Giving Up Paradise

For millions of refugees, life is nothing if not uncertain. They come to a new world with two purposes: escaping one set of realities, and building a new set. This story is about a family who fled Somalia during the Civil War of the 1990s. They settled in a Somali neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, and tried to instill in their children the morals of their home country. Yet seemingly minor events interfered. The family was forced to understand that big changes start by allowing small ones.

I grew up in a crowded home, in a crowded building, in a crowded neighborhood. Our two-bedroom flat was on the fourth floor of an eight-story building in Eastleigh, a Somali neighborhood in eastern Nairobi. I was one of eight children. I shared a bedroom with four or five siblings at a time.  I had four older sisters: Fadumo, Anab, Hiran, and Mulki. My official name is Maryam but I was given the nickname Kayf because it was the first word my father uttered upon hearing the news of my birth. Kayf is an Arabic word that translates closest into the interjection, “How?!”  Apparently, he had muttered, “how… how… how is it possible that it is yet another girl?” None of the girls before me were desired and I was the least welcome of us all. My father’s prayers were answered; after me came three boys: Mohammed, Jamil, and Elmi.

In a one-bedroom flat on the third floor of the same building lived Hawa, Father’s second wife. Hawa was about fifteen years younger than my mother and had a round face, perfect white teeth, large brown eyes, and a curvy figure. She had two girls from her first marriage to Hussein, Father’s younger brother. When Hussein drowned at sea on his way from Kismaio, Somalia to Mombasa, Kenya, Father proposed to Hawa and she accepted. Mom needed no explanation. She was familiar with the code: a man had to protect the widow of his brother and his brother’s children. She took care not to comment on Hawa’s beauty or youth. Hawa then bore Father three boys.

Everybody in our crowded building was between homes, sometimes and combined with the scent of washed laundry drying on the clotheslines.