Somaliland’s first midwife Edna: 'I started writing about my life because I came so close to death

Edna Adan Ismail is used to counselling patients to a healthy mind in the hospital ward. As a midwife and administrator at her own hospital in Somaliland, the self-declared and breakaway state of Somalia, she has seen her fair share of patients distressed by their afflictions. Despite this, however, Ismail is not immune to the trauma a sudden brush with death brings. It happened to her 15 years ago when what was initially thought to be a routine cold became full-blown pneumonia. Recalling her stay in hospital, Ismail says she feared she wouldn’t survive.  “Things like that make you think,” she says. “This was really the first time I ever came close to death and I thought about how I should begin writing down what happened in my life. I have been blessed to live a full life, so I knew I had a story to tell.” It is one of many understatements Ismail, 82, delivers in her interview with The National. We meet in Dubai, where she took part in the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, which was held earlier this month. It was mission accomplished at the six-day event – not only did she sell out her sessions, but she also sold every festival copy of her memoir A Woman of Firsts. True to its title, the engaging and powerful work has Ismail retracing her footsteps through a pioneering life – from growing up in a poor and traditional household, to becoming Somaliland’s first qualified midwife and its first female government minister. She also showed tireless commitment to women’s education across Africa and called for the eradication of female genital mutilation. With so much ground to cover, Ismail’s memoir is not so much one story, but a series of startling personal journeys. Some of them are enchanting, while others are heartbreaking. It took Ismail a decade to produce the book and she describes the process as painful. “It was not that I was sitting around doing nothing,” she says. “I was teaching and had a hospital to run, which I still do to this day. So the idea of finding the time to write my story, which I believed was important, was extremely hard.” The solution was as effective as it was ingenious – Ismail recorded her story on tape and paid someone to transcribe it. Not only did this method result in the book’s conversational style, it was also Ismail’s most natural form of expression.