Desert Flower Read Online Free PDF Page B

held on to my mother with a grip of iron. I wanted to tell her what Papa’s friend had done to me, but I didn’t have the words I didn’t
     
    know what he’d done. I looked at his smiling face in the firelight, a face I would have to see again and again over the years, and knew I’d hate him forever.
    She stroked my head as I pressed my face into her thigh. “Waris, it’s okay. There, there, it was only a story, baby. It’s not real.” To Guban, she said, “Where are the lambs?”
     
    A NOMAD’S LIFE
    Growing up in Africa I did not have the sense of history that seems so important in other parts of the world. Our language, Somali, did not have a written script until 1973, so we did not learn to read or write. Knowledge was passed down by word of mouth poetry or folktales or, more important, by our parents teaching us the skills we needed to survive. For example, my mother taught me how to weave from dried grass containers tight enough to hold milk; my father taught me how to care for our animals and make sure they were healthy. We didn’t spend much time talking about the past nobody had time for
     
    that. Everything was today, what are we going to do today? Are all the children in? Are all the animals safe? How are we going to eat? Where can we find water?
    In Somalia, we lived the way our ancestors had for thousands of years; nothing had changed dramatically for us. As nomads we did not live with electricity, telephones, or automobiles, much less computers, television, or space travel. These facts, combined with our emphasis on living in the present, gave us a much different perspective on time than the one that dominates the Western world.
    Like the rest of my family, I have no idea how old I am; I can only guess. A baby who is born in my country has little guarantee of being alive one year later, so the concept of tracking birthdays does not retain the same importance. When I was a child, we lived without artificial time constructions of schedules, clocks, and calendars. Instead, we lived by the seasons and the sun, planning our moves around our need for rain, planning our day around the span of daylight available. We told time by using the sun. If my shadow was on the west side, it was morning; when it moved directly underneath me, it was noon. When my shadow crossed to the other side, it was afternoon. As the
     
    day grew longer, so did my shadow my cue to start heading home before dark.
    When we got up in the morning, we decided what we’d do that day, then did that task the best we could until we finished or the sky grew too dark for us to see. There was no such notion of getting up and having your day all planned out for you. In New York, people frequently whip out their date books and ask, “Are you free for lunch on the fourteenth or what about the fifteenth?” I respond with “Why don’t you call me the day before you want to meet up?” No matter how many times I write down appointments, I can’t get used to the idea. When I first came to London, I was mystified by the connection between people staring at their wrist, then crying, “I’ve got to dash!” I felt like everyone was rushing everywhere, every action was timed. In Africa there was no hurry, no stress. African time is very, very slow, very calm. If you say, “I’ll see you tomorrow around noon,” that means about four or five o’clock. And today I still refuse to wear a watch.
    During my childhood years in Somalia, it never occurred to me to fast-forward into the future, or delve into the past enough to ask, “Mama, how did you grow up?” As a consequence I know little of my family history, especially since I left home at
     
    such an early age. I constantly wish I could go back and ask those questions now ask my mother what her life was like when she was a little girl, or ask where her mother came from, or how her father died. It disturbs me that I may never know these facts.
    However, one thing I do know about my mother is