Nomad (6 page)

Just as I had lied about my identity when I sought asylum in Holland, my father too, it seemed, had lied to cheat the asylum system so that he could live in Britain. The tribal hero, the preserver of the culture of Islam and the clan, took handouts from the unbelievers on a false pretext, with a fake passport, though, unlike me, he had nothing but contempt for their values and way of life. Before he died he had even applied for and received British citizenship, not because he wanted to be a British subject but because of the instrumental benefits of free housing and health care. At the same time, he continued to lecture me never to be loyal to a secular state; he repeatedly urged me to return to the true faith. If I had stayed with him for a week he would have trapped me in a week-long lecture. He would have asked me to reunite with the family—his wives, their daughters, some of whom probably think I should be put to death and who certainly consider me a whore.

We who are born into Islam don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy. (Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad elevated it and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live happily, in union. Polygamy creates a context of uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the other wife getting? Who is the
favored child? Who will he marry next, and how can we manipulate him most efficiently? Rival wives and their children plot and are often said to cast spells on each other. If security, safety, and predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for power.

My grandmother, a second wife herself, used to say that our family was too noble to feel jealousy. Nobility in Somali nomadic culture is synonymous with self-restraint, with resilience. A higher-status clan is more self-conscious, hence more stoic. Expressions of jealousy or any other kind of emotion are frowned upon. My grandmother said she was lucky, and people called her spoiled, because after her older cowife died her husband didn’t take another wife for many years, until my grandmother had had nine children. Even then, he only married again because eight of those children were girls.

My grandmother had thought her position was safe, because even though she had given birth to daughter after daughter, for years her husband did not marry another wife. And then he did marry again. And that third wife, to my grandmother’s enduring shame, gave birth to three boys. My grandfather had a total of thirteen children.

There was nothing my grandmother could do and nothing she wished to say, so she did not protest. But after that, the worst in her came to the fore: she became mean and petty, exploding with temper at her children, who took the brunt of her anger.

Long after I was an adult, I realized that it was jealousy that finally drove my grandmother to walk away from her husband. After my grandfather’s new wife had her second son, my grandmother could no longer contain her shame and envy, and she left their home in the desert, ostensibly to look after her adult children, which included my mother.

My mother’s story was similar. Even though she was my father’s second wife, from the day she learned that my father had married a third woman and had another child, Sahra, my mother became erratic, sometimes exploding with grief and pain and violence. She had fainting episodes and skin diseases, symptoms caused by suppressed jealousy. From being a strong, accomplished woman she became a wreck, and we, her children, bore the brunt of her misery.

Of my father’s six children who made it to adulthood, three have suffered mental illnesses so severe that they can barely function. My sister Haweya died after three years of depression and psychotic attacks; my brother Mahad is a manic-depressive, unable to hold down a job; one of our half sisters has had psychotic episodes since she was eighteen. Aunts and uncles on both sides of my family have cases of
Waalli
, or generic “madness,” as they call all mental problems in Somali.

Perhaps polygamy invites madness, or perhaps it is the clash between aspiration and reality. All my relatives desperately wanted to be modern. They yearned for freedom, but once they found it they were bewildered and broken by it. Obviously mental instability has biological factors too, but it is also affected by the culture we mature in, the tactics and strategies of survival we develop, the relationships we have with others, and the unbearable dissonance between the world we are told to see and the world in which we actually live.

As I spoke with Magool after my father’s death, it occurred to me that the message that Abeh had tried so desperately to tell me on his deathbed was probably that I should look after his wives: his first wife, who also lives in England; his second wife, my mother, who lives in Somalia; his third wife, Sahra’s mother; and his fourth wife, a woman whom he married in Somalia after Sahra was born and with whom he had no children. I had almost forgotten about the fourth wife’s existence.

I pondered this for some time, something I had never permitted myself to do while he was alive. My father had hurt so many people, as he married women and fathered children and then left them behind, more or less untended. Judging my father by my adoptive Western standards, I found that he had failed in his duties toward his wives and children.

I have never condemned my father or allowed myself to feel real anger toward him. But if I had gone to his side and spoken truthfully to him before he died, I might have had to open an emotional closet I have nailed shut. Now that he was dead I felt contempt for myself, and I was filled with regret for everything he and I might have done differently.

*    *    *

I grew closer to Magool in the weeks after my father’s death. My young cousin had grown up smart, independent, a free spirit, tough and yet compassionate, with a no-nonsense attitude toward life. Now she was the suddenly my only precious link to my extended family. Magool had lived with me for over six months in the Netherlands in the early 1990s. Unlike Sahra, she adopted the Western values of individual responsibility in matters of life, love, and family. Because everyone in her environment had tried to convert her back to Islam, she knew how annoying the process was and never tried to convert me. Magool was also my connection to the Somali bloodline to which, whether I liked it or not, I still belonged.

One day I asked Magool for news of my mother, and she told me a story that surprised and pleased me.

All those long years after my father had left my mother alone in Kenya with three children, Ma had refused to say more than a word or two to him. Her mute, awful anger lay between them even before he left us; her silence filled our house on Park Road in Nairobi, until he could no longer bear it. When he came back to Kenya ten years later, she turned away from his outstretched arms and ignored his endearments, even in the presence of family and friends.

After I fled my family and my father moved to London, Ma followed the news about him closely, Magool told me. When she learned that he was dying and suffering, she believed it was because his soul was not being allowed to depart quietly and in peace. My father’s kidneys failed, then started functioning again; he would breathe on his own for a while and then had to be hooked up to the ventilator again. Ma saw all this not as the effects of leukemia or the septic infection that was raging through his body and killing his organs but as a sign of, a prelude to, the explicit tortures of the grave that loom so large in Islamic teaching.

In the hell described in the Quran, flames lick the flesh of the sinful; burning embers will be placed under their feet, their scalps will be scalded and their brains boiled. These tortures are endless, for as their skin is burned it is replaced and burned again. In the suffering of my father on his deathbed, my mother believed, Allah and his angels were giving him a taste of the punishments to come for his wrongdoings.

I imagined my mother must have asked herself whom my father
could have wronged more than he had wronged her. Who else had he abandoned, cheated on, dragged to foreign countries? Who but she had gone hungry and watched her fatherless children fall away and betray her after he departed? Who could possibly have suffered more than she because of the sins of Hirsi Magan Isse? My mother felt she held the keys to my father’s last chance for salvation before the grave, so she resolved to act.

Perhaps she thought that by doing good she might be forgiven for her own sins. Or perhaps it was because she truly loved him. (This is what I tell myself.) Maybe her sense of ethics and justice, of being the daughter of a respected judge among the nomads, never deserted her, or maybe her act was all about power. Whatever her reasoning, my mother decided to register at my father’s deathbed like his other wives. Her presence was different from theirs, however. She cajoled Magool, the daughter of her younger sister, into going to the hospital on her behalf to deliver a message.

I am not sure how, but Magool had grown friendly with my half sister, Sahra. She found out from Sahra that my father was in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and also found out which ward he was in. Then she went to see him with a message from my mother. Unlike me, she did not talk at first, but hovered quietly for a few minutes, until she felt comfortable enough to whisper his name. Magool said that he opened his eyes and raised his head to see who she was. Making eye contact with him, she then delivered the message my mother had made her memorize:

When Magool related this story to me, I asked her how Abeh had responded. “I don’t know if he heard me,” she answered. “He lifted
up his head for a second, and then his head fell back on the pillows. He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them again. I am assuming he heard. At least that is what I told your Ma.”

“What did you tell her, exactly?”

“I told her that he heard me, that I could see he understood. I’m not sure he really did, but she is old and lonely and it will do her good to know that the father of her children got her message.”

I don’t remember my mother being in a forgiving mood too often, but I knew how much this would mean to her, and it made me feel better too. Regardless of her motivation, my mother’s message to my father was gracious and timely, and it surely brought her some peace.

One afternoon, less than a week after my father had passed away, Magool phoned me. “Ayaan,
Abaayo
,” she said, using an endearment that is best translated as “dear sister.”

“Yes,
Abaayo
, dear, what is it?”
Is there more bad news?
I wondered.

“Abaayo
, Ayaan …”

“Uhhhmm,
Abaayo
Magool.”

“Abaayo
Ayaan.”

“Abbbaaayyo
. Yessss.” I tried to contain my irritation but failed.

“Will you do me a favor,
Abaayo
, please,
Abaayo?”
Magool asked me. “Just this once?”

“Abaayo
, what is it?”

“Please,
Abaayo
, just say yes first?”

I hesitated. I had no idea what Magool would ask for, and I didn’t want to commit to something I could never deliver. From the old days I knew that Somali relatives ask—no,
demand
—money, immigration papers, the smuggling of people and goods; they request to be allowed to camp in your home for three days only, which stretch into forever. All this is preceded by floods of endearments of “dear sister” and “dear cousin” and all the special Somali words for every inflexion of relationship that lies beyond and in between.

“It depends,
Abaayo,”
I responded. “I will say yes if what you ask won’t compromise my safety, if it is legal, and if I can afford it.”

Magool laughed. “No problem,
Abaayo.”

I was now more intrigued than irritated. “So?”

“Abaayo
, phone your mother.”

I was silent for a few seconds, taking the time to find the right response, and when I spoke again my voice was so soft that she asked me to repeat what I said. “Magool, I don’t know if ma wants to talk to me anymore.”

“Abaayo
”—the compassion in Magool’s voice was plainly audible now—“I will give you her phone number. Yes, she wants to talk to you. She is all alone now. My ma was with her until a few months ago. Now my mother has gone to Tanzania with my brother. Your mother is all by herself and she asks after you all the time. Please, call her. Promise me you will call her.”

At first I felt a jolt of childlike excitement. Then I felt fear; I dreaded the confrontation that would be bound to occur as soon as I spoke with my mother. But that was soon overcome by the sense of duty she had inculcated in me, and the guilt of having neglected her. My father had just passed away. What if my mother was taken ill? Would I ever see her again? I knew the answer: my mother is in Somalia and I am an infidel who would be killed instantly on arrival. I would not be present at her bedside.

But at least I could talk to her. And so I tried the number Magool gave me. I got an out-of-order signal, a busy signal, a recorded female voice telling me in English and Spanish, “All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.” Magool had warned me that getting through to Somalia was hard and advised me to keep trying; I called so often, whenever I had a little free time, that it became a habit. I had almost come to believe that Magool had deluded me and the line would never work when finally, one afternoon, in the front seat of the Land Rover of a friend of mine who was driving me out of town to buy furniture for an apartment I had just rented, I connected to the phone line in my mother’s dirt-floor house in Las Anod, a place located between Somaliland and Puntland, two autonomous regions in what was once Somalia.