I felt I was the authority in the household now. I told Ma, “I want you to go yourself to the grocery store, to pick up the money when it comes. I don’t want Mahad to be involved.” I told her how much money I had sent Mahad for her—easily over $10,000, which he had told me he was using to rent her a house in Westlands—and she came to life a bit, with anger.
I went to visit Halwa. She was still living in her father’s house, still sleeping in the same bedroom, but it was as if a ghost had taken out her soul. A few months after I left Nairobi in 1992 to live with Osman Moussa, Halwa was finally married to her cousin from Yemen. He ordered her around and expected her to serve him, though he was primitive and had never learned to read. Halwa hated her husband, but she became pregnant. When her daughter was born, she pleaded with her father to allow her to divorce. Her father reluctantly paid out a settlement, and Halwa’s husband returned to Yemen. Now she hardly ever went out of her father’s house. Her daughter was four years old; she was Halwa’s only joy in life.
The next day I went to visit Mahad’s newborn son. I liked Sha’a, Mahad’s young wife, very much. She seemed neglected: Mahad obviously wasn’t spending much time with her. When I cornered Mahad, he said he was angry with Sha’a for getting pregnant. I asked if he had by any chance been using contraception, and he said no, Sha’a was supposed to count the days. I couldn’t help it: I told Mahad how facile it was for him, a male, to always blame women for his problems. But when I saw him getting angry in return, I gritted my teeth to avoid another outburst: this wasn’t the right time for that.
Then I asked about the money I had sent him. Mahad told me he had invested it in a business, but the man absconded to Oman. As usual, he was the victim.
I walked around. Nairobi was a shell of the city I had lived in. Roads were wrecked, telephones barely worked. The economy was in ruins; such a huge increase in poverty in so short a time seemed obscene. Violence had become routine on the streets. Under Daniel Arap Moi, larceny and corruption on a truly massive scale was draining the whole country of any sense of energy and hope. Everything was chaos and no one seemed to have any hope of making it better. It seemed like the end of the line.
The night before I flew back to Holland, I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the cars rumbling down the road in the early morning and realized I would never live here again. My life, or what I would make of it, would be in Holland now, for good.
When I got back to Leiden after Haweya’s funeral, I was on autopilot. My feelings had gone dead. I executed daily tasks and somehow got things done. Gradually, life took shape. I had missed several exams and papers, so I had work to do. Marco was very good to me: that helped.
My old boyfriend, Abshir Abdi Aynab, the imam from Somalia, called me to express his condolences. He told me he was living in Switzerland and wanted to visit me. I brushed him off. I wanted nothing more to do with my old life.
CHAPTER 14
Leaving God
I was becoming integrated into student society, and that society was nowhere near as predictable or as sedate as my circle in Ede. Geeske and my other friends in Leiden were either agnostics or atheists. Elroy, Marco’s best friend, was homosexual.
For example, Marco’s friend Giovanni and his girlfriend, Mirjam, broke up after Giovanni went to Israel to do biology research for three months. In his absence, Mirjam fell in love with Olivier, one of Giovanni’s friends. When Giovanni returned, he was upset—they had been together for years—but there was no honor killing, not even a hint of violence. Mirjam had a perfect right to fall in love with someone else. Even her mother thought so, though she’d adored Giovanni. I was fascinated by this vision of a completely different moral system.
In May 1998, there were elections. Now that I was Dutch, I could vote. I gave it a lot of thought. Actually to have the ability to choose the government of Holland—it felt like a momentous responsibility. I voted, like most of my friends, for Wim Kok from the Labor Party, a social democrat. My heart was on the left. I chose Kok because of his fairness and honesty, because he promised jobs and I believed him; he had experience, and I liked his track record. Although I was a political science student working as a translator, it had not occurred to me yet to analyze any party’s stance on immigration and integration. I was not yet questioning the government’s role in why immigrants were so overrepresented in crime statistics, unemployment, and other social problems.
In January 2000, the political commentator Paul Scheffer published an article, “The Multicultural Drama,” in the NRC Handelsblad, a well-respected evening newspaper. It instantly became the talk of Holland. Everybody had an opinion about it. Scheffer said a new ethnic underclass of immigrants had formed, and it was much too insular, rejecting the values that knit together Dutch society and creating new, damaging social divisions. There wasn’t enough insistence on immigrants adapting; teachers even questioned the relevance of teaching immigrant children Dutch history, and a whole generation of these children were being written off under a pretence of tolerance. Scheffer said there was no place in Holland for a culture that rejected the separation of church and state and denied rights to women and homosexuals. He foresaw social unrest.
At the time, I pooh-poohed Scheffer’s concerns. To me, it seemed that the Dutch lived in an absolute paradise and tended to call any small problem a crisis. I thought of Holland in the 1990s as a country living through an Embarrassment of Riches, like its Golden Age in the 1600s. It was a trim little country, where everybody was always nice. The economy was booming. Trains arrived on time, although markedly less so since they had been privatized. Politics were collegial and even friendly. There were women and homosexuals in the cabinet, and everyone respected them enormously. I didn’t believe the country could really have problems. To me, the words Scheffer used—crisis, social upheaval—seemed just newspaper chatter.
In my final year, I had to focus on completing my thesis. I had chosen to examine the drift toward making law in the courts instead of in Parliament. Politicians in Holland were failing to take responsibility and act decisively; because they were so driven to seek consensus and electoral gains, they were letting judges take charge of issues that they deemed too controversial to touch. I thought I might go on to do a doctorate after I graduated, and perhaps teach.
In the spring of 2000 my father, by then almost blind from cataracts, managed to get a visa to go to Germany for an operation on his eyes, for which I gladly helped him pay. I visited him in Düsseldorf, driving all the way in my Peugeot 206 with Mirjam. Marco and Ellen joined us a day later. Marco wanted badly to meet my father, and we agreed that Ellen and he should pretend to be a couple because I wasn’t ready to discuss with my father the fact that I was living in sin. Not yet.
Abeh embraced me. He looked much older, but he smelled exactly the same. It felt deeply good to be enfolded by him again. At first we just talked about general things: what I was studying, politics. All my father wanted to talk about was Somalia, the great state Somalia could one day become. And he clearly said he wanted an Islamic government, a rule by Allah’s laws. Any system of politics devised by man was bound to go wrong.
I took the opposite stance. I surprised myself: I spoke sharply. I said Divine Law wouldn’t be fair to everyone who wasn’t Muslim. Even within Islam, not everyone thought the same way. Who would make the law? I told my father, “The rule of clerics is totalitarian. It means people can’t choose. Humanity is varied, and we should celebrate that instead of suppressing it.”
My father just said, “We must all work hard to convert everyone to Islam.” He disappointed me with this simple-minded logic and his depressing lack of realism.
My father had decided to arrange for my divorce. I didn’t feel the slightest bit married; Osman Moussa was just a vague memory for me. But to my father, it was vital. He told me that he shouldn’t have obliged me to marry against my will. I should be free to choose the husband I wanted. I think he wanted to think of himself as someone who accorded freedom; there
was still a democrat buried inside him, after all.
Abeh told me he was sad to see changes in me. He said I was becoming too worldly, not spiritual enough. He said, “I won’t ask you to wear a headscarf, but please, grow your hair.” I told him I would, and I have. When he asked me if I still prayed, I said of course I did. In some sense this was still true. I had all sorts of un-Muslim ideas, and yet, in those days, I did still think of myself as being, in some larger, more important way, a believer.
* * *
When I graduated from Leiden, in September 2000, I was almost thirty years old. It had taken me an extra year to get my master’s degree, but I had made it. I told myself I should be proud. I had solid qualifications, a rocky but intimate relationship, and strong friendships. I was earning my own money. I had made myself a place in Holland with my own hands and legs and brain.
I was thrilled to be graduating after so many years. I tried to get a visa for my father to attend the ceremony, but it was turned down. I phoned my mother, to tell her I was getting my Master of Science degree. She made an awkward remark about how odd it was that it should be me, of her three children, who would graduate from the university. She probably meant no harm by it. In her eyes, I was still the dumbest of the three of us.
Marco and I threw a party at the Café Einstein, which many Leiden students frequented. Johanna and Maarten came from Ede with their kids, Irene and Jan, whom I adore as if they were my own little brother and sister. Maarten climbed on a chair and started telling funny stories about what I was like when I first arrived. Geeske was the master of ceremonies, and Mirjam’s parents made lots of little hors d’oeuvres, which touched me hugely. When Mirjam and Olivier walked in I tensed, waiting for some dispute to break out with Giovanni, but Mirjam hit it off perfectly with Giovanni’s new girlfriend, Albertine.
A whole group of people around me wished me well, but I also needed to think about what I was going to do next. I wanted to get a proper job and earn money, so that Marco and I could afford a nicer apartment. I hated our dank council housing on the Langegracht, which gave me allergies. Before the Eid festival, some of our neighbors, who were Moroccan and Turkish, slaughtered sheep in the basement, where we kept our bicycles. The entrails stayed in the trash for days before the garbage was picked up; it was like being in Eastleigh. There was noise at all hours. I wanted to get out of there, even though Marco said we couldn’t afford it yet. He was so frugal, I complained. I couldn’t see the point of waiting any longer than we had to.
I decided against continuing my university studies. I could have gone on for a doctorate and received some kind of stipend as a teaching assistant, but that wasn’t much better than minimum wage. It wouldn’t get us out of the Langegracht, or go far toward supporting my family in Africa. I would have to work. But I didn’t want just to continue as a translator, which I saw as my student job, not a permanent career. I also wanted to gain more experience before shifting from being a student to research and teaching. I still had a great deal to learn, but I feared that in the private sector everyone would say I was too old for an entry-level job. I was so nervous about it that I took the first post I was offered, with Glaxo, the pharmaceutical company.
I had applied because Glaxo’s business was helping people. Glaxo spent millions on AIDS and malaria research: by working there, I would somehow be participating. It was a big company; you came in on the sales force but you could move, and rise, with time. The job came with a good starting salary, a company car, and two weeks of training that was like a crash course in medicine, with an emphasis on headaches and the respiratory system. It was also an education in how to sell things to people, which was a real eye-opener.
I was supposed to sell Imigran, a migraine medication, to doctors. The Glaxo people taught us techniques to outwit doctors’ secretaries and get an appointment. They taught us to evaluate someone’s personality type and pitch our sales techniques precisely to that kind of person, so that every appointment would get us a sale. If you sensed a doctor was the authoritarian type, you had to keep your pitch short and make it clear how clever you thought he was. You let him talk a lot, then when you pitched the medication, you used the exact same words that he had. With analytical personalities you didn’t mention the medication at all, at first; you went straight into a long discussion of all the different kinds of migraine headaches. It was manipulative and to me a waste of doctors’ precious time, so after a few weeks I gave back the car, the phone, and the laptop. That was it for me and business.
Next I signed up at a temp agency, which sent me to work as an office manager in the housing department of the Oegstgeest City Council. It was the same pleasant residential community outside Leiden where I had first lived with Chantal. I worked there for two or three months; I thought it would give me the opportunity to see government from within.
For every application for a permit to build an attic or change a few windows, a whole group of people in this office had to work together, but they seemed to dislike each other. There were more civil servants than there were tasks to do, and they spent their days bickering. Every permit had to be countersigned by directors and directors of the directors, and everything was unbelievably slow. I had applied for a job at the Interior Ministry a year before and it had taken six months to process my application: now friends who worked in government ministries confirmed that government work was slow, with no imagination or satisfaction. So I ruled out government. I didn’t want to work in the civil service for the rest of my life.
I began looking around, with a sense of growing panic, for what I was going to do. One morning in March, Marco looked up from the newspaper and crowed, “This job’s perfect for you: your name is written all over it.” He showed me the ad. The Wiardi Beckman Institute, the political bureau of Wim Kok’s Labor Party, was looking for a junior researcher.
It paid less than Glaxo, but it was only four days a week, and I could translate the rest of the time to supplement my income. More important, it sounded truly interesting. I would be researching issues that were politically and socially relevant, for a party to which I already belonged. A think tank would not be bureaucratic at all. It would be small, intellectually agile, challenging.
The Wiardi Beckman Institute offered me the job in June 2001. I was thrilled. I was supposed to start work the first of September. I instantly quit the city council job and went back to translating; this earned me much more money, which Marco and I would need to buy a house.
I was determined to find us another place to live, and at first Marco went along with me. But whenever I found somewhere I liked, Marco would balk, claiming it was too expensive or too far away from the center of town for him. Marco didn’t want to move, didn’t want to be ensnared in a huge bank loan. He wanted to spend all his spare cash on roaming the world. I thought that was immature. He said I was too impatient and a spendthrift.
Our relationship was deteriorating. We had been fighting for years over small, stupid things: time management and household expenses. He needed to plan everything; I hated that constriction. He had a temper; I have never liked yelling or being yelled at. I had already started thinking about breaking up when I saw a perfect, if run-down house on a tree-lined street, close to the train station, with wooden floors and fireplaces. Marco said renovating it would cost too much.
I decided to buy the house anyway, without Marco. We could still be friends—maybe he could still be my boyfriend—but it was time for me to move out, before things got any worse between us. Ellen had split up with her husband, Badal Zadeh, and, after a certain amount of soul-searching, she agreed to come live in Leiden and share the house, and mortgage, with me. We went to the bank: both of us earned good money. In April, Ellen and I moved in together.
One evening we were watching TV when an item came on about gay schoolteachers being harassed by Moroccan kids. This sort of thing was often in the news in those days; you would open the newspaper and think “What, Moroccan boys again? What’s wrong with them?” So
when an imam came on, wearing traditional clothes and with the imam manner about him, speaking Arabic, I turned up the volume. He looked at the camera with great authority and explained that homosexuality was a contagious disease that could infect schoolchildren. It was, he said, a threat to humanity.
I remember standing up and saying, “This is so backward. He is so stupid!” To the Somali in me, this attitude was familiar; but the Dutch person in me was shocked. The interview caused a commotion, and I sat down and wrote an article and sent it to the NRC Handelsblad. I wrote that this attitude was much larger than just one imam: it was systemic in Islam, because this was a religion that had never gone through a process of Enlightenment that would lead people to question its rigid approach to individual freedom. Moreover, I wrote, Islam didn’t oppose only the right of homosexuals to live undisturbed. Anyone who had been to an abortion clinic or a women’s center could readily see that the sexual morals of Islam can only lead to suffering.
It was spontaneous indignation: I found myself discovering my opinions as I typed. The article was edited into a short letter couched in nice, politically correct language, and was published in May. But that was my political coming out.
Ellen and I spent two months fixing up the house. Then I settled back to enjoy life. We had dinner parties. Ellen was going through a period of religious turmoil, looking for her bearings, and she talked about which church she should join. Even Marco and I were getting along very well; we considered getting back together again. It was a summer of cooking for people, independence, a happy time.
* * *
On September 3, I started work. The Labor Party’s think tank was a small office, and I was just a junior researcher. My first task was to work on immigration, which I was beginning to see as the most important question facing Holland in the twenty-first century. I wasn’t looking at Islam as a central question yet but studying migration, its causes, and the implications for a welfare state of absorbing all these new migrants. Should the Labor Party support more restrictive policies on immigration?