Spent 8 Hours Yesterday Re-reading Abdi Nor Iftin's CALL ME AMERICAN, a Somali-American Memoir That is Engaging, Harsh, & Telling

In 2018, I read Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin, and thought to myself, "I wish this was written at the time of my dissertation." Then, piecing together history to help explain how so many Somali-Americans were arriving through refugee services was limited. There were only so many books published, and I remember Eastern African scholars in African Studies challenging me when I began writing about Bantu people coming to Syracuse. "They don't live there...you need to check your sources...I've never heard of this population." Long story short, little was known because little was written, and all written came from Western viewpoints. I simply listened to Ali, Abdi, and Omar and from what they told me, I tried to piece together the story, one article, one publication, and one inquiry at a time.

I did spend a lot of this period reflecting on 1990-1994 while doing the research, simply because at the height of the Somali wars, when the United States stepped in, I was an undergraduate college student first studying with Carol Boyce Davies in London and realizing how little of the world my own schooling offered me. Here I was, 19 studying in a Black British Experience abroad program while also learning more about Shakespeare. I was clueless about the world that, then a child, Abdi Nor Iftin was living. It is beyond imagination. As we were pub-hopping, touring, eating samosas, and attending more London theater than what should be humanly possible, mothers and children were living in rubble, starving, dodging bullets, stepping over dead bodies, and surviving in absolute fear. 

That hits homes. I was budding into an intellectual work on a 'living abroad' program, which others didn't have a place to call home. There, the two words present themselves.

This month, I've been working with Abdi on a collaborative piece, as well as preparing for his appearance on The Write Time. As I read his memoir yesterday, I was taking notes to the fill-in gaps of the puzzle that I wasn't able to figure out in 2009-2011 when I was living in the library. His narrative does a beautiful job of blending story together with the details of Somalia, colonized heavily by the British, Italians, Yemeni, Russia, and even China. The U.S. in its policing of the world stepped in when the Humanitarian crisis became unbearable. 

Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) of Bridgeport would love to get Abdi Nor Iftin to visit Connecticut this upcoming year and I promised them I'd do anything I could do to help. I've read numerous refugee-background immigrant stories, but this one is extra hitting, probably because Chitunga and I watched every U.S. marines movie about that period of time, simply when he wanted to enlist. The movies were educational, but Hollywood all the way. Abdi's memoir fills in more culture, history, tradition, and norms from the perspective of a child building meaning from that time. It's hard to type that it is unbelievable, but the story truly is unbelievable. 

If I was in charge of curriculum in the Western world, I'd make this memoir required reading for every graduating senior. To know there, is to know here. 

I can't wait to host Abdi Nor Iftin on The Write Time and want to meet him in person, too. Who knows? Maybe he'll be my reason to finally visit Maine.