S\u00e3o Paulo \u2013 This Friday (16), the Somali writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali will launch her third book in Brazil, published by Companhia das Letras. \u201cNomad\u201d recounts the author\u2019s story from the time when she left her family, in Kenya, until her more recent address, in the United States. In \u201cNomad,\u201d Ayaan reveals why she chose to live in the United States and the reasons that drove her to quit her religion and family.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wrote \u2018Nomad\u2019 to answer questions readers had after reading \u2018Infidel\u2019 [the book in which she recounts her childhood and adolescence]. Many readers wanted to get an update on my relations with my family. In answering them I use members of my family to illustrate differences in attitudes to sexuality, money and aggression between Westerners and Muslims in general. Readers also wanted to know about my experiences in the US and whether I had any proposals to remedy the conflict in values between Muslims living in the West and their host societies,\u201d the writer told ANBA. <\/p>\n
Ayaan was born in Somalia in 1969, moved to Saudi Arabia in 1977, went to Ethiopia a year later and lived in Kenya between 1979 and 1980. Then she returned to Kenya, where she lived until 1992. In that year, she was supposed to move from Kenya to Canada to marry a relative to whom she had been promised. \u201cIn my trip from Kenya to Canada, I was supposed to make a stop in Germany, where I would get my Canadian visa, and then continue. But a sort of instinctive desperation caused me to change my mind. I took a train to the Netherlands,\u201d she reveals in the book. <\/p>\n
She lied to the local authorities to be able to stay in the Netherlands, a country that borrowed her money and gave her a place to live in, and allowed her to study and work until she became a member of the Parliament. The lie she told in order to be accepted in the Netherlands caused her to move again years later, this time to the United States, where she has lived since 2006.<\/p>\n
Ever since she decided to go to the Netherlands and leave her promised husband, Ayaan realized that all of her relatives would suffer the consequences. \u201cMy parents and the rest of my family suffered the anguish of collective shame: they have to contend with their daughter not only rejecting their choice of a husband but the entire moral framework they live by. In a tribal-Islamic context the choices I made are seen as worse than death,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The writer also suffers the consequences. Ayaan gets frequent death threats. There are places she cannot go to without bodyguards. One such place was the hospital where her father was a patient before he died, in 2008, in London. In the neighbourhood of the hospital, there lived people who do not want her alive. \u201cMy life with threats and security is not only emotional but also a practical matter. It is the cost I have to pay for my freedom and it is worth it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
In addition to telling her story from country to country and city to city, the writer questions Islamic procedures, especially concerning the submission of women. In some excerpts, she reveals her first contact with Western attitudes, places and values, as in the part where she explains to a Dutch social worker that she did not know what a savings account was, or when she recounts her first gambling experience during a visit to Las Vegas. Ayaan did not even understand it when she was first invited to attend a \u201ctypically American\u201d wedding. \u201cI asked myself whether any human being could honour those promises: to love and respect through health and illness, wealth and poverty, until death does them part,\u201d she says in her book.<\/p>\n
Now, in the United States, Ayaan is always in the company of bodyguards. She still gets death threats by email. Still, she believes her life today is better than it would be, had she continued living with her relatives or her promised husband. \u201cI cannot travel or go elsewhere without security but within the parameters of security I lead a meaningful life in freedom and for that I am deeply grateful,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Service<\/b><\/p>\n
Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
392 pages
46.00 Brazilian reals (US$ 27.00)
Companhia das Letras publishing house<\/p>\n
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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