The Last Nomad
Coming of Age in the Somali Desert
-
-
5.0 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A remarkable and inspiring true story that "stuns with raw beauty" about one woman's resilience, her courageous journey to America, and her family's lost way of life.
Finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nonfiction Award
Winner of the 2022 Gold Nautilus Award, Multicultural & Indigenous Category
Born in Somalia, a spare daughter in a large family, Shugri Said Salh was sent at age six to live with her nomadic grandmother in the desert. The last of her family to learn this once-common way of life, Salh found herself chasing warthogs, climbing termite hills, herding goats, and moving constantly in search of water and grazing lands with her nomadic family. For Salh, though the desert was a harsh place threatened by drought, predators, and enemy clans, it also held beauty, innovation, centuries of tradition, and a way for a young Sufi girl to learn courage and independence from a fearless group of relatives. Salh grew to love the freedom of roaming with her animals and the powerful feeling of community found in nomadic rituals and the oral storytelling of her ancestors.
As she came of age, though, both she and her beloved Somalia were forced to confront change, violence, and instability. Salh writes with engaging frankness and a fierce feminism of trying to break free of the patriarchal beliefs of her culture, of her forced female genital mutilation, of the loss of her mother, and of her growing need for independence. Taken from the desert by her strict father and then displaced along with millions of others by the Somali Civil War, Salh fled first to a refugee camp on the Kenyan border and ultimately to North America to learn yet another way of life.
Readers will fall in love with Salh on the page as she tells her inspiring story about leaving Africa, learning English, finding love, and embracing a new horizon for herself and her family. Honest and tender, The Last Nomad is a riveting coming-of-age story of resilience, survival, and the shifting definitions of home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Amazing, Spectacular Novel!!
Highly recommend! I came away from this book feeling changed like I deeply learned the truths of resilience, forgiveness, empathy, fear and many more.