Nomad (7 page)

“Hello,” said a soft voice on the other end. (This greeting came to us Somalis when the British introduced the telephone to our country; ever since, Somalis say
hello
when they pick up a phone.)

“Hello,
hooyo, M
a. It is me, Ayaan.” I held my breath, certain she would curse and hang up on me.

“Hello, did you say Ayaan?” Now I was certain it was my mother. I hadn’t recognized her voice at first.

“Hooyo
, mother, mother. Yes, it is Ayaan. It is me. Please don’t hang up.”

“Allah has brought you back to me. I am not going to hang up.”

“Mother, how are you? Do you know that Father just passed away?”

“I know that. You must know, my daughter, that death is the only thing that is certain. We are all going to die. What credit for the hereafter have you built for yourself?”

I sighed. My ma had not changed. It was as though the five years in which she and I hadn’t spoken had never been. Her voice was the same, with its echoes of her Dhulbahante clan, and so were her constant references to death, to the hereafter, and her expectations and demands, her evident, manifest disappointment in me, her oldest daughter. I made an attempt to change the subject: “Ma, I think it was gracious of you to send Magool to forgive him on your behalf.”

“Did she pass on my message?” she asked me eagerly. “What did he say?” My mother was desperate to know how Magool had handled it; she must have heard gossip about Magool’s ungodly life, for she also wanted to know whether her messenger to his hospital bed was appropriately dressed.

“Ma,” I replied, “Magool is a responsible and honorable young woman. She did exactly as you said. She told me that Abeh responded, that he understood her, and I am sure you can be comfortable that it was not too late.”

“Ayaan, did you go and see him?”

“Yes, Ma, I did. I am happy I did. It was tough.”

Our conversation went on like this, stiff and tense, almost like strangers speaking, but with ripples of unspoken meanings and fears. Ma filled me in on the details of my grandmother’s death, in 2006, “around the time that Saddam Hussein was tried and executed,” as Magool had said. Grandmother had become deaf, Ma told me, and she grew smaller and more immobile, until one day that mighty, fearsome force of will stopped breathing.

She told me a little about her own life since then. She was living alone in Sool, a district in what was once the land of the Dhulbahante, her nomad clan of camel herders. I paused for a moment to
imagine it: a little hamlet of cinderblock buildings, unpaved roads, thorn bushes, and endless dust. She would have to fetch wood to make charcoal for the brazier. Perhaps she was comforted by being among her ancestral people.

Then my mother turned the conversation back to what I was doing to invest in my hereafter. “Do you pray and fast, and read the Quran, my daughter?”

It took me so long to think of a good answer that she asked if I was still there. I decided to tell her the truth. “Ma, I don’t pray or fast, and I read the Quran occasionally. What I find in the Quran does not appeal to me.”

As soon as I said the words I regretted it. Predictably, she flew into a rage. “Infidel!” she cried. “You have abandoned God and all that is good, and you have abandoned your mother. You are lost!”

Then she hung up on me.

I was shaking and trying not to cry. To my friend Linda, who had been sitting beside me in the driver’s seat, the whole conversation had been a series of weird emotional noises in the strange sounds of the Somali language. Now, baffled, she looked on as I raged and tried not to cry in her front seat.

“My mother never listens and she never did listen to me,” I burst out. “Should I lie to her? Why does she want me to deceive her? Isn’t that just self-deception? What will she gain from my telling her that I pray and fast? You know, listening to her trying to frighten me into believing that dead people will all stand up on just one day and traipse around and be tried in a giant tribunal, and separated into the good ones and the bad ones—it’s just insanity!” On and on I went, sounding pretty much like my mother, ranting.

Linda, clutching the steering wheel with one hand and trying to calm me down with the other, implored me to listen to her. “Ayaan, please, try to empathize with your mother. She’s all alone …”

“My mother is scared. It’s worse than being alone: she’s frightened,” I said. “She believes in a God who has her paralyzed in fear. She is worried that her God is going to torture
me
in my grave and burn me in
my
afterlife. These are not fairy tales to her, she believes them to be as real and true as the red lights we are approaching now, and it is the only thing that matters to her. She will never give up on it.”

Linda slowed down and pulled over, and then she let me have it. She told me that, as a mother, she could feel my mother’s pain. She told me that even though
she
had hung up on
me
, I should call my ma right back.

So I did.

I was almost certain the call wouldn’t get through, and that if it did, Ma wouldn’t answer. I thought she would be seething, feeling sorry for herself and cursing me. But she answered the phone, and before she had a chance to berate me I yelled at the top of my voice, fearful that she would interrupt me or cut me off,
“Hooyo
, I am sorry I hurt you—I am sorry that I don’t pray and fast—I promise I will work hard at attempting to let it all in—I will go into the Quran with an open mind. Please forgive me …”

“Stop rambling and listen,” Ma broke in, louder. “I want you to listen.”

I caught my breath and asked her one more time not to hang up.

“I am not going to hang up,” she told me.
“You
are the one who disappeared for all these years, who left me alone with only your poor brother Mahad, who, you know, is sick. Your sister died, your father left me, and my mother passed away. You are all I have. I am not going to hang up on you.”

“Ma, I am really sorry,” I stammered. “I want to help. I have some money for you. I want to send it to you. How do I do that? I don’t know of any
Hawala
enterprises here in the U.S. who can transport money safely to Somalia. Besides, many of them are being investigated by the U.S. government for helping al Qaeda …”

“I don’t want to talk about money,” my mother said. “Allah is the giver and taker of life and of nourishment. I want to talk to you about Allah. He sustains me; he sustained me all the time you were gone. I want you to listen. Are you listening?”

Dutifully, I answered that I was listening, though I pursed my lips.

“I am displeased that you gave up your faith in Allah. Do you remember when we were in Somalia, you got a fever, you had malaria. I thought I was going to lose you. I had lost Quman, your youngest sister, a few months before. I was desperate, so desperate to keep you, and I begged Allah, and he let you live.

“Do you remember the airport in Jeddah, when your father did not
show up? You children were too young to understand it then, but the Saudis almost put us on a plane back to Somalia, where our escape would have been discovered, and all of us might have been put behind bars. I prayed to Allah, prayed for his mercy. I understood that he was testing me and I never lost faith in him.”

I wanted to say that it was thanks to the inefficient if terrifying Saudi bureaucracy, plus sheer luck, that we made it out of Somalia. All those secular factors combined had saved us from being caught, not her one-sided conversation with Allah. But all I did was purse my lips some more and say, “Hmmm, yes, Mother.”

“Do you remember our lives in Ethiopia? You and Mahad got lost one day and all the Somalis were predicting the Ethiopians would bring you back cut into little pieces. I prayed all night and you were both brought back to me healthy and alive. Throughout those low hours of desolation I never lost faith in him.”

I remembered, acutely, Ma’s prejudice against Ethiopians, how even after they brought us back safely she never lost that narrow-mindedness.
Do please get to the point
, I thought.

“I gave birth in Ethiopia to a dead baby. I wept and wept and went through it all without once losing faith in the creator and sustainer.”

“Hm.”
Because you are a survivor, Ma. And your belief contributed to your survival, no doubt about it. You derived strength from your belief in Allah, but it also blinded you to options you had, and never took
.

“I was dumped with the three of you in Kenya. Your father left me in a strange place with nothing. I took on all the humiliation his absence exposed me to. I watched your brother drop out of school. I listened to the news from my home and relatives in Somalia who were massacred by Siad Barre. I fell ill, I endured losing my home, I watched my youngest daughter lose her mind and I dealt with the shame she brought on me. I endured your distance and silence and now I’m sitting here with nothing. My only son is no support. All of you have abandoned me. There are open wounds on my leg, there’s fluid coming out of them that is neither blood nor water. I itch. I can’t sleep. And not once have I lost faith in Allah.”

I wanted to say,
Ma, Abeh left because the two of you were incompatible. You mollycoddled Mahad into a spineless mommy’s boy; he grew up frightened by Abeh, and you beat and cursed Haweya systematically. You were dogmatic
and incurious. And faith in Allah has nothing to do with it. You made choices that made your life miserable and blamed others
. I was surprised at my own anger, my inward blasphemy. But I said only, “Yes, Mother.”

“We will all face our maker,” my mother told me. “You will die too.”

“Yes, mother,” I said, thinking of the words of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell: “When I die I shall rot.”

“So tell me,” she asked, and I knew she was fighting back tears—I had grown up with her eternal sense of abandonment and self-pity. “What is it that makes you question the Almighty? Why are you so feeble in faith? What are you committed to, then? What happened to you? Are you bewitched? How can you doubt him? I can bear everything, but I can’t bear the thought of you forsaking Allah and inviting his wrath. You are my child and I can’t bear the thought of you in hell.”

I thought,
I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny. He is arbitrary and incoherent. Faith in him demands that I relinquish my responsibility, become a member of a herd. He denies me pleasure, the adventure of learning, friendships. I am feeble in faith, Mother, because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman—because I don’t want to be like you
. What I said was “When I die I will rot.”

I instantly regretted it. It was like torturing her to say such things, even though it is what I believe to be true. Ma was not interested in my thoughts or my answers. Her queries didn’t seek affirmation, only obedience. She wanted me to lie to her.

So I again said I was sorry. “Mother, I will try, I promise to try my best,” I murmured. This was hypocritical, and I knew it.

At first I called my mother every day, then once every two days, and then every weekend. My conversations with her grew ever more unbearably depressing. Eventually I ended up calling her perhaps once a month.

Our talks were always strained. Ma wanted forgiveness from God. I wanted forgiveness from her. She wanted forgiveness for herself because, since I had strayed, God might want her to pay in the hereafter for doing a poor job of teaching me his commandments. As long as we talked, we served each other by soothing our own images of ourselves,
preserving each other’s pride. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her any details of my life; everything I said would be interpreted by her as irreligious, blasphemous, or immoral. I would try to avoid the subject of religion, but that is not easy in the Somali language, where all greetings and farewells are beset with Allah’s will, mercy, and blessings. In every conversation my mother deployed every kind of tactic she could to try to persuade me to return to her strategy for survival—belief in Islam—even though to me it was the root cause that had made her life so miserable in the first place.

I found myself falling back into my old habit of punctuating her sentences with appropriate noises that would convey that I was listening, though in fact I zoned out until I could interrupt her with a question. After a while, a typical phone conversation with her would go like this:

“Hello, Ma. It is Ayaan.”

“Assalaamu-alaika
.” (May Allah bless you.)

“How are you, Mother? Did you sleep well?”

“Allah is merciful. He takes care of me. I sleep well and eat well because the Almighty desires so. And you, Ayaan, are you praying?”

“Not yet, mother.”

“You have abandoned your mother and you have abandoned God. Does it not matter to you? Please, just wash, just stand on the mat, bow your head. Who knows what Allah will inspire.”

I would feel shame and guilt, and anger at my own shame and guilt. How easily I fell back into the habit of seeking to assuage my mother’s anger. So I would try to deflect the conversation: Had she received my latest bank order to pay for medicine and food? Then I would try to race away. “Mother, I just called to greet you, I have to run, I will call you when I have more time.”

“What are you pursuing? What is chasing you? Remember to pray and thank Allah …”

“Ma, I have to go.” Talking to her, I always find myself implicitly obeying the Somali rule that a child cannot end the conversation. I can’t just hang up. I have to wait for her to indicate that I can go.

“Haste is bad. Why did you call me if you have no time? You have distanced yourself from Allah and from us, you are on the edge, you must come back, you must pray …”

“Ma, I have to run, to work, please let me go.”

“Go then, my child, may Allah bless you and protect you from the
jinn
and from Satan.”

“Amin, amin, amin
, you too. ’Bye.” I would hang up feeling inadequate, a failure.

I felt like a failure because talking to her stirred in me the dormant feelings of guilt and duty to serve and obey my parents. As long as I was not in direct contact with Ma or other relatives, or people from our culture, I could suppress these sentiments. But having heard her voice and learning of her plight in her remote village in Somalia, I felt the pangs of guilt cut through my soul. Ma also knew how to work me, from when I was a little girl. As she continued to complain about how she had been abandoned and neglected by my father, Mahad, and Haweya, about the civil war, about her skin ailment, her age and general malaise, I tormented myself with “What if” questions. What if I had been resourceful enough to send her money, called her, sent her pictures, just let her know that I cared, that I was her daughter?