Bloodlines

Ayaan Hirsi Ali starts her life learning about her tribe. (From her book Infidel)

My grandmother nods, grudgingly. I have done well, for a five-year-old.

I have managed to count my forefathers back for three hundred years the part that is crucially important. Osman Mahamud is the name of my father’s subclan, and thus my own. It is where I belong, who I am.

Later, as I grow up, my grandmother will coax and even beat me to learn my father’s ancestry eight hundred years back, to the beginning of the great clan of the Darod. I am a Darod, a Harti, a Macherten, an Osman Mahamud. I am of the consort called the Higher Shoulder. I am a Magan.

“Get it right,” my grandmother warns, shaking a switch at me. “The names will make you strong. They are your bloodline. If you honor them they will keep you alive. If you dishonor them you will be forsaken.

You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone. Do it again.”

The importance of knowing one’s family lineage becomes a life-and-death matter about midway through the memoir. The country is falling apart. People in flight gather at Somalia’s border with Kenya in hopes of crossing to safety.

To be tied by blood is to be part of a large safety net. There is an obligation to aid and rescue. There is an obligation to support single women and provide housing. It’s a group thing.