Mogadishu Memoir

“Go, greet your father,” my mother commanded me. I was six or seven years old when I first met my dad. My parents had found themselves in a verbal altercation a few months before I was born, and they had decided, according to local Somali tradition, to terminate their marriage after my birth. My mother, my five-year-old sister Lul from a previous marriage, and I had all moved to Mogadishu 30 kilometers south of Afgooye, my birthplace. Afgooye, a small farming town with beautiful scenery, was the weekend getaway for Mogadishu’s affluent and middle class back when the country was relatively peaceful; it was also where my father’s family and his Geledi clan lived. My mother, on the other hand, hailed from the northeast region, hundreds of miles away and not long ago a bastion of piracy. My father was a light-skinned man of medium build, in his forties. He had bushy eyebrows. He wore a light coat and trousers that matched, and, on his head was a red traditional hat. His voice was husky, and he spoke with an authority that 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. He sat on a traditional stool called a “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 him. He seemed a good conversationalist, but perhaps not a good listener, because at times he appeared to be engaged in a monologue with himself. In the midst of the conversation, my father gave me five Somali shillings, an amount equivalent to one U.S dollar. I was so excited to have paper money that I left immediately to go to a neighborhood store to buy cold soda and candy. My father was still talking and laughing when I returned to the house. I watched him closely, studying his every move. I wondered if had come to visit me or to consume large quantities of tea. Once in a while he would ask me a question, but most of his conversation was directed to my mother. He was as loquacious as my mother was reticent. But this day, six or seven years after their divorce, my parents were having fun, talking as though there was no rancor or bitterness. I was the one, oddly, who was left out of the picture. After that first encounter, my father would pop up in our house to visit me at least once every five years or so. He was still living 30 kilometers away, but he was spending a great deal of time in Mogadishu working and visiting relatives, some of whom lived just a few blocks from us. I knew my father had a government job in the1960s and early 1970s. Although he had never been to school, he was articulate, smart, and well respected by his people. My mother rarely talked about him. She never complained about the fact that he paid no child support, but whenever I promised to do something and failed to deliver, my mother would scold me by telling me I was acting like my father. She used the Somali term “booto,” which roughly means “blather,” to describe my genetic inclination for vacuous talk. In all, I don’t think I saw my father more than four or five times. I pretended I didn’t care about him and acted as though he didn’t exist. From time to time, while walking in the streets of Mogadishu, I met my brothers and sisters from other mothers. There were never planned visits from my father’s side of the family, although I vaguely remember two or three times when three of my sisters came and visited me. An older brother also once visited and took me to a tailor, where he ordered two shirts and two trousers. The young man seemed so enthusiastic about looking out for me. I was elated. He was supposed to come by a week later and pay the tailor for the order, but unfortunately I never saw him again. As a child, I was more interested in seeing my older brother again and connecting with him than the clothes that were left unclaimed at the tailor’s shop. Then, in 1978 at the age of 18, I left Somalia for Egypt. A year and a half later, I came to the United States to attend university. I was a freshman at Ohio University in 1981 when a letter from my mother arrived informing me of my father’s death. As I grew older, my father became a different person to me. He was no longer the man who had abandoned me or rarely visited me. He was not the man who never set foot in my school or took me to soccer games. I made all kinds of excuses for him. How did he manage to feed 20-odd children with a meager income? I was one mouth he did not have to worry about. I was living with my mother, a single hard-working woman in a patriarchal society, and I had a large contingency of relatives from her side of the family who were always kind to me. I vacillated between two extremes: my feelings of disappointment that I was deprived of fatherly care and love, and my understanding that my dad must have been in a financial pinch and unable to support me. Was his dereliction of paternal duties the result of his other obligations to feed his battalion of children? My father, undoubtedly, was a product of his time and circumstances. He did not see fathering children that he would not support as shirking of his responsibility.