Read Desert Flower for Free Online

that she was very beautiful. I know I sound like the typical adoring daughter, but she was. Her face was like a Modigliani sculpture, and her skin so dark and smooth, that she looked as if she’d been perfectly chiseled from black marble. Since Mama’s skin was jet black and her teeth dazzlingly white, at night when she smiled all you could see were her teeth glowing, as if they floated all by themselves in the night. Her hair was long and straight, very soft, and she’d smooth it with her fingers, since she never owned a comb. My mother is tall and slender traits that all her daughters inherited.
    Her demeanor is very calm, very quiet. But when she starts talking, she’s hysterically funny and she laughs a lot. She tells jokes, and some of them are funny, some are really dirty, and some are just stupid little things she’d say to crack us up. She’d look at me and say, “Waris, why are your eyes disappearing into your face?” But her favorite

D
    silly joke was calling me Avdohol, which means ‘small mouth.” Mama would look at me for no reason and say, “Hey, Avdohol, why is your mouth so small?”
    My father was very handsome, and believe me, he knew it. He was about six feet tall, slim, and lighter than Mama; his hair was brown, and his eyes were light brown. Papa was cocky because he knew he was good-looking. He always teased Mama, “I can go and get another woman if you don’t -‘ and then he’d fill in the blank with whatever he was after. Or, “Look, I’m getting bored around here. I’m getting me another woman…” My mother would tease back, “Go ahead. See what you can do.” They really loved each other, but unfortunately one day these taunts came true.
    My mother grew up in Mogadishu, the capital city of Somalia. My father, on the other hand, was a nomad and had always lived roaming the desert. When she met him, my mother thought Papa was so handsome that a life wandering with him as nomads sounded like a romantic idea; they quickly decided to get married. Papa went to my grandmother, since my grandfather was dead, and asked permission to marry my mother. My grandmother said, “No, no, no, absolutely not.” To my mother she added, “He’s just a playboy!”
    Grandmother was not about to allow her beautiful daughter to throw her life away raising camels in the wilderness with this man, this desert man! However, when my mother was about sixteen, she ran away and married Papa anyhow.
    They went to the other side of the country and lived with his family in the desert, which created a whole series of problems for my mother. Her family had money and power, and she had never known this type of harsh nomadic life. Greater than that dilemma, however, was the fact that my father was from the Daarood tribe, and my mother was from the Hawiye tribe. Like Native Americans, the citizens of Somalia are divided into individual tribes, and each has a fanatical loyalty to its own group. This tribal pride has been the source of wars throughout our history.
    A great rivalry exists between the Daaroods and Hawiyes, and my father’s family always treated my mother badly, assuming she was a lesser mortal by virtue of being from a different tribe than their own. Mama was lonely for a very long time, but she had to adapt. After I ran away from home and was separated from my family, I realized what life must have been like for her, living all alone among the Daaroods.
    My mother started having babies, and raising
     
    her children gave her the love she missed being away from her own people. But again, now that I’m grown, I look back and realize what she went through having twelve children. I remember when Mama was pregnant, she would suddenly disappear, and we wouldn’t see her for days. Then she would show up carrying a tiny baby. She went off into the desert alone and gave birth, taking along something sharp to cut the umbilical cord. Once after she disappeared we had to move our camp in the endless search for