I’ve always been very close to my parents, my mum especially. When people ask, I call us the Somali Gilmore Girls, but a lot funnier and with more traumatic baggage. Family is at the heart of my life and my culture.
But a trip to Calais as a young journalist led me to a shocking revelation about my parents and my early childhood – that I was born a refugee. My mum had told me this after I returned from my first reporting trip to the refugee camp in Calais.
I didn’t know what to say when she asked if I had truly forgotten what we had been through. I couldn’t really remember these formative years of my life – which was hugely disorienting and strange.
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And so I set off to uncover the past, interviewing my parents over the course of four years: in what would become my memoir Scattered. I talked about the lives they built as young people in the newly independent Somalia before the war; about their courtship and early marriage; about what happened to them as the country descended into chaos and they decided to leave. I saw my parents in a new light; I saw them for the resilient survivors that they were, not just the victims of the system designed to crush them.
I was hearing my family’s history in my parents’ own words for the first time; I was hearing about the challenges they faced while they were still younger than I am now. I was hearing of how they came to their tortuous decision to leave Somalia, the risk they took when they got on a fishing boat to reach Kenya, and the normality they tried to build for us in the refugee camp we called home.