Scattered by Aamna Mohdin review – the road to survival

A journalist’s exploration of her family’s chaotic journey from Somalia is startling in its intimacy and honesty

In her first book, Guardian journalist Aamna Mohdin explores her Somali family’s refugee experience in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and Britain, confronting many different versions of herself in the process. As she rests in a hotel after visiting the Kenyan beach where her mother had landed, heavily pregnant with her, after fleeing the carnage in Mogadishu, Mohdin reflects on a quote from William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Reading on, she wonders how much of who she is was determined by those events: “All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Scattered illuminates the webs that entrap not only Mohdin, but countless others who fled the Somali civil war and many conflicts since.