The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert

In this agile personal history of trauma, civil strife, and asylum, debut author Salh vividly describes a youth divided between opposing worlds. After being raised in the Somali nomadic tradition by her grandmother in the desert, Salh left at age nine to live with her siblings in Mogadishu in the 1980s until violence forced them to flee, first to Kenya and eventually Canada. With precision, Salh writes about her role in memorializing her nation’s history through the writing of this book—and the civil war that was overshadowed in world news by contemporaneous American aggression in Iraq—while illustrating the contradictory gender dynamics of the culture she grew up in, due to the growth in religious extremism. Though she received an education in her teens—thanks in part to Somali dictator Siad Barre’s belief in women’s equality—she continued to fear for her safety in a misogynistic society where men were “empowered, guilt-free, and valued above women” and female virginity signified a family’s social standing. This sentiment is rendered most boldly when she describes her circumcision, a harrowing rite of passage in her otherwise “blissful” childhood. Despite the graphic nature of her experiences, Salh’s prose radiates with deep empathy and sensitivity, a reflection of the gift for storytelling she inherited from her poet grandmother. This stuns with its raw beauty. (Aug.)