The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [37]
Of course, I have to learn certain things. I understand that at times I must strike a compromise, that I need to become more strategic in my thinking and formulate my thoughts more accurately, but I have no intention of giving up. I can live with the price I have to pay for this. As long as I am protected, I have the mental energy to go on. I need to be careful, though, not to push for too much too fast. My impatience is my Achilles’ heel: I want it all to happen here and now. I need to be told that tomorrow will still be good.
I KNOW MY father loves me, but I have made a choice that radically opposes everything he stands for. If he really said to the Dutch weekly what he is quoted as saying—that he never received any phone threats—it feels to me like a slap in the face. After each of my public appearances he received telephone calls from Somali Muslims who wanted to lodge a complaint. Initially he ignored these calls, but he did ask me whether the stories were true. I told him that I was making a stand for the rights of women in Islam. His reaction was: “Make a stand for what you feel is right, but make sure you do it in God’s name.” The fact that I have now publicly denounced God is a terrible disappointment to him, one he can barely accept. By smearing Islam, I have smeared his reputation and his honor. That is why he has turned away from me. I feel for him, but at the same time I am furious. At the end of the book that I am writing at the moment, I address an open letter to him in which I accuse him of offering his children conditional love only. Every time he has had to make a choice between the community and his children, he has chosen the former. This hurts.
I am a real daddy’s girl. During the short periods he spent with our family, he was wonderfully kind to me and praised me to the skies. He also organized some things for which I feel indebted to him to this day. For example, when we were living in Ethiopia my mother did not want my sister or me to attend school. We were going to be married off within a few years anyway, so what good would all that knowledge be to us? We were better off learning to do the housework. But my father insisted that we go to school. He said he would curse my mother forever if she would not let us. He also declared himself dead set against our circumcision. What he doesn’t know is that my grandmother secretly arranged to have it done behind his back.
My brother, my sister, and I did tackle him about never spending any time with us. He had brought us into the world but took no responsibility for it. We had nothing against his political activities, felt quite proud even, but we also wanted a father. He thought our criticisms were unworthy of us. Trivial moaning. We should see that he had a vocation and therefore make sacrifices with our heads up. God had bestowed the honor of this position upon him.
When I was born my father was in prison. I was six years old when I first saw him. Even though our father was absent for long periods, as children we sensed the tension surrounding his political activities. I always refer to the years in Somalia as the whispering years. Hush, hush, nobody can be trusted. I can remember hearing the pounding on the door, my grandmother opening it and being tossed to the floor, the verbal abuse of men ransacking our house. A child cannot understand these things.
On my sixth birthday we followed my father—who had by then fled the country—to Saudi Arabia. None of us felt happy there, with the exception of my mother, who flourished in a country