This is the moment I discovered I was born a refugee

I’ve always been very close to my parents, my mum especially. When people ask, I call us the Somali Gilmore Girls, but a lot funnier and with more traumatic baggage. Family is at the heart of my life and my culture.

But a trip to Calais as a young journalist led me to a shocking revelation about my parents and my early childhood – that I was born a refugee. My mum had told me this after I returned from my first reporting trip to the refugee camp in Calais. 

I didn’t know what to say when she asked if I had truly forgotten what we had been through. I couldn’t really remember these formative years of my life – which was hugely disorienting and strange.

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And so I set off to uncover the past, interviewing my parents over the course of four years: in what would become my memoir Scattered. I talked about the lives they built as young people in the newly independent Somalia before the war; about their courtship and early marriage; about what happened to them as the country descended into chaos and they decided to leave. I saw my parents in a new light; I saw them for the resilient survivors that they were, not just the victims of the system designed to crush them.

I was hearing my family’s history in my parents’ own words for the first time; I was hearing about the challenges they faced while they were still younger than I am now. I was hearing of how they came to their tortuous decision to leave Somalia, the risk they took when they got on a fishing boat to reach Kenya, and the normality they tried to build for us in the refugee camp we called home. 

It made me understand my parents in a new light: not just as the people they had been in the past, but the ways in which it shaped who they are in the present. I understood where their dark sense of humour had come from, their strength and resilience, and, most importantly, why they continue to hold on to the hope that tomorrow will be a better day. 

I also learned a second shocking revelation after I had begun work on the book: that my mother and I had been separated for a year when she was deported. This was both a revelation about our family and our family’s history, but also threw memories of my childhood into sharp relief.

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I remembered when I was around nine years old, I’d woken up at the break of dawn and found an empty space where my cousin, who was at mine for a sleepover, had been. I panicked. I spent the next few hours looking for her in our small flat while my parents slept. 

I had searched the same place; under the couch or bed, in the kitchen cupboards, or out in the landing, in some desperate hope that she would magically reappear. My aunt had taken her home when I was asleep, I was later told. I had so desperately wanted her to be with me.

I finally understood why I had been so desperate then and in other similar moments in my life. Those events in my early childhood had long reverberations for me, too. I couldn’t access all the memories I’d repressed, but going to therapy allowed me a safe space to imagine myself back there.

As a journalist, I have always been drawn to stories about displacement: and I realised that, however unconsciously, this was for a personal reason as well as a political one. 

When I heard the young girl on the radio talking about Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy, I was overcome with emotion – her story mirrored that of mine and my mum’s, but my mum and I had been lucky enough to be reunited.

Today my parents and I are closer than ever; but it has been a long journey, both literal and emotional, to understand and uncover everything that we went through as a family.

Writing my book has taught me so much about my family history and myself; and becoming a mother myself in the last year has deepened my understanding too. 

When I look at my child, I can’t imagine the pain of being taken from him, but I know I’d do just about anything to be reunited with him. 

I hope to use the revelations I learnt and the experience of writing Scattered in my reporting going forward. I want to better understand and report on what unaccompanied refugee children experience in the UK and Europe; and the lifelong impact being separated from your parents continues to have on children.

Scattered by Aamna Mohdin is out now (Bloomsbury, £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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