Infidel

  I felt grown up. The house was in Eastleigh, the Somali neighborhood, so I remained under the watchful eye of the clan. Still, it was freer and calmer than the murderous atmosphere around Hanan and Ma. When her husband was home, Jawahir fluttered around putting on pretty clothes and perfuming herself with frankincense. Ali never seemed to notice, but he was at least respectful and kind.

  While I was staying at Jawahir’s house, two of Ali’s coworkers proposed to me. It came as a surprise—the first time, Jawahir exploded with laughter at how taken aback I was—but it was all very proper and respectful. First these men went to Ali, one after the other, and then Ali came to me to present their case. Each time he went into detail about the man: what a hard worker he was, and a decent provider, reliable, Osman Mahamud, of course; how I could move into a house nearby and this man would take care of me. It was all about money and security. There was no idea of love as described in the novels I had read. Even Bollywood movies contained more romance than this.

  One of these suitors was very persistent. He was in his late twenties, a staunch Muslim, but thick, I thought, as well as ugly and completely unschooled. He pleaded. He told me how motivated he was to protect me; that was his highest card. If I said yes, he told me, he would travel to Somalia to look for my father, or at least my brother, and obtain their approval, which was, obviously, the only permission that actually counted. There was no discussion of attraction or compatibility.

  Privately, I thought it was surreal. This wasn’t my idea of wooing. I wanted excitement, someone dashing and gorgeous, deeply learned, with dark eyes and a sense of humor. I wanted to be swept off my feet. I dreaded becoming a married woman. I didn’t want to settle down to Jawahir’s life. I didn’t want to grow fat and old like my schoolmate Zainab. I didn’t want to turn into my mother and have the kind of sex that Sahra and Jawahir did.

  I said no, each time, very politely. I told Ali that I wanted to finish school before I could even consider such a thing. Thankfully Ma backed me up. She told Ali that I couldn’t be betrothed in the absence of my father and brother. It wouldn’t be right; it wouldn’t be following the rules. It would look furtive, she told him. Privately, I’m sure, she considered such marriages beneath me.

  * * *

  When Halwa’s parents moved to a new house they had constructed in one of the expensive estates that were springing up around the city, they offered to rent my mother an apartment in the small building they had just left on Park Road. Just before we moved in, Haweya returned from Mogadishu, with a suitcase full of short skirts and a new glint in her eye. When she saw her, Ma covered her eyes and exclaimed, “Allah! What now!” My mother had hoped that Somalia would tame Haweya, but she returned even more willful than when she’d left, with a completely adult determination about her.

  Haweya had seen a different side to Somalia than my mother had expected. Somali women do seek to be baarri, the ideal behavior for a woman, to serve well. Almost all of them are genitally excised, which the Arabs mostly don’t do. But traditionally, Somali women work, which makes them unlike Arab women, and perhaps freer. Islam was never as forceful in Somalia as it has always been in Saudi Arabia, the country of its origin, and some Somali women of my father’s generation were very modern in their outlook. Our aunt, Ibado Dhadey Magan—and even, to some extent, our stepmother, Maryan Farah—were examples to Haweya. They were very different from my mother, who had become frozen in passive, bitter resentment since the day my father left.

  Haweya came home full of plans to go out and work. She said she had decided to come back to Kenya because the education was better: Ibado Dhadey had convinced her that she needed qualifications. Haweya didn’t want to return to high school and study for her O-level exams; she thought she was much too old for that. She would go to secretarial school, since she didn’t need O-levels to get in.

  A few months after Haweya came back, I took my O-level exams and barely passed. There was no way I could go on to do A-levels with such grades, and I was too proud to even think of going back a year and trying again. Haweya and I decided that we would go to secretarial school together. We knew it wouldn’t be easy to persuade Ma, who wanted me to go and stay in an Islamic boardinghouse for girls down the road, to learn to cook and clean and read the Quran. I told her I was already cooking and cleaning and reading the Quran, and that secretarial school would be just like secondary school really.

  Haweya and I carefully avoided stating the obvious, which was that secretarial school would make us qualified to work in offices—that we planned, in fact, to earn our own living. We told Ma that Ibado would pay Haweya’s fees. The United Nations refugee agency would pay part of mine, because I was a refugee and had completed high school, and this was vocational training. Finally, grudgingly, Ma agreed to pay the rest.

  Early in 1988, Mahad sent Ma a letter from Somalia. He wrote that he had met Abdellahi Abdi Aynab, the eldest son of the prison director who had been executed for helping my father escape from jail. Abdellahi lived in Aden, Mahad said. He had his own business, was only twenty-four years old, worked hard, and was devout. And Abdellahi Abdi Aynab respectfully requested my hand in marriage.

  My mother sat me down. This was a beautiful match, she told me. There was a symmetry to it. My father would certainly approve. She did her best to persuade me to say yes to Mahad’s plan. But the whole idea chilled me. I honored this man’s father, of course; he was a saint to us. Still, could Mahad really expect me to say yes, to marry someone I hadn’t even met, and live in a country I had never been?

  I wrote the most perfect letter back to Mahad. I told him, “My dearest brother, I am only eighteen, and marriage remains far from my mind. I must experience a period of adulthood before I jump from being a child to my husband’s house.” It was polite and respectful, but clear.

  Then Mahad wrote to me directly to tell me to think about it. And a few days later a letter arrived from Abdellahi Abdi Aynab himself. It was a beautiful letter, in elegant Somali—he was from a very cultivated family—introducing himself, talking about his views of life, and including two photographs of him in Aden. It was a little like a pen-pal letter, minus the smiley faces. I still didn’t feel drawn to the idea of marrying this man, but in terms of wedding proposals to a complete stranger, he did his best, I thought.

  My mother was swept off her feet by the photographs of Aden, the city where her adult life had begun. She told me this marriage was my destiny. I wasn’t ready to make this decision and felt trapped just thinking about it. Still, my mother and my brother more or less settled between themselves that when it came time for me to marry, it would be to this man.

  I didn’t think it was much of a threat. Abdellahi Abdi Aynab was in Aden; Mahad was in Somalia. It wasn’t as if there were any kind of immediate plan. I wrote back to him saying that I wasn’t rejecting him as a person—that I couldn’t, since I had never met him—but marriage was simply not on my horizon right now. And this was fine. Nothing was signed. Nobody forced me.

  * * *

  I had begun to skip the Islamic debates on Thursday nights. As the months went on I found them more predictable and less inspiring. I kept seeing inconsistencies in the arguments, and my questions were getting no real answers. There was nothing new. The speakers were making us aware of the old fundamentals of Islam, and the need to adhere to and practice that faith much more actively, but there was no progress in the lessons, no change, and any interpretation seemed to be for the sake of convenience rather than logic.

  It was as if my head had somehow divided in two. When in Sister Aziza’s world, I was devout, meek, and respectful of the many, many barriers that restricted me to a very narrow role. The rest of the time I read novels and lived in the world of my imagination, filled with daring. As a reader, I could put on someone else’s shoes and live through his adventures, borrow his individuality and make choices that I didn’t have at home.

  The moral dilemmas I found in books were so interesting they kept me awake. The answ
ers to them were unexpected and difficult, but they had an internal logic you could understand. Reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I understood that the two characters were just one person, that both evil and good live in each of us at one time. This was more exciting than rereading the hadith.

  I began sneaking out from time to time to go to the cinema with Haweya or some of the other Somali girls. It didn’t feel like sinning; it felt like friendship. When I prayed these days, I skipped a lot of the prayers. It was rare, now, for me to pray five times every day.

  In February 1989, the BBC ran the news that the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued an order to kill a man called Salman Rushdie, who had written a book about the wives of the Prophet Muhammad titled The Satanic Verses. There had been riots across the Muslim world about this evil book. The Ayatollah said Rushdie, who was born Muslim, was guilty of blasphemy and the crime of apostasy—seeking to renounce the faith—which is punishable by execution. He sentenced him to death and set a price on Rushdie’s head.

  One evening a few weeks later, Sister Aziza and her husband stopped by our flat to ask me to take a walk with them over to the Muslim community center beside the school where our debates took place. A small crowd had gathered in the parking lot. Some young men drove up in a car and made a show of burning small flags: the Israeli flag, the American flag. Then they tied Rushdie’s book onto a stick and doused it with kerosene and held a cigarette lighter to it, cheering as it smoldered pitifully in the drizzle.

  Sister Aziza was cheering and chanting beside me. I felt estranged, somehow very uncomfortable. I wondered if it wasn’t a little silly to have bought even one copy of this book to burn it; after all, the money would still go to its author. It didn’t even occur to me to question that Salman Rushdie should be killed: if Rushdie had insulted the Prophet, then he deserved to die. Evidently Rushdie had written something so horrible that I didn’t even know what it was. But burning a book seemed like something that the apartheid government in South Africa would do. I couldn’t articulate why I was uneasy, but I left early. I think that may have been the last time I went to the debate center.

  * * *

  Haweya and I started classes at a secretarial college downtown. It was rubbish. Fifty or sixty girls were crammed into a big room above a shop, with not even enough typewriters to go round. Lesson one was “Left hand, first finger. Type ffff. Right hand, first finger. Type jjj.” We learned nothing, so at the end of the day we demanded that our fees be refunded. It was an extraordinary feeling to stand alongside Haweya and demand something from a total stranger. Together, I found, we could both be strong.

  We looked around for a better education. We asked girls we knew, who worked, where the best secretaries came from. They recommended Valley Secretarial College, which had fifteen students per class and taught shorthand and had real computers. It was in Kilimani, two bus rides across the sprawl of outer Nairobi, and it was expensive, but we registered.

  Secretarial school wasn’t intellectually stimulating, but it meant we were out in the world. For the first time I really saw the streets of Nairobi as we rattled back and forth in the matatou bus every day. One time, as I was walking to the matatou, I heard a shriek of “THIEF!” A crowd of people caught a man who was running down the road, a Kenyan boy, about my age, wearing just a pair of shorts. As I walked by, I saw him, cringing on the ground in the middle of a circle of people who were throwing big stones at him.

  The crowd got bigger and more determined, some of them dressed in tatters and others wearing suits. Young girls were cheering as if the Kenyan team had won the World Cup. There were stones, shrieks, kicks, more stones. People were shouting MWIZI, MWIZI, “Thief, Thief.” The kid was severely wounded. Blood was streaming from his head. Every blow made him bleed more. His eyes were so swollen you couldn’t see them anymore. Then someone kicked him hard, in the mouth, and he just lay there, on the ground, twitching.

  I thought I would throw up. I slipped back; I couldn’t watch anymore. This was the most disgusting sight I had ever seen. I felt guilty just having watched, as though I had participated. The boy probably died. As long as we had lived in Nairobi we had heard about lynchings: thieves killed on the streets by vengeful mobs. But this was the first time I had ever seen one.

  The atmosphere at secretarial college was also far more lurid than at Muslim Girls’. In school, some of the Kenyan girls had giggled about sex; to them, it was natural to go out and attract boys. Still, almost all of them were practicing Christians and devoted to the ideals of Christian marriage. But at Valley College Secretarial School our classmates were openly unchaste. They freely admitted to having sex with men. They lived the lives my mother banned us from living, which made them both deeply shocking to me and also fascinating.

  Lucy, for example, was chatty and friendly and loved to talk. She wore clothes so tight you could see every roll in her thighs. She said, “A man likes something to hold on to.” Lucy went to discos every weekend to drink beer and meet men, and when she was fed up with one man after a few weeks, she found another. She just laughed when we commented, and told us with friendly scorn, “You can’t eat the same meal every day.”

  Lucy talked about sex all the time. To her, a virgin was either too ugly and stuck up for boys to want her, or a religious fanatic. Virginity was ridiculous. “Why would I promise myself to one man when I can get them all?” she asked me once. “What is this cage you’re in, girl?”

  Lucy considered religion in general boring and Islam in particular creepy, and she made no secret of it. She didn’t aspire to marriage, she aspired to fun; and to Lucy, sex was fun. Sometimes men gave you money, which was good, and sometimes they could dance well, which was terrific, but that wasn’t the point. Lucy liked having sex, and when she stopped liking it with one man, she just found another man to be with.

  After we had known her for a few months Lucy announced that she was pregnant. She said she had done it on purpose, because this man was just too good-looking and she wanted a pretty baby. Her life seemed almost otherworldly to me; at the time, I was still putting on my robe every evening to take the matatou home. We asked Lucy if her parents would not punish her severely for this, but she laughed that no, her parents would take care of the baby; they would even be pleased with her if it was particularly cute.

  I still missed my father. I was staggered by Lucy’s irresponsibility about her baby, and I confess I lectured her. We ended up falling out. But whether it was Lucy’s influence or not, I did begin to relax a bit about my huge black robe. It was dawning on me that I wouldn’t be able to keep wearing it for long if I was planning to work in an office in Nairobi. I almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to wear my hidjab at work.

  The robe had begun to seem cumbersome, too, and also rather stupid. What counted, surely, was my intention to behave modestly. I began wearing a long, tailored coat, like Halwa did. I also began avoiding Sister Aziza. I knew she wouldn’t approve.

  * * *

  We received our grades in September 1989. Lucy, by now visibly pregnant, failed. Haweya and I both graduated with first-class certificates as Valley College secretaries. We came home elated and told Ma she needn’t worry any more about all the rent we owed. Now that we could work, we would be able to support her.

  Ma got up from the stool she used to sit on by the brazier with a face like thunder. We would not work. She was adamant. To our mother, for a young, unmarried girl to work in an office was second cousin to prostitution. Grandma was behind her all the way. “Money earned by a woman has never made anyone rich,” she said, quoting yet another from her endless supply of anachronistic proverbs.

  I turned to Haweya grimly and said, in English, “Then we’ll move out.” I knew now that there were such things as hostels; we could rent a room, somewhere decent, and live our own lives.

  Perhaps Ma understood more English than I thought. When we stomped into our room, she slipped out and bought a huge stock of food and three padlocks. When Haweya and I headed out that evening
for a walk, we found all the doors barred. “You’re not going anywhere,” Ma said. “You have food—cook it if you’re hungry.”

  Haweya went insane. She pulled off her headscarf and coat and yelled, “It’s my ambition in life to become a prostitute! I know everything about how to get pregnant! Look at my breasts and buttocks. I will call a man to the window and tell him to give me his sperm and I will GET PREGNANT!” Her screaming went on for hours. I could see that in a way Ma was enjoying Haweya’s sharp, biting language, but that didn’t make her any less angry.

  Days of rage and tedium went by, behind bars. I found an outrage inside myself I hadn’t known I possessed. We passed notes through the window to people who lived in our building and asked them to take them to Halwa and Sahra. Halwa’s mother came over to try to persuade Ma that she couldn’t keep us locked up until we died there. It simply wasn’t a solution. We were clever girls and had no father, and after all, our mother didn’t have any other means of support. She told Ma we could find a decent, Muslim company to work for, one that would at least permit us to wear a headscarf.

  Ma went to the Osman Mahamud again, to Farah Gouré and the other men. Farah Gouré agreed that Ma had a perfect right to prevent us from working, if that was best for us in her judgment. But we could not be married, because our father was not available to approve the match. And padlocking us into the house was simply not a long-term solution. Farah Gouré said the only thing to do was to send us both back to Somalia, a good Muslim country. We could perhaps work there; in any case, it was obvious we could benefit from living among Somalis.

  Ma had no choice but to agree. When we heard we would be going to Somalia, I was thrilled. Haweya told me, “Ayaan, put both your legs back on the ground. You won’t like it.” She knew what I was expecting: I was expecting to be recognized, and loved. I thought Somalia would be full of only decent people, all behaving toward one another as they should. Somehow the Somalis in Somalia would be different from all the Somalis I knew in Kenya. Jawahir had told me there was no crime or violence there. The weather would be warm all the time, not cold and misty as it often was in Nairobi. When I was growing up I was always told that every little thing that went wrong in my mother’s life was the fault of the Kenyans; Somalia meant trust and justice and fairness. In Somalia, everything would fall into place, and make sense.