What survived my real mother was “memory”, not I. People were, in a general sense, kinder and more generous to me, because my parents had died and I was an orphan. People said kind things about my parents, while they gave their counsel, gratis of course, to Misra, telling her how best to take care of me and how best to raise me, so I would be a monument of remembrance to them. Some looked disfavourably upon my calling Misra “Mother” and took the first opportunity to correct that. Others didn’t bother and argued that in time I would know she wasn’t my mother. As I grew older and met more and more of these people, I decided I would refrain from calling Misra anything until we were in the privacy of our room, so she could address me, or I her, however each liked. It was during this period that I asked Misra if she remembered anything about her own childhood. She answered that the only thing she could recall was that she wasn’t allowed any of the things she wanted to do and she longed to grow old enough so she could be herself. I asked, “As a child you weren’t yourself, do you mean?”
She said, “Childhood may best be described as a condition of becoming someone else when with adults, and yourself when alone or with other children; it is difficult getting used to either. I mean, it is difficult getting used to the idea that, although you've been given clothes bought specifically for you, the choice when and why to wear them or whether you would remain without them is not your own.”
I remember, I was six then. And I remember thinking about “nakedness”. In those days, whenever I saw someone naked, I could think of two things — beds and baths. One day I saw Misra and Aw-Adan naked. They were near a bed all right, but they were not in it, nor were they having their baths. I wondered if the choice to remain undressed could be an adult’s, too. A child, this I knew for certain, was allowed to roam about in the house or even in the street, totally unclothed. Although “who” the child was mattered a great deal too. If you were the child of one of those people who couldn’t afford to buy clothes for themselves, let alone for their children — well, one could understand and sympathize, couldn’t one? With this, and many other related and unrelated thoughts in my mind, I formulated a question in my head, a question which, in a roundabout way, had something to do with “nakedness” and which, in so far as I was concerned, directly had to do with my seeing Aw-Adan, the priest, and Misra, naked, although then they weren’t in bed but near it. I asked Misra what their “relationship” was.
To Misra, the question, “What’s this person’s relationship to me?” meant nothing more and nothing less than, “Who is this person?”—which in turn meant, “Is he an uncle or an aunt or a cousin?” To her, the fabric of Somali society was basically incestuous and you had a glimpse into the mind of a Somali if you knew to whom he or she was related by blood or by marriage. Neither she nor Aw-Adan was born Somali and I suspect she knew that I had been aware of that and therefore she must have sensed that no amount of tapestrying her woven story with patterns of her own inventions would have convinced me as the truth might have — life’s most excellent embroidery. She smiled sweetly, silently and looked away as though looking for an answer. She might have been inventing a genealogical tree whose branches and roots supplied a pedigree of the appropriate answers to my question. But I doubted very much if she was the type of woman who could lose herself in the eternity of a search for who she was — for she knew who she was.
When I insisted she respond to my question, she said, simply and plainly, as though she were speaking the words for the first time ever, “Aw-Adan? He is a man.”
For a moment or two, she sought and sat under the cool shade of the generic term “The Tree of Man” — and smiled triumphantly. I was sure she was under the wrong impression that she had dealt with my question satisfactorily. Then I asked, “What about Uncle Qorrax? Is he a man too?”
She was most singularly exposed, like an isolated eucalyptus tree a lightning had struck. She sat motionless, speechless, looking away from me, embarrassed.
II
I didn’t like Uncle Qorrax. It was no secret I didn’t like him. I was barely three days old when I made that abundantly clear to everybody, including himself. The story is told how he arranged to make a formal call on his nephew — that is me — how he had asked that I be washed with a scented soap which he had provided for that very purpose, how he had sent ahead of himself his youngest wife so she would help Misra with the arrangements and be present when he was introduced to me.
He came dressed in his best — a silk sarong he hadn’t worn until that day, a most colourful cimaama to go with it and a Baravaan hat. Also, he wore his patent-leather shoes and his favourite socks. He left his compound predicting that I would like him. He added, “I am determined to make him like me”. He said so to Shahrawello. I doubt it if she told him how ludicrous he looked, calling on his nephew not even three days old, dressed as though he were visiting a king. But what good would her speaking her mind have done her or anyone else? She stood aside, letting him go past her, and chuckled to herself as he took his long strides. After he had gone, I believe there was an improvised gathering and each of them commented on how absurd this all was, some laughed until their ribs ached. Anyway, Shahrawello is reported to have said that a man is not his clothes but that “a child inherits its mother’s hates and loves”. And she bet her life, if anyone was willing to bet a coin of the smallest denomination, that the young one wouldn’t like his uncle.
I was asleep when he entered. He was angry at Misra, accusing her of disobedience, scolding her for not having prepared me for the occasion. And he made unnecessary noises so I would wake up. I wouldn’t. Not until Misra went out of the room to cry outside. I heard her crying and I awoke. I looked this and that way No Misra. And who was this — a man awkwardly dressed with top hat and all, ugly, thin and tall? What’s more, I was lying on my back, helpless, like a beetle on its spine, and my hands, however many times I raised them, returned to me empty — empty of Misra and full of vacant air. Then I heard Uncle’s ugly voice, thin and yet sharp, piercing, cutting me in two halves. And I cried a furious cry, so heinous that he froze where he was, frightened at the thought that I might harm myself. When he came nearer me, I cried louder and with vengeance and no one could silence me until Misra returned. Once she was back in the room, you could sense that my cry wasn’t as fierce as it had been. All she had to do was to lay a finger on any part of my body and I fell quiet. But my body remained nervous and there was something agitated in the atmosphere until Uncle Qorrax was out of the room. I began to relax when I could no longer hear his ugly voice.
That I burst into tears immediately when he walked into the room I had been in— this entered the lore of the traditions told in my uncle’s compound. Obviously, it made him very uneasy. But there was little he could do to me, or about me. His position as a respected member of the community dictated that he treat me with apparent kindness, and that he provide for me, someone else to take my mother’s place. Misra, until then, was not a bona fide member of the compound. It appears she became one, especially, when I chose her — chose her in preference to all the other women who had been tried on me, one after the other, a dozen or so women into whose open arms I was dropped. I cried with vigour whenever Misra wasn’t there. In the end, the community of relations approved of my choice. But not my uncle. Not until a year later.