There was nothing noble about these jobs, but they weren’t dishonorable either. They were mundane, but they paid money, and they were convenient: if I took the morning shifts, I could attend Dutch class in the late afternoon. I saw them as stepping stones: if I worked enough, I could earn more than my welfare benefit, and the surplus helped pay for my rent and classes.
Working at factories gave me a chance to see another social class of Dutch people. So far I had met only social workers and middle-class people who volunteered at the refugee camp. Working-class people spoke differently, and their interaction with migrants was not as easygoing. At the biscuit factory almost all the workers were women, and they divided clearly into ethnic groups: Dutch women on the one hand, and Moroccan and Turkish women on the other. They kept apart in the lunch room and on the factory floor as well. If a Moroccan woman was paired with a native Dutch woman, the work would be done shoddily and there would be constant conflict, with packages piling up and falling on the floor, whereas if Moroccans worked together they made an effort to get the job done right. It was mutual xenophobia: the Dutch thought the Moroccans were lazy and unpleasant, and the Moroccans said the Dutch stank and dressed like whores. Both groups saw themselves as superior.
The dye factory was almost all Dutch. Some of the workers had been employed there for ten, even twenty years. They liked their jobs, they told me, and I saw that they expected to work hard and get it done efficiently, that there was a kind of pleasure in doing even a lowly job well.
Gradually I was changing, learning how to adapt to this new country, to manage time, and work, and go to school, alone.
Six months after I first registered at the government labor agency, they called me in to take an IQ test. The test was very long, and I’m sure it was extremely expensive. A lot of it was math, which I have always been hopeless at; the rest of it was psychological tests and language skills—Dutch language, of course. My results were poor.
The job counselor told me I was eligible to attend a medium-level vocational course, something administrative, like bookkeeping or training to be a receptionist. Something with very little theory, which would swiftly prepare me to work. I told her that I wanted to study political science, and she said I couldn’t: political science was a university course, and I could never hope to get in.
The job counselor sent me to learn bookkeeping in Wageningen, a village close to Ede. That was a very expensive course, too, but it seemed to her to be the only option. I suppose she thought that the universal language of numbers would be easier for a foreigner to grasp.
I did horribly. After four weeks my debit side had never once matched my credit side. The teacher sighed and said, “This is really not for you.” I said, “I told them that.” So he wrote a letter saying I was not suitable for bookkeeping, and I stopped attending class.
I still wanted more than this life. I had decided I wanted to study political science. If that required going to university, then that’s where I would go. Ellen and Hanneke thought I was mad: a degree, sure, that was a fine ambition, but in political science? I tried to explain that I wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa. Why there was so much peace, security, and wealth in Europe. What the causes of war were, and how you built peace.
I didn’t have any answers, just questions. I thought about it all the time. Every contact I had with government, I thought, “How do you get to have a government like this?” I watched Hanneke and Ellen draw up schedules with the other girls they shared their flat with—lists of who would do the cleaning and the grocery shopping and cooking. And it was like the bus timetable: all the girls actually did all the chores. Amazingly, there wasn’t even any conflict about it. How did you get to be this way?
There were rules about everything in Holland. I got stopped by a policeman one evening for cycling without my lights on and I froze, assuming something horrible was going to happen. But all I got was a firm but courteous lecture and a fine of twenty-five guilders. Moreover, the policeman said I wasn’t supposed to pay the fine right away; it would come in the mail. Sure enough, a month later I received a detailed bill. I thought about this system, how cleverly it prevented you ever giving a policeman money, so he never got tempted to pocket it.
Government was very present in this country. It could be bureaucratic, sometimes stupidly complex, but it also seemed very beneficial. I wanted to know how you do that. This was an infidel country, whose way of life we Muslims were supposed to oppose and reject. Why was it, then, so much better run, better led, and made for such better lives than the places we came from? Shouldn’t the places where Allah was worshipped and His laws obeyed have been at peace and wealthy, and the unbelievers’ countries ignorant, poor, and at war?
I wanted to understand conflict. In 1992 and 1993, it seemed as if the whole world outside the West was breaking out in civil wars and tribal conflicts. The end of the cold war had unfrozen old fault lines of hatred. And of all the countries where war had broken out, so many seemed to be Muslim. What was wrong with us? Why should infidels have peace, and Muslims be killing each other, when we were the ones who worshipped the true God? If I studied political science, I thought, I would understand that.
It wasn’t going to be easy to qualify. The government had accepted my O-levels and Kenyan secretarial course as equivalent to a Havo Plus school diploma, but even this was stretching it. To get into the university, I would need another qualification called a propadeuse. I panicked: I thought I could never pass the math. With Ellen’s help, I figured out that the easiest way for me to pass the propadeuse would be to study social work in a vocational college, as Ellen and Hanneke did. That way, after a year I could transfer to the university, and I could avoid encountering too much math.
I announced to my language school that I wanted to register for the Dutch language test that I would need to pass in order to attend the vocational college. My teacher was kind but told me condescendingly that it was far too early, I had been studying Dutch for only a year. People took three years; I was being impatient and irresponsible. It would be a waste of my money even to apply.
Ellen told me the teacher had no right to prevent me—it was my money. So I went to the exam center in Nijmegen and registered to take the Dutch test anyway. And I passed. Vocational college would be my next step.
* * *
All this time, I had mostly avoided other Somalis. Even when we were still living in the asylum center, I hadn’t had much fun with them. Everyone who hung out in Hasna’s caravan seemed to spend all their time complaining, especially the people who lived outside the asylum center, who had been in Holland for years and were simply visiting. These Somalis weren’t integrating into Dutch society. They weren’t working. They had nothing to do but hang about the asylum center and cadge meals. There were a few individuals who learned to cycle, who were ambitious and studied and worked—I wasn’t unique—but those people had no time to socialize. The others just chewed qat all night and sat around talking about how horrible Holland was.
We were all facing the same confusion. We had always been sure that we, as Muslims and Somalis, were superior to unbelievers, and here we were, not superior at all. In day-to-day life, we didn’t know how the cash machines worked or that you had to push a button to order the bus to stop. One time I took a bus together with Dhahabo, another Somali asylum seeker. When it hurtled right on past where we wanted to go, Dhahabo yelled “STOP!” and everyone stared at us. It was embarrassing.
Many people withdrew from such embarrassment into an enclave of shared Somaliness. Their reaction was to create a fantasy that they as Somalis knew better about everything than these inferior white people. “You don’t need to teach me how to use a thermometer, our Somali thermometers are much more advanced”—that kind of attitude. “His breath smells of pig. He’s only a bus driver. How dare he think he can tell me how to behave.”
In my first weeks at the asylum center, as I was standing in a crowd of Somalis j
ust outside Hasna’s caravan, someone called out to us, “There’s a man crying on TV!” We rushed to the television; it was a program called I’m Sorry, where people confessed things. A huge broad-shouldered Dutch man, red-faced and squeaky-voiced, was weeping—weeping tears—over something he’d done. He whimpered, “I’m so sorry,” and we stared at each other in horror and wonder. I’m sure none of us had ever seen a man cry. Then we burst out laughing. This country was so strange to us.
By the time I moved to Ede, I had come to understand Holland better. It irritated me now when Somalis who had lived in Holland for a long time complained that they were offered only lowly jobs. They wanted honorable professions: airline pilot, lawyer. When I pointed out that they had no qualifications for such work, their attitude was that everything was Holland’s fault. The Europeans had colonized Somalia, which was why we all had no qualifications and were in this mess to begin with. I thought that was so clearly nonsense. We had torn ourselves apart, all on our own.
It was the same sort of defensive, arrogant attitude that I had often seen among people from rural areas who emigrated to the city, whether Mogadishu or Nairobi. Here in Holland the claim was always that we were held back by racism. Everyone seemed to be in a constant simmer of anger about how we were discriminated against because we were black. If a shopkeeper wouldn’t bargain over the price of a T-shirt, Yasmin said there were special, discount prices only for white people. She and Hasna told me they often didn’t bother paying for buses; they just invented appointments in town, and if the refugee office didn’t give them a ticket they said they were being racist.
“If you tell a Dutch person it’s racist he will give you whatever you want,” Hasna once told me with satisfaction. There is discrimination in Holland—I would never deny that—but the claim of racism can also be strategic.
Sometimes it did feel good to be around Somalis, to relax with people I completely understood. Adapting to Dutch people was still a huge effort for me. But the minute I said “I’m sorry, tomorrow morning I have to wake up early,” the Somalis were at me. I was acting white, who did I think I was, I looked down on them, I had become gaalo.
Somali young men constantly approached me on the street as if they had some kind of right to me. They made obscene suggestions; to them I was obviously immoral, and therefore available. Somali women always tried to wheedle money out of me. I didn’t give it them. I used to say, “Why should I?” I thought if they needed more money they could do factory work, too.
I felt embarrassed and even let down by the way so many Somalis accepted welfare money and then turned on the society that gave it to them. There was still a lot of clan feeling in me; I felt somehow responsible for their actions. I didn’t like how they denied misdeeds, even if they were caught red-handed. I didn’t like how they boasted, or the myths and transparently false conspiracy theories they propagated. I didn’t like the endless gossiping or the constant complaints that they were victims of external factors. Somalis never said “Sorry” or “I made a mistake” or “I don’t know”: they invented excuses. All these group strategies to avoid confronting reality depressed me. Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn’t make it easier.
So I spent my time with Ellen and Hanneke. But that left Yasmin all alone after her school ended, which was at about three every day. A bunch of Isaq and Hawiye boys from the asylum center began coming to our apartment in the afternoons, to chew qat. (Somalis are extremely good at getting things done when they want to, and somehow there were fresh qat leaves available, even in little Ede.) Yasmin used to cook for these men, so when I came home they would all be reclining on a mat in the living room with the leaves and stalks on the floor.
For a while I crept around in my own house, feeling invaded. Among Somalis it is dishonorable to turn a guest out of your house. Finally, though, I did it the Dutch way: I told Yasmin to stop it. I didn’t want these men in my place. I told Yasmin that when they rang the doorbell we would pretend to be out. After that, on the street, I got a name as the awful Darod woman who was snooty to the Isaq and the Hawiye, and that was fine by me. I didn’t want to observe the code of honor any more.
The relationship between Yasmin and me began deteriorating. One night she walked out. I didn’t even realize she was gone till two days later, not until I found out that my bank card and my A-status refugee papers were missing. She had just given me three hundred guilders for the month’s rent, and that was gone, too. A few days later I got a letter from her. She said she was in Italy, but the letter was postmarked Denmark. She said she was sorry, and she hadn’t used the bank card; the three hundred guilders wasn’t really stealing because it was hers. She said she was lonely, and hated living in Holland. She said the phone bill might be high, but she had needed her family.
About a month later I received a 2,500-guilder phone bill and went berserk. I was beyond bankrupt. Johanna helped me call the phone company. They sent a detailed bill, and it was Australia, Canada, Kenya, Somalia—I had no idea Yasmin knew so many people. Johanna said, “Take Yasmin’s letter to her social worker, because it proves that she made all these calls, and they will look after the bill.” I did, and Yasmin’s social work agency paid about two thousand guilders.
* * *
One morning in January 1994 the phone rang. It was Haweya. She was standing in a phone booth at the Frankfurt airport. It had been months since I had last called home. Now my sister was here, in Europe. She had just arrived! A huge wave of joy rushed over me. I asked Haweya if this was a just a visit, or more, and she said “More.” I said, “Come to Holland—come and live with me.”
I called my friends Jan and Greetje. Jan was in his late fifties and a volunteer at Refugee Aid. He suggested that Haweya take a train to the German border; he would meet her there and drive her into Holland by car, to avoid any checkpoints. That way Haweya could claim she had traveled directly to Holland. It meant she could ask for asylum in Holland instead of in Germany.
When Jan’s car finally drove up with Haweya inside, we hugged and screamed and jumped and laughed and hugged again. But after a while Haweya slumped into a chair and started crying. Finally, she told me she had had an abortion in Nairobi. A man who was from Trinidad, who worked for the UN, who was divorced—she had loved this man, and she had become pregnant.
A man from Trinidad—uncircumcised, not even a Muslim. Flat-nosed, round-faced, kinky-haired. My mother would have seen such a man as subhuman, like the Kenyans. What Haweya had done was, in clan terms, unforgivable. Running away from your husband was one thing, but getting pregnant out of wedlock, and with such a person—it was as if the whole Osman Mahamud family had been impregnated by somebody from Trinidad.
Haweya’s lover arranged for her to have an abortion, discreetly, with an Indian doctor. Afterward, when she felt so rocky, he said, “Take time off, go to Holland, see your sister.”
I choked back the Somali in me, which was appalled by the whole story. I told her to stop crying. I said these weren’t the right circumstances to have a child, be sensible, don’t torture yourself. I said the sorts of things Johanna would say, and then I put Haweya to bed in Yasmin’s old room, just as Johanna would have done.
But Haweya didn’t spring back to life. She was dreamy, absent-minded, unfocused. She couldn’t sleep. She said the fights at home with Ma had gotten completely out of hand. She had come to me with no plan, no idea of what to do next.
I was so eager to have my sister live with me. I helped her cook up a story that would get her refugee status. Haweya registered as an asylum seeker in Lunteren, and the refugee center agreed to allow her to stay with me as long as she signed in once a week.
Haweya started Dutch lessons, but it was just one lesson every week at the refugee center with a volunteer, because she wasn’t allowed to take proper classes until she was given refugee papers. I took her out with me and my friends. We took long walks together, and watched all the films we wanted to without fear of punishment. We took trips to A
msterdam; I taught her to cycle. We had many happy moments. But so often, Haweya didn’t seem to want to be anywhere. She spent most of the time lying on the sofa, watching TV until the programs turned to snow. She had bouts of crying: tears simply rolled down her cheeks. She tramped off on long walks on her own.
We called Ma from time to time, always using her Indian neighbors’ phone. Our conversations were predictable. Ma would always tell us to pray, to fast, to read the Quran. Or she would complain. She constantly told me she had sacrificed her whole life for her children and all of us had let her down. Her legs were covered with open sores from her psoriasis. Her head hurt. We had left her to die like this; it was our fault. Mahad didn’t look after her and never held down a job; he thought he was too good for anything he was qualified to do. Calling Ma was not always pleasant, but I did it, and I sent money, because it was my duty.
The months went by. Haweya began spending much more time at the asylum center, seeking companionship. I found out she was having a relationship with a Somali boy there, and I suspected that they were sleeping together. One day Haweya told me she was pregnant again. Here I had cut almost all ties with Somalia and my sister was reviving them.
I got really angry with her. I hate to think about it now. I yelled, “Is this going to be a habit? To get pregnant once may be forgivable, but now you are in Holland! Condoms are free at the refugee center!” I told Haweya, “You can’t have another abortion—this is murder. You’ll have the baby, and I will look after it.”
I moralized. Haweya insisted she wanted an abortion anyway. We had a huge fight. I went with her to the refugee center to ask for medical assistance. I asked the social work counselor, Josée, to talk to Haweya, because I was worried about her.
To my surprise, Josée said Haweya had already approached her. She said, “There are deep problems. But don’t worry about your sister. I see her every week and I believe it’s helping.” I had no idea that Haweya was in any kind of psychotherapy. Josée said this was because Haweya was afraid of my judgment.