Aman

The Story of a Somali Girl

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by Virginia Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy

Random House, Inc

Due/Published August 1995, 349 pages, paper

ISBN 0679762094

An extraordinary first-person account of a young woman's coming of age in Somalia during the 1950s and 1960s. Aman is an instantly recognizable story of a girl who struggles against the obligations and strictures of family and society. Aman gives a portrait of herself as fiercely devoted to her family and culture yet searching for a better life. By the time she is eight, she has undergone a ritual clitoridectomy. At eleven her innocent romance with a white boy leads to a murder. At thirteen she is given away in an arranged marriage to a stranger who attempts to deflower her with a knife. She runs away to the city, where her beauty and rebelliousness lead her to the rich, decadent demimonde of white colonialists. Unflinchingly honest in the telling of her story, Aman emerges as a woman capable of both generosity and selfishness, love and cruelty. Hers is an astonishing history, engagingly - and necessarily - concerned with the role of women in tribal societies, female circumcision, the vicissitudes of colonialism, and the quest for female self-awareness.