The Women of Kismayo

The breasts of Kismayo assembled
along the mid-day market street.

No airbrushed mangoes, no
black lace, no underwire chemise.

No half-cupped pleasures,
no come-hither nods, no Italian

centerfolds. Simply the women
of the town telling their men

to take action, to do something
equally bold. And the husbands

on their way home, expecting
sweet yams and meat,

moaned and covered their eyes,
screamed like spoiled children

dredged abruptly from sleep—
incredulous that their women

could unbutton such beauty
for other clans, who

(in between splayed
hands) watched quite willingly.

Give us your guns, here is our
cutlery, we are the men!

the women sang to them
an articulation without shame.

And now in the late night hour
when men want nothing but rest,

they fold their broken bodies, still
watched by their wives cool breasts

round, full, commanding as colonels—
two taut nipples targeting each man.

-- Susan Rich

...

The Women of Kismayo
By Nuruddin Farah

from The Times Literary Supplement (London), (November 15, 1996), pp. 44)

A generation of war-lords have made Somalia an archetype of natural disintegration and the power of tyrants. Even now, with the death of Mohammed Farah Aideed, there is no end in sight. But there is another dimension to Somalian politics: the radical role of women. Two years before the entire country collapsed into civil war, in Kismayo, Somalia's southern coastal city, something happened that momentarily interrupted the slow march of strife over the body politic. A few dozen women, defying the conviction that enjoins female sartorial modesty, bared their breasts in public in front of a crowd of men. Fists raised, voices harsh, they shouted "Rise, Rise!", challenging the men to action, reproaching them for their failure to confront the excesses of the dictatorship. By challenging the men in this manner, the women implied that they would not from then on defer to them as husbands, fathers, or figures of authority.

There was a sense of public unease in Kismayo after this event, the haruspices interpreting the women's action as a transgression, a sign of worse things to come, a countdown to the total collapse of a centuries-old status quo. These harbingers of folly spoke of women preparing to take over the opposition, of the spread of AIDS, of families fragmenting. At stake was Somali culture itself, the death of which was now thought to be imminent. The discord at the hearth was seen as symbolic of discord at the national level. At the height of an autocrat's rule, especially towards the end of his reign, such people argued, the difference between the sexes is authority. Men become women, women men, the terms defining either rendered provisional. Thus the women gave politics a more intimate profile, bringing to the fore questions about the national crisis. It was the women, ironically, who took politics, confined by dictatorship to the privacy of the home, back into the public domain. The traditional dress code of Somalia is not, in fact, as rigid as that of most Islamic countries (though we practise the uglier, more explicit form of female constraint, genital infibulation). Within definite limits, our women do display their bodies, wearing guntiino or see-through dirac robes, both garments allowing breasts, navel-buttons and the contour of their figures to be seen. Although not dressed as demurely as others in the Muslim world, our women are discreet with their lovers, seldom showing the whole extent of their bodies even to their husbands. There is a tradition in Mogadishu according to which a bride does not reveal her face to her groom on her wedding-night until after the payment of a waji-fur fee, a cash settlement. Treated as treasures, women's bodies are sexualized; a woman is face, a fee, treasure. Or, in the idiom of a Somali satirist, Naagi waa naas, "Women are breasts!".

Men, on the other hand, are many things at once, more than the sum of their members, which are often enough on public display. You see men of all ages and all walks of life half crouched and busily urinating or easing themselves by the roadside, their fingers deftly holding their clothes away from themselves. Once done, they shake their manhood with vigour, and then place a pebble at the opening to dry up the urine, an impurity that should not come into contact with a man's clothes. That men uninhibitedly exhibit themselves to all and sundry is emblematic of their appropriation of all the power outside the hearth, legislating modesty for women, but not for themselves.

So completely naked breasts were deeply shocking - the men of Kismayo booed, but the majority did not know how to react, covering their faces with their fingers splayed, staring - or standing mesmerized and gawking. Those men who belonged to the same house as the breast-baring women knew that they would suffer humiliation at the hands of the security police. And they did. Taken in to be interrogated, they were asked again and again what they knew, and reprimanded for not having alerted the authorities to what the regime viewed as a treasonable act. Yet the women were released soon after the crowd had been dispersed. It was only their male relations who were detained, then physically humiliated because the women were thought to be incapable of staging a public action without the support or knowledge of their men-folk.

A handful of these men met later in secret. This group resolved to form a fighting force, to be recruited from their immediate families, a militia bonded by blood. This was not what the women wanted. Somali clans are based on male bonding, reaffirming the power of men over women. This explains why women interpret the current community-based mutinies that characterize current Somali politics in ways antithetically to the view held by men. Where men mystify politics, glorifying their role in it, women are distrustful of the warring and peacemaking processes. Women are aware of the importance of the multiplicity of connections the warring communities have, seeing themselves now as mothers to children of one family, now as daughters of another, and on remarriage, as mothers to offspring from yet another lineage. The men remain true to their father's ancestral identity, the women do not.

Women know that their clan identities are an artifice. They know the men who stage the mutinies, know the women victims, the women turned into spoils of war - or into gifts of peace given away in marriage to settle a dispute between men. By baring their breasts and putting their honour on the line, the women of Kismayo revealed the extent to which men think of them as secret enemies, untrustworthy, labouring in the service of some alien interest. Proverbial lore compares them, in fact, to shadows, adjusting their shapes to the external circumstances.

Somali men think a woman's one identity is incomplete without reference to a man, husband, a father, a brother, or some other male relation. So when the women bared their breasts, the men in Kismayo asked one another, not who the women were, but whose women they were. As did the security police. It wasn't the women who mattered, but the men to whom they were related, who were deemed to be responsible for them. Under torture, some of the men disowned the women ringleaders, whom they described as being odd, that is to say, attached, single, widows, spinsters, or divorcees. At pain to distance themselves from the inspirers of the breast-baring incident, most laid blame at the door of one particular widow, with no blood connection to their own communities. The chief of the state security branch was reported as saying in jest, "He is indeed hopeless who expects widows to lead a campaign against a regime!"

The women's protest achieved nothing. There was no follow-up, without an independent women's movement, and no bonding comparable to the one shared by men who swear their allegiance to the clan; any action undertaken by the women was bound to fail. But the symbolic force of their act endures. It reveals, once again, how scared men are, in a patriarchal society, of female sexuality, of women claiming their proprietorial rights to their bodies. To be a Somali and a woman fighting for equality and social justice in these times requires an even greater deal of courage than in times of peace. And yet it is more necessary than ever.