Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  “Women must not go to groceries by themselves,” said Sheikh Ahmed. “They must go with men. You must pray more. Come to the mosque regularly. We are in a non-Muslim country, and we need to pray to Allah to keep us safe here until we can go back to our country.” I raised my hand and shouted “Amen!” with everyone else. The threat was real. I felt I needed the safety of the community and prayers.

  Sheikh Ahmed looked down into my face without saying anything, but from his burning eyes I could see he was thinking, “I told you so!”

  I knew I could always go back to Yarmouth and stay with Sharon and Gib for safety, but I felt this was a time that the Somali community needed my support. Few refugees spoke English, so my interpretation skills could be needed more than ever if there was trouble. So I stayed close, went to the mosque every evening, and listened to updates of events during the day.

  * * *

  —

  About a week after his inauguration, the president signed an executive order barring citizens of seven countries, including Somalia, from coming to the United States. That included permanent residents with green cards, like me. I was advised by a lawyer not to leave the United States for any reason, because I might not get back in. It was a comfort to see Americans protesting against the ban, followed by court orders striking it down. But the damage was real and affected my own family just as I had feared. A few days after the executive order, Hassan received a final denial letter from the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. It said, “As the request to review the case again has been rejected, the applicant has exhausted all avenues to seek a new decision on his refugee application and the original decision remains final.”

  My brother had now been a refugee in Kenya for fifteen years. Throughout that time he went back and forth for interviews to get resettled in the United States. Now his dream of coming to America was gone forever.

  Hassan is now a husband and a dad of twins, a boy and a girl. There is no denying his marriage to Nasra had a practical side: Hassan knew that a single man applying for resettlement in America has fewer chances than a married man because he is more likely to be a terrorist. And for Nasra, marrying a Somali with a brother in the United States was a form of security. Nasra’s parents live in Mogadishu, three miles from our mom. Her parents got together with my mom and slaughtered four goats, ate rice, and drank camel milk at the wedding, even though the bride and groom were not there.

  As a gift, I sent a thousand dollars for Hassan to get a twin bed and some cooking utensils, new clothes, and some jewelry for his wife. He went back to school after things calmed down in Little Mogadishu, and in March 2017 he got his undergraduate degree in community health. Sharon had paid all his tuition. But now Hassan is back on the streets of Little Mogadishu hawking socks and shoes, struggling to support his family. In Kenya refugees are not allowed to work, even refugees with English and a college degree.

  One day Nasra and the twins got sick. Hassan can’t afford a clinic in Nairobi, so he did what our parents would do in Somalia: he read the Koran and made them drink holy water. Even though his children were both born in Nairobi, they do not have the right to be Kenyan citizens. Hassan is currently applying for their refugee papers.

  Meanwhile in Mogadishu, my other nieces and nephews are growing up in the same civil war that has raged in one form or another for more than a quarter century. Somalia has changed little since I left. Al-Shabaab is active, and the African Union troops are still fighting them. Mogadishu has been reduced to rubble more than ten times. In October 2017, two truck bombs exploded in Zobe Square, the place where my brother used to hang out with his friends, killing more than 500 people, including two guys I had played soccer with.

  My sister Nima’s children are growing up in the usual Somali way. They go to the madrassa and get beaten so they will learn the Koran. The girls have undergone genital mutilation. When they come back to their two-room hut of corrugated-metal sheets at night, my mom tells them the same stories that she told us about the nomadic life in the bush. Chasing the dik-diks, jumping over thornbushes, singing around the campfires, and praying for rain.

  The other day they sent me a picture of everyone. I could not tell my mom from my sister; they both look the same age. Nima has five kids. All her labors were in the house with no professional medical care; each was more complicated than the last, and her sixth child died inside her before being born. She underwent surgery; they said it was fifty-fifty she would live. She survived but remains sick and weak, and she stays inside the hut all day.

  Omar, Nima’s husband, no longer receives money from his cousin in America. Apparently, his demands grew too large after raising a family, and the cousin cut him off. He is jobless, wandering the streets of Mogadishu by day and returning home in the evening empty-handed. On May 8, 2017, his younger brother was killed in an al-Shabaab attack when they were walking together on the street. The terrorists were targeting a government official with a roadside bomb, but Omar and his brother happened to be there. Omar was slightly injured and is recovering. When I spoke to him on the phone, he said, “Inshallah I will be fine!”

  Thanks to me, his kids don’t have to beg for food. I do my best to keep food on their table and clothes on their backs, sending four hundred dollars every month. I know how hard it is to watch your own dad reduced to doing nothing in life. I trust at least they will not starve to death like my baby sister Sadia, but a new drought in Somalia has driven up the price of scarce food, and I can send only so much money.

  My dad is in Baidoa with three kids from his second wife. He calls to ask for money. Sometimes I can’t help him; it is hard to support everyone. But the drought has touched Baidoa hard, it is very dry and hot there. People and animals are in pain and dying fast. How can I let my dad go hungry? So I send him what money I can to keep him alive. I tell him to bring his family to Mogadishu and stay close to my mom so they can eat together to survive. But the road to Mogadishu is under the control of al-Shabaab, and they kill people leaving Baidoa. He is stuck.

  Macalin Basbaas is an old man now and can barely walk, but he takes small steps to our house to say hello to my mom. He often visits at the end of the month when he knows I send money to her. She gives him food and sometimes buys him clothes. And several times I have sent him money directly. This may seem hard to understand after all the cruelty he showed me, but it would stress my mom to see him in misery, so I have helped. I also realize that without him I would never have memorized the Koran; those verses do comfort me every day. Macalin Basbaas probably does not remember cursing me when I danced at my sister’s wedding. Back then I was the stupid man, the wasted student, not like my friend Mukhtar, his devoted assistant who died in jihad. Macalin Basbaas respects me now.

  Siciid, my father’s friend and our truck driver, died of natural causes. Falis, who introduced me to American culture in her video shack, also escaped Somalia. The last I heard, she was living in Nairobi, but I am no longer in touch with her.

  In early 2017, I joined a group chat on WhatsApp with Faisa, who is living in the Dolo Ado refugee camp in Ethiopia. She recognized my voice and sent me a private message: “Is this Abdi American?” In no time we were speaking on the phone. When I told her I was in the United States, she could not believe it. We talked about our memories of good times on the beach in Mogadishu, before al-Shabaab came and ruined it. Our first stolen kiss, under the mango trees and the chattering monkeys by the river in Afgooye. How life had changed for us. Faisa is married now and so could not speak long to me.

  I knew she had met a man of her own tribe a few years back. This was the guy in Sweden; they had connected online. He took the dangerous route out of Somalia through Kenya and Sudan and then across the Sahara Desert. He got arrested in Libya for a few months by gangs. His family bailed him out, and eventually he crossed the sea into Italy, and from there to Sweden, where his uncle lives. He has applied for asylum and is living in a crowded apartmen
t with other refugees. He gets an allowance of sixty-five dollars a month from the government of Sweden. He can’t drive, work, or travel. The government has not yet accepted his asylum, but the pictures he sent to Faisa got her excited about Europe. With the hope that this man will one day become a Swedish citizen, she accepted his marriage proposal. Their wedding, which her husband could not attend, was held at the Dolo Ado refugee camp. Several goats were slaughtered. Faisa said she danced. That made me happy.

  Muna is still in Little Mogadishu, still looking for Mr. Right on Facebook. She is “dating” several men in the United States, one in Seattle, another in Minnesota, a third in Atlanta. She tells me she is getting close to the guy in Atlanta, who drives a truck. He is older and has another wife but has promised Muna that he will bring her over to the United States. He insists he can marry two wives at the same time in the United States under Somali culture, not the American system. I tell her that is not really possible and she will have no married rights in America. Muna doesn’t bother to flirt with me. We are just friends and can share our stories and dreams.

  My mom is getting old. She can’t see or hear well, and she has no way to get eyeglasses or hearing aids. But she can still run fast and jump high; brave Madinah is still strong. She dreams of a Somalia without violence so that she can go back to her nomad life. I dream of bringing her to America, just for a visit, so at least she can experience a different life. I would love her to see snow and fall foliage, and let her taste the sweet drinks at Starbucks. I would take her to some farms in America where they have cows she could touch and smell, even if they’re big and fat, not like the skinny long-horned cows my mom and her family had. Then I would let her go back and spend her final days in her beloved bush, gathering the fragrant herbs of the desert, bathing under the Isha Baidoa waterfall, and calling out to camels and goats. People can still actually live that way in the twenty-first century.

  In Somalia, at least the politics have become a bit brighter. Along with the U.S. elections in 2016 came a presidential election in my country. The winner was a Somali American from Buffalo, New York. His government is still only provisional and is not in control of the whole country, but it is a start. Half of the people in the current Somali government are from the United States. Some of them can’t even speak proper Somali; they grew up here. So the “brain drain” is reversing course; Somalis who came to America as refugees are returning as leaders.

  * * *

  —

  In the four years since I arrived in America, I have been on radio and television, in newspapers, and to conferences. I was a keynote speaker at the University of Maine. I talk often to high-school students around the state. I have traveled as far as Nashville to speak at Vanderbilt University. Every time I tell my story, I am reminded how lucky I am to be here. Abdi Iftin, a child of war in Mogadishu, with no more formal education than Macalin Basbaas’s madrassa, speaking at famous universities! Once I wanted to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger; now my idols are those students I meet. I have enrolled at the University of Southern Maine and plan eventually to study law. Someday I hope to stand for president of Somalia.

  No one from my Rahanweyn clan is yet able to run for Somali president. They are still considered lower class and unfit for the top job under the power-sharing system set up after independence in 1960. But the Rahanweyn are many, and politics can change. Someday I would like to be Somalia’s first Rahanweyn president, but I want to run as a Somali American, not a Rahanweyn, promising peace and justice for all Somalis regardless of clan.

  I want to land at Mogadishu Airport one day with a heart full of love and ambition for my people. Somalis overseas send back $1.4 billion every year to their home country, according to a 2016 World Bank report, through remittances to family members. This is more than all foreign government aid. But I think we could do more. What if we could spend that money to start schools in Somalia, teaching more than just the Koran? What if we built roads, sanitation systems, hospitals, apartment buildings? Islamic extremism is currently the greatest roadblock. Al-Shabaab prefers madrassas and child soldiers to clinics and colleges. And because they thrive on chaos, they love Trump and other politicians around the world who shake their swords at Islam.

  But radical Muslims do not represent Islam. Nor do they represent the hopes and dreams of the Somali people. You can pray to Allah five times a day and still hold hands at the movies, this I know. I know it is possible to savor camel milk and democracy, to chase dik-diks across the bush and stop at red lights, to proudly name your nomadic ancestors and dance to hip-hop at your own wedding. These are not contradictions or abominations but reflections of our universal humanity and, yes, our shrinking world. How else to explain an African boy’s love of Terminator movies, or African drumming classes being taught in American high schools?

  My passion for America was ignited by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hiding from militia fighters in Falis’s video shack in Mogadishu, watching the Terminator dispatch his enemies from the seat of a motorcycle, I had no idea that my hero was not even born in America. Like me, he had a dream to call himself American since he was a child suffering abuse—in his case beatings from a strict dad. Like me, he had Hollywood movie heroes, including the athlete Johnny Weissmuller (also a poor immigrant!) of Tarzan fame. He taught himself English and made sure he was always ready when good luck came his way. And of course, no one had any clue he would one day become governor of California. Now I can see so many ways this poor boy from war-torn Austria was like the poor boy from violent Mogadishu. When Arnold was born, right after World War II, many people thought the countries of Europe were incapable of democracy; the same is said today about African nations. It took time and the support of America, but finally many of those European nations, including Germany itself, became beacons of freedom and tolerance. I hope that holds, but more important I hope that my own example reminds people of what is possible. No one gets to choose when or where to be born, but what happens after that is what you can imagine.

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have written this book without the tireless support, prayers, and encouragement of my family: my mother, Madinah Ibrahim Moalim; my father, Nur Iftin; my brother, Hassan Nor Iftin; and my sister, Nima Nor Iftin, have all shared stories from my childhood and their own. While these stories were already a part of my life, my parents and siblings filled in countless details important to researching the book over many hours of phone conversations between Maine, Kenya, and Somalia. Often these stories were painful for them to recall, and I applaud their bravery in revisiting ugly memories. While shocking to Westerners, my family’s continuing struggle to survive will be sadly familiar to millions of other Somalis—to those like me, who got out, and to those like my family, who remain behind.

  I also want to graciously thank the team that came to my rescue when I was living in Mogadishu as a young man hunted by radical Islamists and other armed factions: Paul Salopek, Cori Princell, Dick Gordon, Ben Bellows, and Sharon McDonnell and her family made a dream team that set up a fund to support my family and my journey out of Somalia to Kenya and finally to the United States.

  In Nairobi, special thanks to Pamela Gordon, who took risks to help me, and to my friends Yonis and Farah, for standing with me together and texting each other when we became prey for the police.

  I am grateful to have a wonderful literary agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, who mentored this book and my writing so diligently, and the fantastic team at Knopf, including Andrew Miller, Zakiya Harris, and Bette Alexander. Thanks to Max Alexander for the passion and guidance he brought to this book. I am lucky to live in the same state as Max, and the work we did together on this book was remarkable. Thank you, Max, for being such a good and supportive friend.

  Very special thanks to Sharon McDonnell and her husband, Gib Parrish, for their generosity in allowing me to become a member of their family and to write this book in their house in Yarmouth, Maine. I would not have
been able to complete it without their moral and material support. Thanks to Becky Steele and her husband, Douglas McCown, for standing up for me and other Maine Somalis after candidate Trump implied that we were criminals. Thanks to Kirk and Camille, who volunteered their time and ideas.

  Finally, thanks to Nicole Bellows, Margaret Caudill, Leo Hornak, and the BBC, This American Life and Ira Glass for following and documenting my story in Kenya and America. I also want to thank Elizabeth Harvey, Yussuf, Abdul, Mohamed, Awil, Jihan, Hannah Read, Maya Tepler, Gil Morino, Meg, Rick, Nene Riley, Shannon Sayer, and Natalya and Morgan McDonnell.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.