Nomad (12 page)

I was shocked. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I told her how to count the menstrual cycles,” he said. “I told her the day they came, the day they ended, and when she could get pregnant. And she promised me, she was going to observe this. She betrayed me.”

I found it difficult to control my rage at Mahad’s attitude. I told him how irresponsible he was being, that he had a healthy baby boy with a woman who was of our clan. I said, “You just wanted to have a good time with her. Now, as always, you don’t want to take responsibility—you are letting that poor girl down and you are letting your baby down.”

Mahad was clenching his fists and his jaw. The last time he hit me was in 1986, before he went to Somalia. I thought he might hit me again. He did not; he just walked away.

This was not the right time for a fight. I had to avoid trouble. Mahad and my mother could take away my passport if they wanted to. They could keep me in this terrible place to teach me a lesson, and without my passport I might never be able to go back to my life of freedom in Holland.

*    *    *

After a few weeks in Nairobi I returned to Holland, to my job translating for Somali refugees and immigrants interacting with the Dutch social services. I saw many Somali mothers with babies who looked just like Mahad’s son, who had been abandoned by men just like my brother. They were tormented by mothers-in-law just like my mother, and like my family they were all focused backward, to a mythical past of life as nomads in the Somali desert. They would tell their little children about Somalia’s heroes, about milking camels, and to hate other clans. They would emotionally blackmail their children not to become “too Dutch,” to speak Somali instead of Dutch and not give up their culture.

These children performed poorly in school. As part of their evaluations they were given puzzles to work out; they were required to say “please” and “thank you” and to behave properly at the dinner table. In Holland these are important indicators that children are well-adjusted. But all the Somali children I translated for, who in their homes certainly ate on the floor, with their hands, flatly failed these tests. That meant they would not go to a normal school; they would go to a “special school” for “remedial learning.” The Dutch government would spend a lot of money on coaching them to catch up.

There seemed to be a pattern of such disconnects between the expectations of the parents and the reality of the children in many immigrant families in Holland—not just Somalis, but also families from Morocco, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Yugoslavia. I was amazed that officials in so many different institutions—social workers, schoolteachers, the police, child protection services, domestic violence agencies—all assumed that there was some deep cultural puzzle that they did not understand. In itself that was not a bad assumption, but then they proceeded to
protect
these puzzling cultural norms. This was the advice they received from anthropologists, Arabists, Islamologists, cultural experts, and ethnic organizations, all of whom insisted that these behaviors were something special and unique and worth preserving in these homes.

I worried about my brother’s child. How could he ever become successful in the modern world with the familial strife around him?

After a short interval, just as he had led me to expect, Mahad
divorced Suban. With all his notions of noble upbringing and family honor, with all his lofty illusions of becoming a prince, he couldn’t even act with integrity in his own personal life.

I decided to convince my mother to go back to Somalia. She had always complained that my father had deprived her of the company of her family and forced her to live among foreigners. She wanted to go home, so I told her I would pay for her to go. She would be with her brother and his children, her sisters and their children. She would go back to the sounds and smells of the Dhulbahante lands where she was born.

Even though I encouraged Ma to return to her place of birth, which lies far removed from the constant unrest in Mogadishu, I worried about this move. Ma was used to the luxury of living in a large city. Nairobi is not the best city in the world, but there you are protected from the worst of the weather and, most of the time, you have electricity and running water. There are doctors. You buy milk in packs; you do not milk the cows yourself. You do not have to slaughter animals for meat; you buy it. To get to my mother’s apartment in Nairobi, you had to walk up four flights of stairs, without an elevator. But there was no threat from wild animals, like snakes and scorpions and other reptiles. She had a toilet and a bathroom.

I said all of this to Ma. She told me, “I want to go back. I am alone, lonely. I want to be with my family.”

So in 1998 I paid for her to make the long journey to Las Anod with an escort, and she left. Suban and Mahad were already divorced; according to Shari’a law, all Mahad had to do was get a couple of his buddies and pronounce the
talaq
, the declaration “I divorce thee, and Allah is my witness.” But now, at least, Suban could not complain that Ma was interfering between her and Mahad, and Mahad could not complain that was he was being held hostage by our mother. I thought I had fixed the problem.

During this period Mahad and I corresponded a little. He would phone or write lists of demands specifying the consignment of clothes I should send him and the business contacts I should make. He was imperious, ranting; his temper seemed always on the brink of explosion. He would explain at length that he was planning to get together a militia to defend the Somali coast from polluters. At five guilders
a minute, these were expensive calls, and I remember them well. Although his pride was based on no visible achievement, Mahad often used the term
honor
. “Think about our name,” he would scold me, telling me that I was obliged to help him in the name of family honor.

A few months after my mother left for Puntland I received a phone call from my father, who was in another part of Puntland at the time. His voice was sad. “Ayaan, my child, this time I am calling about Mahad.”

I felt the tears shoot to my eyes and a sensation of total helplessness. I thought Abeh was telling me that Mahad had died. Instead he said, “Mahad has lost his mind. It is worse than being dead. He is tied up in ropes. I have prayed to Allah to make him well again.”

From what my father told me in further telephone conversations, it appeared that Mahad was suffering from manic depression.

Of the three of us siblings, it was Mahad who should have succeeded in life. He was the brightest; he had by far the most opportunities; above all, he had the right to succeed. He was continually encouraged to think of himself as the biggest, best, most incredible being. Even as a child, Mahad was always highly sensitive to the requirements of honor. He would brood about the misdeeds of his sisters, and beat us. But as soon as a visitor showed up, whether a Kenyan or the most noble of our clan, he would be charming, reserved, and go to great lengths to demonstrate our family’s refinement and superiority.

After the Somali civil war, however, Mahad saw that our father’s aspirations for Somalia’s future had become irrelevant. Our mother was abandoned and bitter; our sister had gone mad and died after multiple abortions; and I was living out of wedlock with an infidel. Having always aspired to greatness and wealth without ever developing any skills or holding down a job that would have enabled him to achieve them, Mahad must have seen all this as the failure of our family. Our family honor was in ruins. And since everyone had always told Mahad that it was up to him, the only boy, to uphold and defend the family’s honor, perhaps he believed that this failure was ultimately his fault, that he couldn’t live up to the aspirations and the duties of a good Muslim son.

My nephew’s life was going to be in the hands of his mother. I thought that I had fixed the problems between the adults responsible
for this young boy, but now Mahad would not be in any position to help his son. There seemed to be nothing I could do, at least not from Holland.

I continued to maintain sporadic telephone contact with my father and my mother. Despite my fears, Ma seemed to be thriving in her village in Puntland. The money I sent her was enough to pay for her upkeep and her food. Sometimes she shared it with her relatives. Her nieces brought her water, carrying it in pails and jerry cans from nearby wells. They also swept her front yard, fetched her charcoal, and cooked for her. She said she was never alone. At night she sat with her brother and sisters and their children, and they talked about their childhood and the different directions that their lives had gone, about the civil war and the things that had brought them back to their place of birth. All around them was desert, scrub, sheep, and stretches of unpaved roads on which merchants traveled in trucks, bringing in sugar, rice, and other staples.

Ma told me that Mahad was sick because he was bewitched by Suban. Sometimes she said he was bewitched by my father’s first wife. Mahad spent long periods in the hospital, and longer periods holed up in a room in Eastleigh, barely supporting himself, let alone his child. Abeh said Suban was angry and lonely and that she had sent the little boy, hardly two years old, to Qardo, near the northern tip of Somalia, where Abeh was living. The little boy first responded to the name Abdullahi, but after he was put in my father’s hands he was called Ya’qub. I decided to call him Jacob. I begged Father to send him back to Nairobi so that he could go to a proper school. After a while Abeh persuaded Suban to take the boy back.

Between 2001 and 2006 my family broke off all contact with me. I had no idea how Mahad’s young son was faring, no idea whether he was even attending school. In 2006 I reestablished contact with Mahad, who was still living in Eastleigh, the Somali neighborhood in Nairobi. His health and state of mind were precarious. Some days he seemed fine, and at other times he would be delirious, saying he heard voices. At such times he would rarely leave his bed. Although they were divorced, Suban visited him regularly, washing his clothes, cooking his food, calling relatives when Mahad became ill.

After Abeh died, I got back in contact with Mahad. His voice wasn’t
the same; it was slurred and slow, as if his tongue were too large for his mouth. The first conversation was one long monologue: I had abandoned him; I didn’t care about him; this is what success does, it estranges you from family; it alienates you from religion—a long list of accusations. The two concrete things he wanted from me were money (which I sent) and a visa for resettlement in America (which I didn’t send).

Mahad refused to acknowledge his mental illness. I asked him if he were seeing a doctor. I begged him to go and get medicine. But he insisted there was nothing wrong with him. “I just talk to myself, that’s all,” he said. “I lie down and rest a lot. But they read the Quran over me and it makes me feel better.”

I knew the procedure. A group of people read passages from the Quran and spit into a pail of water and sprinkle it on the patient. Or they spit on his bedcovers after every few passages. Not large drops but little lines of saliva, with the tongue quickly returning to the mouth after letting a little drop fall, a very particular kind of gesture.

I asked for news of Jacob. He was doing well in school, Mahad said; he was fine, healthy and cheerful. I tried to visualize him, ten years old, just a bit older than the son of some friends of mine. I saw him as tall like his father and strong-boned like his mother. I suppose I fantasized that Jacob was the one who would be able to break apart the restrictive shackles of our family and faith and attain the successes that his father and grandfather had not.

But Jacob would soon be a teenager. And I remembered all too well how tragically twisted Mahad had become during his teenage years in Nairobi, how he had squandered years that he should have spent studying in high school. I knew that nowadays radical Islamic cells were rife in Eastleigh, preying on the disadvantaged and disaffected, far more than when Mahad and I were young.

I found comfort in a conversation I had with Suban one day. As usual, she asked me for money, but she also asked me to send her clothes. When I asked her to describe what kind of clothes she wanted, she said skirts and blouses. This gave me hope, for I thought that if she were attracted to shrouding herself in a
jilbab
she would not ask for such clothes.

I began sending money to Mahad, and also to Suban. When Jacob
left primary school I made arrangements for a friend to go to Nairobi to find a really good school for him, a school with a library and laboratories and good teachers. I offered to pay the fees. This went very well, and Jacob has been attending that school ever since. On the days when Mahad is not too depressed or too manic, he shows some interest in his son. Mahad told me that the boy is doing very well in school, that his reading, his English, his social skills are all excellent.

It’s important to me that Jacob get an easier initiation into modernity than Mahad had. I can’t influence his home situation. I can only imagine what it is like: confusing assignments, the nostalgic dreams of nomadic life, warlords as heroes, and a strong dose of Islam. He’s probably been taught how to do his ablutions, stand on a mat, face Mecca and pray five times a day. He’s been taught the ideas of sin, hell, and the hereafter.

I have no real strategy for protecting Jacob. I have tried, and failed, to persuade Suban to send him to me, so that I can bring him up in a Western environment. I fix my hopes for him on his schooling. I hope that they will teach him to have faith in life as it is now, on Earth, and help him develop coping skills that embrace modernity. I want him to discover thinkers and writers who will teach him how complex life is, that it’s full of predicaments, and that the art of living is finding your way through these predicaments. Life is not about projecting onto others your inability to cope, nurturing hatred and then going off either to self-destruction or to annihilate those who have been more successful than you.

I have hope in Jacob’s future—a future that is modest and that may contain fewer heroes and more loneliness than the future my brother had been led to aspire to, but one that is more humane.