Nomad (14 page)

Two people from different cultures met. One was from a society that stresses individual responsibility (in this case, sexual responsibility), and the other was reared to think in group terms. She was brought up in fear of her own sexuality, steeped in self-loathing for having sex outside of wedlock, taught to distrust the infidel. He felt trust; she betrayed it.

When Hiran was finally diagnosed with full-blown AIDS she could no longer cope and went into temporary psychosis. Only then did her boyfriend discover her illness, and he immediately had himself tested. He discovered that he too was infected. According to Magool, after he got over the initial shock and devastation, he continued to visit Hiran in the hospital. When she was well enough to talk, according to Magool (who was present), he asked Hiran why she had never told him. Hiran said, “You gave it to me. I got it from you.” Only then did he stop visiting her.

At the heart of the clash of values between the tribal culture of Islam and Western modernity are three universal human passions: sex, money, and violence. In the Western perspective, the debate now raging about how to assimilate minorities (read, Muslims) into Europe and how best to wage the “war on terror” that began in America in response to the 9/11 attacks boils down to fundamentally different
views on sex, money, and violence—or, transposed into loftier vocabulary, demography, buying power, and military capability.

Having studied the rhetoric of radical Islam, and having tried as a young woman to live according to its principles, I know that the same three themes are the yardsticks by which Islamists measure what they consider the decadence and moral turpitude of the West.

My cousins, like so many individuals in a globalized world—including myself—are caught between the two worlds. They were never prepared for life in the West. European and North American societies have been fundamentally reshaped by the values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shifted the balance of power from the collective to the individual. During these hundreds of years, thinkers and activists developed and refined ways of allowing as much individual liberty as possible within the realms of these three urges without sacrificing the common good. (Who determines the “common good” shall forever remain a subject of debate, in open societies as in all others.)

These three passions lie at the center of Muslims’ journey from tribal life to Western societies that are based on the values of the Enlightenment. Immigrants from traditional societies that have been dominated for centuries by the bloodlines and values of clan and tribe make the physical transition to the West in a matter of hours. Often they have been driven to look for a better life when home has become a nasty, unwelcoming place. Yet both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

Ladan, Hiran, Hassan, and Anab, like me, succeeded in coming to the West with personal high hopes of a better life, and at least in the case of Hassan, with the additional hope of success for his father, his aunt, our uncles, my mother, and a host of siblings and cousins. We were resilient and resourceful; we were survivors, even (in the case of Anab) a warrior. But their lack of clarity about where they stood on
the core issues of sex, money, and violence—their failure to recognize that where they live geographically must change where they stand ideologically—has led them to human tragedies of disease, debt, and death. I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind.

Ladan and Hiran grew up in families from a merchant clan. Their families were among the wealthiest in Somalia, with international business interests. Because of their wealth and commercial ties to foreign countries, these families could purchase the gadgets of modernity. These girls were used to having a car, televisions, videos, and other modern possessions.

The circle of people with whom they interacted in Somalia followed Western fashions and proclaimed (almost too loudly to be true) their Western attitudes. Ladan in particular spent much of her teenage life with female role models who knew more about Valentino, Armani, Prada, Gucci, and Chanel than chapters in the Quran or the sayings of the Prophet. They conducted a grim competition about who looked sexier, because Western fashion is about displaying the female body.

Ladan and Hiran wore makeup, styled their hair, and even mixed with boys. Yet their modernity was only skin-deep. Their fathers were both very successful and frugal, yet they allowed their daughters the trappings of Western culture. Even so, they didn’t educate them about how to make money, let alone save or invest it. And their apparent ease with the visible markers of a Western lifestyle did not translate into a stable sense of identity or a coherent, resilient approach to the vicissitudes of life.

Many Westerners entertain a general belief that non-Westerners who have grown up in large cities with wealth and cultural ties to Western countries are better prepared for life in modern societies. But Ladan and Hiran did not grow up with a complete set of moral values, either Islamic or Western. They looked modern; they played the part and dreamed the part, but they were not anchored in Western sexual mores. They indulged their desires as if they were indeed Western young people, but they did not escape the culture of shame. They buried their shame under elaborate layers of secrecy and hypocrisy; they hid, even from themselves, the bare, bold fact that they were having sex.

*    *    *

As I heard about the troubles of my family, I was once again filled with a sense of guilt and regret. But this was different from the earlier guilt I had felt at escaping my arranged marriage and from my regret at betraying my father and compromising his honor; it was different from the guilt I had felt at putting my mother in a position where she was blamed for what I had done. I no longer had that old, constant remorse, that constant guilt about what I could have done for my family in those years of silence and anger, after I had fled from my clan to a society that was free, informed, and affluent, to a new world in which I had learned to survive.

Now my guilt stemmed from a new feeling: that I should have shared some of those tools of survival with the closest members of my family. Instead of cutting them off, I should have called them more often. If I had kept up with Hiran and Ladan, perhaps I could have helped them to shed their religious and clan convictions—to learn about contraceptives, for example, and face up to their sexuality, instead of pretending (even to themselves) that they weren’t really having sex and thus taking no precautions.

My actions were selfish, but they were not malicious. They were selfish because I had chosen to improve
my
life, pursue happiness in
my
way. They were treacherous because, in achieving my personal goals, I was aware that I was disregarding long-held traditions of my family and religious edicts.

One evening, about three months after my father’s death and after conversations with my mother and Magool, I sat down to dinner with an American couple who had become very close friends of mine. While I ruminated over the ruins of my family, we talked about the books of Edward Banfield, who maintained that the tightly inward-looking focus of traditional societies impedes their members from progressing in the modern world, for it prevents them from making bonds outside their clan.

Afterward I asked myself,
What is it about our Somali culture that holds us back?
Perhaps part of it is that we do not have much to call culture anymore. There are no Somali historians, few authors, few if any artists of any kind. The old ways are broken, and the new ways involve
only violence and disorder. As a tribe we are fragmented; as clans, scattered; as families, dysfunctional.

Slowly I sought reconciliation with my family, and yet with every renewed tie I felt more alienation and more sadness at how far and fast our family had regressed. Haweya, gone. Mahad, a shadow of himself. Hiran, broken. My half sister, Sahra, denying modernity, choosing to entomb herself in her veil. Ladan, unaware of the volumes of books, videos, and DVDs on parenting, now preparing to bring another child into the world, oblivious of the risks to which her addiction and poverty expose her daughter. My conscientious cousin Hassan, spending his money to prop up people invested in outdated values.

I wanted to tell Hassan,
Save your money, buy a home, get an education—above all, rethink the values of our grandmother, and teach your children new ethics. Help them develop the tools to be successful and get ahead in America. Our grandmother was disciplined and resolute, but her lessons about traditions and bloodlines cannot carry us through this new landscape. If we try to hold on to them we will break apart, for the old ways have failed. Even Somalis can learn to adopt the values of a liberal democracy
.

One evening, staring at my grandmother’s photograph above the fireplace in my apartment, I began thinking about her first voyage away from the lands of her ancestors. She must have been only about forty when she crossed the Red Sea in a dinghy, traveling from the port of Berbera, in Somalia, to Aden. Her husband’s third young wife had just had her second son. Shame and jealousy burned within her and propelled her out of the desert with her youngest daughter, who was still not married.

I imagined her, afraid perhaps, but excited by the motion of the sea and the challenge of the unknown. Perhaps, secretly, she desired to escape the monotony of the nomadic life, a life with a very short span, vulnerable to natural disasters and war.

My grandmother used to talk to the dead. She talked with our forefathers, calling them by name. Many a time she warned us not to cross them, not to bring down their fury. As I stared at her photograph, I realized that I no longer feared my forefathers, and I marveled at that. I looked at her dark, piercing eyes, so full of judgment and accusation,
and in my mind I spoke to my grandmother. And then, because my literacy has robbed me of my grandmother’s flawless memory, I did as I always do when something is important: I pulled out a notebook.

It began as fragments, part English, part Somali. It was not a conscious composition, like an article or a manuscript. I had no clear idea that what I was writing was a formal farewell, a statement of adieu to every family tie I had ever known and to all the bequests my clan, tribe, religion, and culture had ever bestowed on me. But gradually it dawned on me that, just as she would have done, I was talking to my forebears. I was writing my grandmother a letter.

Dear Grandmother,

I do not wail for your passing. You were ready to go. Ma said you kept asking your forefathers to take you. Your legs refused to carry you. Your joints jammed. When straight, they hurt you to bend them; when bent and curled for a few minutes, they refused to straighten. They creaked with effort. Your side ached from sitting and from lying down. Your skin creased into folds hard to clean; the sweat collected in them and you itched. Your long, thin, and lovely fingers curled inward into stiff and crooked branches. You scratched the itch in your side with them, but the nails cut you instead. Your ears refused to serve you any longer; your eyes wouldn’t see anymore. Your daughters and granddaughters comforted you as best they could, but they could not ease the pain of old age.

I do not wail for your passing, but I am filled with a sense of guilt: I wish I too had been there for you. You held me in my childhood when I was in pain; you whispered words of consolation in my ears as I was shaken by the fevers that attack a body so young it doesn’t know how to defend itself. You called in the help of your forefathers on my behalf; you chided me not to give in; you took me to the witch doctor, who took your money and your sheep and burned wounds in my chest with a long blacksmith’s nail he held with tongs. That hurt me more than the fever, Grandmother, and I still have the scars. They are a symbol of your love for me. It was not the witch doctor but you who spurred me to fight the demons in my blood and recover.

I am sorry, Grandmother, that I was not there in your old age as you were there in my childhood. I would have summoned the spirits of my new world. Here, they have salves to cleanse and soothe the itch in folded skin; they have hearing aids; they have walking sticks on wheels to help you roll smoothly along the road. They have all these props and more, and painkillers. I am sorry, Grandmother, for abandoning you when I could have been a source of comfort in your old age.

I have lived with the infidels for almost two decades. I have come to learn, appreciate, and adopt their way of life. I know that this would make you sad. Before he died Father tried to convince me to change my mind, and Ma does the same every time I speak to her on the phone. I think, at first, you would do the same as my parents, and tell me to respect the traditions of our fathers and forefathers. But I have this odd feeling that you, Grandma, would come to see my point of view.

Still, I do not wail for your passing.

Gone with you are the rigid rules of custom. “Repeat after me: I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, who is the son of Magan, who is the son of Guleid …” Gone with you is that bloodline, for better or for worse, and gone is the idiot tradition that meant you cherished mares and she-camels more than your daughters and granddaughters.

When a boy was born into the family you rejoiced. Your eyes twinkled, you smiled, and with a burst of energy you would weave impossible numbers of grass mats to give away as gifts. As you wove you would tell us your warrior legends—about courage, resistance, conquest, and
sharaf, sharaf, sharaf
. Honor, honor, honor.