Somali Airways didn’t fly to very many places. One of them was Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. Sending each other messages through the clan network, my parents agreed to meet there. The clan also produced a fake passport for my mother. She claimed to be an ordinary Dhulbahante woman on a pilgrimage to Mecca. I like to imagine them: my father and mother, young and happy, meeting in Jeddah, yearning to live once more as one family.
My mother didn’t want to move to Ethiopia, because Ethiopians were Christians: unbelievers. Saudi Arabia was God’s country, the homeland of the Prophet Muhammad. A truly Muslim country, it was resonant with Allah, the most suitable place to bring up children. My mother had learned Arabic in Aden; more important, she also imbibed a vision that Islam was purer, deeper, closer to God in the countries of the Arabian peninsula. Saudi Arabian law came straight from the Quran: it was the law of Allah. Inevitably, the life of our family, reunited in Saudi Arabia, would be predictable, certain, and good.
Somehow she convinced our father of this plan. He found a job in Saudi Arabia, at one of the government ministries. I remember his job as deciphering Morse code for some government office. He moved to Riyadh and lived at a clan mate’s house while he waited for the preparations for our flight to be completed.
My mother was heroic. She managed to get another false passport, in which the names and dates of birth of her three children were listed so we could leave Somalia with her. She packed, in secret. She arranged for us to be driven discreetly to the airport. One morning in April 1978—I was eight years old—Grandma woke us up early, the gray light barely beginning to filter into the room. She dressed us in good dresses instead of school uniforms. Khadija’s oldest stepson, who owned a garage opposite our house, arrived in his black car and bundled us in rapidly; Grandma stayed home. When we spilled out of the car, miles later, Ma pointed to a huge metal tube with flat wings poking out of it that was standing nearby. “That is an airplane,” she announced. “We are going to fly on it.”
We had never seen an airplane close up before, just the far-off machines that celebrated Afwayne’s rule by belching smoke across the city once a year on National Day. We shrieked and raced about, flapping our arms; the prospect of flight was so exciting, we imagined she might even mean we would fly like birds. With a fake passport and a grueling interrogation by the airport officials ahead of her, my mother didn’t need the extra trouble. She swung her hard, flat hand at our heads and cuffed us into silence.
We couldn’t stay good for long. We kids had almost never gone anywhere—we were never taken out on excursions—and here, at long last, was an utterly thrilling adventure. Herded into the aircraft, we wriggled out of our seat belts and fought for the window seat, biting and scratching and climbing over total strangers. As the plane rose into the sky my mother glared at us. “Let this plane crash, Allah,” she called out. “Take them away. I don’t want this life. Let us all die!” This was worse than being hit, the worst thing I had ever heard.
Our ears throbbed from the altitude and we screamed the entire flight. We were hated by every person on that plane. Then, just before we landed, along with all the other women passengers on the airplane, our mother covered herself with a huge black cloth, showing only her face. That silenced us. We followed her into the airport terminal in Jeddah, where, amid a completely astounding number of people with all kinds of garments and skin colors, Ma discovered that our father had not come to pick us up. We were completely on our own, abandoned in the airport in Jeddah.
* * *
I am not quite sure if this is exactly true, but this is my understanding of what happened. My father was expecting us to arrive, though he may not have known the precise date. Then a sudden call came for him from Addis Ababa.
The day we left Somalia there was an attempted coup against Afwayne. Somalia’s airspace was closed, and there was fighting. (After the coup leaders were executed, there was a period of much more intensive surveillance. If we hadn’t left when we did, who knows when we would have been able to get out.) For reasons that cannot have been unrelated to the attempted coup, my father had rushed back to Ethiopia. In his haste, he must have neglected to arrange for someone to meet the next Somali Airways flight to Jeddah, the flight that we had managed to get on.
Again and again, in years to come, Ma flung this scene at my father, in accusation. For now we were well and truly stuck. This was Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated, governed strictly according to the scriptures and example of the Prophet Muhammad. And by law, all women in Saudi Arabia must be in the care of a man.
My mother argued loudly with the Saudi immigration official, but he merely repeated in an ever louder voice that she could not leave the airport without a man in charge. He never looked straight at her, only somewhere just above her head.
We spent hours in that strange airport. We played tag. Mahad got lost. I vomited. Ma said the devil was in us and cursed us to Hell and back. She looked different, drained; she didn’t seem to have anything under control. She cried and said unkind things about Father, things I had never heard her say. My mother must have felt betrayed. She had been so competent, managing the clandestine departure, the false passports. And now she was abandoned.
Just before nightfall a Somali man came up and asked my mother what the matter was. He was a Dhulbahante, like her, so he offered to help. My mother asked him to just take her into Jeddah, to the home of a Dhulbahante family she knew of, where we could stay. All she needed was his help through the immigration desk and into the taxi; without a man in charge, no taxi driver would accept her in his car.
We woke up in the house of this unknown family, in Jeddah. The bedroom was small and intensely hot, but my mother was fierce: we must behave. That meant staying in the room, on the bed. If we talked louder than a whisper we were hit, and if we walked around we were hit, too. We could look out of the window, into a big courtyard where a half dozen Somali women of all ages were cooking and talking.
One of them, a young woman, offered to take us out for a walk. Outdoors was a completely different world. The roads were paved; the traffic was astounding. And all the women in this country were covered in black. They were humanlike shapes. The front of them was black and the back of them was black, too. You could see which way they were looking only by the direction their shoes pointed. We could tell they were women because the lady who was holding our hands tightly to prevent us from wandering off was covered in black, too. You could see her face, because she was Somali. Saudi women had no faces.
We pulled away and ran over to the black shapes. We stared up at them, trying to make out where their eyes could be. One raised her hand, gloved in black, and we shrieked, “They have hands!” We pulled faces at her. We were truly awful, but what we were seeing was so alien, so sinister, that we were trying to tame it, make it less awful. And what these Saudi women saw, of course, was little black kids acting like baboons.
After two or three days, two men of the Osman Mahamud clan arrived at the house with word from our father. He was in Ethiopia and might have to remain there for months. They asked my mother where she wanted to live while waiting for him to return. That night, something inside her seemed to snap. She cried and cursed and hit at us in a kind of frenzy. She threw shoes at whoever opened his or her mouth. We were all scared of her now, even Mahad, her favorite.
When the men came back the next day my mother told them, “Mecca.” She must have felt that her life was going so wrong that if she clambered into Allah’s embrace, He would make it better. Mecca, the home of the Prophet Muhammad, was the closest you could get to Allah. A week later all our stuff was loaded into a car.
We arrived at the foot of a tall building. Garbage was strewn all over the streets, heaps of rubbish covered in fat, buzzing flies. The stench in the stairwell was overpowering. The cockroaches were so contented they didn’t even bother to scuttle away. Father had sent money to these guardians of ours to rent a flat, but Mecca was expensive: the only place they could find for us was a sm
all apartment in a building occupied by Egyptian construction workers.
We had never been inside an apartment building before. As we climbed the stairwell, Ma told Haweya and me, “If you come out here on your own, the men who live behind these doors on the stairs will snatch you up and cut you into pieces and eat you.” That was effective: never once did we venture outdoors alone.
She opened a door onto a two-room apartment. We were going to have electricity! There were switches on the wall that turned on light bulbs and—something we had never seen—a ceiling fan. When Ma’s back was turned we began playing with the fan. We threw clothes and small objects at it just to watch them whirl. The fan broke.
That first week, the apartment was like a charcoal oven. We were so hot that Haweya’s back broke out in fat little blisters, and for a week she was one big painful never-ending scream.
The uncles had already paid five months’ rent up front; there was nothing to be done about the flat. All they could do was take us to the bazaar to buy essentials. Here we were too transfixed to misbehave. There were lights and glitter and toys—toys everywhere—and stalls pungent with blood and spices, the cackle of animals, and the plump promises of pastries. We had rarely been to a Somali market, and this huge array of stalls and shops was the most glorious thing we had ever seen. The uncles held our hands very firmly as we walked through this magical place and bought mattresses, bedsheets, pillows, a small fan. The next day we returned for some food, prayer mats, cutlery, cooking pots, a metal basin for washing clothes, a scrubbing brush, hard soap, and a pail.
Then our mother was alone with us—virtually the first time this had ever happened. With our grandmother staying behind in Somalia, my mother had nobody with whom to share tasks and plans. She could do nothing on her own. She wasn’t supposed to go out on the street without these new guardians of ours, our uncles, and neither were we. To phone them she had to scuttle down to the corner grocer, with my ten-year-old brother in tow acting as her protective male.
All day long we would wait in the apartment for the uncles to do us favors, and all day long my mother cursed our father. “May Allah never bring him back,” I remember her shouting. “May Allah make him barren. May he get a painful disease. May he never see Paradise.” Worst of all, “May Afwayne catch him and torture him. May he be cut off from the bloodline and die alone.”
Realistically, we could do nothing but wait. Mother set about reestablishing discipline in her household. We children had grown wild in the months she had left us alone with our grandma. Ma saw us pretty much as camels: to tame us, she yelled and hit a lot. If we ran around, she yelled “Sit. SIT!” and we would shrink to the floor; then she would flick us with the radio cable on our legs and arms. When we cried, she would yell “QUIET!” and hit us again.
This wasn’t pleasant, but the hitting was not wanton, and though it hurt, it was controlled. To my mother, corporal punishment was a reasonable and necessary part of bringing up a child. In those days, as we learned to behave better, she hit us less.
When the mosques in Mecca cried for prayer, they created a kind of synchronized chain we heard every day: first our neighborhood mosque and then the next one, and the next, calling across the whole city and the country and the world. We developed a game of rushing from one window to another, testing who could remember best which direction the next call would come from.
In Somalia we had been Muslims, but our Islam was diluted, relaxed about regular praying, mixed up with more ancient beliefs. Now our mother began insisting that we pray when the mosques called, five times each day. Before every prayer we had to wash and robe ourselves, and then we had to line up and follow her instruction. After the evening prayer we had to go to bed.
My mother also enrolled us in a local Quran school, although we spoke practically no Arabic. In Somalia, both school and Quran school had been mixed (boys and girls); here, everything was segregated. Mahad had to go a madrassah for boys, and Haweya and I to one for girls. All the girls at madrassah were white; I thought of them as white, and myself, for the first time, as black. They called Haweya and I Abid, which meant slaves. Being called a slave—the racial prejudice this term conveyed—was a big part of what I hated in Saudi Arabia. The teacher didn’t teach us to write, just recited to us from the Quran. We had to learn it, verse by verse, by heart.
We had already learned part of the Quran by heart in Mogadishu, although of course we had never understood more than a word or two of it, because it was in Arabic. But the teacher in Mecca said we recited it disrespectfully: we raced it, to show off. So now we had to learn it all by heart again, but this time with reverent pauses. We still didn’t understand more than the bare gist of it. Apparently, understanding wasn’t the point.
Everything in Saudi Arabia was about sin. You weren’t naughty; you were sinful. You weren’t clean; you were pure. The word haram, forbidden, was something we heard every day. Taking a bus with men was haram. Boys and girls playing together was haram. When we played with the other girls in the courtyard of the Quran school, if our white headscarves shook loose, that was haram, too, even if there were no boys around.
* * *
Ma decided to take us to the Grand Mosque, which was a welcome break from being cooped up. The air shimmered with heat; it was another punishingly, blindingly hot afternoon, the heat in Mecca like nothing I had ever known. And we walked into a place that was utterly beautiful: white, cool, dim, vast. A breeze flowed inside this building. It felt like being let out of jail. As my mother followed the solemn ritual, pacing slowly seven times around the sacred stone, we sprinted all over the place and skidded around on the floor, shrieking for joy.
The people in this place were almost as varied as at the airport, many even blacker than we were, and some who were so much whiter than the Saudis that they looked bleached. And because this was God’s house, all these people were kind. When we ran into a grown-up he took our hands gently and led us back to Ma. She was furious, and I knew that we had shamed her, so I knelt down in front of her and performed the begging prayer that I had learned in the madrassah, cupping my hands before her and asking for her forgiveness. To my astonishment, it worked: she smiled.
My mother found comfort in the vastness and beauty of the Grand Mosque, and it seemed to give her hope and a sense of peace. We all liked going there; we even got ice cream afterward. Gradually, the rituals and stories centered on this place began to mean something to me. People were patient with each other in the Grand Mosque, and communal—everyone washing his or her feet in the same fountain, with no shoving or prejudice. We were all Muslims in God’s house, and it was beautiful. It had a quality of timelessness. I think this is one reason Muslims believe that Islam means peace: because in a large, cool place full of kindness you do feel peaceful.
But as soon as we left the mosque, Saudi Arabia meant intense heat and filth and cruelty. People had their heads cut off in public squares. Adults spoke of it. It was a normal, routine thing: after the Friday noon prayer you could go home for lunch, or you could go and watch the executions. Hands were cut off. Men were flogged. Women were stoned. In the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia was booming, but though the price of oil was tugging the country’s economy into the modern world, its society seemed fixed in the Middle Ages.
When the month of pilgrimage came, Ma said we couldn’t go to the Grand Mosque any more. We couldn’t even leave the house, for fear of stampedes by the huge crowds of pilgrims. We could only watch the crowds of people robed in white walking down the street and listen from our windows to the constant prayer.
One evening during the pilgrimage month, just after bedtime, there was a knock at the door. We heard one of the uncles shout, “Here is your father!” We rushed out of bed. Mahad hurled himself at one of the men who walked in. Rather sheepishly at first, Haweya and I did the same, clutching at this stranger, pulling him down to the floor.
I had fantasized a father who would understand me, know that I was trying to be good. Now here was that
man. We clambered over him and crammed in close to him, just touching him. Ma wanted to put us back to bed, but our father said no, we should stay up. I fell asleep on the mat, arm outstretched, watching my father eat.
My Abeh was lean. He had high cheekbones like mine, and a round forehead; he had a strong neck and broad shoulders that were slightly stooped. His eyes were creased, which I thought was because he read a lot of books and worried a great deal about the future of our country. His hairline was high, which made him look distinguished. His voice was low and seemed always to have a smile in it. And unlike all the other adults in our lives, he thought we children were wonderful.
The next morning Abeh woke us up for prayer. The mats were spread out already, with Mahad’s next to his, and Ma’s and Haweya’s and mine behind. We began to wrap ourselves in long white cloths for prayer, as Ma had begun insisting we do, but Abeh stopped us. “You don’t have to do that until you’re grown up,” he said. And when Ma protested, my wonderful Abeh told her, “Asha, you know, it’s not the rules, it’s the spirit.”
After that, Haweya and I squirreled in between him and Mahad for the prayer. He didn’t push us away. When Ma protested “It’s forbidden,” Abeh shushed her.
We did that and over: at every prayer throughout the day we stuck by my father’s side. By the evening prayer Abeh must have realized it wasn’t going to stop by itself, and besides, Ma was right: it was forbidden. Men do not pray alongside women. Women pray behind, because though they cover themselves for prayer, that cloth could shift and uncover a piece of clothing, or skin, which could distract the men and lead them into sin. But my Abeh didn’t explain it like that. He said, “You must stand behind now, because you are big girls.”
We, of course, asked, “Why?”
“Allah wills it.”
“But why does Allah will it? He made me, too, but he always prefers Mahad.”