Edgelands
A Life on Society’s Margins
a memoir by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
EXCERPT
ON SATURDAY, JULY 26, 2005, at age nineteen, I escaped an arranged marriage to a woman in northeastern Somalia whom I’d never met. I’d arrived in London in early June, en route to meet my father in Abu Dhabi; we were supposed to fly to Somalia together. He was keen for me to get married to cover up the stench of my homosexuality. While in London, during a phone call with my stepmother back in Toronto she said I could still chase boys in Somalia as long as I gave her some grandkids. I knew that if I didn’t escape, I would lead a life of regret in the land of my ancestors.
The whole debacle began while I was having my stomach pumped at the old Keele Street site of Humber River Hospital. I’d been admitted because I took a deadly dose of pills after a violent argument with my stepmother. She lunged at me; I pushed her to the ground and ran out of the apartment barefoot. I sat in the stairwell and decided I was going to kill myself that night. Suicide had always been a fantasy but in that moment, I worked up the courage to try it. I was no longer satisfied with imagining my body underneath a car or torn asunder by the force of a speeding train, bones protruding out of sockets and flesh cut to the bone.
On that spring evening in 2005, nestled beside the Humber River, I downed a few bottles of benzodiazepines and painkillers in the bathroom. The painkillers belonged to my stepsister Fadumo, who had been in a car accident.
There I was, hooked up to various machines measuring my vitals and others trying to empty my guts of the sedating pills. I was told, by Fadumo, that I was given over to outbursts in which I accused various family members of wrongdoing and yelled that I would hate them forevermore.
Once discharged, the doctors and nurses told me to return for group therapy but I didn’t. At home, everyone treated me with kid gloves and my stepmother seemed maternal for a change. No longer harping on about my failures.
At this point, she insisted I ought to fly out to the Horn of Africa to calm my nerves. She figured camel rides and lounging on the beach would undo whatever was ailing me. My stepsister, the one who had been in the car accident, would change not only the trajectory of that trip but my entire life.
Shortly after my discharge, I accompanied Fadumo to an appointment with her lawyer. She was expecting to receive news about a potential insurance settlement. A motorcyclist had cut off her boyfriend on the highway. The motorcyclist lost his life and she and her boyfriend were left injured. As we made our way downtown, she told me that she heard me confess to homosexual relations while I was having my stomach pumped. Apparently, I had been going on about the man I had lost my virginity to. She didn’t think it was right that her mother was blaming herself for my suicide attempt and gave me an ultimatum.
Either you tell her or I will. It’s up to you.
I couldn’t believe this heifer. Here she was asking for my moral support in getting over her car accident but she had very little compassion for me. Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised because that was my role in this family. I was the whipping post and scapegoat but everyone needed my help, be it with their schoolwork or with money. I was good for nothing but good enough to ghostwrite an essay about Othello and Desdemona.