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One August afternoon last year, waiting in the polished lobby of the Maan-Soor Hotel in Hargeisa, Somaliland, I wondered if it wasn’t too late to cancel the appointment I had made. I had been returning to the city of my birth regularly for the past eight years, but my experiences were always screened by the purdah of wealth, protected by tinted windows and uniformed guards waving metal-detecting wands at every entrance. I had spent even longer away than most of the returning diaspora that clogged the city every summer, having migrated in 1986, before the civil war, to join my father, who moved to England in 1947. Today I was venturing beyond the tinted glass into the real city, to attend a class on marriage.
I had heard about it from Caroline, a tall, American Ph.D. student. She knew the city better than I did and had signed up for the course, to further understand “negotiations of intimacy and morality” in Hargeisa. Love can be a taboo subject in Somali families; relationships come together and fall apart mysteriously, shrouded in secrecy. Caroline had agreed to take me to the next class so I could hear for myself what they taught about how it happened, how a happy marriage worked.
The building was along a street I hadn’t visited before, in a workaday district of car mechanics, teashops and khat stalls. Two little boys in long white khamis chased a third over uneven ground, leaping pools of gray rainwater. We climbed a dark concrete staircase, past a landing dotted with handmade posters, until we heard our names being called from above.
The classroom was so full that I had to tiptoe between feet and knees to the chair a student had vacated for me. A young man with a neat beard and glasses stood near the whiteboard. In front of him, the dim room was a sea of black: black abayas, head scarves, niqabs, gloves. I stood out there in my gaudy prints and sheer hijab. (In Somaliland, that item is nonnegotiable.) I smiled, nodded and tried to make my body smaller, to reduce the feeling that I was intruding on a space that was not my own.
Read more:The Good Wife in Somaliland
Source: The New York Times Magazine