Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  Every night after a great movie I buried myself underneath a warm blanket and thought about my past life, the tough times, the near-death escapes. My heart warmed with the knowledge that I was far away from that pain, even as I worried for my family. But waking up in the morning for work, I had to face another freezing day on the batting squad, my own real-life version of The Grey. At least there were no wolves. I didn’t mind the hard work, but I hated the cold.

  One day the manager of the company called me into his office to tell me I was getting a raise to twelve dollars an hour. He put me on the night shift with a batting squad insulating a new school building on an island off the coast of Portland. Every evening we took our truck out to the island on a ferry, then worked all night as more and more snow fell. One of the crew members was Bob, a tiny guy who had piercings in his lower lip and tattoos on his neck. The other guys called him Mini because he was so small. His nickname reminded me of the militiamen in Somalia who had nicknames like “Long-Eared” and “One-Eyed,” and I called him Bob. He seemed to like doing his job, but he cursed a lot, maybe to make up for his small size.

  One time during our midnight break, Bob started a conversation with me. “Man, I am fucking scared for my wife,” he said, explaining that he didn’t like leaving her home alone all night. He said his town had a bad record of gun violence and thugs breaking into houses. He had lost a brother to a drug dealer who shot him twice in the head. “I got a fucking gun in my house so my wife can protect herself,” he said. I asked him if he had ever seen anyone get shot and he said no, just animals when out hunting.

  All of my co-workers liked to go hunting; they shot deer and turkeys and sometimes even moose and bears. They told stories about Americans getting accidentally killed by guns in the woods and how you needed to wear orange during deer season. They talked all the time about guns and what kinds of guns they liked best. I knew lots of guns too, but not the kind they took hunting. Of course I always saw lots of weapons in Hollywood movies but didn’t really understand how much Americans thought about shooting guns. It wasn’t just hunting; all over the news that winter were stories of black Americans getting shot by police. There was so much talk of racism; I didn’t know this existed in the United States. Every day was a new surprise.

  I couldn’t believe Americans were scared for their lives in their own homes until I heard stories like Bob’s. I slept in my big white room peacefully, with no sounds of gunfire anywhere around or police kicking down my door for a bribe.

  Then we had a gun incident at work. Jimmy, one of the older guys working at the company, was fired for smoking weed inside the office. I guess he couldn’t wait until getting on the truck. His co-workers had a day full of fun talking about their friend getting fired as I listened in surprise. But the next morning Jimmy returned to the shop with a rifle in his hand, threatening to spray bullets on us. It was a Friday and payday, so all the guys had been in a good mood, talking about how they would spend their money over the weekend. But the happy day turned into a frantic game of hide-and-seek as we scattered behind stacks of insulation. The cops soon arrived and managed to get the gun from Jimmy before they arrested him. It was still so early in the morning most of Yarmouth was still asleep. Until then the only white Americans I had seen with guns were those handsome marines in Mogadishu, and they always pointed their weapons away from us. I had no idea Americans turned guns on each other like Somali militiamen, and this left me scared and confused.

  * * *

  —

  Months passed and the winter finally ended. The warm weather felt so good, but I realized I had been in America almost a year and without much progress. I was trying so hard to fit in, but I had so much to learn. One day I left the stove on, I forgot you have to turn it off, it’s not like a cookfire that burns out. Sharon and Gib were so patient and kind, but my pride made me embarrassed to make mistakes. Sometimes I went upstairs, lay in my bed, and remembered the good old days when thinking about America was heavenly. I was realizing nothing is easy, even in America.

  Somalis are pretty reserved around strangers; until you know someone, it’s considered best to listen respectfully and be quiet. But most Americans speak their minds right away. They are not afraid of starting a conversation. I struggled for months to gain such confidence.

  I didn’t want to admit this to myself, but I was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then I have learned that virtually all Somali refugees have some version of this. I would wake up at night in a sweat, having nightmares, which only made me more tired at work. When I wasn’t working, I spent more and more time up in my room watching movies and surfing the Internet. I talked on the phone with Hassan a lot, and for some reason I found peace talking to him about life, even though he was still at the mercy of the brutal Kenyan police. He kept telling me that everything would work out fine. Hassan was preparing to marry his new sweetheart—another Somali refugee, a woman he had met in Little Mogadishu who was selling fruits and milk on the street. Together we planned his wedding over the phone. We had fun talking about the music and food he would arrange for the wedding.

  I found myself missing all my African friends and our shared language and culture. I missed drinking Somali tea and sitting around on floor mats eating dinner with our hands, no forks, no spoons. I realized that as horrible as my life was in Africa, I was homesick.

  I knew I could not reasonably go back to Kenya even for a visit, much less Somalia, but I longed to see more of America. I wanted to see the America from movies, where black people in sneakers play basketball on the side of the street. I heard that a group of immigrants played soccer every weekend in Portland, and I decided to join them.

  Gib gave me a ride down to the pitch on Back Cove. I couldn’t believe what I saw—Iraqis, Burundis, Rwandans, Somalis, Latin Americans, and other people, all playing soccer together. I heard Spanish, French, Swahili, Somali, Kinyarwanda, Arabic, and more. But together we all spoke English, our one common language. I had no idea all these people lived in Maine! About a third of the players were female, white American women who loved soccer. They played hard and scored goals, roaming the pitch as defenders, strikers, and even midfielders. I’d never seen anything like this either.

  I joined up quickly and had an amazing day, even scoring a goal. We played rough, lots of tackling and tripping, stuff that would definitely draw penalties in a professional match. But at the end of the day it was handshakes and congratulations to the winners, so much fun. As much as I loved my family in Yarmouth, I decided I needed to be close to these people.

  16

  Respect

  Through a friend of Sharon’s I was introduced to Abdul, a young man who ran an agency in Portland that helped settle new Somali immigrants, most of whom suffered from trauma and emotional stress and spoke no English. Abdul took me to the main mosque in town, and I couldn’t believe all the Somalis, most of whom had cars, jobs, and their own homes. Within a week I said warm good-byes to my new American family, quit my job on the batting squad, and moved into an apartment in Portland with Abdul and three other Somali guys. The second-floor apartment was in a complex of several nearly identical buildings, spread out on a winding road amid lots of trees, like a suburban street. Many of the apartments had Somali and other refugees, or really poor Americans, and were publicly subsidized. We paid the market rate because we all had green cards and could work. My plan was to get a job in Portland; until then I would pay my four-hundred-dollar monthly rent and utilities out of savings.

  It sounded like a TV show: five Somali guys in a small Maine apartment. There was Abdul, the only one of us who had already become an American citizen. Yussuf and Awil worked at Walmart and the Shaw’s grocery store; Mohamed was a taxi driver. The apartment had only two bedrooms and one bathroom, but we just spread out mattresses and slept all over the floor, taking turns in the bathroom. I was in charge of making breakfast, usually Somali sour panc
akes called anjara, with peas and some cubed lamb or goat from the halal market. For lunch everyone was off at work; dinner was the Somali version of beans and rice known as ambulo, drizzled with sesame or olive oil and a little sugar. Okay, a lot of sugar. Of course we ate on the floor, with our hands, just like in Africa. We laughed so hard, wrestled, drove together to soccer games and the mosque, and maybe washed dishes once a week.

  My roommates had all been in Maine over ten years, making me the new guy in town. But I was surprised how little American culture they had absorbed. I would play the latest hip-hop songs on my phone while I cooked, but they just listened to Arabic chants called nasheeds. No one except me had a passion for America. Abdul was the only one who had even bothered learning English, which he needed for his work. In their jobs stocking shelves at Walmart and Shaw’s, Yussuf and Awil didn’t really need to speak English. They knew where the cans went, how to open boxes, how to punch in and out of the time clock. When customers approached them with a question, they would scurry away—too embarrassed to confront an American and be caught with no English, like being naked. The same with Mohamed, who knew only enough English to collect fares and enter addresses into the GPS of his taxi.

  I said to them, “Ten years in America, why don’t you learn English? You could get better jobs! Cashiers make more than shelf stockers, but they need to speak English. And you could have fun on the weekend, going to movies and parties.” But Mohamed, Awil, and Yussuf felt like they were just biding their time until they could return to Somalia. They checked the Somali news every day, hoping peace would come. In a decade none of them had ever been outside Maine, except to Boston to make a flight back to Somalia. They had all returned home at least twice for visits, and they talked about enjoying camel milk and camel meat, which you can’t find in Maine. Mohamed’s dad was the chief of a village in southern Somalia, and Mohamed hoped to inherit the crown when his dad stepped down. When he went back to Somalia, the villagers gave him a royal reception, literally showering him in camel milk. It must have been hard to come back to Portland and pick up passengers at the bus terminal. Of course his family in Somalia thinks he’s rich.

  All my roommates were supporting their families back home. None of them had a savings account; every penny they did not spend on their own small expenses went back to Somalia. There were always too many people to support and not enough money. Every week was the same: you got paid on Friday; you sent whatever money was left over from the last week to your mom, or your dad, or your uncle or brother in Somalia or Kenya. Life was one paycheck at a time, so different from my American friends who always talked about their future goals. They wanted to go to college, get a good job, save money to buy a house or travel, the usual things. For most Somalis in Maine, the only future goal besides going home was to have money left over at the end of the week so your family in Somalia could boil some beans and maize.

  My roommates were members of either the Hawiye or the Darod clan, each of which has a huge number of people living in Maine. My Rahanweyn clan does not have much of a presence here in Maine, and often I felt disconnected. Every Somali I met asked me about my clan. When I told them Rahanweyn, they would ask me what I was doing in Maine; there are more Rahanweyn in Minnesota or Seattle, they said. But I told them I was not here to reunite with my tribe, I was here to be American. That sounded like a crime to them—to abandon your clan and become an American! To them you could not be Somali without having a clan.

  In Somalia, al-Shabaab and even the more moderate imams always told us that everyone in America was a crusading Christian bent on converting Muslims and destroying Islam. So I was really surprised when I got to Maine and saw that nobody I met was interested in talking about Jesus or Christianity. Most Americans seemed like they would rather spend their Sundays outside, or reading the paper, or having brunch, or doing just about anything besides going to church. In Kenya there are so many more Christian churches; pastors even get onto the public buses and preach, waving the Bible and spreading the word. I never saw someone preaching on a bus in Maine or Boston. I learned that when a stranger was nice to me, it was enough to just say “thank you,” not “God bless you.”

  Shannon, my American friend from Bangor whom I had met on the health project in Kenya, and her friend Tina told me they were spiritual but not religious. They lived with their boyfriends, even though their families had big houses. They preferred to live their own way. That individual liberty was such a new concept to me, to most Africans, and it was scary but exciting. It got me thinking that this is a great nation where you can be anyone, as long as you can assimilate and learn the language and customs. That was my task, and I worked at it every day. So many figures of speech to memorize! Someone asked me, “What is your apartment situation like?” I started describing the kitchen, the bathroom, the location. Then he said he meant who were my roommates, how much was the rent, and so on. The “situation.”

  I have always been fast to learn languages, but now I was finding that customs and culture were much harder to absorb, and in these cases my language skills often failed me. Discussions about American music, sports, TV shows, food, breeds of dogs, and species of birds just made me sit there like an idiot. Sometimes I felt all I could talk about were my own life stories. People appreciated hearing them, but I also wanted to feel like I belonged here and could talk about American things. So I vowed to keep learning.

  I was often invited by my American friends to go hiking, skiing, and other fun weekend things, and I always accepted. On these trips we would split the cost of everything, gas, food, hotel rooms. This is an aspect of American culture very different from Somalia, where it is the custom that one person is honored to pay for the meal. One time my roommates and I had lunch together at the Babylon Iraqi restaurant. After the goat meat and rice I took out my debit card and asked everyone to do the same. “Let’s split it,” I said. But they were all angry and astonished I would suggest this thoughtless American custom. They insisted I pay for it all.

  Likewise in our apartment when Somali guests came from Minnesota or Seattle, we would let them share our beds. Two people in one bed. Or I would sleep on the floor in the living room and let them take my bed. But when I visited my American friends in their houses, they asked me to sleep in the living room. They never shared their own bed! I found myself constantly juggling the customs of these two different worlds.

  When I returned from the movies or hikes or other fun things to my apartment, I would recount my activities. My roommates asked if I had prayed during all the fun. When I said no, they yelled at me for becoming too American. “You have abandoned your faith for a hike in the woods!”

  My roommates also thought outdoor activities were stupid.

  “Why bother building a camp in the wilderness when you can sleep in your freshly made bed?”

  “We came here from refugee camps. Camping is not fun!”

  “We hiked hundreds of miles through the bush into Kenya, now we have cars, we don’t need to hike!”

  Birthdays were another strange concept to my roommates. Everyone in our apartment except me was born on January 1. One time an American co-worker at Walmart brought Yussuf some cupcakes for his birthday, and it made him so angry. He felt like this American had crossed unwritten boundaries by involving him in an American custom. In Somalia no one cares about age. People are born and die. Period. When he got home, he threw the cupcakes in the trash. My roommates thought I was crazy for picking June 20 as my birthday, but why was that any worse than picking January 1? Of course my family in Yarmouth put a huge effort into celebrating my birthday every year, with a cake and candles and a big dinner. And my American friends on Facebook always left me warm birthday wishes. On June 20, I always felt like I was born an American.

  * * *

  —

  The Somali community in Maine is run by sheikhs and imams, who lead the prayers at the mosques. In Portland, the Muslim Commu
nity Center is where everyone gathers to pray, especially on Friday. Sheikh Ahmed is one of the top leaders, and he also owns a halal market. One day he delivered a speech warning Somali women not to fall into the temptations of individual liberty that American women have. “Look, they sleep with their boyfriends who are not married to them!” he said. “And their parents are fine with it! A’udhu billahi minash shaitanir rajim.” I seek shelter in Allah from the rejected Satan!

  The women sufficiently condemned, he switched to the men.

  “We’ve got a problem in the Muslim community in Maine. So many of our young men are abandoning the culture. Some even live with white families! Some are dating white non-Muslim women; some are drinking alcohol. This is a huge problem. We ask for your support to do counseling for these young men for them to return to the word of Allah.”

  I have always considered myself blessed by amazing good luck, which makes it hard to understand how Sheikh Ahmed could have lived right downstairs from us. He would pound on our door at five every single morning, waking us up and demanding we go with him to the mosque for morning prayers. Every day was the same: as we rode with him in his car, he asked us to read the Koran on the way so we should arrive safely at the mosque. Portland is not known for roadside bombs or militia roadblocks, so these prayers seemed like overkill on the short drive, but Sheikh Ahmed wasn’t taking any chances. He recited the Koran every time he stepped out his door. To him Somalia and the United States were the same when it came to death. You could die any day, anywhere, and you’d better read the Koran to be safe.

  In the evening, Sheikh Ahmed often came up to our apartment, to make sure Satan was not hanging around. I would have to stop the hip-hop music because he might curse at me. He walked around our house like he was doing an inspection. One time I had two portraits sitting next to my bed, Obama and Schwarzenegger. Sheikh Ahmed recognized Obama of course and told me to remove his image. “It is not good for you,” he said. “Who is this other man?”