Angry Queer Somali Boy

A Complicated Memoir

by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali

EXCERPT

The Dutch Disease

THERE’S A SAYING IN DUTCH that translates to “God made the Earth but the Dutch created the Netherlands.”

Pray for me as we glide through an African boy’s journey through one of Europe’s more narrow cultures. It begins this way.

My stepmother decided in the spur of the moment that she’d rather get off the plane with the kids at Schiphol, the main international airport of the Netherlands, instead of in London, our intended destination. She didn’t inform her sister, patiently waiting for her in the United Kingdom, for about a week.

Dutch immigration officers must’ve been given a fright as this heavily pregnant Somali woman lurched toward them.

Her tale of woe lined up with Dutch asylum policy. The truth was, she knew nothing about the horrors she described in her testimony to the refugee board, as we had spent the previous few years luxuriating in a Middle Eastern exurb while bombs rained down on Somalia’s northern cities.

In retrospect, this was a necessary lie.

Years later, as we exchanged the Netherlands for Canada, we made a pitstop to see my father in the Emirates. Seated a few rows behind us and screened off by the lovely KLM crew, was a screaming man being subdued by Dutch immigration officers. In her halting Dutch, Samira asked the flight attendant what the matter was. Apparently, he had been rejected for asylum and was being sent back to East Africa.

Had Samira told the truth in 1991, we too would’ve been cast back to the Horn.

Instead, we had been temporarily housed in an apartment in the city of Alphen aan den Rijn, and a short time later, or so it seemed to me, we were in a refugee camp in Gelderland.

Gelderland is in the west of the Netherlands and is considered part of the Dutch Bible Belt.

The camp was in a farmer’s field. Each family was assigned a trailer. On television, I watched American boys with long hair singing about their fears and broken hearts. I felt guilty looking at their pale and sinewy bodies, often shirtless. Their lack of modesty and religious convention excited me.

It was in Gelderland that, once again, Arab hatred of blackness reared its ugly head. My stepmother was in line at the remittance office in the camp. She was heavily pregnant and not paying attention. When it was her turn, the mand behind her mumbled something in Arabic and pushed her. Samira, never one to back down from a fight, steadied herself and socked him. Her ring lodged in his face and once out, his cheek split wide open and blood gushed everywhere.

It taught him never to fuck with a pregnant Somali woman again.