Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Read Free Book Online Page B

higher-status clan is more self-conscious, hence more stoic. Expressions of jealousy or any other kind of emotion are frowned upon. My grandmother said she was lucky, and people called her spoiled, because after her older cowife died her husband didn’t take another wife for many years, until my grandmother had had nine children. Even then, he only married again because eight of those children were girls.
    My grandmother had thought her position was safe, because even though she had given birth to daughter after daughter, for years her husband did not marry another wife. And then he did marry again. And that third wife, to my grandmother’s enduring shame, gave birth to three boys. My grandfather had a total of thirteen children.
    There was nothing my grandmother could do and nothing she wished to say, so she did not protest. But after that, the worst in her came to the fore: she became mean and petty, exploding with temper at her children, who took the brunt of her anger.
    Long after I was an adult, I realized that it was jealousy that finally drove my grandmother to walk away from her husband. After my grandfather’s new wife had her second son, my grandmother could no longer contain her shame and envy, and she left their home in the desert, ostensibly to look after her adult children, which included my mother.
    My mother’s story was similar. Even though she was my father’s second wife, from the day she learned that my father had married a third woman and had another child, Sahra, my mother became erratic, sometimes exploding with grief and pain and violence. She had fainting episodes and skin diseases, symptoms caused by suppressed jealousy. From being a strong, accomplished woman she became a wreck, and we, her children, bore the brunt of her misery.
    Of my father’s six children who made it to adulthood, three have suffered mental illnesses so severe that they can barely function. My sister Haweya died after three years of depression and psychotic attacks; my brother Mahad is a manic-depressive, unable to hold down a job; one of our half sisters has had psychotic episodes since she was eighteen. Aunts and uncles on both sides of my family have cases of
Waalli
, or generic “madness,” as they call all mental problems in Somali.
    Perhaps polygamy invites madness, or perhaps it is the clash between aspiration and reality. All my relatives desperately wanted to be modern. They yearned for freedom, but once they found it they were bewildered and broken by it. Obviously mental instability has biological factors too, but it is also affected by the culture we mature in, the tactics and strategies of survival we develop, the relationships we have with others, and the unbearable dissonance between the world we are told to see and the world in which we actually live.
    As I spoke with Magool after my father’s death, it occurred to me that the message that Abeh had tried so desperately to tell me on his deathbed was probably that I should look after his wives: his first wife, who also lives in England; his second wife, my mother, who lives in Somalia; his third wife, Sahra’s mother; and his fourth wife, a woman whom he married in Somalia after Sahra was born and with whom he had no children. I had almost forgotten about the fourth wife’s existence.
    I pondered this for some time, something I had never permitted myself to do while he was alive. My father had hurt so many people, as he married women and fathered children and then left them behind, more or less untended. Judging my father by my adoptive Western standards, I found that he had failed in his duties toward his wives and children.
    I have never condemned my father or allowed myself to feel real anger toward him. But if I had gone to his side and spoken truthfully to him before he died, I might have had to open an emotional closet I have nailed shut. Now that he was dead I felt contempt for myself, and I was filled with regret for everything he and I might