Western feminism treats Somali and Ethiopian women as victims and barometers of regional violence. Our relatives tell a different story.
Courtesy of the author.
Hannah Giorgis is an Ethiopian-American writer based in New York. Safy-Hallan Farah is a Somali-American writer based in Minneapolis. In October, Safy facilitated an "Everything you believe about East African women is wrong" Twitter discussion. Hannah's contributions to the discussion led to conversations between her and Safy. Here, they explore the topic in greater depth together, using the life stories of women in their respective families.
Fadumo, tall and svelte, wasn't a woman yet, not by the standards of her time. She wasn't old enough for her sins to be counted — that happens at 15 in Islam. She wasn't fully developed, and she didn't know how to say "no" yet.
But her soon-to-be husband — 40 years her senior — was a man. He was the kind of man who honored his family and clan. Toward Fadumo, he was clinical and cold. So when her father said, "This is your husband," she did what most teenagers could probably only fantasize about: She ran away.
Her mother told her to leave their no-name village in northern Somalia to go live with relatives in Aden, Yemen. She told her, "Run away as fast as you can and never look back." Carrying a knife, some fabric, and the clothes on her back, Fadumo left in the middle of the night. In case of lions, her mother instructed her to stay awake during the night, climb up into a tree, and use the fabric to tether herself to it. Fadumo ran until there was no running left, until she crossed the Red Sea on a boat.
The distance between where Fadumo was headed and where she was meant the difference between freedom and dependence, between life and death. In Aden, Fadumo eventually married the son of a prominent Somali-Yemeni family — a husband of her own choosing. With him, Fadumo had Khadija who had Shukri. Shukri flew from Mogadishu to study in Rome at age 17 and had Safy years later, in her early twenties. If Fadumo listened to her father, her life, and the lives of Shukri and Safy, would have been lost in transmutation; the changing tides would have washed over her memory.
Shukri in the late '80s.
Courtesy of the author.
East African womanhood is a minefield between the region's war zones and too-simple Western understanding thereof. The experiences of women from Ethiopia and Somalia serve largely as a barometer of the nations' violence. But our foremothers taught us resistance long before we had a name for it. Their stories alchemize the violence that forced them out of the arms of their families and toward countries that don't recognize their strength. Spinning blood into honey and bone into gold, they transformed their pain into our power.
In the parts of East Africa our ancestors are from, warfare and political and religious tension prevent women from cultivating connections across borders. But in America, our experiences overlap in ways that illuminate our shared history. To be from East Africa is to bear the mark of our region's hurt and pain. We're called upon to explain famine and female genital mutilation, veils and victimhood. Our foremothers taught us that these scripts don't define us, even when prepackaged stereotypes offer us convenient roles to slip into. Their stories complicate the Western feminism that paints them as objects of rescue rather than subjects with agency.
