Go, greet your father,” my mother commanded me.
I was either six or seven years old when I first saw my father. My parents had an altercation three months before I was born and they had decided, according to local tradition, to terminate their marriage after my birth. My mother, my five year old sister from a previous marriage, and I moved to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, 16 miles south of Afgoi, my birthplace. Afgoi, a small farming town with beautiful scenery and the weekend getaway of Mogadishu’s affluent and middle class when the country was relatively peaceful was also where my father’s family and his Geledi clan lived. My mother, on the other hand, hailed from Qardho in the Northeast region, hundred miles away and today’s bastion of piracy.
My father was a medium built, light-skinned man in his forties, with bushy eye brows. He had a light coat and trouser that matched, and on his head, he was wearing a traditional kaffiyeh. His voice was husky, and he spoke with authority which evoked fear and respect. Initially, I was afraid of him. He unleashed a torrent of questions about my school and I answered them politely and in short sentences while maintaining a distance from him. He sat on a traditional chair called ‘Ganbar’ and started speaking to my mother as though he was a regular member of our household. He spoke loudly and laughed outrageously.
My mother made sweet tea for my father.
He seemed a good conversationalist, but perhaps as not a good listener because at times it appeared as though he was engaged in a monologue with himself. In the midst of the conversation, my father gave me five shillings; an equivalent of one U.S dollar. I was excited that I had paper money, and I left immediately to go to a neighborhood store to buy cold soda and candy.
My father was still talking and laughing when I came back to the house. I kept watching him closely as I studied his every move. I kept wondering if he had come to visit me or consume large quantities of tea. Once in a while, he would ask me a question, but most of his conversation was geared toward my mother. He was as loquacious as my mother was reticent.
My father loved women so much that he fathered close to 28 children from several wives, but I was the only child that my father had with my mother. My parent’s marriage came to an end when my father married a third younger wife while my mother, the second in hierarchy, was pregnant with me. My mother, who was seething with jealousy, flew into a paroxysm of rage one day, kicked him out of the house, as she demanded for a divorce. When elders tried to mediate the couple, my mother confounded all their attempts for reconciliation.
But this day, my parents were having fun, talking as though there was no rancor or bitterness. I was the one who was, oddly, left out of the picture.
After that first encounter, my father would pop in our house to visit me at least once every five or six years. He was still living 16 miles away but he was spending a great deal of time in Mogadishu working, and visiting two of my sisters and his grandchildren who lived few blocks from my house.
My mother rarely talked about my father. She never complained about the fact that he did not pay child support. But when I promised to do something and failed to deliver, my mother would scold me of being like my father. She used the Somali term “booto” which roughly means blather to illustrate my genetic inclination for vacuous talk.
I think I met my father not more than four or five times. I pretended that I did not care about him, and acted as though he did not exist. From time to time, I met my brothers and sisters while walking in the streets of Mogadishu. There were never planned visits from my father’s side of the family.
Then in 1978, at age 18, I left Somalia for Egypt. One and half years later, I came to the United States to attend university.
It was some time in 1981, when my mother sent me a letter informing me the death of my father which happened two months earlier.
All of sudden, my father became, to me, a different person. He was no longer the man who had abandoned me and rarely visited me. He was not the man who never set foot in my school or took me to soccer games. I started giving him all kinds of excuses. How did he manage to feed 28 children with a meager income? I was only one mouth he did not have to worry about. I was living with my mother, a single hard working woman in a paternalistic society, and I had a large contingency of relatives, from her side of the family, who were always kind to me.
I kept vacillating between two thoughts; my feelings of disappointment that I was deprived from paternal care and love on one hand, and on the other hand my understanding that my father was, financially, in dire strait and could not have supported me. Was his dereliction of paternal duties the result of his other obligation to feed a battalion?
Perhaps, as a child, it would have meant a lot to me if he had visited me regularly, talked to me more, played with me, or took me for an outing in those rare visits.
Last fall, my mother passed away. My 25-year old son, who lives in Switzerland, called me and told me that he loved me and that he could not have asked for a better father. Immediately, I started thinking about my own father. Maybe he was all along with me, in the back of my mind, inadvertently helping me to become a better father. Perhaps, I was trying so hard not to deprive my four children- now adults- of having an engaging and loving father. It seemed that the best lesson my father ever taught me was how not to be a father.
Now, I miss him even more.
Mogadishu Memoir Part II :A Unique Woman
Do you know the cliché that ‘single mothers are both fathers and mothers to their children’? Well, my mother would have scoffed that statement as an oxymoron gone awry. To her, and without any embellishments; single mothers are women doing their thankless jobs in the absence of fathers who have abdicated their responsibilities.
My mother, Dahabo Yusuf Muse, was born in Qardho to a Majerteen father (Osman Mohamoud) and a Dhulbahante mother (Nur Ahmed). In early 1950s, she met a teacher (Reer Baraawe) in Bossasso and married him. The couple moved to Afgoi where the husband was transferred. Although my mother was blessed with four children from that marriage, three of her offspring died in childhood. My sister, five years my senior, survived. Mother got divorced and met my father and married him. That marriage was short-lived too. My mother divorced my father and moved to Mogadishu after my birth.
My mother was tall, dark, and imposing. She rarely smiled, and her poker face was her signature trademark. It was difficult to know if she was pleased with you or angry with you. Neighbors and friends called her “Dahabo Dheer” (Dahabo, the tall). My mother had a hot temper. She was quick to criticize and slow to commend. She rarely showed any emotions. I have never heard my mother saying to my sister and to me that she loved us. But that did not mean that she was not a loving mother. Indeed, she was but she just did not show any physical or oral display of emotions. In spite of her serious projections, my mother was sometimes goofy. On rare occasions, she would run in our house, when we were alone, raise her dress to her knees, run and do strange acrobatic moves. Most of the time though she kept quiet and minded her own business.
Even though mother was a single parent, she did not live off on her relatives’ goodwill. She worked hard to support her two children. The two absent fathers in this case, unfortunately, were nowhere to be seen, let alone provide assistance. There were no government programs to assist the needy and the indigent. Immediately after our move to Mogadishu in 1960, my mother earned money by cooking meals for her brother and his bachelor friends. Then, she started making incenses (uunsi) and started importing perfumes and colognes from Aden; at the time a bustling British colonial post. Her incenses were in demand because she was a perfectionist who had such prodigious capacity for detailed work. You could see that she took pride in her work. The first ten years of my life, my mother, my sister, and I shared a room. Afterwards, we got our own little house that my mother rented. Given our humble living condition, I never felt, as a child, financially deprived. My mother always gave me money when I needed. If my mother did not want to do something, she never hesitated to let you know. For instance, she cooked breakfast and lunch for our family. When I told her that some families had also dinner as part of their daily meal intake, my mother looked at me as though I had offended her, and then quietly informed me that she was not into cooking a third meal every day. It was not a financial decision but rather a personal choice.
My mother was a clean person who always smelled nice. Her female friends teasingly named her “Dahabo Foon” because she smelled great. She had nice jewelry collection, and I used to tease her to sell them off because she was single.
My mother was illiterate until 1972. She was, though, a strong advocate for good education. Early on, she placed my sister and me into Qur’an school before we even started elementary school. My sister and I were placed in a Dugsi/Ardo (Quran School) that was a bit far from our home. A tall, big, single elderly woman named Maryam owned that school. The choice of this school was not coincidental. Teacher Maryam and my mother belonged to the same Majertein sub-clan (Osman Mahmoud). Moreover, teacher Maryam was the sister of Somalia’s president at the time,
Dr. Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke. Teacher Maryam was the only woman who operated her own Dugsi as all other Qur’an schools at that time were owned and managed by men. She had memorized the Quran and opened the school. Later, she would build a big mosque next to the school, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. I will address my years in that school later.
My mother placed my sister and me in a private English school run by a man named NUR (Abgaal) who had a laundry business in our neighborhood. Teacher Nur was smart and self-made man. I hated his school though because it was very competitive and not age-appropriate. For instance, my sister and I were in the same level even though she was older than me. Moreover, there were fewer students, and Teacher Nur did not hesitate to hit us with a stick if we missed our assignments. My mother was paying a fortune to send my sister and me to that school. These early and odious English tutoring classes proved to be so beneficial that, later in my schooling, I always excelled in language courses. They gave me a strong foundation not only to do well in English, but also the motivation and the discipline to acquire Arabic. Now, this was an indication of my mother, the illiterate, being ahead of her time. Other than my smattering knowledge of English and Arabic, my sister today speaks English, Arabic, and French fluently. Moreover, she will neither go hungry nor get lost in Italy.
In 1972 when Somali language was finally written, I taught my mother how to read, write, and basic math. She was always grateful to me for teaching her literacy, and I was eternally grateful to her, among other things, for giving me the opportunity of attending private schools.
In my first year in elementary school, my mother was shocked by my odd behavior of tearing my lessons from my notebook and then discarding the pages. When she inquired why I was doing that, I told her “Well, these pages were already used and I need a clean notebook”. She always narrated this humorous story to juxtapose my sister’s serious studying habits. My laissez faire approach to studying during my first grade did not bode well with my mother. But in 1980, when I decided to come to the USA, some members of my family were adamantly opposed to my pursuit of higher education at that juncture of my life because they wanted me to stay in Egypt and not quit my job with the Somali Airlines. My mother gave me $1600 that she had at the time and encouraged me to seek education in America. It was a sage decision that I never regretted.
As a child, I would go with my mother to the market. I was fascinated with the respect she commanded, on one hand, and her pugnacious habit of picking fights with strangers, on the other hand. At the market, my mother used to get the best cut of meat from butchers. Her poker face gave her an aura of respectability. She was serious and, unlike other women, never joked with the butchers. But sometimes she would argue with cab drivers or storeowners for reasons that seemed trivial to me at the time. Because prices were never set in the country and aware of her female status, my mother did not give an inch in bargaining. I hated such outings because of my aversion to confrontations and discord.
Once, I saw my mother in a wrestling match with a woman younger than her in Isku-Raran neighborhood sometime in mid sixties. Both fell on the floor. It was an ugly sight to be witnessed by a child. Fortunately, no one was hurt. The cause of the fight was innocuous; my mother turned on the radio in a day where a house a block away had ‘tacsi’ (funeral). My sister instigated the whole thing when she told my mother that the woman in question made disparaging remarks about my mother’s uncouth and blasphemous behavior. My mother loved listening to Radio Mogadishu so much that no one could have come between her and the radio. In addition, she was in the confines of her room when she felt badmouthed. In Somalia in 1960s, the radio was broadcasted for only a few hours a day and was the only source of news and information in a country which had no television and no mass circulating papers. To her detractors, the incident showed my mother as a woman with deeply entrenched stubbornness. To her admirers, it was plainly Dahabo Dheer being herself.
As a child, I would engage in occasional fights with other children. When one boy taunted me one day of being “ugly”, I felt hurt and upset. My mother told me, “Don’t listen to him. Thank Allah that you have your senses. You can hear, talk, and walk soundly:” These statements, somehow, gave me a great deal of comfort and assurance.
My mother married several times and none of her marriages lasted long. Her strong personality, a no-nonsense approach to life, and her fierce independence were characters abominable to insecure men. Being a single mother gave my mother some sort of edginess and a cynical attitude to men. It was apparent that romance was not her forte. I remember her brother, and my beloved uncle Abdirahman Yusuf Muse ‘Abdi Gurey’, telling me, “Hassan, your mom is not lucky with men”. This apt characterization was, indeed, a true illustration of my mother’s odd relationship with the opposite sex. Men, generally and unfortunately, prefer women who are pliable, dependant, and less demanding. My mother’s top priority was raising her children and making sure that they got the best education available to them. She was an imperfect woman who was dealing with an imperfect world with grace and dignity. May Allah have mercy on her.
Mogadishu Memoir Part III: Defying the Odds
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust.
It was challenging for me as a young boy, while growing up in Mogadishu in the 1960s, to be surrounded by two strong-willed women. If my mother was a symbol of doggedness in the face of adversity, my sister was the paragon of discipline, competitiveness, and self-confidence. If my mother had a way of giving her views without appearing to do so, my sister enunciated her thoughts clearly and carefully.
My sister, Lul Mohamed Nur, is five years older than me, but I would not dare say so in front of people who have seen both of us lest I be accused of wishful thinking. Simply put, she appears much younger than me. She is tall, sociable, and smart. As a child, I was always conscious of giving her that power of being my ‘protector’ and she, in turn, always saw me as her little brother who needed her guidance. I do not know if my sister knows this; she did have some influence on me, especially in my formative years.
I remember my sister being a well-behaved and well-liked child in our neighborhood. When most young women her age stayed home and did domestic chores, my sister was an assiduous student who attended, in the 60s and early 70s, an all-Arabic Egyptian-run school (Jamal Abdinassir) from kindergarten to the 12th grade. If my sister liked something, she was not bashful of letting people know. I remember an incident in which my sister and some of her girl friends went to the house of a lady that baked Somali bread ‘muufo’. The baker lady at the time was churning milk into yogurt and my sister commented how the yogurt looked good. “Do you want some?” the lady asked my sister and her friends. The other girls sheepishly said “no” except my sister who said, “I would love to have some”. Then, the lady offered the yogurt only to my sister and when Lul tried to eat, the girls asked her if she could share it with them. “No way,” my sister protested, “you were offered but refused to accept the offer”.
I was probably 4 or five years old when I started going to the Quran School, or Dugsi as it is called, with my sister. We had to walk to the school, which was at least 15 minutes away. While attending the Dugsi, I got involved in a Quran contest with a beautiful, bright, and competitive Abgaal girl named Rahma. Rahma was new to our school but felt at ease with the new environment. She and I were in the same age group but the age or gender was not important factors. What was important was to see which student had memorized the Quran the best and the most. In our Dugsi, there were always contests and Rahma and I became finalists for one of those contests. Initially, I was able to beat her in one of these contests because of my sister’s assistance. But Rahma was a fierce competitor and she kept coming back more determined than before. I held my ground and managed to get ahead of her. After a while, I did not care much about competing with Rahma, but my sister did. Lul used to spend more time with me in order to get ahead of Rahma but that girl proved to be a formidable contender and my victory was short lived. After my sister graduated from the Dugsi, Rahma caught up with me and got ahead. When some of the children in my neighborhood told my sister about my embarrassing defeat in the hands of Rahma, Lul was very disappointed. Somehow, she felt that I had let her down.
I was fascinated by my sister’s creativity when it came to cooking; she always experimented with different things which at times seemed odd to me. My sister would buy vegetables and make delicious meals out of it and she seemed averse to traditional food of rice and spaghetti. Even today, as an adult, she enjoys cooking and I consider her a great chef.
My sister Lul was a voracious reader. She was the one who introduced me to Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. I always admired the good education my sister was getting from her school. I do not recall ever studying Shakespeare or Charles Dickens in my own prestigious Russian-built Benadir Secondary School. I still remember Lul reading to me Shakespeare’s famous play, The Merchant of Venice, and becoming enamored with this captivating tale of a Jewish merchant, Shylock, bent on getting a ‘pound of flesh’ from poor Antonio. I was fascinated with Portia defending her husband and his friend by disguising as a male attorney. As a child, I could not help but admire this type of storytelling. She also read to me Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities. As a child, I had hard time understanding the killings and the carnage engulfing France during the revolution, but I was fascinated with the love story between Lucy and her noble husband Charles Darnay. Later, as a teenager, I started reading my sister’s Arabic books and became more entranced with them.
While growing up, my mother always treated Lul like a grown up. I was the impetuous child who required close supervision, and that used to irritate me. At age eleven or twelve, my sister lost her expensive watch that my mother had bought her while in school. Petrified to face our mother’s wrath, my sister, after school, went straight to my Uncle Abdi Gurey’s house in Hodan District. My uncle had to bring her to our house and plead to my mother to forget about the watch and forgive my sister, who was afraid and remorseful. My uncle gave my mother some money to cover the cost of the watch. All this was unfolding without my mother ever uttering a word or even showing how she might have been upset about the lost watch. My mother, a known martinet, kept smiling and seemed to be amused with the comic potential of the whole incident.
In the 1960s, I first heard about the Beatles, Ray Charles, the Temptations, and Elvis, through my sister. The information that I was imbibing from Lul about Western Music at the time was, at best, mediocre. I still remember my sister telling me the story behind Ray Charles’ hit “Hit Road Jack”. She made it more like a racial matter in which a black American man was trying to pass some Whites in a street and was being harassed. Of course, the movie RAY told a different story.
In mid 1970s, I decided to join the Somali officer-training program so I could go to the Soviet Union. I was interested in studying abroad and coming back to Somalia as an army officer. Naively, I contacted ordinary people who happened to be Marehan so they could intercede on my behalf. I remember going and seeking the help of a young man in our Isku-Raran neighborhood, Omar Yusuf Marehan, at a café close to El Gab Cinema and meeting him to help me. Omar, though Marehan, was in no position to help me achieve my career goal. Perplexed by my request, he looked at me and politely promised to look into the matter. In the midst of my obsession to join the army, my sister intervened and said that I would not leave school and join the army. At the time, she was the breadwinner in our household, and I chose not to disagree with her request but I was disappointed and felt that I had missed an opportunity. This was in 1976, and a year later, Somalia was involved in a bloody war with Ethiopia. I always wondered how my future would have turned if I joined the army.
In 1978, my sister married her boss: a family man 20 years her senior and with wife and eight children. We, family members, became our own befuddlement. Abdirahman Jama Barre was the Foreign Minister of Somalia and my sister’s immediate supervisor. Although Abdirahman and I come from two diametrically-opposed political spectrums, there were many times-in a span of 32 years- he had shared with me some intriguing stories, but that is a discussion for another day.
My brother-in-law Abdirahman was, in all fairness, always kind to my mother but his marriage to my sister drew the ire of one strong man; President Siad Barre, his brother. The president was concerned that Abdirahman was wrecking his first marriage in favor of a young and upcoming woman. After three years of marriage and the birth of two children abroad, my sister, posted in Europe at the time, went back to Somalia. One day, Siad` Barre summoned her to the presidential palace, Villa Somalia. Lul must have felt a morbid fear in facing the president. My sister found the president in his office incandescent with rage like a snake coiled to strike. Siad Barre asked Lul to leave Abdirahman Jama alone because he was already married and was the father of eight children. Barre was under pressure from Abdirahman’s first wife (Shiikhaal) to intervene and do something about the couple’s faltering marriage. Siad Barre offered my sister a plumb job-away from the Foreign Ministry- if she left Abdirahman and saved his first marriage. My sister, a quiet and a courteous person by nature, politely declined. The president flew off the handle, asked my sister her full name, as though he did not know the person he had summoned, scribbled something in his desk calendar book, and abruptly dismissed her from his office. My sister thought that she would be facing an uncertain and possibly treacherous future. It was widely rumored that whoever made the listing in that notorious book was doomed. But she was vastly relieved when nothing ominous happened. Several years later, Siad Barre became cordial and left the couple alone after they started having a total of seven children.
My sister and I used to get into heated political debate in Egypt in front of friends. I was the critic of the very government she was working for and she was the defender. It was only natural, that while in a visit to Mogadishu in 1985, that my brother-in-law rendered a characteristic verdict against me in my mother’s house. “Your son,” my brother-in-law told her, “is a good student and a fine young man, but he is ‘kacaan-diid’ (anti-revolutionary)”. I thought that Abdirahman had gotten a waft of my discussions with my sister in Cairo, but I was wrong. Oddly, he had something else in mind. In 1982, while visiting some friends in Washington, D.C, I was invited to a wedding. Someone, whom I guess must have been suffering from Kat hangover, came up with harebrained idea of asking me, a 22-year old man from Ohio majoring political science, to give an impromptu speech. That was a colossal mistake. It was a social and joyous gathering attended by many people, including Somali diplomats. After congratulating the young couple, I took few jabs at the policies of the Somali government. The speech lasted ten minutes, and I honestly thought it was all forgotten until someone told my brother-in-law about it. He was, to put it mildly, incensed but he never confronted me.
While growing up, my sister loved learning and always wanted to seek higher education. However, she got married at age 23 and, after a year, became a mother. Nevertheless, she started attending the Somali National University and because of family responsibilities and the gestation of the political turmoil in Somalia in late 1980s, Lul was unable to finish her college education. The words ‘discipline’ and ‘determination’ often come to my mind when I talk about my sister. Ten years ago, my sister, over forty, went back to school and took university courses with American youngsters that were young enough to be her children. She had an adamantine will to get her college degree and, indeed, she succeeded in obtaining her B.A in Business Administration.
Hassan M. Abukar
http://www.wardheernews.com/Articles_10 ... assan.html
Ask your mum, she might know him.
