Nomad (40 page)

In her living room Oriana insisted that we drink champagne to celebrate that I had come to see her. “And you’re so young,” she said. I offered to get the bottle and to open it, but she said, “No, I can still do this, I have to do this.” When I saw how much her hands trembled and how tiny she was in proportion to the large bottle, I insisted on
helping her. “No,” she said again. “I still want to do this, because I’m able to.” Then she began to speak again. And as fragile as her body was, her spirit was so strong and resilient. I listened.

After she had recounted her life journey through Italy, the Middle East, and now in the United States, she arrived at the subject that brought our own paths together: the threat of Islam. But instantly she changed the subject. “You must have a child,” she said. “I only regret one thing in my life, and that is that I do not have children. I wanted a baby, I tried to have one, but I tried too late, and I failed. Darling,” she almost pleaded with me, “it hurts to be alone. Life is lonely. It must be, sometimes. Still, I would very much have liked to have a child. I would have liked to pass on life. I want for you what I wanted for myself and failed to get. I want you to start thinking about having a child of your own before it is too late. Time flies, and one day you will come to regret that you postponed it.”

She handed me copies of her books, in Italian. She had other life lessons to tell me, I knew, but she was visibly exhausted. Twice she said, “Darling, don’t let life pass you by.” She refused to let me say good-bye and invited me to visit her again. I wanted to. Her fierce eyes and sharp cheekbones and her sense of resolution reminded me of my fearsome aunt Khadija. But four months later, on the morning of September 15, 2006, I was behind my desk at the office of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington when I heard on the radio that Oriana was gone. I remember her telling me, “Darling, when the cancer kills me, many will celebrate.” I belong to those who mourn her loss.

Dear child, she inspired me to have you. In the short time I was with her Oriana told me that she had miscarried, and months later I read her
Letter to a Child Never Born
. Her message to me was dual: that motherhood is a choice and that love between a woman and a man is a hoax. I agree and disagree with Oriana. Motherhood for women in my circumstances is indeed a choice, but it is not a choice for many others. And love between a man and a woman is not a hoax.

First, motherhood. Your great-grandmother had little choice about being a mother, maybe none. She was about thirteen when she was
given away to an older man. She conceived at fourteen. When she was sixteen, she gave birth to twins. She was always proud to tell us that she did it alone, under a tree, cut the umbilical cords herself and returned home that evening, not only with the babies but also with her count of sheep and goats. The only thing that marred what could have been a moment of exceptional joy and pride was that she showed up with two girls instead of two boys.

In her life there was little to choose. The seasons chose for her. It barely rained, so she and her family moved from waterhole to waterhole. Sometimes wild animals attacked them, sometimes enemy tribes. Animals and men vied for the green pastures and oases, for scraps of food and shelter. My grandmother’s life oscillated between periods of subsistence that were considered luxurious and periods of malnutrition and famine. All this was punctuated by epidemics. She used to tell us of the seasons of
duumo
, or malaria, an epidemic spread by the mosquitoes that suck the blood of their victims and leave parasites behind. Mothers woke up and found their babies dead after their little bodies had been wracked by fever all night long. Wailing, the women would run to the next hut to ask for help, only to find that another child had died there and two more in the next hut. On and on, death spread over miles of huts. Young men, children, women—many people became sick, feverish, and in a matter of weeks or days passed away.

My grandmother told these stories along with stories of other women getting pregnant and giving birth to more children, of their suffering and dying, of being overtaken by circumstances, being pushed into marriage, war, or worse. It seemed to me like a senseless cycle of pain, discomfort, and death.

In the letter to her unborn baby Oriana Fallaci, that brave, unfazed, and unabashed woman, admits fear. Not fear of pain, suffering, or even death but fear of her child. She worries that her baby may accuse her of bringing him or her into a world of violence, death, pain, and misery. For Oriana life is an effort, a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which one pays a cruel price.

My child, the world was always full of fear, full of pain and suffering. Every day there are reports of accidents, bankruptcies, wars and
starvation, the threat of nuclear bombs, the rise of dictatorships, mass exoduses of boys and girls, men and women from battle-torn states, whole villages that now carry the status “displaced” because of natural and man-made disasters. There is not only news of destruction but also the threat of more miseries to come: shortages of water in the near future will threaten the lives of millions of people, and rising sea levels could inundate whole cities.

Yet I want you to come into this world.

I think back to my grandmother’s life and I am filled with optimism for you. Grandmother was never sure how old she was, but we estimated that she probably made it to eighty-nine. When she died, her children and grandchildren surrounded her. For her too life was an effort. It had moments of joy, sometimes long stretches of joy, but when she was rearing me I do not remember a day when she did not mention death.

My mother, your grandmother, had it a little better than her mother did. She conceived me in a city. I was not born under a tree, and she did not cut the umbilical cord herself; she gave birth to me in a hospital, with a doctor and nurses. But I came too soon. The doctor, nurses, and relatives in attendance were all convinced that I would die, for I weighed no more than 3.3 pounds. Mother had no strategy other than to lay me on her belly, wrap the hospital bed sheets around us both, and rub my back and croon to me. Morning after morning, night after night, my little heart kept beating and I cried—my only signs of life. She wanted me. Unlike Oriana, she did not ponder the complexities of what life would present to me, what it would mean to be born into violence, corruption, torture, and anarchy, countless diseases and upheaval. Mother just wanted me to live, whatever life brought.

My mother went on to conceive child after child. She miscarried and conceived and gave birth and lost children and conceived again. Whenever she and my father were reunited, my mother conceived. The last child was stillborn. Mohammed was his name. He would have been your youngest uncle, born in 1979.

This history of conceptions and miscarriages is very important for me to know. It is the experiences of your foremothers that give me the confidence to take a chance on having you. In that chain of four generations of women—I am counting you as the fourth—I see a profound
advancement in the quality of life and also the potential for continued improvement.

I now live in Oriana’s world, the world of science, where they take pictures of you in the womb when you are just a seed, “a transparent egg, suspended in the womb that looks like any mammal.” Women visit a doctor every two weeks for examinations, and when two months are completed the doctor says, “It’s a very delicate transition.” I read Oriana’s words and grapple with the irony. Your grandmother would say, “With all the science and education and the knowledge that the infidel amasses, they do not grasp that every part of life is a delicate transition!” But that is what knowledge brings. As the third generation from that woman in the bushes, I have been exposed to too much of it to be nonchalant about conceiving you. I have to think, like Oriana, about whether or not you want to be born. Do you want to come into a world of violence and fraud and corruption? Do you want life?

The other choice, as Oriana pointed out, is nothingness and silence. Do you prefer nothingness? To stay where you are, in the silence that is not death, because you have not been alive?

That beautiful frail woman held my hand in her apartment and said, “Let your child come.” She knew. She had worked out for herself an answer that appealed to me strongly. When she conceived, almost everyone around her advised her to have an abortion, but she refused. She wanted her baby.

Oriana told me the story of how her community rejected her unborn child: the man who fathered her child, her doctor and nurse, her pharmacist, her boss, her best friend. They all said to her, “Get rid of your baby. Abort. Think of your career.” A single woman who decided to have a baby was considered irresponsible. The father of her child offered to pay for half the abortion (only half because, after all, the conception was partially her fault too).

My community would not agree with Oriana’s. My doctor is a gay man. I went to him and asked him if he could freeze my eggs or embryos. He said he could, but advised against it. Because I was thirty-seven, he said, “Just have the baby. You are a healthy woman. You are strong. I see no reason for you to take such drastic measures.” He never once mentioned the disadvantages to the child of having a single parent. My boss, who is really like an adopted father, would
support any decision I made if I were pregnant with you. I could never imagine him persuading me to have you removed. My best friends, my colleagues—no one would stand in my way.

I have struggled with whether to have you on my own, as Oriana tried to, or to marry your father. As she says, having a child is a personal choice. I agree. It’s not only a personal choice; it’s a very selfish choice. I want to have you for me, for
my
delight, to enrich my existence. I want to know what it is to love unconditionally and be loved back that way. As I carry you in my womb I want to know what it is to “feel the needles of anxiety pierce my soul, each alternating with a flush of joy,” as she described the early stages of her pregnancy. I want to feel you grow inside me as another life. I want to hold you. I want to give you life. I want you. And I want you for me.

What shall I give you in return? First I shall teach you how to choose. Sometimes too many options make the mind reel, and sometimes they paralyze us in fear. You, if you make it, will live, unlike your foremothers, in a reality of too many options. And learning to choose is often harder than having only one or no choice at all.

Education—the thrill and pain and exercise of learning—will be available to you in ways it was not to your grandmothers: preschool and kindergarten, elementary and high school, college and university, summer camps and student exchange programs, internships and alumni conferences. You will learn to read and write, to count and clap, to develop your skills at making friends and compromising with rivals; you will have a choice of ballet, painting, classical music, pop, athletics, team sports; you will read Shakespeare in tiny, clever, illustrated children’s books and listen to Mozart while you’re still in my belly. You will be born in a world of gadgets, and gadgets you shall have—to calculate, to navigate, to call and message and read and listen to music with.

You will have me, your father, your nanny, your teachers, and an extended family of adults all cheering you on. You will learn to assemble and reassemble your priorities with each year that comes. But above all you will have to learn to choose from all the options that we give you.

My education was very different from the one that awaits you. In my school we were required to wear a white shirt and a green skirt,
white socks and black shoes, a green cardigan and a green tie with the school emblem. My tie was always askew, my top button always unbuttoned, and my cardigan always getting lost. My high school years were a constant battle with authority.

My mother dictated to me what to wear, when to play (almost never), what to read, and whom to befriend. She did not allow me to make friends with girls, much less boys, from any other community. She banned reading novels and listening to music; asking her if I might go to the cinema made my mother scream and threaten me with physical punishment. The idea of my having a boyfriend made my mother cringe and curse uncontrollably.

Nonetheless I had non-Muslim, Kenyan friends along with my friends from India and Yemen. I read everything I could, and did it practically under her nose. I just tucked the pages of my novels in the midst of the Quran, the only book she allowed. I sneaked out to my friends’ homes and listened to their music and watched their movies. I even managed to have a boyfriend. (And this was in the days when there were no cell phones, text messages, or e-mail.)

My dear child, as you grow and make that transition from girlhood to womanhood your body will change. You’ll grow breasts and hips, and your lips will become full. You will become an object of desire for boys, and you will desire them. This was a frightening prospect for my mother; I am sure every parent feels a protective twinge at the idea of their child having sex. I am fortunate to have lived in different cultures and to have learned that openness about sexuality is preferable to repression. All cultures that have repressed sexuality attain the opposite of what they seek: sexual diseases spread faster, and unwanted pregnancies increase. Abortions attempted in secret often kill the mother too.

Instead of denying the reality of sexuality, Europeans and Americans teach their children, as soon as they are old enough to raise the subject, everything they need to know about their bodies: that sex is a source of pleasure, that you can choose when and whom you want to have sex with, all the contraceptives that are available to you, how you can protect yourself against diseases. Then you take the responsibility for your own sexuality and for the risk of bringing a child into the world when you’re not ready. You take responsibility for avoiding
being infected with a disease, as well as for not infecting others. Such openness encourages responsibility and choice based on information and reason and not mystification of intercourse.