A tale of two sisters: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her sister, Haweya,
hetty ter haar
A tale of two sisters Alexander Linklater
Saturday March 3, 2007
Guardian
A yaan Hirsi Ali and her sister, Haweya, grew up in conditions that most western psychologists would consider traumatic. Circumcised as little girls in Somalia, and abandoned by their father, a rebel leader, they were raised as refugees in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Isolated and desperate, their mother would beat them mercilessly. Subjected to harsh Islamic teachings, they were also beaten by their ma'alim - once so badly that Ayaan nearly died. The sisters grew up against a background of tyranny, war, exile, famine and religious dogma.This story, told by Ayaan in her memoir, Infidel, might seem to allow plenty of room for the view that trauma lay behind the mental illness that would eventually consume Haweya. In 1994, after destroying her honour by having an abortion, she joined Ayaan as an asylum-seeker in Holland. There she had another abortion. In 1996, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with a severe psychotic disorder. She had been smashing her head against walls, screaming, "Allaahu Akbar! Allaahu Akbar!"
Yet, for Ayaan, the idea that her sister became schizophrenic due to religion or upbringing is simplistic. For a start, it is the same type of interpretation that is often used to undermine her own arguments against female oppression in Islam. If Haweya went mad because of hardship, Ayaan's uncompromising views can be explained the same way. Her enemies deride her as a self-hating Islamophobe, incensed by her Muslim upbringing, sexually frustrated by circumcision, and haunted by the death of Theo van Gogh - the director who was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004, after making Ayaan's anti-Qur'anic film, Submission: Part 1. But to use trauma to diminish her critique of Islam is, she says, "just a means of not listening to what I have to say".
Furthermore, Ayaan points out that while she and Haweya might have had a hard life by European standards, by African standards "it was not so bad". As much as anything, what she remembers is laughter and sisterhood. She and Haweya were deeply bonded. They confided in each other, made trouble together, protected one another. At home, Haweya would rage against their mother and Ayaan would intervene, taking on the mantle of maternal care, washing Haweya gently when their mother wanted to scrub her "like you'd scrub the floor". Out in the dangerous streets of Nairobi or Mogadishu, meanwhile, Haweya was the fearless one, standing up for her more delicate older sister. Ayaan still thinks of her as "my guardian angel".
Why, then, did Haweya lose her mind? Ayaan provides the same answer you would get from any honest psychiatrist: "It's mostly guesswork." For sure, the events of their lives contained "stressors". Perhaps Haweya's flight to Holland, which removed the privations of clan life, also removed a psychological safety net. Rates of psychosis increase among migrants and, statistically, African populations are among the most vulnerable. But this doesn't explain why one sister should become a politician and the other a psychotic. Perhaps there was a fault-line of vulnerability in Haweya's childhood defiance that would eventually shatter her mind. This kind of guesswork only heightens the difficulty of the question. How, after all, do such predispositions of character emerge in the first place?
Behavioural geneticists, who study the biological basis of character, would begin where Ayaan begins, with the story of how her nomadic grandmother drummed into the sisters the lesson of who they were: "I am Ayaan ... I am Haweya," they were taught to recite, "the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan, the son of Isse .." They learned to list their forefathers going back 800 years, to the dawn of the Darod clan.
Yet Haweya's madness seems to have come not from their father's side of the family but from their mother's - with three maternal cousins suffering from similar psychotic illnesses. And therein lies an enigma: in the Somali clan system, matrilineal inheritance is deemed worthless, and nobody recalls the names or characteristics of women. As her grandmother warned the girls, a woman alone is disposable, like a piece of sheep fat in the sun.
Ayaan believes she has inherited the strength of the women in her family, only putting it to a different use. Where her mother and grandmother enforced Islamic traditions, she has fought against them. Yet - who knows? - perhaps she also has something of her father's clan character: born to lead.
Haweya inherited other things. During an electrical storm in Nairobi in 1998, she ran out into the night in a psychotic fit, miscarried and died.
For five years afterwards, Ayaan lost the ability to laugh. The irrepressible giggling of her childhood would never return. "Something has gone for good," she says. "Part of me went with Haweya."
Rex Marinus
You do certainly have a point, you know, in the parallel you drew between
the PDP, O basanjo and Mugabe. I should acknowledge that. But I should also
say that the ZANU-PF is not the PDP and Mugabe is not Obasanjo, however you
cut it. One is a statesman, Obasanjo is not. He is a client of the
international system against which Mugabe fights. That is why in spite of
Obasanjo's atrocities, including well documented examples of war crimes,
political corruption, and human rights abuses, he is feted, and courted by
the "international community." There, is the dilemma in our various analyses
of Africa. It is a bit refreshing to have people like Mugabe make a stand.
Now, I agree in fact that Muagbe has raised enormous questions about the
validity of the democratic process in comtemporary Africa: principally, when
is a democracy? That was the point I was attempting to raise, and which can
be clarified, in my mind, by looking at the very pattern of coverage by
journals in London and New York, who precisley demonise Mugabe using the the
specious argument of his lack of "democratic credentials" - his so-called
hold on power. Mugabe may indeed have a question or two to answer on his
use(s) of power, and he is certainly not a saint, but there is a school of
thought that says, on this land question, to "return to Caesar what was
stolen from Caesar" amounts to the perpetuation of the last five hundred
years of inquity against African peoples by Caesar.
I do not think that rail-roading Mugabe out of power, using the fronts of
highly compromised interests like the MDC is, when properly considered a
victory for Zimbabweans. I think we can as well ask the question: what
would, say, Americans do if Al-Quaeda makes campaign contributions to the
Libertarian Party, to fight George Bush? That is what the government of
Zimbabwe - and it is indeed a government headed by Mugabe - is saying: can
MDC, allegedly funded by international interests opposed to Muagbe claim a
higher ground for legitimacy in the afairs of Zimbabwe? What is at issue
here is not Mugabe, but the land question. What is MDC's proposal for
settling the question? Mugabe is accused of handing confiscated land to his
cronies. We dare not condone that of course. But cronyism is not a Shona
word. Bechtel or Haliburton's contracts in Iraq was not by open biding.
But nobody has asked that the US government be dismantled on account of
that. Ultimately, Mugabe is on his way out. Time is against him. The land
will remain, but it will have to be deployed to serve the greatest interest
of Zimbabweans - black and white and in-between. Finally, I do not agree
that anything was "stolen" from Caesar. Caesar has been doing most of the
stealing, the last time I checked. That is what Mugabe is saying. That is
where I agree with Mugabe. I do not agree with him on the matter of hanging
on to power for its own sake. Kabissa!
Obi Nwakanma
_____________________
"If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell,
I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell."
--Christopher Okigbo
_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar - get it now!
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/