Since I was a child, my father instilled in me a love of reading. I used to have a picture of myself holding up a book, in Arabic, wearing one of my favorite dresses, long and floral with short sleeves and yellow flowers. I had just been admitted to first grade, a full year early in Kadugli, a small town in western Sudan. I forced myself on the school principal as she stood talking to Dad who took me to school to humor me. I insisted that I was ready but my parents told me I was still too young. This is one of many childhood stories my mother likes to tell about me under the heading "Kids Say the Darnedest Things." Even though I was only 5 years old, I ranked "First" in class and became the smart one in the family.
Over the years, my life, like my family's life, was subject to seismic changes, going from one country to the next. I was forced to adapt to all the changes; there were new schools, new people, and new languages. My Dad, ever the idealist, didn't think I was perturbed by any of this, but I was. Books kept me sane and helped me escape the trauma of my life. When I was living in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, I enrolled in the only English speaking school, the International Community School of Abidjan (ICSA).
I went from a local Saudi Islamic educational system that was fully in Arabic, to an international American school, fully in English. Like a scene worthy of George Orwell’s “1984”, my school’s name in Jeddah was just a number, 59. My closest friend and classmates were already engaged to be married. We were in third grade elementary school! I was daydreaming about attending university in Wisconsin, Madison, my Dad’s alma mater and where I was born, while my classmates were planning their wedding at the tender age of nine. That’s the level of stark difference between where I was coming from, to where I ended up.
The locals in Abidjan spoke only French. I set about learning English and French at the same time. More trauma. I remember being terrified and running screaming down the street when I first arrived in Abidjan because my Mom sent me on a walk with her friend's nanny. Everything was so unfamiliar and scary. The city was Black, African. I thought for sure they are about to kidnap me and I will never see my family again. Before you get offended, I am also Black and African. But after living in Saudi Arabia, the cultural divide between Arabia and Black Africa is too great, especially for an impressionable child. My Mom used to tell me stories about kids in her hometown, Kosti, Sudan, being kidnapped by Arab merchants and condemned to slavery. It happened to one of her neighbors whose kid, a boy, went missing, but he was considered alive and well, living in captivity somewhere in Arabia. I did not want that to happen to me.
Once I learned English, thanks to my English as a Second Language (ESL) course, I joined my peers in the fourth grade. I was almost put back a year but my Mom caught it. She stormed into the school and like a good helicopter mom, demanded I get reassigned to my rightful place. The school did not immediately give in. First, I had to pass a math test. Thank god mathematical operations are universal. My Saudi education was surprisingly top class, with all the public money Big Oil can afford. I passed with flying colors.
Safely settled in my class, I read mystery novels religiously, even at the dining table with my book propped up by my plate. Very antisocial, perhaps. But I just needed to disconnect from reality. A child psychologist would've explained that I was a deeply traumatized girl, being abused mercilessly by my parent's lack of awareness for my pain and suffering. My mother expected me to uphold my Sudanese identity fully, without regard to my environment, as if I am living in a vacuum, despite moving countries and continents. My Dad expected me to rise up to his expectations of his "clever child." Never mind, that I had new languages to learn and new people to figure out, hailing from other cultures and religions.
My family honor was paramount and I paid a heavy price. That's where Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie came in to the rescue. Like the mystery that my life is, they are sure to solve it. Or so I believed.
Once I finished reading those series, I dabbled in romance novels. That's when I reluctantly started reading in French, which was not my forte. I would buy Harlequin novels from the Librarie De France, a bookshop within walking distance from my school. I discovered romance thanks to my cousins in Khartoum, who had a hidden stash of Mills and Boon novels, bought in London, no doubt.
They were steamy and hugely enjoyable for an adolescent teenager with a mother who acted like I was an asexual amoeba. To her, I am to go from being a pure virgin child to a woman in my husband’s bed, without a hint of love or romance in between. I have the chopped clitoris to prove it. Unlike my sisters, I did not escape the primitive, highly inhumane practice of “purification” to discourage pre-marital sex, hence dishonor, by removing the clitoris and ensuring no sexual pleasure.
Wrongly attributed to Islam, female genital mutilation (FGM) is a practice prevalent in Africa to this day. I was only in third grade when my aunts took me and my cousin Nazik, to a clinic to perform the operation, with a local anesthesia. My mother, like the coward that she is, was nowhere in sight. Later, she would feign ignorance and cry crocodile tears about what happened to me. She puts the blame fully on her older sisters who acted without her knowledge or Dad’s, as if I was an orphan child.
At the clinic, I was wide awake, my back on the operating table, legs open. The Egyptian doctors did the deed, as I was looking up at the ceiling, in Khartoum, Sudan. My cousin, who went through the same thing, in a different operating room, did not live long after that. She died in 1985. Ironically, our family was on holiday in Cairo, enjoying the sights, fully aware that my cousin, who also happened to be my best friend and favorite person in the whole wide world, was slowly dying in Sudan. I never said goodbye. She was already dead and buried when we finally got to Khartoum. I swear my parents did that on purpose, hanging out in Egypt until it was safe to show up, in time for Nazik’s memorial. May she rest in peace.
The Mills and Boon novels passed the time during boring summers, visiting the relatives and soaking in the native culture. I soaked in British culture, and escaped fully into the stories, so engrossed I was in my cousins' books. Again, very antisocial but what would Nancy Drew do to cope with the crushing grief and pain? Nazik and I used to run around my aunt’s house, getting up to mischief, planning our future, University of Wisconsin-Madison. I knew we would go there together even if she wasn’t American. Nazik was gone and I was alone again in the world.
My Mom was unaware of my foray into romance but my Dad knew. He disapproved. I recall a flight, probably to Bonn, West Germany, the capital at the time when the Berlin Wall was still standing. President Regan did not yet say his famous line, "tear down this wall." I was reading another steamy novel, not Mills and Boon. This story took place in Scotland, and interspersed Scottish history with the love story. Dad pointed to my book and said to a colleague of his from work, who happened to be on the same flight, something about me reading trash. I was incensed. I dove into a retelling of Scottish history that I just picked up from my book, worthy of a dissertation by an over-ambitious PhD student. Dad's friend said something encouraging to Dad about my book choice. I think he was a young British guy that Dad was probably training at work. Now I think Dad was secretly proud of me being stuck in a book, like he taught me to be. An avid reader, just like him.
In recent years, I moved on to more intellectual reading fare. I started reading classics, like Dad wanted. I believe his favorite writer was Dostoyevsky, and his favorite book by that author is “The Brothers Karamazov.” But I believe his favorite book is “The Little Prince”by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I would love to verify if this is indeed correct, but my Dad died in February 1997, in the back of a taxi on his way to the hotel from the airport, in Nairobi, Kenya.
On Valentine’s Day, in 1997, I boarded a flight from Dane County airport to Detroit, Michigan, en route to my grief-stricken family. I saw my Industrial Engineering professor on the flight, a red eye leaving Madison at the crack of dawn. I was a Masters student at the time and he was my professor, teaching a course on complex systems. A Swede of origin, Gustafson, was sitting in first class, when I spotted him. I was immediately relieved to see him and started to tell him I will be away for a couple of weeks to bury my Dad on the other side of the world. He cut me off before I could get the words out and dismissed me as if I was an annoying mosquito. This coming from a man who spent his lecture time, not teaching engineering as our good money was paying for, but seeking therapy for his fear of losing his wife who was diagnosed with breast cancer. His PhD student and our teaching assistant (TA), ended up being the one doing the real teaching but not after taking some minutes off the clock to complain about Gustafson herself.
I was on multiple flights that day, making the trek from Madison, WI, to Paris, France, to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to Nairobi, Kenya, and finally to Khartoum, Sudan. That was the final destination for my Dad's lifeless body, where he is in eternal rest at the cemetery in Omdurman, lying next to my cousin Nazik, who died years earlier, at the ripe old age of 9 years old. My Dad's older brother had just died two weeks earlier. The level of grief that struck our family from losing the two well-loved brothers is worthy of a Russian writer. Dostoyevsky.
My Russian writer of choice is Tolstoy. Don't get me wrong; I am not into "War and Peace." True to my romance novel roots and my flights of fancy, my favorite book by Tolstoy is "Anna Karenina." Maybe that's not fair to Tolstoy because that is the only book of his I read. But I recently reread it again and it is a really good book. I would highly recommend it. My one tip for that novel is, pay attention to the first line of the book. It is one of the greatest openings. I missed it the first time I read it, but a friend pointed it out to me.
For a long time, I mistakenly believed that “Anna Karenina” is my favorite book. My college friend Mona gave me a hardcover copy of the book as a birthday present because that's what I told everyone. Now, let me tell you the truth because I just remembered what my favorite novel actually is today.
Like a story worthy of the genre that my favorite novel is from, my life is nothing short of true magic realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most famous writer, if not the inventor of this literary movement. You might be mistaken into thinking that my favorite novel is "Love in the Time of Cholera." This is his most well-known book. That was what my now ex-husband thought when I told him what my favorite novel was.
I had just finished reading it while living and working in Newcastle, England. My flat mate Ania, a Polish "femme fatale", was busy dating the local color, while I read quietly in my bedroom, thankful I was not hearing any sexual noises from her room down the hall. Once I finished reading my book, I got that feeling I get when a really good book is done. Like a refugee being kicked out from a safe haven, I was like a deer in the headlight. What now? How will I live again in a world without this book? Could there be another book, just as good, if not better, waiting for me to find?
I instantly dethroned “Anna Karenina”as my favorite novel and picked this book instead. Can you guess which one? My then boyfriend, now ex-husband, challenged me when I told him that this is my favorite book. In fairness, I had not read "Love in the Time of Cholera," so we decided to read it together, me for the first time and him for the second time. That's when I thought he was the man for me and the one I was waiting for. We finished the book and it was a good read. But my ex-husband was wrong; it is not better than my favorite book, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The story of my life. Gracias, Senor Marquez. I love you, Dad. Rest in peace.