith in the creator and sustainer.”
“Hm.” Because you are a survivor, Ma. And your belief contributed to your survival, no doubt about it. You derived strength from your belief in Allah, but it also blinded you to options you had, and never took.
“I was dumped with the three of you in Kenya. Your father left me in a strange place with nothing. I took on all the humiliation his absence exposed me to. I watched your brother drop out of school. I listened to the news from my home and relatives in Somalia who were massacred by Siad Barre. I fell ill, I endured losing my home, I watched my youngest daughter lose her mind and I dealt with the shame she brought on me. I endured your distance and silence and now I’m sitting here with nothing. My only son is no support. All of you have abandoned me. There are open wounds on my leg, there’s fluid coming out of them that is neither blood nor water. I itch. I can’t sleep. And not once have I lost faith in Allah.”
I wanted to say, Ma, Abeh left because the two of you were incompatible. You mollycoddled Mahad into a spineless mommy’s boy; he grew up frightened by Abeh, and you beat and cursed Haweya systematically. You were dogmatic and incurious. And faith in Allah has nothing to do with it. You made choices that made your life miserable and blamed others. I was surprised at my own anger, my inward blasphemy. But I said only, “Yes, Mother.”