Today is a historic day like, and completely unlike every 4th January 20th going back almost 300 years. Americans had the bitter sweet opportunity to inaugurate our 46th president- one who represents a welcome and needed change- amid the backdrop of a raging pandemic, attempted coup, unthinkable wrongs committed against asylum seekers, and nationwide protests against racial injustice and police brutality. It's the civil rights movement of the 60's overlain with the 1917 influenza pandemic, plus wild-west internet and misinformed, would-be revolutionaries.
My inside view of this colossally significant era prompts me to think more about the history, or version of history I learned growing up. I think about the things I know now that educators definitely already knew then, but left out, altered or white-washed. I wonder about the important stories left out of the American canon and what version of our country's history my son will learn, including the parts of it I've now lived through. And I'm certain that if we're committed to moving forward, we'll make stories like Abdi Nor Iftin's Call Me American mandatory high school reading. In fact, I feel so strongly about its power for good that after I bought this book, I put it in my Little Free Library, along with two more. Then I bought another one because I was sad it wasn't in my house anymore, and when my mom started her own Little Free Library I sent one more copy to her.
And here's why. In Call Me American Iftin explores his memories of growing up in Somalia in the midst of the country's bloody and protracted civil war, his early love of American culture, and the unlikely path he took to change his situation. In earlier times the author's deep, sometimes quirkily endearing love for my country's culture would have made me proud. I believe Iftin intended the tone of the resolution of the book to be of cautionary hope, but in 2019 when I read it for the first time, and honestly still, it made me feel as if I've been complicit in a conman's bait and switch. Like we dangled a really great country in front of him and then swapped it with a seedy reality show. Following young Abdi's infatuation with Rambo and all things American, knowing he would later find himself facing the racial and religious intolerance that now plagues the country, I felt like waving my arms and telling him, "Don't do it! Choose box #2!"
I'm glad he didn't. Worthy of Iftin's praise and talents or not, we are certainly lucky to have attracted and officially welcomed someone who has and will contribute to the richness of our complex cultural and literary heritage. In his memoir, Iftin's memories are dramatic and wholly terrifying at times in their vivid depictions of his daily life from early childhood and into an uncertain adulthood as a refugee. His stories are interspersed with humor, audacious optimism, and a youthful confidence (a testament to his story-telling skill from the perch of early-thirties-hood). Iftin's clear, almost matter-of-fact recollection of successive tragedies left me haunted in their implicit indictment of the recklessness and short-sighted power grabs that robbed a young boy of his father, of an education beyond brutal and compulsory religious study, and thrust him towards an almost certain early death that many of his peers were not so lucky to avoid.
I'm about the same age as Iftin, so it was impossible for me not to compare childhoods. The same year that little Abdi evaded gunmen bent on a civil war his people had nothing to do with, by leaving everything but the people behind and fleeing through the desert on foot, little Erin did nothing more memorable than turning 7. By the following year Abdi was fatherless, out of school, and devising ways to make money for his mother and starving sister in the streets of Mogadishu. Meanwhile, I too, had just encountered the loss of a loved one. In my case, it was a grandparent and caused only by the brutality of illness, not of man.
The stories are highly emotional, but the overall tone is somehow optimistic. The piece is after far more than shock, or your sympathy. This memoir is about connection across borders and circumstances; it's about overcoming enormous obstacles long before you should have been asked to and relentlessly demanding happiness. It forces an admission of the absurd inequalities that still abound here and abroad, including in the eyes of those who are tasked with protection of the vulnerable, and a recognition that there is still a long road ahead for us to become the people we profess ourselves to be.
Do yourself a favor and top off a historic moment in American history with a book that pushes its story forward.
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