“My grandmother learned to weave dried grass so tight you could carry water for miles in one of her pitchers. She could make her own small domed house out of bent boughs and woven mats, then dismantle it and load it onto a nasty-tempered transport camel. When my grandmother was about ten years old, her father, an Isaq herder, died. Her mother married her uncle. (This is a common practice. It saves a dowry and trouble.) When my grandmother was about thirteen, that uncle received a proposal for my grandmother’s hand from a wealthy nomad named Artan, who was about forty years old. Artan was a Dhulbahante, which was a good bloodline of the Darod. He was widely respected, skilled with animals, and a good navigator: he could read his environment so well that he always knew when to move and where to go to find rain. Other clan members came to him to arbitrate their disputes.
Artan was already married, but he and his wife had only one child, a daughter who was a little younger than my grandmother. When he decided to take another wife, Artan first chose the father of the bride: he must be a man from a good clan, with a decent reputation. The girl must be hardworking, strong, young, and pure. My grandmother, Ibaado, was all that. Artan paid a bride price for her. A few days after Artan married her and took her away, my grandmother bolted. She managed to walk almost all the way back to her mother’s camp before Artan caught up with her. He agreed to let her rest for a bit with her mother, to recover. Then, after a week, her stepfather took her to Artan’s camp and told her, “This is your destiny.”
For the rest of her life, my grandmother was irreproachable in every way. She raised eight girls and one boy, and never was there a whisper of gossip about their virtue or their work. She instilled willpower and obedience and a sense of honor in her children. She grazed animals, fetched firewood, built fences of sticks laced with thorn branches. She had hard hands and a hard head, and when her husband hosted clan meetings in his role as a clan arbiter, she kept her girls safely apart from the men and the singing and the drums. They could listen only from afar to the poetry competitions and watch as the men traded goods and tales. My grandmother showed no jealousy toward her older co-wife, though she stayed out of her way; when the older wife died, my grandmother tolerated the presence of her haughty stepdaughter, Khadija, the girl who was almost her own age.
Artan had nine daughters and a young wife. Guarding the honor of his women was of paramount importance. He kept them well away from any other nomads, roaming for weeks to find a place with pasture and no young men. They navigated endlessly through the remotest deserts. As we sat under the talal tree outside our house in Mogadishu, my grandmother often told us about the beautiful emptiness of sitting in front of a hut she had built with her own hands, staring into the vast, never-ending space.
In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious. The British and Italians claimed to be ruling Somalia, but this would have meant nothing to my grandmother. To her there were only the clans: the great nomad clans of the Isaq and the Darod, the lesser Hawiye farmers, and, lower still, the inferior Sab. The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person’s skin had burned off.
My mother, Asha, was born sometime in the early 1940s, along with her identical twin sister, Halimo. My grandmother gave birth to them alone, under a tree. They were her third and fourth children; she was about eighteen, leading her goats and sheep to pasture when she felt the pains. She lay down and bore forth; then she cut the umbilical cords with her knife. A few hours later, she gathered together the goats and sheep and managed to bring the herd home safely before dark, carrying her newborn twins. Nobody was impressed by the exploit: she was only bringing home two more girls.
To my grandmother, feelings were a foolish self-indulgence. Pride was important, though—pride in your work, and your strength—and self-reliance. If you were weak, people would speak ill of you. If your thorn fences were not strong enough, your animals would be raided by lions, hyenas, and foxes, your husband would marry another, your daughters’ virginity would be stolen, and your sons seen as worthless.”
~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, author, scholar, and former Dutch politician.
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