“Go, greet your father,” my mother commanded me.
I was either six or seven years old when I first saw my father. My parents had an altercation three months before I was born and they had decided, according to local tradition, to terminate their marriage after my birth. My mother, my five year old sister from a previous marriage, and I moved to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, 16 miles south of Afgoi, my birthplace. Afgoi, a small farming town with beautiful scenery and the weekend getaway of Mogadishu’s affluent and middle class when the country was relatively peaceful was also where my father’s family and his Geledi clan lived. My mother, on the other hand, hailed from Qardho in the Northeast region, hundred miles away and today’s bastion of piracy.
My father was a medium built, light-skinned man in his forties, with bushy eye brows. He had a light coat and trouser that matched, and on his head, he was wearing a traditional kaffiyeh. His voice was husky, and he spoke with authority which evoked fear and respect. Initially, I was afraid of him. He unleashed a torrent of questions about my school and I answered them politely and in short sentences while maintaining a distance from him. He sat on a traditional chair called ‘Ganbar’ and started speaking to my mother as though he was a regular member of our household. He spoke loudly and laughed outrageously.
My mother made sweet tea for my father. He seemed a good conversationalist, but perhaps as not a good listener because at times it appeared as though he was engaged in a monologue with himself. In the midst of the conversation, my father gave me five shillings; an equivalent of one U.S dollar. I was excited that I had paper money, and I left immediately to go to a neighborhood store to buy cold soda and candy.
My father was still talking and laughing when I came back to the house. I kept watching him closely as I studied his every move. I kept wondering if he had come to visit me or consume large quantities of tea. Once in a while, he would ask me a question, but most of his conversation was geared toward my mother. He was as loquacious as my mother was reticent.
My father loved women so much that he fathered close to 28 children from several wives, but I was the only child that my father had with my mother. My parent’s marriage came to an end when my father married a third younger wife while my mother, the second in hierarchy, was pregnant with me. My mother, who was seething with jealousy, flew into a paroxysm of rage one day, kicked him out of the house, as she demanded for a divorce. When elders tried to mediate the couple, my mother confounded all their attempts for reconciliation.
But this day, my parents were having fun, talking as though there was no rancor or bitterness. I was the one who was, oddly, left out of the picture.
After that first encounter, my father would pop in our house to visit me at least once every five or six years. He was still living 16 miles away but he was spending a great deal of time in Mogadishu working, and visiting two of my sisters and his grandchildren who lived few blocks from my house.
My mother rarely talked about my father. She never complained about the fact that he did not pay child support. But when I promised to do something and failed to deliver, my mother would scold me of being like my father. She used the Somali term “booto” which roughly means blather to illustrate my genetic inclination for vacuous talk.
I think I met my father not more than four or five times. I pretended that I did not care about him, and acted as though he did not exist. From time to time, I met my brothers and sisters while walking in the streets of Mogadishu. There were never planned visits from my father’s side of the family.
Then in 1978, at age 18, I left Somalia for Egypt. One and half years later, I came to the United States to attend university.
It was some time in 1981, when my mother sent me a letter informing me the death of my father which happened two months earlier.
All of sudden, my father became, to me, a different person. He was no longer the man who had abandoned me and rarely visited me. He was not the man who never set foot in my school or took me to soccer games. I started giving him all kinds of excuses. How did he manage to feed 28 children with a meager income? I was only one mouth he did not have to worry about. I was living with my mother, a single hard working woman in a paternalistic society, and I had a large contingency of relatives, from her side of the family, who were always kind to me.
I kept vacillating between two thoughts; my feelings of disappointment that I was deprived from paternal care and love on one hand, and on the other hand my understanding that my father was, financially, in dire strait and could not have supported me. Was his dereliction of paternal duties the result of his other obligation to feed a battalion?
Perhaps, as a child, it would have meant a lot to me if he had visited me regularly, talked to me more, played with me, or took me for an outing in those rare visits.
Last fall, my mother passed away. My 25-year old son, who lives in Switzerland, called me and told me that he loved me and that he could not have asked for a better father. Immediately, I started thinking about my own father. Maybe he was all along with me, in the back of my mind, inadvertently helping me to become a better father. Perhaps, I was trying so hard not to deprive my four children- now adults- of having an engaging and loving father. It seemed that the best lesson my father ever taught me was how not to be a father.
Now, I miss him even more.
No comments:
Post a Comment