Quote, Unquote: 'Desert Dawn' by Waris Dirie and Jeanne D'Haem
Created | Updated Dec 22, 2002
This is the sequel to Waris Dirie's autobiography, Desert Flower, in which she tells her life story: growing up in a family of desert nomads in Somalia, running away from an arranged marriage, being discovered in London by photographer Terence Donovan and becoming a top fashion model. Desert Dawn is about Dirie's journey home to Somalia to rediscover the land and the family she left behind twenty years earlier.
This quote comes from chapter five, Endless Flights, where Dirie describes traveling to Somalia, which involves a flight transfer at Abu Dhabi. On arriving she is told, to her surprise, that the next plane to Somalia will not be leaving for another two days. She remembers that her sister works as a maid for a Saudi family who do not live far from the airport and so decides to go and stay with her until she can catch her on-going flight. However, Dirie's plans are dashed when she is told that she is forbidden to enter the country, since she has no visa to enter the United Arab Emirates. She cannot leave the airport.
I will never understand this need for documents and papers. Why do they have all this power over people; why do they dictate what people can do? Nobody has papers in Somalia. We don't need to show a passport when we are looking for grass for the goats to eat. If you want to see someone you go, you don't have papers to keep some people in and others out. You do what you feel, what you need to do. You are a person, not numbers and letters written on a piece of paper. It doesn't matter to a nomad where he is from, it matters where he is. Once I asked my mother about the year that I was born – she doesn't remember.
I think this quote provides an excellent commentary on border and immigration control, and one with which I am in total agreement.
(All quotes taken from Desert Dawn, Warie Dirie and Jeanne D'Haem, Virago Press 2002).
