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For The Chronicle’s complete list of events and activities happening during Labor Day weekend, go to datebook.sfchronicle.com.
Oakland Symphony Brooklyn Basin Free Summer Concert Series: “Stirring Serenades”:
The second to last outdoor performance in the series is set to feature works by Dvorak and Mozart and VillaLobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5,” featuring soprano soloist Shawnette Sulker.
The Milk Carton Kids:
Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale blur the line between harmony and melody with original, plaintive tunes and fine lyrical guitar work. Introspective singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx opens.
San Francisco Opera: “Tosca”:
Music director Eun Sun Kim conducts Puccini’s dramatic opera classic. Soprano Ailyn Pérez, tenor Michael Fabiano and bass-baritone Alfred Walker are featured in the revival of director Shawna Lucey’s lush period production. Sung in Italian with English supertitles.
Sweetwater Reopening: George Porter Jr. & Friends
and Runnin’ Pardners: Best known as the bassist of the Meters, few bass players in modern New Orleans music history are as storied as George Porter Jr. He has recorded with artists including Paul McCartney, Jimmy Buffett, David Byrne and Patti LaBelle and performed with Mickey Hart, John Scofield, Steve Kimock, Zigaboo Modeliste and many others. and singer-songwriterguitarist Tim Flannery performs original music in the beer garden backed by his band, the Lunatic Fringe.
9 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Sept. 3-4. $25-$30. 6 p.m Sunday, Sept. 5. $25-$41. HopMonk Novato, 224 Vintage Way, Novato. 415-8926200. hopmonk.com
Lost ’80s Live on Labor Day Weekend:
Mountain Winery is scheduled to present a concert featuring bands with claims to ’80s pop culture fame, including A Flock of Seagulls, Josie Cotton, Glass Tiger, the Romantics, Animotion, Naked Eyes and others, live and in-person at the 2,500-seat outdoor amphitheater/winery in Saratoga.
6:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 4. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. $49.50$600. Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce Road, Saratoga. 408-7412822. mountainwinery.com
San Francisco Shakespeare in the Park: “Pericles, Prince of Tyre”:
Co-authored by Shakespeare and George Wilkins, the script for this fourpart production is a modern verse translation, written by Ellen McLaughlin, of the Jacobean-era play.
The fourth and final episode of the S.F. Shakes production, directed by Pantoja, is the first in the series to be presented live in outdoor venues around the bay, from Sept. 4-12 in Redwood City; Sept. 18-26 in San Francisco and Oct. 2-10 in Cupertino.
You can watch the first three episodes from the series on the S.F. Shakes’ YouTube channel.
Anne Schrager is the calendar producer for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: listings@ sfchronicle.com
Even though it’s been nearly 30 years since Shugri Said Salh left her native Somalia, fleeing the East African country’s nascent civil war, she admits that she still sometimes laughs alone in her car when she catches herself instinctively scanning the horizon — for signs of rain or dangerous predators — when driving her family minivan through traffic in Santa Rosa.
Salh might just be running a quintessentially American errand like heading to Whole Foods or shuttling one of her three kids to soccer practice in the suburbs, yet her memories of the open-air nomadic life she lived as a girl herding goats across the expansive Somali desert still surface and absorb her imagination with a deeply sensory and even nostalgic pull.
“I have come so far from where I started that it is often comical,” Salh writes in her moving memoir, “The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert.” “I feel like a portal between two worlds.”
Salh’s book is an absorbing attempt to explain, through vivid recollection and compassion for her own personal traumas and triumphs, how it feels to have experienced two such dramatically divergent lives. Now a skilled infusion nurse married to an Ethiopian software engineer in Northern California, Salh is keenly aware, as her title suggests, of her remarkable position as the last person in her centuries-old ancestral line to have followed the traditions of a purely nomadic lifestyle, one governed entirely by nature’s rhythms and demands.
One of her mother’s nine children (her father, an Arabic scholar, had 23 children with numerous wives), Salh was
The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert
Author events
In conversation with Meg McConahey: Virtual event. 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 2. Free. www.copperfieldsbooks.com In conversation with Marcie Thomas: 5 p.m. Sept. 20. Free. facebook.com/BrownGirl Collective
sent before starting first grade to live with her beloved maternal grandmother, or a nomad and central character in her life and her book. Salh writes fondly of being an adventurous, fearless child, learning to navigate the seemingly endless arid landscape alone, to look after her baby goats, to make yogurt, climb termite mounds and move regularly with her clan in search of grazing land and a new water source, watching the adults pack up their belongings and portable huts onto camels.
Yet Salh’s nostalgia is complicated by both the omnipresent threat of violence, war and famine (she was born during one of Somalia’s worst droughts) and her evolving views — especially acute now that she’s an American medical professional — on her homeland’s long-standing mistreatment of women.
She writes with brutal honesty about undergoing female genital mutilation at a young age in a harrowing outdoor ceremony. (More than 200 million girls worldwide have survived FGM, the partial or total cutting away of the external female genitalia, for no medical reason.) Salh’s excruciating recovery took months, and the extreme policing of her virginity was a constant reminder that in Somali culture, female arousal was deemed the root of humanity’s ills.
“A young woman’s virginity signified her value, and once that was lost, there was no point in fighting for her,” Salh writes.
And yet, Salh reflects now, she was so indoctrinated in those beliefs that she and her sister Arafo looked forward to the barbaric rite of passage as an opportunity to join the ranks of “clean girls.”
Salh realized she wasn’t considered “normal” by global standards “only when so many Somali women like me were streaming into Canada as refugees” in the early ’90s, she said recently by phone. “Then, our mutilated bodies were being discovered either through birthing children or (seeing a doctor) for a period issue or, in my case, when I wanted to get intimate. People were writing about us in the news. There was this obsession with seemingly normal, beautiful Somali women having something so wrong with them.”
She acknowledged it’s hard for Americans, and likely many of her readers, to understand that “when you’re coming from that world I grew up in, that was our normal. You don’t know better. Every woman I knew was mutilated. If she wasn’t, we made fun of her. Even as an adult, some of them went and got it before marriage.”
Salh underwent reconstructive surgery shortly after getting married. Since then, she has struggled to dismantle the psychological knot of shame she carried inside.
“The psychological effects of shame are so big and so deeply ingrained,” she says. Salh and her sisters talk by phone about their journey toward psychological health and finally feeling empowered to make other choices.
“I will not perpetuate this ritual with my daughters,” she says. “Change doesn’t come easily, but I’m encouraged seeing so many Somali women growing up in the diaspora developing more of a voice to fight back. I want this book to reach the whole world because I hope even one man reads it in Somalia and says, ‘Wow, let’s not do this to our women.’ ” When asked whether it was painful reliving her experiences by writing the graphic section on her genital mutilation, Salh said that, surprisingly, “the orphanage chapter was actually harder.”
At age 9, following her moth
er’s death, Salh was sent to live with her siblings at a group home in Mogadishu run by well-meaning Europeans. (She describes her shock at seeing her first white person.) “My nomadic soul had begun eroding,” she writes. She longed for her grandmother as the surrounding city devolved into the chaos of war.
In January 1991, Salh and
her family fled Mogadishu on foot, eventually making it to a refugee camp in Kenya. A year later she arrived in Ottawa, where she met her husband, Selehdin Salh. He accepted a job in Petaluma in 1999 and the two moved to the Bay Area. Salh attended Pacific Union College of Nursing in Napa and says she has worked to the point of total exhaustion through the COVID pandemic.
She prides herself on being
from a nation of poets and is a gregarious storyteller with the patients in her care, personalizing and adding levity to otherwise sterile procedures like starting an IV. As evident throughout her memoir, Salh’s sense of humor remains intact.
“I laughed many times writing this book because this life I’m living seems impossible,” she says. “I could have lived a million other lives. One life was set for me, the life of the
ending.
Harnack was guillotined on Feb. 16, 1943, at the age of 40 on Adolf Hitler’s direct orders, which we learn on page 6. Yet knowing her terrible fate from the onset shouldn’t dissuade you from reading this pageturner about Harnack’s perilous journey, no matter how much you know about the Holocaust and the brave resistance movement.
Born in Milwaukee, Mildred Fish was studying for a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin when she met German doctoral student Arvid Harnack. The two married and she followed him to his homeland, where she taught American literary history at the University of Berlin. Mildred quickly became
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days troubled by the rise of Nazism.
Donner’s descriptive style takes us inside Nazi Germany and makes the book hard to put down. “Swastikas are cropping up like daisies everywhere: on posters pasted to the walls of U-Bahn stations, on flags and banners and pamphlets,” she writes.
Mildred is most anxious about the politician gaining popularity, “a high-school dropout named Adolf Hitler who, Mildred predicts, will bring ‘a great increase of misery and oppression.’ ”
She begins holding secret resistance meetings in her apartment, forming a group she and Arvid name The Circle. She recruits like-minded members who first distribute leaflets urging Germans to “resist, resist, resist,” and later put their lives at risk feeding intelligence about Hitler’s expansion plans to the U.S. and elsewhere.
Author events
“Mildred Harnack: American Grad Student/Berlin Resistance Leader”: Rebecca Donner in live-stream conversation with George Hammond. 3 p.m. Sept. 7. $5 general admission; $32 admission plus book. www. commonwealthclub.org
Book Passage presents Rebecca Donner: In person event. 5:30 p.m. Sept. 9. Book Passage Ferry Building, 1 Ferry Building, S.F. Free. www.book passage.com.
We see Hitler’s rise to power and increasingly violent crackdown on his perceived enemies through the eyes of Mildred and Arvid. Donner’s book documents their sham trials on charges of treason. Its title stems from what a chaplain observed when he visited Mildred in prison, emaciated and struggling with tuberculosis, yet intensely focused on translating a volume of Goethe’s poems into English.
“In all the frequent troubles of our days/ A God gave compensation — more his praise/ In looking sky- and heavenward as duty/ In sunshine and in virtue and in beauty.”
Mildred Harnack didn’t survive to see the end of the war or Hitler’s downfall. But her heroic actions may now get the attention they deserve through this heartbreaking work written by her descendant.