There was an unspoken fantasy that when we came to America we would be greeted by its citizens, whom we needed to impress in order to fit in, so that we could land a good job, go to the right school, and move into one of those beautiful homes with the white picket fences we had seen in the orientation video.
Woe, even Marquis de Sade would have blushed at such straw-manning.
But, when they arrive at JFK, hop in a cab on their way to a hotel for the night, young Omar sees from her seat homelessness, squalor, and she is dismayed:
Through the window of the taxi I watched the darkened highways become city streets -- and I was appalled by what I saw. Trash everywhere...Large pyramids, some even taller than I was, of black trash bags lined the streets -- as if New Yorkers were preparing for a levee to break.
The scene is something she will later draw on in her political career to message that there is a considerable difference between what America advertizes about itself and the product you get handed -- but that, working together, we can all make the Dream happen, bring the Ad to life.
When the narrative switches to Arlington, Virginia, and then Minneapolis, we are returned to Omar the Streetfighting Girl. Very entertaining bully-bashing, and no doubt true, if my memory of such moments is accurate anymore. She subtly knocks the US educational system by noting that her Somalian fourth grade education placed her in sixth grade in America. She describes middle school years that conjure up the Levant, a school environment she finds herself in, almost daily, that is part barroom fight and part ice hockey brawl. She tells us she got in fights over "looks" and one day,
I stared back, and if they said something, which of course I couldn't understand, I usually decided to hit them first, assuming they were going to hit me. I wasn't afraid, and I wanted people to know it.
Uh-oh, is Omar a unilateralist? ( Maybe we could set up a bout between Boochani and Omar, I'm thinking.)
When she gets to the topic of integument she notes bravely that Somalis have no word for Caucasian. And the American idea of white is, well, odd, and maybe even wyrd. She says,
[M]y conception of white was very different from the American construct. There is no Somali translation for the word Caucasian. The word we use describes an actual skin tone, the way you appear.
This cracked me up, as I pictured the Might Whitey as a black-and-white stick figure, in contrast to the colored folk. And I also thought, more seriously, about Kate Chopin's story, "Desiree's Baby," where the mother is seen as white by her Southern community until, one day, while nursing, someone, I forget who, notices the negroid aureoles of her breasts and the sh*t hits the fan: Now, she's Black, and on her way to suicide -- just like that. Wyrd.
In Minneapolis, she fell in love with Johnny Depp in his Bollywood-like role in Cry Baby. At Edison middle school, she joined up with dozens of other Somali students, relieved, after three years of relative isolation in Arlington, to be "surrounded by people who understood things about my existence without my having to explain." But, the fights continue, often over her wearing a hijab. She ended up spending long hours in detention, but "given the long hours of studying in detention, I had become a very good student." Again, Omar and her silver linings.
But there's more -- more fights, and more life lessons leading to activist leanings and development. She describes the crazy chaos of school days filled with endless dysfunction:
Like Minneapolis itself, Edison's mainstream classes were very diverse. Unfortunately, the differences among the student population proved more divisive than anything else. There were a lot of fights: everyone fought everyone. African Americans and African immigrants fought over who was blacker. Muslim kids and white ones fought over U.S. policy in the Middle East. Latinos against African Americans, Africans against Native Americans, and on and on.
Diversive/Divisive. Omar saw a thing, and corralled some like-minded pals and formed a coalition they called Unity in Diversity. "We recruited everyone with the express purpose of understanding the triggers of our racially charged environment and bridging the harmful divides," she said.
Like Barack Obama's political career, she starts out as a community organizer of sorts, and goes from there. It also is a part of the narrative where she and Paley deftly weave in the influences of her private life, marriage/divorce (Ahmed), kids and miscarriage, the patriarchal influences of the large Somali community of Minneapolis, raising kids and running for office, finishing her education, working on local political campaigns. etc. This is all meet and appropriate, routine and reassuring. She's a normal American girl overcoming any number of obstacles, a 'rugged individualist' who won't be cowed or bullied by the rest of humankine.
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