Free Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

by her own standards, I had failed my mother.
    It was difficult to contain the flood of nostalgia that overwhelmed me after my father died. My memory, mysteriously, marks the colors of places for me, so that recalling even just those colors can be soothing. My mind still harks back to colors, long after forgetting the stories and the streets and even the people.
    I remember the off-white sand in front of our house in Mogadishu and the blue of the cloudless sky, the houses painted white with shutters that were sometimes blue but mainly green, a whole spectrum of weather-beaten green paints. The bougainvillea were an explosion of purple, pink, crimson, and all the shades in between, in the bright, hot, and unrelenting sun. I remember the yellow-green of the papaya tree and the brown blotches on the flanks of the white goats, and how you could tell them from sheep, even across a great distance, because the sheep’s heads were black and their bodies white. I remember thecobalt blue of my first school uniform and the yellow of the shirts of the boys who terrified me. The bright colors of the shawls and draped garments worn by the women and the darker hues of gray and green of the sarongs worn by the men are as fresh in my mind as if I had seen them only yesterday. I remember the stark palette of grays, whites, and blacks in Saudi Arabia, then the suddenly clanging, clashing colors when we moved to Kenya. My memories of Holland are a series of dim but lovely harmonies, muted cream-colored stone and mild green fields and gray skies.
    In the weeks and months that followed my father’s death, it was the season that in America they so poetically call fall. Outside my window in the house I was visiting in upstate New York, tall trees, which I was told were oaks and maples, filled the landscape. Almost as I watched them, their large leaves seemed to shift color, some maroon, some yellow and red. Then they fell so that the ground became a vast, beautiful carpet, embroidered with designs in gold, brown, and deep oxblood.
    The sky is of a different blue in America, not as sharply bright as the one above Mogadishu and not as dim and gray as the sky above Leiden. I yearned for the warmth of a fireplace where I could stare at the flames that so resemble the beauty outdoors, where I could warm my toes and think about what it would be like if I were still encircled by my family.
    When my sister Haweya died in 1998 I wanted to die too. I felt that all the compromise solutions that I had patched together to enable me to negotiate a successful life in a modern country alongside the ancient values we had been taught made me a worthless, spineless person. I thought that the best of us had been taken, and that I didn’t deserve life if she could not have it.
    When my father died I did not so much miss him as I missed the illusion of certainty, the childish feeling that I was beloved. I longed for a structured, stable life, one in which my goals and the behavior required of me were consistent. In a way, I understood fully what Sahra and others saw in religion, which is the chance to be like a child again, protected, taken by the arm and told what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do—to take a break from thinking.
    *    *    *
    I felt remorse at my alienation from Sahra and the rest of my family. Sahra may be downtrodden from an objective standpoint (or, at any rate, from mine), but she doesn’t feel that way. She has a daughter and a husband; she is protected from loneliness. She
belongs
. She has the certainty, the strength, the clear goals that stem from belief. She was with my father through his old age and death. I was not.
    I was thirty-eight years old and I was only beginning to truly understand why people want to belong somewhere, and to understand how difficult it is to sever all ties with the culture and religion in which you are born. Outwardly I was a success. People wrote articles about me, they asked me