Sihaam Mohamoud: Jeg blev sendt på genopdragelsesrejse

Sihaam Mohamoud was eight years old when her mother told her they were going on a very long summer vacation. It was January. The vacation lasted over a year, and it took her to Somaliland, a region she had never visited, to live in a Quran school where girls were beaten with iron pipes for arriving late. She was shot in the face during her stay. She was the only student who had ever attended a Danish public school.

The central question of this conversation is how a child born and raised in Denmark ends up sent back to a country she does not know, and what that reveals about the pressures inside certain diaspora families. Mohamoud’s answer is direct: the practice is called daran alis, a Somali term for children who have become “too European” or “too Western.” The solution, for some parents, is to send them back to be re-educated in their “own” culture.

The mechanics of the return trip

Mohamoud’s mother was not a monster, she insists. She stayed by her daughter’s side the entire year. But the decision to leave Denmark was made in a state of crisis. The family had been living in shelters, moving between municipalities, and the mother—who was herself only a teenager when she had Sihaam—heard that other Somalis were relocating back. She saw it as an escape from a situation where they had no stable housing.