A journalist’s deep dive into her family’s tumultuous odyssey from Somalia is both surprisingly raw and candid
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Aamna Mohdin. Photograph: Alice Zoo/The Guardian
In her debut book, Guardian scribe Aamna Mohdin unravels her Somali clan’s refugee saga across Kenya, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Britain, confronting manifold identities along the way. Resting in a hotel post-visit to the Kenyan beach where her pregnant mother landed after fleeing Mogadishu’s chaos, she ponders Faulkner’s notion: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
As she reads on, she contemplates how her identity was shaped by these events: “We all toil in webs spun long before we entered the world, webs of heritage and environment, of aspiration and repercussion, of history and timelessness.” Scattered illuminates those very webs trapping not just Mohdin, but legions of others fleeing the Somali civil conflict and countless other wars.
Being a refugee’s child, Mohdin finds herself in a fog of knowing and not knowing: she recalls Kakuma camp in Kenya yet forgets her schooling there; she knows her early London days separated from both parents, but the trauma dulls her memory. The grind of forging a life in Britain as a “third-culture kid” renders her past murky and unnerving.
Her tale unfolds through heartfelt chats with her affectionate, straightforward parents in East London, on pandemic-era video calls, and in a Turkish eatery later on. There’s a cathartic feel for both the storyteller and her kin. Amidst laughs, hardship tales are shared, but Mohdin revisits the terror of young eyes witnessing Saudi guards hauling her mom away for deportation.
Covering the 2015 refugee crisis as a journalist, Mohdin stays composed while reporting on the tragedies in Calais, among souls yearning for a fresh start in the UK, just like her family did. But when a charity worker mistakenly scolds her, thinking she’s another refugee lining up for basics, her distance shatters. When your own kin have braved perilous seas, clung to trucks, or vanished into detention, you’re ensnared in that web of history, ambition, and consequence.
Such a saga feels surreal in today’s Britain, where politicians channel public wrath towards asylum seekers.
In the UK, Mohdin’s kin thrives and blossoms to where her dad can make trips back to Somalia to restore what’s gone. A narrative that defies belief in modern Britain, where some leaders—ironically children of refugees—fuel public ire against those fleeing terror, and shut down safe passages.
The wreckage of the Somali civil strife and its resulting humanitarian nightmare is rarely chronicled, mostly politicized or academic. Thus, the unvarnished honesty and closeness in this portrait of a family’s frantic quest for refuge stands out. Especially poignant, since many of Somalia’s famed authors, like the pioneering novelist Farah Awl, perished during the war’s flight. Now, the children of that era are piecing the story back together.
Scattered: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee by Aamna Mohdin is out via Bloomsbury Circus (£18.99). Support the Guardian and Observer and get your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.
