Glimpses of Somali Diaspora: A Documentary Review

Three decades ago, most of the Somalis in America were students scattered around the country and there was a small number in major cities like Washington and New York that worked. When I first came to the States in 1980, I briefly lived in New York which had small number of former Somali seamen and a dozen diplomats working for the U.N. After four months in New York City, I saw the small money I had dwindling and I decided to move to Ohio to start my college education. I knew no one in Ohio but when I arrived there I was amazed to meet three young women from Northern Somalia who were already attending the university. The three were siblings and they had come to the States at a tender age of 17 with scholarships from the United Arab Emirates that were secured for them by Omar Arteh Ghalib. After several years in Ohio, I moved to a city in Southern California, not far from Los Angeles, for graduate studies. Southern California was different because it had two dozen Somali families who were brought as Ethiopian refugees. The community, though small, was a closely-knit group and we visited each other in the Weekends, ate together, and helped the new arrivals. But in early 1990s and due to the gestation of the Somali Civil War, a new wave of refugees poured in our city that had witnessed the disintegration of Somalia on first-hand and had seen gruesome killings and displacement. The small Somali community that coexisted peacefully and in harmony for years all of sudden became infused with a new blood that saw the world, perhaps, in the prism of clan warfare. Many of the newcomers seemed to be hauling around some legitimate grievances about what was done to them. It did not take long that the early pioneers of the community-some highly educated- to start mangling their roles by gradually gravitating to their clans and then becoming stooges doing their tribe’s bidding. It was a needling reminder, or perhaps a repudiation of conventional wisdom, that the educated class is bereft of the vagaries of clannism. It was like the x-ray-not beautified but stripped down- and beyond the veneer of civility laid individuals with extreme clannish views. I remember two educated good friends, one Ortoble and the other Ogaden, who used to go out every day and drink coffee together all of sudden ceasing to socialize. When I inquired about the reason of their falling out, the Ortoble man said, “Don’t you know what happened in Kismayo? The Ogadens are now claiming Kismayo as their territory”. One Issak fellow used to stand in a major intersection of the city cursing what he called “Dulmiga Daaroodka” (Darod Wrongdoing). A Marehan man mused if his daily prayers, behind a Habar Gidir Sheikh, would ever be accepted. Coming from a non-Hawiye, non-Issak, and non-Darod clan, I was somehow spared from this dysfunctional and acrimonious environment. There were numerous times that I was called to interpret in court cases because the defendants and the victims found a Geledi man either “neutral” or “harmless”. But my short honeymoon was rudely interrupted when one day I walked into a court and an attorney asked me a relevant (ok, dumb) question; “What is you clan?” In a normal conversation, I would have told that lawyer about my clan and, perhaps, would have basked in informing him that the Geledi Sultanate onetime ruled what is now called “Benadir” region but this was a court of law. I refused to state my clan in the pretext that I was a professional, and hence an impartial, interpreter. The attorney pondered for seconds and posed another question that almost made me yell with a hideous laughter. “Okay, do you speak ‘Darod Dialect’? “Who told you that the Darod have their own dialect?” I asked him. The attorney showed me a young woman-who was born and raised in Kenya- and who was a Case Worker for a local clan-based organization as the source of his information.

The issues many of the Somali refugees faced in the 1990s were the same many refugees face when placed in a new country; language barrier, lack of employment, and growing youth delinquencies. More Somalis kept coming to the States under the Family Unification Act until the American government amended the law in late 1990s. Then there was the tragedy of 9/11 in 2001 which almost put future Somali emigration to America to a complete halt. It was sometime after 2002, when a new wave of Somali refugees came but this time they were overwhelmingly Bantu. The Bantu encountered major difficulties in their resettlement in America because many of them came from small farming towns. Moreover, the Bantu refugees were a protected group because of the legacy of slavery and discrimination in Somalia.
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The Letter: An American Town and the Somali Invasion; Written, Produced, and Directed by Ziad Hamzeh; Arab Film Production, 2003.

What were Somali refugees doing in Lewiston, Maine, in 2003?

Maine is the second “Whitest State’ in America (after Vermont) and Lewiston the second largest city in that state. According to U.S Census of 2000, Lewiston had a 97.3% White population. The Somalis were not resettled in Lewiston as refugees but instead went there in a wave of secondary migration. Most of them came from cities like Atlanta and were placed in dangerous neighborhoods that were infested with drugs, gangs, and high rate crime. Fearing for their lives, some of these refugees sent a “Sahan” to look for a safer place to settle. Somali nomads normally send “Sahan”-someone who does exploratory expedition- to look for water and lush grazing for their livestock before they make a move. That is how Lewiston, Maine, was discovered by Somalis. Gradually, more Somali families kept moving there until the Mayor of Lewiston, Larry Raymond, wrote a public letter asking the 1,100 Somali refugees already in that city to tell their friends and relatives in other parts of the USA not to come to Lewiston because of the city’s constrained resources. To the Somalis, Lewiston became their new home and getaway. “Compared to where we came from,” said a Somali resident, “Lewiston is heaven.” Lewiston residents were evidently baffled by the new Somali ‘invasion’ to their town. Somalia, after all, is the same country in which American soldiers were killed and their corpses dragged in the streets of Mogadishu. The fact that the popular movie “Black Hawk Down” –in which the above incident was based-was released during the time of the controversy added insult to injury. Moreover, a young Army Ranger, Sergeant Thomas J. Field from Lisbon, Maine; a town next to Lewiston, was killed in Somalia at that time and a local highway was named after him. White Supremacists discovered a fertile ground in exploiting the ‘Somali invasion’ to a pristine White city to rally people against black refugees and immigrants. Poor Whites seemed vulnerable for fear that the Somalis would compete with them with the limited resources. During rallies some of these White folks reiterated unfounded statements that Somalis were “given free rent, free food, free cars, and never had to pay taxes”. One woman aptly put it, “We are sick of Somalis. They get everything and we get nothing.” The mayor rationalized the writing of his infamous letter by declaring that Somalis were “without skills. No language skills. No working skills. [They] Do not pay taxes”. In short, Mayor Raymond retorted that he was “asking a moral issue; give us a break”.

The Somalis, confronted by an outside threat, came together and showed a monolithic front. They started defending themselves against the vicious attacks of White Supremacists and the Mayor. The Somali community did open businesses in Lewiston to revitalize the sagging economy of the city. Community elders explained to the media that the Somalis were hardworking people, multi-lingual, honest, and peaceful. They articulated that they were being singled out for their “color” and “religion”. In fairness, some of the White residents of Lewiston came out in support of the Somalis and against the White Supremacists who had called for a massive rally to demonstrate against the Somali presence in Lewiston. The racists supported Mayor Raymond’s letter and vowed to separate races. The controversy grew out of proportion and there was media frenzy across the United States about Maine and the Somali influx there. Maine’s leading politicians from Governor John Baldacci- a grandson of a Lebanese immigrant-to the State’s famous US Senators (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) condemned the rally organized by the World Church of the Creator –a racist group headed by Mathew Hail- and assured the Somali refugees that they were welcome to live and work in Maine.

Seven years after the ‘Somali Invasion’, Karen Jacobsen, Director of Forced Migration Program at Tufts University, said that the refugees in Lewiston in general and Somalis in particular had revitalized that city’s economy. “They [Somalis] have a very good network [with strong] trading links and [bring] new economic activities.” (“The Refugees Who Saved Lewiston”, Newsweek, January 17, 2009).

The Letter is a documentary that captures the reactions, views, and fears of the people who were touched by the Somali influx to Lewiston. Ziad Hamzeh is a master filmmaker who gives a chance all the parties involved in this controversy to express their views, sentiments, and concerns without any interference. This documentary, moreover, raises many issues that are still engulfing the United States today; To what extent America is ready to accept new breed of immigrants that are non-Europeans in its midst. The documentary is the story of a group of immigrants in pursuit of economic independence and better life and the reaction they generate. It is the interplay between racism and tolerance on one hand and the slow process of remaking and deconstructing American society.

Rain in a Dry Land; Written, Produced, and Directed by Anne Makepeace. Anne Makepeace Productions, 2007.

In March 10, 2003, filmmaker Anne Makepeace was reading an article in the New York Times about 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees being resettled in fifty cities in the USA after a year when she had an epiphany. She would make a documentary about these refugees which the article referred as descendants of ex-slaves who were expelled from their homes, endured an odyssey that took them to Kenya where they were languishing in refugee camps. What intrigued Ms. Makepeace was the fact that the Bantu refugees had no urban background and had never seen “indoor plumbing” “a staircase” and “a building taller than one story”. She wondered how these upcoming refugees would cope in a complex and advanced industrial society like America. She went to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and decided to follow two Bantu families for a period of 18 months that covered from these families’ preparation/orientation to come to America to their settlement in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Atlanta, Georgia, respectively. One family had a husband, a wife, and children and the other was led by a single mother. These two families have stories to tell about their relatively peaceful life in Somalia, before the Somali Civil War, to the traumatic period they went through when family members were killed, beaten, and displaced.

Rain in a Dry Land is a documentary that tells the story of refugee families as they face culture shock while at the same time bracing for a new life in an alien country. It is the story of struggle, survival, and resiliency. The Bantu refugees encounter the typical challenges many of the refugees face like limited English proficiency, scarce employment opportunities, and making sense of their new environment. The filmmaker’s unique ‘tell-it-like it is’ approach is both endearing and painful. The youngsters are perhaps the ones who have the most difficult time as they attempt to navigate between their new lives in America and their attempts to preserve their cultural identity.

The story of Somali refugees presented in The Latter and Rain in a Dry Land is still a story whose ending is still being written. Thirty years ago, many Americans were not aware of where Somalia was located. Today, Somalia is in the news. In the USA, many Somali refugees have found safety and the opportunity to start a new chapter in their lives. Perhaps, the rosy picture of America being ‘a paradise’ that many of these refugees were imbibed during orientation classes in the refugee camps is far from the truth. With opportunity, indeed, comes adversity.