MINNEAPOLIS — On a sunny day in 1991, Maryan, my dad’s first cousin, was hiding from rifle-carrying soldiers in a house in Mogadishu, Somalia, while the melodic voice of the singer Magool blared from a megaphone outside. Magool repeated an ugly slur for the Darod, our family’s clan, while a sweaty Maryan crouched inside the kitchen, holding her breath.
When I was 10 years old, Maryan casually told me this story from the civil war in Somalia — then almost a decade in the past — over breakfast in my family’s home in Minneapolis. I found it perplexing that Magool, an artist many Somalis held in high esteem, would allow herself to become a mouthpiece for violent men.
As a child, I didn’t understand the extent to which clan ideology distorted many Somalis’ thinking. My own paternal grandmother, traumatized by the war, gave me my first introduction to that mind-set.
“Do you know the name of your clan, or what a clan is?” she asked me, in Somali, of course, when I was visiting at her home in Ohio during the summer between fifth and sixth grades.
I didn’t, I told her.
She took it upon herself to teach me not only about my own clan but also about the singer Magool’s clan, and her disdain for it. At the time, I cared more about cartoons than about politics or my identity as a Somali, but I didn’t judge my grandmother.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/opinion/somalia-2017-clan-ideology.html
When I was 10 years old, Maryan casually told me this story from the civil war in Somalia — then almost a decade in the past — over breakfast in my family’s home in Minneapolis. I found it perplexing that Magool, an artist many Somalis held in high esteem, would allow herself to become a mouthpiece for violent men.
As a child, I didn’t understand the extent to which clan ideology distorted many Somalis’ thinking. My own paternal grandmother, traumatized by the war, gave me my first introduction to that mind-set.
“Do you know the name of your clan, or what a clan is?” she asked me, in Somali, of course, when I was visiting at her home in Ohio during the summer between fifth and sixth grades.
I didn’t, I told her.
She took it upon herself to teach me not only about my own clan but also about the singer Magool’s clan, and her disdain for it. At the time, I cared more about cartoons than about politics or my identity as a Somali, but I didn’t judge my grandmother.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/opinion/somalia-2017-clan-ideology.html
