Nomad (4 page)

My father had a contradictory attitude to women. He embraced some modern ideas on literacy, urged his first wife to attend university, and insisted that my sister Haweya and I go to school when my mother resisted the idea. He believed in women’s strength and he repeatedly insisted that a woman’s role was valuable and important. But as he aged he became more orthodox in his Islamic convictions that we must cover ourselves, marry, and submit to our husbands.
Despite his often eccentric views, even my father would not have tolerated seeing a woman at a funeral.

When I arrived at Heathrow Airport in London a large black car from the Dutch Embassy was there to greet me; another, smaller but even safer, held men from Scotland Yard. We drove straight to the hospital. Now, to my relief, my father lay alive before me. Poor Abeh. He was tied to a hospital bed, old, vulnerable, sick. He smiled deeply at me, and dozed, and then he would wake and gasp for air, trying again and again to speak, but nothing came out, only “Ash hah,” gasping for breath. Then he would make kissing gestures to me with his lips and hold on to my hand as tightly as he could.

I felt heavy with the burden of everything I had never said to my father and the sheer waste of all the years we had been apart. The only words I could find were trite messages of love, and I said them over and over again. It was too late for anything else.

I hadn’t gone to the hospital seeking absolution. I had ceased to believe in the idea that if I did the right thing, such as fulfill my duty to seek forgiveness from my parents and acquire their blessings, my sins would be washed away. Perhaps my presence did not even give him that much pleasure, since he could see that his daughter wore trousers and no headscarf. I went there just for the light in his eyes, for his acknowledgment of me, his love for me and mine for him—a mutual recognition that we had always been precious to each other.

He was using up his last reserves of strength in the effort to tell me something. I will never know what that was. For my father, God was the creator and the sustainer, but God was also ferocious and wrathful. Deep down I understood that on his deathbed my father was terrified that I risked the rage of Allah because I had rejected his faith. Father always taught us that those not forgiven by God will lead a miserable life on earth and eternal fire in the hereafter. But although our beliefs are not reconciled—and never will be, for they are worlds apart—my father did, I think, forgive me. He ultimately allowed his feelings of fatherly love to transcend his adherence to the demands of his unforgiving God.

*    *    *

Visiting hours were approaching. Soon the streams of Somalis that Sahra had warned me about would begin arriving to see my father, and I couldn’t bear the idea of any kind of confrontation. So, painfully, I said good-bye to Abeh.

When the men from Scotland Yard escorted me out of the hospital I found myself standing on Whitechapel Road, the center of the largest Muslim population in Great Britain. A noisy, tarpaulin-covered street market was across the road, crowded with stalls selling lengths of saris, international phone cards, and spicy lamb sandwiches. On the pavement beside me, standing at the bus stop outside the hospital steps, was a collection of women wearing every variety of Muslim covering imaginable, from a pastel headscarf to the complete, thick black
niqaab
that covers you completely, with a veil of black cloth that blanks out your face, even your eyes. These were young, strong women, not doddering old ladies; some of them were pregnant, most of them had several small children, and they were out shopping for their families in the sunlight. Several wore a variation that was new to me: in addition to a long robe and headscarf they had an extra face veil fixed on with Velcro, with two thick black strips of cloth strapped so as to leave barely an inch or so uncovered, just skirting the eyelashes.

The phone booths and the signs for the London Underground were British, but I would not have thought I was in England. I smelled the lunchboxes of my schoolmates at the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School in Nairobi, a heady clash of spices and food, and perfumed hair oils. Here again was the noisy bustle of the street and the mixture of people—Somalis and, I guess, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis—crowded at the market.

At the smells alone I felt a tug of longing for the innocence of youth. I don’t know if in other cultures that sense of community is as strong, but for someone who has grown up within a clan, the feeling—the smell—of family is very powerful. Yet my longing was mixed with a dread of confrontation. What if somebody in this crowd recognized me, as people sometimes do, and decided to pick a fight? In the eyes of many of them, I am an infidel and a traitor, who goes about unpunished.

My bodyguards and I got back in the car and drove down Whitechapel
Road, slowly, in heavy traffic. Seated outside a
halal
fast-food shop was a small woman in a long black robe with a black embroidered beak of cloth tied over her nose and mouth, in the style of Algerian women. Two small children were crying in the buggy beside her, and she was trying to jiggle and comfort them while she lifted her cloth beak to try to eat her pastry modestly underneath it. Her older toddler was wearing a veil too. It was not a face veil, but it covered her hair and shoulders; it was white and lacy and elasticized so it fit snugly over her head. The child couldn’t have been older than three.

Two shop fronts farther down was a huge mosque, the biggest mosque in London, my escorts told me. A small crowd of men stood outside it, all wearing loose clothing, long beards, and white skullcaps. All these people had left their countries of origin only to band together here, unwilling or unable to let go, where they enforce their culture more strongly even than in Nairobi. Here was the mosque, like a symbolic magnetic north, the force that moved their women to cover themselves so ferociously, the better to separate themselves from the dreadful influence of the culture and values of the country where they have chosen to live.

It was just a glimpse, and yet I felt an instant sense of panic and suffocation. I was right back in the heart of it all: inside the world of veils and blinkers, the world where women must hide their hair and their bodies, must cower to eat in public, and must follow a few steps behind their men on the street. A web of values—of honor and shame and religion—still entangled me together with all those women at the bus stop and almost every other woman along Whitechapel Road that morning. We were all very far from where we had been born, but only I had left behind that culture. They had brought their web of values with them, halfway across the world.

I felt as though I was the only true nomad.

Driving back to Heathrow Airport, I thought back to my first meeting with my half sister, Sahra, in Ethiopia in 1992, when she was eight years old and I was twenty-two and newly married, en route to Europe.

We had ended up speaking in sign language, smiling, holding hands, and misunderstanding one another. Sahra had been a charming little girl, with a bright child’s curiosity and my father’s way of being physically affectionate. She had sprinted about with the same kind of energy, enthusiasm, and playfulness as my sister Haweya. She was dressed that day in a sleeveless frock, torn and patched up in so many places that I could not help feeling a strong sense of shame that I did not bring her a new dress.

I was not sure whether the state of her frock was the result of poverty or simply acceptance of the Ethiopian approach to children. When we lived in Addis Ababa, most children were dressed in tatters and often seemed neglected by their parents. As a child I considered this Ethiopian neglect to be the epitome of freedom. I wanted to be left alone, to play as many hours of the day and night as I wanted to, rather than be put to work. Sahra’s mother seemed as indulgent as mine had been rigid and forbidding.

But it was not only Sahra’s frock that was tattered. The apartment was too. We were in a half room, separated from the other spaces by a thin cotton sheet that had once been white but now was stained by smoke and dust. The cement compound of the apartment building had once been smooth and even, but now, like many other shared compounds, it had cracks and large and small holes that were filled
with little puddles of water. None of the tenants could afford to make repairs, and they did not work together to raise the money to maintain and clean the communal areas. By late afternoon fat mosquitoes zoomed and whined by my ears. I decided to marshal my best Arabic and Amharic to campaign for us to dry the puddles of water.

My stepmother had shrugged her shoulders in charming helplessness. “It is as Allah wills,” she said. “The puddles will dry when it stops raining. Allah brings the rains and Allah makes the sun shine.”

My father’s third wife accepted her life as it came to her. Like my mother, she was passive, but her passiveness was different from my mother’s. Both women were steeped in self-pity; both resigned themselves to their circumstances. But my mother cursed, scolded, screamed, demanded, and insulted those she blamed. Sahra’s mom smiled and chided; she cast her eyes down and seemed to be content. Whatever the next day brought was Allah’s choice, and she saw no point in defying events, her husband, or her God. Every sentence ended with
Inshallah
, “God willing.” That was her method of survival.

I did not have the energy or the linguistic skill to suggest that although we could leave to Allah such things as making rain and making the sun shine, perhaps we could dry the puddles ourselves. I had had malaria twice as a child and learned in health education and science classes both in Juja Road and the Muslim Girls’ Secondary School that the parasite that causes malaria lays its eggs in still water. To avoid getting sick we sprayed the mosquitoes and slept under nets, but we also had to dry out all the little puddles and pools of water that collected around our compound and even in the potholes in the streets around our house. We never succeeded in drying out the water in the neighborhood, of course, but as I grew up I dried our compound in Nairobi with a survivor’s zeal and preached to Somali relatives about invisible animals that bred in the water.

Little Sahra and her mother lived a very communal life. Throughout the day people walked in and out of the building and its compound. There was a large stone water pitcher in a corner of the courtyard, and men would come in, scoop some water out in the large aluminum ladle, and drink straight from the ladle. Women used the same pitcher to make tea and fill their cooking pots. At one point that
afternoon someone said something about hygiene: “Wash your hands before you use the pitcher. We all drink from it.”

“What?” a young man responded with an awkward grin. “Wash hands with what? There is no water left.” Indeed, the metal ladle hit the bottom of the stone pitcher with a clank, indicating that it was empty, and the older ladies began pleading and crying out for the younger women to fetch more water. Concern about hygiene was lost in the hubbub.

Everyone was talking, a friendly clamor of gossip and criticism of the
habash
, the Somali word for Ethiopians. Every sentence that everyone spoke was punctuated with “Allah willing” or “For the sake of Allah.”

Sitting in the car that was driving me away from what was certainly the last time I would see my father, I thought about what had kept me away from my family, and from him, for so long: the rule that dictates that a man must command obedience from his women, from his wives and daughters—and they must submit to him. If a man’s women stray from submission, they damage
him:
his good name, his authority, the sense that he is loyal and strong and true to his word. This belief is part of a larger one that individuals don’t matter, that their choices and desires are meaningless, particularly if the individuals are women.

This sense of honor and male entitlement drastically restricts women’s choices. A whole culture and its religion weigh down every Muslim, but the heaviest weight falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders. We are bound to obey and bound to chastity and shame by Allah and the Prophet and by the fathers and husbands who are our guardians. The women along Whitechapel Road carry the burdens of all the obligations and religious rules that in Islam focus so obsessively on women, as surely as their counterparts in East Africa.

I still felt pained by the shame that I had cast on my father’s good name. Because I was an apostate, an unbeliever, because I now lived as a Western woman, I had hurt him and harmed him, even defiled him by my rebellion. But I also knew that my rebellion was necessary, was vital.

Sahra had taken the contrary path. She did not rebel. Magool had told me that Sahra was deeply religious and that she wore the
jilbab
,
a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face. Sahra’s black shroud extended beyond the tips of her fingers and trailed on the ground; she sought with every word and gesture to express her submission to Allah’s will and to the authority of men.

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and
burkas
, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires—what small space in your life can you call your own?

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

As we drove down Whitechapel Road I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated, if not endorsed, not just by the British but by so many Western societies where the equality of the sexes is legally enshrined.

At the airport I phoned Sahra to tell her that I had come to see our father and was leaving again to go back the United States. “You are indeed the lucky one!” she said in Somali, laughing at her play on the meaning of my name, Ayaan, “fortunate.” “Ever since you spoke to him on the phone weeks ago, he has not stopped talking about you.”