Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl as told to Virginia Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy, New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad Waris Dirie and Cathleen Miller, New York: William Morrow, 1999.

by Michael Kevane

Although these two books are about the girlhood (highly unfortunate) of two Somali women, they are worth briefly reviewing in this special issue of the SSA Newsletter because of the paucity of this kind of autobiographical writing in English on Sudanese girls and women. It is very probable that there are many young girls in Sudan living lives very similar to those of Aman (a pseudonym) and Waris Dirie (now a model and special U.N. ambassador). Sudanists will want to read these books carefully the next time they write or discuss the status of women in Sudan; there is an unfortunate tendency to accept cultural norms at face value and assume away deviant behavior, when most likely it is all too common. Only brave and confessional autobiographies like these can provide undeniable substantiation to the dirty underbelly of societies around the world.

Aman and Waris lived very similar lives through their early teenage years. Waris got lucky, while Aman struggled through more years of hardship than any young woman should have to endure before finally (apparently) digging (marrying, really) herself out of the hole.

Both describe with accuracy the beauty of childhood in nomad households in Somalia. They both seem to have come from fairly well-off households, with their fathers owning substantial herds. But while well-off by local standards, they are quite poor in an absolute sense: siblings die from preventable diseases; the children sometimes go for days without food; Waris and Aman begin back-breaking work at early ages; and few of the children attend school.

Their real problems begin with circumcision, the bad kind with removal of clitoris and vaginal tissue, and sewing together (with thorns) of vagina, just as in much of northern Sudan. Both are circumcised by ‘gypsy’ women using old razors, and then left under the care of traditional practitioners as their genitals get infected. Eventually they heal, but are left with problems menstruating and peeing and, of course, engaging in sexual relations. Actually, their problems start before circumcision; even as little girls they are abused as older men use them to masturbate (there seems to be no penetration, and there will be plenty of rape later on).

Then in their early years as teenagers they run away from their families as they are promised to older men in marriage. They run to Mogadishu, surviving a striking and unsavory cast of Somali predators (lions, truck drivers, ‘nice’ old men, Italian colonists, young disco-kings of the wealthy urban class, and stereotypical ‘step-mothers’). Eventully they leave Somali, by very different routes. I won’t give away any more of the plots; the books are similar and are best read back-to-back in case you thought the first exaggerated. When you see a young woman outside a restaurant or theater late at night in Khartoum, or Kosti, or El Obeid, you will never again assume that because they are women in Muslim societies they must have led sheltered, protected lives.

One of the interesting things about the books is that neither of the women come across as particularly nice or ‘good’; Aman makes mistake after mistake (e.g. her ‘nice’ boyfriend leaves town for a month and she immediately starts sleeping with another guy), while Waris mentions her co-national, co-model Iman only to say a couple snide things (however true they might be). The reader in fact has to constantly remind himself/herself that these are basically young girls who never went to school. Can a thirteen year old under their circumstances really be held ‘accountable’? Of course not; one wishes them the best in life.

That said, the books are open to some criticism. Their use of English slang and profanity is a little jarring, the same way that books set in Sudan or Somalia whose characters utter phrases like "By Allah it is the truth he says!" are jarring. It is true that such things are said, but writing a book mean adopting some semblance of narrative verisimilitude and coherence, and I can’t bring myself to believe that people who learned English in their early twenties (or later) are actually ‘thinking’ with American or British expressions like ‘Fuck you." Maybe they really are (see paragraph above). Neither of the authors (perhaps reflecting their life backgrounds) does much deep thinking. Both books were written/told after the collapse of the Somali state and disintegration of Somali society in the early 1990s, with millions of people probably dying early deaths. Yet there is barely any mention of these events, or any attempt to comprehend them, or offer personal observations. Strangely, even the afterword to Aman by Janice Boddy contains basically only a sentence or two about these events. Waris does recommend cutting the balls off of Somali men, as this might ‘calm them down’ (which reminds me of an academic paper delivered years ago at the SSA annual meetings by a pyschologist, about how Sudanese men were ‘castrated’.... hmmmm). If you are going to have a book published with your face on the cover, some reflection on such a grave issue seems warranted.