Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdi Nor Iftin and Max Alexander

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  In Chapters 15 and 16 some names of individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Names: Iftin, Abdi Nor, author. | Alexander, Max, 1957– Author.

  Title: Call me American : a memoir / by Abdi Nor Iftin with Max Alexander.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | “This is a Borzoi Book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017043213 | ISBN 9781524732196 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524732202 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Iftin, Abdi Nor. | Somali Americans—Maine—Biography. | Immigrants—Maine—Biography. | Muslims—Maine—Biography.

  Classification: LCC CT275.I43 A3 2018 | DDC 305.893/540741—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017043213

  Ebook ISBN 9781524732202

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v5.3.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

   1 Under the Neem Tree

   2 The First Bullets

   3 Trail of Thorns

   4 City of Women and Children

   5 Arabic to English

   6 The One They Call American

   7 Buufis

   8 Wedding Vows

   9 Sin and Punishment

  10 Trapped

  11 No Number

  12 Messages from Mogadishu

  13 Little Mogadishu

  14 Long Odds

  15 White Rooms

  16 Respect

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  This book is for my proud nomad mother, who saved me. Mom, you nursed my bloody feet after I had walked for miles with you without shoes; you gave me hope with your stories of brave life in the bush; and when I rested my head on a graveyard full of kids of my age, you would not let me join them. Your strength kept me alive in the city of the dead. Now I am safe in America. So long as we both live, I will return that strength and support to you.

  A mule that grazes with horses thinks it is a horse.

  —SOMALI PROVERB

  1

  Under the Neem Tree

  I was born under a neem tree, probably in 1985. Neem trees grow everywhere in Somalia, with fragrant blossoms like lilacs and medicinal bitter sap that prevents sores. People everywhere in Somalia brush their teeth with those twigs. Their green fruit turns yellow and juicy, a great treat for the birds. The trees have small leaves, but the limbs spread wide and give shelter from the sun—a good place to have a baby. A good place to be born.

  I was born into a culture where birthdays are not celebrated, or even recorded. This became a problem for me when I left Somalia and entered the world of documents and paperwork. My first birthday record was in Kenya at a refugee registration center. The officers there did not bother to ask me when I was born, because they know Somalis have no idea; the flood of Somali refugees coming into Kenya are always surprised by the question. The officers simply wrote down my birthday as January 1, 1985. To them, every Somali is born on New Year’s Day. Arriving in America was different. Here the officials didn’t want to make up “January 1.” I had to come up with a birth date and stick with it for the rest of my life. It’s a strange thing to choose your own birthday. Some people are born lucky, others born unlucky, but nobody gets to choose when he was born, or where. But there I was. I decided I should choose a date around the middle of the year, which would be equally close to whatever was my real birthday. And I wanted a number that was easy to remember. So I chose June 20, 1985.

  My parents don’t know the day of my birth, but my mom remembers it was very hot. The blazing sun had turned the streets of Mogadishu ash white and the rooms of our small block house into bread ovens. Mom was on her back under the shade of the neem tree, resting on a jiimbaar, a bed made of cow leather stretched over sticks. Our neighbor Maryan cooled Mom’s head with a fan woven from straw, and cleaned the blood. The women of the neighborhood filled the house, curious to see if the baby would be a boy or a girl. They brought fragrant resins and incense like myrrh and uunsi. For me they brought xildiid, the root of a plant that is mixed with water to bathe and protect the baby. Xildiid is one of hundreds of therapeutic plants that grow in Somalia. You can smell the sweet flowers and pungent leaves on the trees and the low bushes that grow everywhere.

  Somalia was once called the Land of the Perfumes; before the wars began, my country exported fragrant and medicinal plants all over the world. My mom remembers somagale, a seasonal plant that sprouts from the ground in the rainy season. She would uproot the plants, crush them, and apply the paste to any bleeding wounds. Awrodhaye was another plant she used to stop bleeding and prevent infections. Mom still believes in those traditional plants that cure everything. She believes knowledge of them has helped her survive anywhere. My mom worried I would not be as strong as her because people in the city don’t know much about the plants and how to survive off the land. Today she asks me on her phone if any of those plants can be found in America. I have not seen them here, but I tell her I have learned other ways to survive.

  While my mom was giving birth, the neighborhood women sat on the edges of the jiimbaar talking and laughing, happy to welcome a new baby. Somali culture dictated that my dad had to stay away from the house; he would stay at his friend Siciid’s place for forty days, the amount of time a woman is supposed to remain chaste after labor. During that time she is called not by her name but rather Umul, which means “maternal.”

  The moment I appeared, Maryan ran down the street to break the good news to my dad that a boy was born (boys are much more appreciated than girls in Somalia). As the women who surrounded Mom ululated in joy, other female neighbors joined the party. My dad took a day off from work and partied with his friends, buying them qat leaves, a stimulant like strong coffee chewed by men in Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Qat is illegal in the U.S. and in much of Europe. He visited us, as a guest in his own house, at least twice during the day. Mom was still sleeping under the neem tree, near clay bowls and glass jars full of porridge and orange juice and the bottled soft drink Vimto, her favorite. Out of respect to my dad she covered her hair while he was there, looking down as she answered his questions. They would never kiss or hug in public. He stood tall and aloof from her bed, examining me, his second son, lying next to Mom.

  The women perfumed the rooms of the house and swept the yard bent over, using a short broom. They came in and out. That same evening, Maryan walked in with ten men, all of them respected local sheikhs. They wore beaded necklaces, the longest string on the leader, and each sheikh kept, in his front pocket, a neem twig for brushing his teeth and a comb and small mirror for grooming his beard after meals. They circled the jiimbaar in the yard where I was lying next to Mom. Some women were cooking a big pot of camel meat; others were mixing a jar of camel milk with sugar and ice cubes from the store. Camel meat and sweet milk together are called duc
o, a blessing for the newborn. For an hour the sheikhs blessed me, verse after verse, very loud, which makes the blessing greater. Afterward, they all sat on a mat on the ground, washed their hands in a dish of water, and feasted on the camel meat and milk. They must have been very hungry because my mom says by the time they were gone, the serving plate was nothing but bones. This blessing and feast meant I would grow better, be healthy and obedient to my parents. For my mom they left a bowlful of the blessed water called tahliil. The sheikhs bless the water by spitting in it; their spit contains prayers. Mom splashed the water on her body every day. She also splashed some on all corners of our house and drank some to prevent curses. Before I left Somalia for Kenya in 2011, two sheikhs had to spit in the water for me so I would stay safe in my travels. That was Mom’s idea.

  Soon after I was born, Mom went back to doing her housework, with me tied to her back so that she was there for me whenever I cried out for milk. She watched me crawl out of the shade of that same neem tree into the scorching heat of the sun, and she was there when I took my first steps on the hot dusty ground. At bedtime she told me Somali folktales and sang lullabies like “Huwaaya Huwaa”: “Mommy is not here, she tiptoed away. She may be with the camel herders. Soon she will return with butter and camel milk.” Mom and her stories were my universe.

  My dad was working and didn’t do much child care, which is normal in Somalia, except to pull out my loose baby teeth or when he did my circumcision. My older brother, Hassan, and I got circumcised on the same day, at the ages of four and three. Hassan was first. “Look at the airplane!” Dad said. Hassan looked up in the sky at the plane, and the sharp Topaz razor came down on his foreskin. Hassan did not even cry; he was always the bravest boy I ever met. When it was my turn, I realized what was coming and I cried, rolling on the ground. Everyone in the neighborhood came to watch the commotion. Two men held me tight to the ground as Dad used the other side of the razor on me. In a moment my foreskin was gone. “Now you are a man,” Dad said.

  * * *

  —

  Of course we were not men, we were still children, and we never strayed far from our mom. Mom likes to call herself the brave daughter of her brave parents. Her name is Madinah Ibrahim Moalim. She was named Madinah after the holy city in Saudi Arabia. Her parents loved that city; they loved Madinah like I love America. It was their biggest dream to see the place where the Prophet Muhammad is buried, but unfortunately they never got to see it. Mom stole the dream from them and always talked about Madinah and Mecca as the best places to be on Earth. It costs three thousand dollars to go to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj, and my mom wants to do it before she dies. Growing up with a huge number of Somali exiles returning from Saudi Arabia, I never understood why my mom and her parents dreamed of living in a place where Somalis are unwelcome. It would be many years before I realized that Somalis are pretty much unwelcome everywhere, and dreams are all we have.

  * * *

  —

  I may not know the day I was born, but at least I know where. Mom was born in the bush and has no idea where because her parents were always moving with the goats and camels. It must have been a little before Somalia got independence from the Italians in 1960. She never saw an Italian or British colonialist but remembers her parents talking about people with no skin that they had seen driving back and forth. Mom spent her toddler days on the hump of a camel, being fed with her mom’s breast milk and camel milk. She says it does not matter how old she is, but she knows she is as old as her camel Daraanle, who was also born the day she was. With hundreds of camels, my mom’s parents had a newborn animal almost every day. They didn’t know how to count with numbers, but they named and marked every camel, goat, and cow and could keep track of them by their names. At the end of the day, when all the animals returned to their corral of thorn branches, my grandmother would count all the goats by their names, while my grandfather did the same with the cows and camels. In total they had almost five hundred animals. They provided the family with milk, meat, and transportation, but there were far more animals than they needed for food. Somali herdspeople have no permanent home, no belongings besides clothes, some jewelry, and cooking utensils. Their wealth is the size of their herd. They have no insurance payments, no loans, no future plans, nothing to worry about except lions and hyenas. To them there are only two days: the day you are born, and the day you die. Everything in between is herding animals.

  My grandparents on both sides were proud pastoralists. They herded their animals across the rangeland of Bay region in south-central Somalia, always moving to find water. They had never heard of Mogadishu or even Somalia, much less Nairobi or New York. Their grazing land was all they knew. Bay lies between the Jubba and the Shabelle Rivers, which nourish the soil. It has more livestock than anywhere else in Somalia and is famous for its gorgeous Isha Baidoa waterfall and the smooth, patterned clay landscape around Diinsoor and Ufuroow villages. Nomads of Bay region enjoy two rainy seasons over the year: Dayr, with light rains, begins in mid-October; Gu brings heavy rains in mid-April. Before it rains, as the clouds build, the animals can smell the coming rain and they dance in anticipation. The people see the excitement of the animals, and they raise their hands to thank God: “Alhamdulilah!”

  The rains mean plentiful water, so the nomads can finally settle down for a few months and build their makeshift huts from sticks carried on the backs of camels. At night the animals stay close to the hut in their corral, and the families sit around a fire near them. They dance with songs for the animals—clapping, stomping their feet on the ground, spinning and shaking their heads, and singing, “Hoo hoobiyoo haa!” “You know my camel by its mark, you know me by my mark!” There is laughter and fresh water and jubilation. A good time for patriotic stories, folktales, poems, and delicious meals of corn and meat. In his time, Iftin, my grandfather, would tell his own brave stories. He would talk about the day he met a pride of lions face-to-face near his house and chased them away for a mile. Eventually, the rains stop, the water dries up, and the nomads pack up their stick huts and thorny corrals on the camelbacks and move on.

  My parents as well as grandparents could name their own great-great-great-grandparents; they could spend a whole night naming them and telling the stories they have passed down. All these ancestral names carry pride; every single one of them was a brave man or woman, someone who owned many livestock and was well known in the area and probably killed a lion. Brave sons and daughters of brave parents. My parents never talked about their lives without talking about the lives of their parents and ancestors because to Somali nomads there is no individual life, only the life of your family. And like their ancestors, my parents followed the Muslim rules. Women have to respect their husbands. Men have power over everything. My parents never questioned these rules or how they came about.

  My mom, Madinah, was a very beautiful nomad girl, tall and slim, with dark hair, a long neck, long legs, and beautiful eyes. One summer day at a watering hole somewhere in Bay region, probably near Buurhakaba with its huge hills, my dad, Nur Iftin, and his herd encountered my mom and hers. She remembers it was raining lightly.

  Herdspeople between the two rivers are respectful of each other’s cattle, which is not always the case in other parts of Somalia. Also they were both proud members of the Rahanweyn clan. So when they met, it was friendly. My dad says he could not take his eyes off my mom. He had never seen such a beautiful woman, but most important he liked how shy she was, which in Somalia is a sign of interest. Mom was barefoot, wearing her long guntiino dress, which goes over only one shoulder, a necklace of black wooden beads, and metal bands around her upper arms. The scars on her neck and arms said without words how brave she was fighting wild animals.

  Dad was in his macawis, a knee-length cloth wrapped tightly around his waist. He wore his nomad sandals made of animal leather. His camels mixed with Mom’s goats around the watering hole. He approached her, and he bragged a
bout his wealth, the animals, which is the only pickup line in the nomadic culture.

  My mom liked him at first sight. Not many men were even taller than my tall mom, but he towered over her. He had a scar on his forehead that showed he had also wrestled wild animals. His high Afro hairstyle crowned his head and wide shoulders. His feet, whitened with the dust, showed that he had walked miles and was still not tired. As he stood there, he introduced Mom to his favorite camels, naming them as they grazed. They also had names for the wild animals that threatened their herds. They talked about Fareey, a local lion who had been terrorizing the herds. Fareey was named for his missing toe, which made his footprints in the clay distinct. Fareey and his pride were smart and killed many animals, including some belonging to my parents’ families, after dark. My dad swore that he would find Fareey and his pride and kill them all to protect my mom’s goats. He never did find that lion, but it was a way to show my mom that he could care for her.

  After their first brief meeting, my parents searched for each other for a couple months, like the guy in The Gods Must Be Crazy who is looking for his two lost boys. When they finally met at another watering hole, my dad believed his prayers had been answered. Now Nur Iftin could not hide his love for Madinah and said he wanted to marry her. She did not say yes or no, but grinned and looked down coyly. In Somalia, that means yes. She was around seventeen, he was in his twenties. Dad arranged a meeting with her parents, and one day both families met in a place near Baidoa, the biggest city in the region, where the agreement was negotiated: fifty camels as a dowry that my dad’s parents paid to my mom’s parents.