Santa Rosa’s Somalia-born soccer mom pens memoir of life in the desert

With a suburban Santa Rosa home, a nursing career and three kids she carts to soccer games, Shugri Said Salh leads a vastly different life from the one she expected as a young girl. As she recalls in her new memoir, “The Last Nomad” (Algonquin Books), Salh began herding goats in the desert of central Somalia when she was 6. Her mother, who had nine children, sent her to live with her grandmother, one of the few female camel tamers at the time. Salh was taught to survive in a perilous, parched landscape, where drought, hunger and predatory lions, hyenas and scorpions were constant threats.

Salh, 47, is the last in her direct line to have lived this nomadic life, where arranged marriages strengthened clan alliances and a bridal future meant surviving a particularly extreme form of female circumcision at 7 or 8 to be made “clean,” a ritual performed on the ground by a clanswoman using an unwashed knife.

After her mother died in 1980, her father could only care for some of the 23 children he had with multiple wives. For several years, Salh lived in an orphanage in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, run by the first White people she had ever encountered, then with an older married sister. By 1990, with Somalia plunged into civil war, Salh’s extended family fled to Kenya. As a refugee, she resettled in Canada, started college, met and married her Ethiopian-born husband, a software engineer, and arrived in Sonoma County in 2000.

QWhen did you start writing?

Shugri Said Salh’s new memoir retraces her experiences from Somalia to Sonoma.

JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/ STAFF

AIn November or December 2015, I started writing short stories that I would put on Facebook. I don’t have a literature background, but I always knew I was a really good storyteller. Somalia is a nation of poets and storytellers.

QSome of the book’s most beautiful passages are early in the book, when you write about being in the desert. You describe dinners of camel’s milk and dried meat, gathering around the fire at night to tell stories or climbing tall termite mounds to get a lay of the land.

AI love writing about the desert. When I look back, it’s just that young girl, standing on the mound, looking into the distance and thinking that the earth and the sky have a meeting point.

QYour adult self condemns the practice of female genital mutilation, but your book puts readers into the perspective of a young Somali girl who saw it as a rite of passage.

AI had to keep this liberal progressive woman away. It may have given some readers the idea that I was OK with it. But I had to embody that little girl to (show the cultural mindset). I would have really felt out of place in my culture had my grandmother not done what she did to me.

QYou wrote that “something inside you died” during the civil war, when you looked through cracks in the wall of your home and witnessed a murder. A young man randomly shot an older Bantu man who was leading his donkey to get some water.

A(The shooting) wrenched my heart. I didn’t think we were capable of that: a Somali just killing another Somali. That brought home the reality. That’s a nightmare I’ve dealt with for some time.

QAs we’re doing this interview (in late August), people are fleeing for their lives in Afghanistan. Does it affect you to see other people going through that?

AFor those of us who have been in a war, it’s such a trigger. Once, when I was hiking with my daughter, I told her, “I’m hiking with you, and we can pretend there are no problems (in other parts of the world).” Maybe that’s how it was for some Americans, when I was (in Somalia) and in chaos and turmoil, there were people taking their walks and not knowing there was a problem.

QHave you been back to Somalia?

ANot yet. I literally flew out of my country in terror, like a bird whose nest burned down. I want to sift my fingers through the soil and feel the warmth of Mogadishu when it’s not shattered by bullets. Somalia and I owe each other a visit. We need to reconcile.