One afternoon Mahad came home with two Hawiye men he had known in Mogadishu, friends of his, who had nowhere to go. He couldn’t leave them on the street in Nairobi, but our flat was full of Darod—full to bursting of Darod men who cursed the Hawiye butchers from day into night. Mahad walked into the house, stood straight in the doorway, and introduced these two men. He explained that they had nowhere to go and nothing to reproach themselves for, and told everyone, “We are not going to say anything negative about the Hawiye.” Everyone was frozen with shock but obeyed. They stayed a week.
One morning in March, I received a letter, in English, from a woman in Finland. She said she was in love with Mahmud Muhammad Artan, and enclosed a picture of herself with him. He was standing, tall and handsome, in a white shirt, with his arm around a white-blonde woman against a backdrop of blue sea. The Finnish girl wrote that Mahmud had a framed photograph of the two of us, but he had told her that I was his cousin. Was I really just his cousin? the letter asked me. Because this Finnish girl planned to marry Mahmud.
It was like a gift. I had almost forgotten about Mahmud, and now this Finnish woman was proposing to take him off my hands. I wrote a polite reply. Of course I was Mahmud’s cousin, I wrote, and of course I couldn’t possibly be his wife: that would be incest. If he was implying that we might in any way be married, this was just teasing. Then I folded up her letter and the photograph, feeling like such an adult for solving my personal problems so neatly.
CHAPTER 9
Abeh
In April 1991, my father came to Nairobi. The Abdihalin brothers burst in with the news one night after the Ramadan dinner. They told us they had been at the house of Farah Gouré and they had heard that our father was in Nairobi. I jumped up screaming with excitement and began dancing for joy all over the place. Haweya was happy, too. Mahad was a bit quiet, and Ma had a look on her face that seemed to marvel at how forgiving we were.
I told her, “Ma, I’m going to look for Abeh and bring him home.” She said, “Nothing of the sort. He can’t stay here.” But I told her, “We’ll talk about that later,” completely dismissing her emotions on the subject. She didn’t make a scene about it because she couldn’t. A mother is not permitted to separate children from their father: we belonged to him.
Haweya and I wrapped ourselves up in shawls and walked to Farah Gouré’s house, which was also flooded with refugees, with people sleeping on every floor. We went from room to room until we found Fadumo and asked, “Where is Abeh?” She began smiling as if the sun had come out. He was in Nairobi, she told us. Everybody was at the mosque right then performing the Taraweh; they would be home later. Fadumo had tears in her eyes, she was so happy for us, but she said we had to understand that everybody was waiting to spend time with our father. He had arrived yesterday, and all these people had been waiting to see him. Still, we had a right to him—the most important right.
We sat and waited until almost midnight, when the doorway suddenly filled up with the shape of my father. We rushed and jumped at him, just as we had when he arrived years before in Mecca, even though we were now easily twice as tall. We took him down to the floor and he was laughing and shouting “My daughters, my daughters, my children!” and hugging us. He looked at us and said, “You’re grown women now, but you still look exactly the same.” There was so much affection in his eyes.
Fadumo invited us to sit in the living room, but we wanted to take our father home with us. Abeh stood up, smiled at her, and said, “There is a time to go and a time to stay, and this is not the time to stay.” His hair was grayer, he was older, but he was still exactly the same person. He even smelled the same; I put my head in his neck and kept smelling him until he removed his shawl and gave it to me. We were gleeful, and everyone around us was beaming—among all the murder and mayhem and refugees and diseases and loss, there was this joy. They were so happy for us. They said, “Go with the children.” So we tugged Abeh out of the house, and someone drove us home.
There in the dark, in the street in front of the house, stood Ma and Mahad. I realized Ma had not wanted to greet our father in front of everyone; she had been waiting for us on the sidewalk for hours. My father got out of the car and opened his arms wide and said “Ah, Asha!” in a clear voice; she turned her face away, and said, “No.” My father embraced her anyway, but she was steel-cold rejection.
Then Mahad hugged my father—it was a quiet kind of greeting—and he put his arms around our mother and took her into the house.
Haweya and I followed with Abeh, and when they saw him, everyone in the house began shouting and greeting and telling stories. Ma stayed in the kitchen.
The first night he was there, Abeh slept in the living room with all the men. At 5:30 next morning he woke up, turned on all the lights, and began singing the call to prayer, Allaahu Akbar, like at the mosque. All the young men on the floor were startled awake, and they all more or less abashedly stood up and began to wash, to prepare themselves. In our bedroom, Ma woke us up, saying, “Your father is calling to pray.” The whole house started praying.
Ma wondered loudly if people were praying to please Allah or Abeh, as few of these people had shown evidence of praying before his arrival. Mahad, Haweya, and I giggled at her apt analysis, but still, there was something very beautiful there for a moment. Everyone was tired, but everyone felt it.
Nothing seemed to make my Ma more tender toward Abeh. Every morning, he greeted her, “Asha, how are you this morning?” And every morning, she turned away. She never once spoke to our father or looked him in the face for the six months he lived with us. Yet she would wake me early every morning and insist I make a separate breakfast for my father, much better than everyone else’s; and every night before bed she would set aside his plate, his glass, his fork, spoon, and knife, so that in this cramped kitchen there was one shelf that held the crockery and pans reserved for my father.
I admired my mother’s sensitivity to the code of honor, and her dignity, but I didn’t like the way she ignored Abeh, though I could see why she did it. She had been neglected, left alone to bring up his children and beg his family for money. She felt that she was no longer his wife. So she fed him; she insisted that everyone in the house respect his privacy and his need for peace; she observed all the proper behavior; but she extricated herself from the situation, went cold, and disappeared.
I cleaned out the pantry for Abeh to stay in, a small room with a very small high window. He slept there on a mattress on the floor, with his clothes in a little pile on a cowhide stool, his copy of the Quran, and a naked lightbulb to read by.
When Abeh was home there was a sense of order in our household. People were more dignified; they sat up straighter and listened—he did the talking. Before he was around, the young men had spent whole afternoons chewing qat and playing cards; they were careful to throw away the evidence before Ma walked in, but they did it. Now our flat was like a madrassah. It was clean: the men began folding their clothes and removing their shoes in the doorway. Bedtime changed drastically: we went to bed early and got up early. And we prayed.
Abeh was out most of the day, at the mosque, meeting with elders, various people from the clans, trying to sew things together, to come to some sort of peaceful arrangement. He was still completely caught up in his vision of a unified, ideal Somalia, but he now believed that only Islam could bind the warring clans together. The kind of violence that had been unleashed across the country could be pacified only by the rule of Allah. My father had given up on American-style democracy.
Abeh told me about his little daughter in Addis Ababa. Her name was Marian; she didn’t speak Somali yet, but he would teach her. His new wife spoke only Ethiopian. We didn’t talk about her much; speaking about a consort with the children of another wife is impolite. But Abeh sounded so tender when he spoke about their little girl, I forgave him.
Ramadan ended, and people began to realize they couldn’t all stay in our apartment forever. I started tramping through Eastleigh w
ith one or another of the men, trying to track down landlords and find places to rent. Quite quickly Mahamuud found an apartment for his family, Mahamed’s family, and Marian and her children. Some of the other young men moved into a long-stay hotel on Ngara Road.
Still, there were a lot of us. My life became devoted to the management of the various problems of our suddenly expanded family: finding new flats, getting the utilities turned on, arranging money transfers, translating everything. I did the housework, which Ma considered my responsibility as the elder daughter, took children to the doctor, and went to the electricity company to pay the bill. I helped register people for resettlement programs in foreign countries, which were taking educated refugees from Somalia. I rushed to get them to the Somali Embassy to get proper passports, before the entire state apparatus of Somalia collapsed and all Somali diplomacy closed down, stranding them for who knows how long.
After several weeks, more young men arrived, friends of Mahad’s. The more men there are, the less help women have around the house, and when Mahamuud left, he took away all the women who had been helping me with the housework. Now I was alone to do it all, and I protested. I told Ma that we must hire a maid, a Kenyan girl, to wash the clothes and keep the house clean; under these circumstances, this would not be a luxury.
Ma said no. I defied her, and said, “If you don’t want a maid, you will have to do it yourself.” I went to my father and said I needed three hundred shillings a month for a maid. We had money now that Abeh was here; he paid the rent. He was glad to pay for a maid to help me.
But after a few weeks Ma chased the girl away. She said having a maid was against her principles. I told her I couldn’t do all the work myself—all the washing, by hand, and scrubbing, and cooking. She never helped with it. But now I refused to wash any clothes, and she beat me with a rolling pin for insolence.
Ma was depressed and becoming bitter and unreasonable again, closing in on herself and hitting me more often. She was unwelcoming; people were moving out of her house because of her. She felt everything was going wrong in her life, while in the wider world, people were slaughtering each other like animals.
After returning to Nairobi I didn’t resume going to the Islamic youth debates, and I avoided seeing Sister Aziza. The idea that somehow everything would fall into place when the House of Islam was completed—that a beautiful caliphate would rise up, in which everyone would be compassionate, helpful, and live according to the rules, where everything would work right—seemed almost fatuous. When my father had us pray I simply went through the motions, thinking about breakfast, about my chores, and about the day that lay ahead.
* * *
A few months later, Maryan Farah, my father’s first wife, arrived from Mogadishu with Arro and Ijaabo. Maryan didn’t come live with us; that would have been too much to ask. She had some relatives in Eastleigh, and at first moved there with the girls. But this Eastleigh family was far too sinful for Ijaabo; she didn’t want to live with people who chewed qat and watched Western movies. So although Arro stayed in Eastleigh, Ijaabo moved in with us, to be with Abeh. He was her father, too.
Ijaabo’s stories about Mogadishu were horrific. She had watched dogs eating bodies on the street, and the stench of the corpses had been horrible. Ijaabo was alive only because her grandmother, Maryan’s mother, had been from a Hawiye family of the same lineage as the forces that besieged Mogadishu. Maryan, although a Darod, was not snobbish, and had always treated her Hawiye relatives with respect. When the Collapse came, the Hawiye side of their family kept Maryan’s house safe, even though the rest of the neighborhood was bathed in blood.
When Maryan and the girls finally left Mogadishu, the city was more than half empty: only the weakest and the Hawiye were left. It had become a place of unpredictable murder, Ijaabo told us. There was no authority—no one could enforce any kind of order.
My stepsister was thinner now, and even more devout. In a way, I could understand this. For Ijaabo, death had become very real: any one of us could die at any moment, and it was urgent to prepare to face God. But this also meant that Ijaabo behaved like some kind of robot, constantly hectoring everyone to be more observant. After a few weeks it irritated us all. More than once, Haweya snarled at her to stop it. Ijaabo would always wail in her teeny high-pitched voice, “I am your sister and I love you so much and I am not telling you to pray to bother you, but because I want you to go to Heaven. Allah said, verse this, verse that, ‘Remember: those who do not pray, they shall be charcoal for the fire.’ ”
One afternoon, just after Ijaabo settled into our apartment, a young woman, Fawzia, knocked at our door, looking for Abdellahi Yasin. She told him she had nowhere to go. Fawzia had her three-year-old boy with her. The child was the son of someone Abdellahi knew, an Osman Mahamud, but he was garac, a bastard, born out of wedlock. Fawzia was alone, and she begged Abdellahi to ask if she could stay in our house.
Abdellahi Yasin was embarrassed, but he came and told Ma and me the story. Ma got a look on her face like something smelled bad. She couldn’t have a prostitute in the house, she said. I recoiled. There was nothing at all to indicate that Fawzia was a prostitute. I saw in front of me the image of the woman in the rag hut, in the camp. I said to Ma, “If you don’t let her stay, I’m leaving.”
It was a long struggle, but Mahad and Haweya backed me, and we won. Finally, Ma said, “She can stay, but I don’t want to see her.” I found a clean sheet and a towel—those were the rarest things in our house-hold—and this poor woman ended up staying with us for a few months with her little boy. By that time, there were so many of us that Haweya, Ijaabo, and I had to share a mattress.
To Ijaabo, Fawzia was the living face of shame, and she immediately embarked on a program to persuade her to repent her sinful ways and become a member of the Brotherhood. Ijaabo used to say, “The only way to wash off your shame is to pray, pray, pray and give your life to Allah, in search of forgiveness.” One evening when she was getting at Fawzia again, I snapped and told her to shut up—she was utterly irritating. I said Allah wouldn’t test us on whether we condemned somebody who became pregnant outside of marriage; He would test us on our hospitality and charity.
Ijaabo quoted the Quran for the six-hundredth time that day. “The man and the woman who commit adultery, flog each of them one hundred times,” she said. I told her, “Okay, here’s a stick. Since we don’t have Islamic law in Kenya, do you want to do the flogging?” Abeh, who was in the room at the time, laughed and took my side. Ijaabo acted angry and insulted for weeks.
Mahad and Haweya knew I was Abeh’s favorite, but they had also learned long ago not to complain about it. Jealousy is forbidden.
The Somalis all shunned Fawzia. When we went out to do the shopping, she was constantly molested on the street. Men would grab at her breast and stare at her lasciviously. They would never have dared to look at me that way: I was Hirsi Magan’s daughter. But Fawzia was known to all as a harlot, and she had no clan protector. She was prey.
Fawzia was used to the verbal and physical abuse. She was conditioned to believe that she deserved it. She told me to ignore Ijaabo’s remarks. Unlike Ijaabo, Fawzia used to help me with the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. After the early morning prayer, she didn’t go back to bed like everyone else did, but instead helped me bake angellos for everyone’s breakfast.
Fawzia told me clearly that she lived for only one thing: her son. He was prey, too. The other, bigger children treated the boy as an outcast. Aidarus and Ahmed, my young cousins, used to plague him. My family never stepped in to prevent the abuse. There was a stigma on him. It was the first time I had knowingly met the child of an unmarried woman.
Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn’t done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.
* * *
A letter arrived from Switzerland for Mahamed Abdihalin’s wife, Fadumo. Her sister, who was living in Europe, had managed to prepare all the papers to get Fadumo and her children a visa to Switzerland. We had only to go to the Swiss Embassy to pick up the visa and buy the tickets. The plan was this: Fadumo would travel to Europe with the children. But instead of going to Switzerland, which almost never gave refugee status to Somalis, she would stop over in Holland. Once she was at the Amsterdam airport, Fadumo would tear up her ticket and ask for asylum in the Netherlands, where it was much easier to qualify as a refugee, and then live there, receiving money from the state.
Mahamed stayed in Nairobi; he was trying to get a business going. If Fadumo got refugee status, he could travel to Europe, too. For Mahamed, sending his wife and family to Europe was like insurance: if things didn’t work out in Nairobi, then as a last resort he could join them there.
A week after Fadumo left, she sent word that she was in a camp in Holland. It didn’t sound that attractive, a camp. Months later, Mahamuud also left; he moved to Abu Dhabi with Si’eedo, to set up a business. These people had lost everything—relatives, property, businesses, social lives, plans for the future—but they were prepared to start from scratch in foreign countries. I didn’t think of any part of this as cheating: I admired their resilience.
* * *
A few months after Maryan Farah came to Nairobi, Abeh decided to marry her again. He would move out of our Park Road apartment to live with Maryan, Ijaabo, and Arro. I suppose that when Maryan found out that Ma never said a word to him, she proposed the move; it made so much sense. When the decision was made, Abeh called Mahad, Haweya, and me together, and told us about it. He asked for our blessing, and we gave it, though of course we declined to be present at the wedding ceremony. I know that Haweya and Mahad were resentful of his decision, but although I was not exactly glad, I wanted Abeh to be happy.