Somalia - Desert Flower

Country: Somalia     
Book: Desert Flower
Author: Waris Dirie
Publication Year: 1998
Genre: Autobiography/Memoir

That we know the name of Waris Dirie at all is somewhat of a miracle. Born to nomadic herders many miles from even the Somali capital of Mogadishu, Dirie’s life is not dissimilar to many girls growing up in Somalia, Ethiopia or the Sudan. Subjected to female circumcision at a young age, leading to health issues for most of her life. Under constant threat of sexual violence by the men around her. Denied even the most basic of education.

The catalyst for change comes when her father tres to sell her into an arranged marriage at 13 to a man in his 60s for some camels. Again, a common enough experience in this part of the world. She runs away into the desert, facing danger in the shape of desert lions and more men threatening sexual assault, before finally arriving at the capital and skipping from one family home to another.

At 14, her uncle flies her to London to work as his maid, where he is the new Somali Ambassador (Somali model and David Bowie’s future wife, Iman is a family friend and regular visitor). For the next four years she is practically a slave, working for 7 days a week without days off. Even when she starts to attend night school to learn English and how to read, the family soon puts a stop to it.

Escape only comes when it is time for her uncle to return to Somalia and Dirie hides her passport to prevent them from forcing her to return. She lives in a YMCA and working ina cleaner in th local McDonalds before embarking on a modeling career. But even this isn’t easy, due to her immigration status within the UK, which leads to two ‘green card’ marriages, neither of which is ideal (an understatement to say the least).

Dirie’s story shows that anyone can rise far above the place in which they were born. Sure, it takes a number of factors, of which luck is not insignificant. Yet for an illiterate girl from the deserts of Western Africa to literarily walk out of desert to the bitter cold streets of London and eventually end up on the catwalks of Paris, Milan and New York is not the kind of thing that happens every day.

Dirie eventually walked away from her modeling carer to become a UN Ambassador working to end Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), as well as to raise her son. The book ends right as she is giving birth and starting to work for the UN. A sequel to Desert Flower, Desert Dawn, was published in 2001.

Desert Flower is in many ways typical of ghost written celebrity memoirs. It’s not high literature, but not everything has to be. For a woman who struggled to read, even at the height of her success, she has done well to publish anything at all. 

Besides, there are certain well known Eton and Oxbridge educated individuals who are incapable of writing anything better. You can receive the best education that money can buy and still be completely ignorant. And you can receive no formal education at all and still be a force for change in the world.

In seeking to connect the books we read on this project to ones we have already read, there is much to connect Dirie’s life story to writers of other countries, even after only the half a dozen nations considered so far.

Dirie’s experience is not dissimilar to that of Firdaus, the protagonist of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero (see: Egypt). She too is subjected to FGM at a young age. She is forcibly married to her uncle and faces abuse and violence at every turn. Yet she raises to a position of relative authority (arguably both women use their bodies to achieve success, though modeling is hardly the same as sex work). Though in the end of course, Firdaus ending is tragic. Dirie’s is transcendent.

Additionally, we can't help but draw parallels between Dirie’s early life and that of Galsan Tschinag, as described in The Blue Sky and The Grey Earth (see: Mongolia). Both are the children of nomadic herding peoples. Yet the difference in treatment of male and female children by their parents is stark to say the least.

The further I dive into this project, the more I find I am merely making a first pass through each country. Some countries inevitably interest me more than others (see: Afghanistan). Some, like Somalia or Finland (see: Finland) are given flying visits before moving on to new horizons. These are places I will revisit in the future, even if only after the project is over (spoilers: this project will never really be over). To repeat, there are 197 countries to get through, plus various dependencies and disputed regions.

That is to say that this is only a first visit to Somalia. I picked Dirie’s memoir partly because it is something different from the novels or even the fictionalised biography of El Saadawi and Tschinag I have focussed so far. I make no apology for trying to read books written by women wherever possible. As we have seen with Malalai Joya’s experiences as a young woman and politician in Afghanistan, or Malala Yousafzai when we turn to Pakistan, how can we not listen to female voices in places where so much is done to silence them by fragile male egos? It is an act of solidarity, however small or tokenistic.

Fiction is great and all, with its labyrinthine plots and larger than life characters. Yet it’s good to sprinkle in some real life heroes and heroines amongst the imaginary. We turn through these pages to know something about the country from which the authors came; through the experiences of the people who lived them from birth. There is much more to see and learn about Somalia, but Desert Flower is a decent enough start. 

Waris Dirie