“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”   William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust.

Mogadishu of Yesteryears

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”. 

A Quran School in Mogadishu. Photo by Claudio Viezzoli.

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.

Abdirahman Jama Barre

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.  

President Mohamed Siyad Barre

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.