Visit the New Yorker magazine website to view a slideshow of photographs taken by Samantha Appleton to accompany this article.
Ali emerges, her arms full of produce. She is a short woman with a commanding gaze. She holds up a dark leafy vegetable. Collard greens, she says, through an interpreter. There's a lot of this in Georgia, and African-Americans like it; she learned that in Atlanta, where she spent seven months before moving to Maine, in 2005, with her husband and five children. Another son, who is twenty-two, is in a refugee camp in Kenya. Ali was a subsistence farmer in Somalia before fleeing the civil war that has consumed the country for the past two decades. Like the other women in the fields, she speaks very little English, and is illiterate in her own language.
The women come in from their plots, their head scarves gilded by the mist. They carry sacks of carrots and corn for their families, along with the produce ordered by the restaurants. The women also sell vegetables, two afternoons a week, at local farmers' markets. They got their start—leased land, tools, seeds, even a van they take to the fields—from some of the foundations and charities that have taken an interest in the Somali refugees, who started arriving in Lewiston almost six years ago. But their income from farming is minuscule. Ali's husband sometimes works as a janitor in a hotel near the coast; that helps to pay the rent. Their children are in school.
A lanky young American, William Burke, waits at the edge of the field with a scale and a notebook, ready to record the women's contributions. Burke is an AmeriCorps volunteer, working for the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project. As a college student, he cooked with one of the Portland chefs whom he has persuaded to order from the Somali farmers.
I ask Burke if the menus will note that the butternut squash was grown by local Somali refugees.
"We haven't done any real branding yet," he says, his tone finely balanced between earnestness and irony. "That will become more of the project later."
Aden says prayers in his local mosque. Eschewing Western psychiatrists, distraught Somalis prefer to take their troubles to the imam at their mosque, and they continue to do so in Maine.
"Who authorized this?" Lewiston officials say that this is the question they heard most often when the Somalis began showing up in town. The answer was: Nobody did. The Somalis had simply decided to come. Most had been resettled by government agencies in large American cities like Atlanta and Columbus, and were not happy with the crime, drugs, and schools they found there. The first few families had landed in Lewiston in February, 2001, after housing could not be obtained for them in Portland, Maine's largest city. Word quickly went out that Lewiston had good schools, a low crime rate, and cheap housing. By Greyhound bus and minivan, Somali families started arriving, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds.
Lewiston, an old mill town on the Androscoggin River, is known to out-of-staters—if it is known at all—for having hosted, in 1965, in a converted high-school hockey rink, a heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali. (The bout had the lowest attendance of any title fight ever.) With a population of thirty-six thousand, the town was until recently ninety-six per cent white and predominantly Catholic—French-Canadian and Irish—and was slowly losing its young people as local mills and factories closed. Unlike towns on the Maine coast, it didn't even see tourists. Then, practically overnight, the streets seemed to be full of black African Muslims. Today, there are about three thousand Somalis in Lewiston, and dozens more arrive every month. Before the Somalis arrived, the Lewiston school system employed one teacher of English as a second language. It now employs fifteen, for five hundred students, nearly all of them Somali. At parent-teacher-conference time, the schools hire extra interpreters. An improbable migration has turned into a large-scale social experiment.
The mayor, Laurier Raymond, tried to call the experiment off. In October, 2002, consulting no one, he wrote an open letter to the Somali community, asking people to stop bringing their families and friends to Lewiston. "Our city is maxed out financially, physically, and emotionally," he wrote. The Mayor was responding, in part, to the complaints of some constituents. Everyone had heard rumors: that the Somalis were getting free cars and vast sums of welfare money and preferment in public housing, and that they would soon bankrupt the town. The rumors were unfounded, but the fear and resentment they signified were real. It was not the best historical moment in which to be a Muslim immigrant in America, particularly not a Somali. There were the September 11th attacks, and then the release of the movie "Black Hawk Down." One of the American soldiers killed in the battle in Somalia which was depicted in the film had grown up near Lewiston, and images of his corpse being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu had been broadcast worldwide.
The Mayor's letter became a national news story, especially after a white-supremacist organization, the World Church of the Creator, based in Illinois, announced a rally in Lewiston to repel "the Somali invasion." The Lewiston Somalis were baffled and scared. An anti-racist counter-demonstration was quickly arranged. In January, 2003, state officials, including the governor and the attorney general, addressed a passionate rally at Bates College, in Lewiston, that drew forty-five hundred people. Meanwhile, across town, the neo-Nazis drew a crowd generously estimated at thirty-two, most of them out-of-staters. The white supremacists have not been heard from since, at least not formally. Mayor Raymond retired, and Lewiston got on with its experiment.
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Somialis take orientation classes in refugee camp in Kenya before coming to America, but many take more classes to learn English upon their arrival.
On Lisbon Street, the main downtown thoroughfare in Lewiston, many of the buildings are shuttered. The old red brick factories that still line the riverfront, and that used to disgorge thousands of workers at shift changes, are now crumbling hulks. Old neighborhoods of three- and four-story apartment buildings, all within walking distance of the mills, are now inhabited largely by Somalis. In the park next to City Hall, Somali boys on bicycles tear around a Civil War monument, while Somali women, dressed in full-length flowing jalabib, babies strapped to their backs, walk slowly, in groups of two or three. Several Somali shops — the Mogadishu Store, the African Multipurpose Store — have opened on Lisbon Street.
But this, in a sense, is all that many of Lewiston's longtime residents see of Somali life. Even though hundreds of Somalis are enrolled in English classes at the Adult Learning Center on the edge of downtown, relatively few speak enough yet to hold a real conversation, or to explain why they're here.
Omar Ahmed, a tweedy, genial man in his fifties with a scholarly-looking beard, speaks English well, and is a welfare case manager for the city. He had an idea about how to break through to the Americans: he would write a play—in Mogadishu, he had been a teacher and a playwright. In 2003, a Lewiston theatre company agreed to produce his latest work, called "Love in Cactus Village," which Ahmed had translated into English. It was the story of a rural Somali girl who defies her father's wish that she marry a rich man. Ahmed described the play to a local reporter as his way of thanking his new neighbors for their hospitality toward him and his fellow-Somalis.
Ahmed had other motives as well. "I wanted to convince the local people that we come from somewhere, that we had universities, that we don't just come from the bush," he told me. "We have such a rich literature, which has survived from our oral traditions. It's so important not to lose our culture. Only a very minute amount of our literature was written down, and even that portion was destroyed in the war. Even our national museum was destroyed, and wild plants are growing there. You can go see."
Ahmed's play was well received by Lewistonians but the local Somalis found it controversial. Even though most of the roles were played by Somali students from Lewiston High, few Somalis attended the performances. And their absence revealed at least as much about the Lewiston Somalis as anything shown onstage did.
"There were so many different objections," Ahmed told me. "People said, 'They will see us as camel riders, camel herders.' But it's true—we have a feeling for animals." The imam of the local mosque demanded that the town ban the play, because it had men and women performing on the same stage. Theatre itself is haram—forbidden—according to a certain interpretation of the Koran. "These people are saying, 'We cannot have theatre,' " Ahmed said, in exasperation. "I say, 'How can we live?' Other Muslim countries—Indonesia, Egypt, even Saudi Arabia—they have theatre."
Farmland in Somalia after a rainstorm.
Other denunciations of Ahmed's play may have had little to do with piety or propriety. People are loath to talk, at least to outsiders, about the clan system in Somalia, whose rivalries have helped fuel the civil war there. But it survives in the diaspora, and it continues to divide expatriate communities, where different groups scramble for access to resources. (A young Somali social worker told me that he'd stopped going to the Lewiston mosque, because it was dominated by members of the Ogaden clan. "I refuse to pray next to someone who sees me first as an Isaaq, not as a Muslim," he said.) Omar Ahmed's job as a welfare case manager had been widely coveted among English-speaking Somalis, and some of the disappointed candidates, particularly those who happened to be members of other clans, were perhaps nursing a grudge.
Lewiston officials, though taken aback by the intensity of the protests, remained enthusiastic backers of the production. After all the bad feeling over the Mayor's letter and the visit by the neo-Nazis, they saw Ahmed's play as a step in the right, pluralist direction. But notice had been served: Somali "unity," much proclaimed by self-appointed community spokespersons, was an illusion.
Mainers are known, traditionally, for their self-reliance and insularity. Anyone whose grandparents weren't born in the state is an outsider, "from away." But migrant workers have been a pillar of Maine's economy for many years: Jamaicans and Haitians pick apples, Mexicans pick blueberries and keep the fish-processing factories in business; Guatemalans and Hondurans are loggers. Indeed, lobstering is practically the only traditional Maine occupation still performed exclusively by local whites. But the other racial and ethnic minorities mostly depart at the end of the season, leaving Maine the whitest state in the nation. The Somali refugees can't go home.
Nearly every Somali family in Lewiston has survived terrible things. Of an estimated prewar population of nine million, at least a million people are believed to have fled the country. More than a million are believed to have died in fighting and famines since 1991. A recent survey of Somali patients at Portland's Maine Medical Center concluded, "The prevalence of trauma in this population was 100 percent." The "trauma events" listed in the Portland study ranged from rape and torture to enduring sniper fire and witnessing killing. It found "considerable psychiatric symptomatology." Yet there was no interest in Western psychiatry: distraught Somalis traditionally take their troubles to the imam at their mosque, and they continue to do so in Maine.
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Huts in Somalia.
Most diaspora Somalis are in constant touch with people back home, by telephone and e-mail and much needed hawala (money transfers), and they follow events there closely. The big news recently has been the growth of the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist movement that originated in Mogadishu's neighborhood Sharia courts, which had emerged to fill the vacuum left by the state's collapse, sixteen years ago, after the overthrow of the longtime dictator, Siad Barre. The I.C.U. amassed a formidable militia and last summer won control of Mogadishu from several contending clan warlords (some of whom the C.I.A. had backed, disastrously, on the ground that they were "antiterrorist"). The I.C.U. has since gained control over most of the country. According to American intelligence, the I.C.U. is providing a haven for Al Qaeda.
In Maine, the first Somalis I asked about the I.C.U. were enthusiastic about its achievements — reducing crime, opening Mogadishu's port for the first time in years, encouraging foreign investment. But one man, a former teacher, sitting in a fast-food restaurant in Lewiston and listening to a friend extoll the new rule of law, smiled sadly and interjected, "Do you think they will give back our houses in Mogadishu if we go and ask?" His friend fell silent. Many Somalis are skeptical of the idea that the I.C.U., because it is Islamist, is pan-Somalian. The movement, they say, is strongly associated with the Hawiye, a major clan. And the repercussions of the fighting, which has been intense recently, and may soon explode into regional war — Ethiopia and Eritrea are backing opposing factions — are felt directly inside the refugee community. In one case I heard about, the Lewiston relatives of a man who had been killed by the Islamists learned that one of the killers was now living in the United States.
Forgetting the civil war got more complicated for many people in Lewiston after the Somali Bantus started showing up, two years ago. Somalia, for all its clan strife, has often been cited as an example of one of the few relatively homogeneous nation-states to emerge in Africa from the colonial period. Everybody spoke the same language, and shared the same ethnicity, culture, and religion. The Bantus were the principal exception. They were the descendants of slaves brought to southern Somalia from farther down the East African coast, and they are, on average, more "African-looking" than ethnic Somalis, who have thinner features and straighter hair. Emerging from chattel slavery in the early twentieth century, most Bantus became subsistence farmers in two river valleys in the south. (Seynab Ali and the other organic farmers are Bantus.) They speak a local language known as Af-Maay-Maay, and have developed their own exuberant form of Islam. Second-class citizens in every sense, they were not provided with schools, health care, or other services, and remained largely preliterate.
When civil war broke out, the Bantus had no weapons, no mobility, and no protection—but they did have food. They were robbed, raped, and murdered en masse. Those who fled languished in refugee camps for a decade or more. In 2003, the United States began to admit twelve thousand Somali Bantus as refugees. Most were resettled in major cities and some started searching for a place that seemed more hospitable. For many Bantu families, that turned out to be Lewiston — there are roughly five hundred Bantus in town now — even though the Somalis already there were, at least by extension, the very agents of the catastrophe they were fleeing.
"Here there is a government," Abkow Ahmed, a soft-spoken thirty-five-year-old Somali Bantu, told me. "There are rules and regulations. Everybody has a role. It is safe." Abkow Ahmed spent thirteen years in a camp in Kenya before he and his family arrived in Boston, in early 2005; in December, they moved to Lewiston. He works nights as a production fryer at a plant that makes doughnuts for Dunkin' Donuts shops. Abkow Ahmed told me that the Somalis in Lewiston had welcomed the Bantus and helped them get settled. "We all know what happened in Somalia," he said. "We know who we are. We know who they are. But nobody can do anything to us here."
Besteman, Catherine. Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery.
University of Pennsylvania Press (1999).
The smooth surface of relations between Bantus and Somalis in Lewiston began to change last January. On Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Bates College hosted a panel on "Recent Shifts in Lewiston's Refugee Population," with the participation of four newly arrived Somali Bantus. Catherine Besteman, a professor of anthropology at Colby College, in Waterville, fifty miles north of Lewiston, was invited to make opening remarks. In 1987 and 1988, she and her husband, Jorge Acero, a photographer, had lived in a Somali Bantu village called Banta, in the Middle Jubba Valley, and she wrote a book, published in 1999, called "Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery." After the dislocations of the war, Besteman spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to track down some of the families she had known in the Middle Jubba. She had since moved on to other topics. When she arrived at Bates, she was introduced to the other panelists, and after a few minutes she found them gaping at her and exclaiming, "Catherine!" "It was a true goose-bump moment," Elizabeth Eames, the chair of the Anthropology Department at Bates, said.
"Three of them were from Banta," Besteman told me. "They didn't recognize me, because they didn't know I was blond. I always kept my hair tied up there. And I didn't recognize them, because they were just the little kids who followed me everywhere, and now they're grown men. But as soon as I said that I'd lived in Banta they said, 'Catherine! We're looking for Catherine!' "
Stunned, she gave her introductory speech. Then each of the men told his story. They were harrowing narratives of cruelty, loss, and escape; two men talked about seeing their fathers murdered. Afterward, Besteman and the Bantu wept together. They made plans for a meeting of the entire Lewiston Bantus community. Besteman and Acero would present a slide show of his photographs from Banta.
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Refugees in Kenya walk along the road.
"So we did it," Besteman recalled. "Most of those who made it over here were babies then. They never knew their parents. People in the audience were seeing their moms and dads for the first time. It was very, very moving. There were a lot of stories being shouted out about the people in the slides. We had hundreds of pictures, and they made us show them over and over. Even the pictures of the fields, they were just incredibly excited to see. And just incredibly sad. It was everything they had lost. We played tapes of someone's dad reading his poetry. He had never heard his father's voice before." Besteman had conducted a census of Banta in 1988, when the population was five hundred, and now she presented it in the form of a chart of families. "People went crazy over it. They could account for everyone on the chart. This guy was shot in his field by a Somali. This guy was hacked with machetes and died of infected wounds. This woman was taken by militiamen from a fleeing group, right near the Kenyan border, never seen again. Et cetera, et cetera."
Besteman and I were sitting in her office at Colby. She showed me a color photograph of a family group in an African village, with a grinning little girl in the center. "This beautiful little girl lives in Lewiston now, on Bartlett Street," she said. "Married, with five kids. Her family"—Besteman indicated the others in the photograph—"are all dead."
"Catherine's two events were the turning points—the Bantu got more confident from them," Sheikh Mohamed, a twenty-nine-year-old Bantu, told me. (When I asked about his unusual first name, he laughed and said, "I was a beloved child, so my mother called me Sheikh.") Among other things, the Bantus began requesting, in hospitals and public offices, interpreters who spoke Af-Maay-Maay. Previously, he said, many people had pretended to understand the Somali interpreters, because they feared that the interpreters might get angry if they asked for someone else.
Sheikh Mohamed works as a cashier at Wal-Mart. He is lithe and frank, and his English, which he learned in the camps in Kenya, is good. He did not seem afraid to speak up for himself. But he found the insults and racial slights that the Bantus experienced in Maine—from other Somalis—to be unrelenting. A Bantu friend of his had gone to the Lewiston mosque to pray, "and they told him to come back with six guys to wash the mosque. For free! They still think we work for them!"
One Somali word for a Bantu is Adoon, the same as the word for a slave, and Somalis did not hesitate to use it. At school, according to Sheikh Mohamed, Somali kids were even involving unwitting white kids in the abuse: "A Somali boy tells a white child to go say 'Uf!' to a Bantu child. To us, that means 'You smell bad.' So the Bantu child starts fighting with the white child. But the white child didn't even know what he was saying!" Mohamed described an encounter he had just had with a white child in the public-housing project where he and his family live. "The white child tells me he hates Bantus. I ask him why. He says his Somali friend hates Bantus, and so he does, too."
Seynab Ali and Hawa Ibrahim, the organic farmers, are enrolled in a beginning-English class at the Adult Learning Center. On the afternoon I visited the class, the teacher, Kelley Rudd, was engaging her students in a series of skits. In one, Ali was trying to borrow mangoes from her neighbor, who asked how many she wanted. Ali hesitated, then blurted, "Five dollars!" The class broke up in laughter, and Ali gave me a wry look.
Rudd, who grew up on the northeastern Maine coast, recently spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Turkmenistan, teaching English. Her Turkmen students, she said, were literate in their own language. "Here we're trying to do everything at once," she said. "Speaking, reading, writing, numbers, oral comprehension, plus literacy itself."
Early on, town officials decided that recipients of general assistance could fulfill Maine's welfare work requirement by taking English-as-a-second- language classes. This has been expensive: federal funds for refugee resettlement do not follow people who pursue "secondary migration" — who move, that is, from the cities where they were first resettled. But the state has begun to help with funding.
Some Somalis have managed to acquire English in Kenyan refugee camps or have middle-class multilingual backgrounds or have already picked up some English in the United States. These students often go into job-training classes with white Americans. But others, particularly the Somali Bantus, have never even held a pen before. There is also the local climate to confront. "In every class with Somalis, we're trying, this time of year, to get them ready for winter," Anne Kemper, who runs the Adult Learning Center, told me. "Talking about snow and ice, how to dress their kids properly for the weather, what a smoke alarm is and what to do if it goes off."
During a break in Rudd's class, I talked to a couple of Bantu men. Our conversation was disrupted, however, by an older, rather imperious Somali woman with a humorless smile, who kept interjecting, "We all Somali. We all same." She wouldn't leave, and the Bantu men withdrew behind polite masks.
I did manage to talk to one young man, an eighteen-year-old Bantu named Osman. He spoke little English, but he made me understand that he had attended high school in Syracuse before moving to Lewiston. He showed me his school I.D.: he had got through two years of American high school with a handful of English words. Refugee children are placed in schools according to their age, not their academic level. Somali parents have been confused by this practice, asking why their illiterate teens are not placed in kindergarten. To an American, the answer—the social dimension—is obvious. But the result is a growing population of alienated, disenchanted Somali youth, unable to compete or succeed.
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Most newly resettled refugees find work doing entry-level jobs in housekeeping, manufacturing, agriculture and the like and live humbly by American standards.
Unemployment in the Somali community is estimated at fifty percent. Alex Nicolaou, an employment counsellor for Catholic Charities in Maine, who works mainly with Somalis, told me that in the Lewiston area a number of refugees are employed by the Dunkin' Donuts plant, a printer and a tampon manufacturer. In Freeport, twenty miles away, L. L. Bean has a giant packing facility that hires many Somalis, particularly during the Christmas season. L. L. Bean's call center, however, like the many telemarketing companies in the area, has few jobs for people with less than standard English.
In some cases, Nicolaou believes, employers use his clients' lack of English as an excuse not to hire them. "If language is a problem, we provide interpreters, free of charge," he said. Many jobs, for that matter, don't require more than a small English vocabulary. But some managers don't bother with excuses. "I have actually had employers say, 'I won't hire black people,' " Nicolaou told me. "Or 'I won't hire Muslims.' I had an H.R. person — this was at a big firm — tell me, 'People need to have been in the country at least one year.' I said, 'That's illegal. Why?' She said, 'Because they might be terrorists. They might plant a bomb or something.'
"A lot of companies have uniform requirements," Nicolaou went on. "No hijab, or it has to be modified. People want to pray five times a day, and employers ask about that. We explain, 'Just give people a place and a few minutes a day.' That is easily handled. Really, my clients just want to work."
In July, a local man threw a frozen pig's head into the Lewiston mosque while people were praying. He claimed that it was a harmless prank, but almost no one believed him, and there were calls for a federal hate-crime prosecution. Top state officials, including the governor, came to Lewiston, just as they had during the duelling rallies of 2003. But among the Somalis, Omar Ahmed told me, the current imam "counselled people not to overreact, to show we are good people by being cool." The man was barred from approaching the mosque and faces a variety of criminal charges, but by fall the incident seemed largely forgotten.
The mosque sits behind a scruffy unmarked storefront on Lisbon Street, next to Caveman and Associates Tattoo Studio. Nuh Iman, the imam, is slight, dark-skinned, and full-bearded, and, on the day I met him, he wore a black-and-white-checked shawl and tinted glasses. With a show of reluctance, he took me to a large upstairs room. Persian rugs covered the floor and windows. The room was a mess, and the building seemed to be falling down around us. "The financial condition of this mosque is very low," he said.
Iman came to the United States in the nineteen-eighties, he said, as part of a military training program. He was then in the Somali Air Force. But things were deteriorating in Somalia, so he stayed. He had come to Lewiston only in 2005, and he planned to return to his home, in northern Virginia, soon. He found life in Lewiston "a bit slow."
I asked him about the Bantus in Lewiston.
"These people are not Bantus," he said. "They just say that so they can get distinction as refugees." He told me (contrary to all historical scholarship) that the people known as Somali Bantus are actually members of minor southern Somali clans, and that the real Bantu "were indigenous people all over Somalia—hunters, like the Indians here, who don't want to settle in cities."
I asked if the Bantus were not, then, the descendants of slaves.
"No, they were not slaves," he said. "Nobody slaved nobody in Somalia."
The imam began to talk about religious doctrine, explaining which local jobs were haram. "If you're a drinks waiter, you're poisoning people — that's haram. But if you're just clearing dishes it's O.K." He went on, "People in Somalia like plays and concerts. But every concert is no good, especially when they talk about love and sex. You are waking up the population. Big band is not allowed in Islam. The big drum, saxophone, trombone, xylophone — Satan created those things."
Somali women in hijab.
Other Somalis in Lewiston take a less puritanical view. The young social worker told me that when Somalis asked him whether it was haram, for example, to deliver a pizza with a bacon topping, he told them to worry about keeping their jobs. Still, there has been a distinct shift, in the past few years, among the Lewiston Somalis, toward stricter religious observance. Women who never wore hijab in Somalia — where miniskirts were once popular in the cities — told me that they always do in Maine. Prayers and fasting have, by all accounts, become more common. In part, this revival predates their migration. Fatuma Hussein, a young mother of five, who fled Mogadishu as a teenager, recalled that during the civil war "people were saying, 'Why did this happen to us? It must be loose women, and drinking alcohol, and going to cinemas.' Even my mother, who is still in Nairobi, she wears the hijab today." (In contrast, the traditional practice of female-genital mutilation, which is almost universal in Somalia, seems to have been abandoned in Maine.)
For some, religiosity is a reaction to cultural dislocation. One Somali college student I met who wears the hijab—in her case, an ankle-length black tunic, worn over pants, and a scarf, covering everything but her face and hands—told me that she had begun to do so only six years ago. She spoke immaculate Society of the Serpent English and could knowledgeably discuss hip-hop videos one moment and, in the next, citing the Prophet Muhammad, argue that music is haram. ("It deadens the heart," she said.) For her, living in a non-Muslim country, she said, "My ethnicity is my anchor."
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Somali schoolchildren in the United States.
Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt on arriving in America. Having escaped the horrors of the civil war and spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya, she was resettled, first, in suburban Atlanta, where she was sent to an all-white high school. "And I tell you," she said, "American high school is the cruellest place I've been."
Omar Ahmed, the playwright, is one of the few Somalis in Lewiston who have been able to get a mortgage and buy a house. "I asked the real-estate guy, 'Who are the neighbors?' He said, 'How should I know? All I know is this house, what's wrong with it, what's good with it. Are you crazy?' I said, 'I need to know who the neighbors are.' He wouldn't help me. So I went next door, knocked on the door, and an old French lady answered. She was scared, hard of hearing, and then her son came, very big, very aggressive. 'What you want?' I told him, 'Don't worry. I am a black man, but I come in peace.' And so they invited me in, and we talked, and we became friends. They told me about the other neighbors. They've helped us so much. I never owned a house in a cold place before. What's a furnace? There is a lot to learn. But this is why we love Maine so much, because the people are so kind."
We were sitting in the living room, where Ahmed's wife, Barlin, was trying to watch "Enemy of the State," starring Will Smith, on a flat-screen TV. Barlin, who studied economics in Mogadishu, speaks Somali, Arabic, and Italian better than she does English. She now works in the escrow department of a bank in Lewiston. A grown daughter, who is a packer at L. L. Bean, walked in, exhausted, from work.
In Ahmed's job as a welfare case manager, he must inform applicants for general assistance whether they qualify for benefits. "At first, when I had to give a negative answer to Somalis, they all said, 'You're like the whites!' And when I had to give whites a negative decision they said, 'You're against us!' But now I start by explaining the system in detail, the guidelines, before I tell them the decision. Then they understand. And I can give them referrals to other agencies for food, and so on, which makes them happier. There is an answer for everything."
When the Bantus started arriving in Lewiston, Omar Ahmed was one of the first local Somalis they turned to. Since he came from their part of Somalia and knew their culture, he was sympathetic. He became an advocate for them. And, as it happened, he was one of only two non-Bantu Somalis present at the slide show presented by Catherine Besteman. Afterward, however, according to Besteman, Ahmed was distraught. Why had only Bantus been there? Why had the whole community not been invited? Besteman thought the answer was self-evident. But Omar Ahmed couldn't see it. And he is no longer perceived in Lewiston as an advocate for the Bantus.
Sheikh Mohamed, the young Bantu who works at Wal-Mart, calls the Hillview public-housing project, where he lives with his family, "paradise." It's on the eastern edge of Lewiston, out past Insane Car Audio, just under a wooded ridge. In the fall, the trees form a blazing, colorful backdrop for an array of fifteen two-story buildings, containing ninety-four apartments. Somali women chat on cell phones on their front stoops while their toddlers play on the neatly mown grass.
"For a lot of Lewiston Somalis, this is the place," Carla Harris, the manager of resident services for Lewiston's public housing, said. "It's like a village." Seventy percent of the Hillview population is now Somali. Harris still hears complaints from local whites. "Just the other day, I had somebody tell me, 'I heard you guys get twenty thousand dollars for every Somali family you take in.' " Harris made a rueful face, as if to say, I wish. "But it's gone well. There used to be more of a crime issue here, before the Somalis came. Now there's nothing. The kids are becoming Americanized, but there's still no drinking, no drugs. We see their kids going off to college. They are not going to be second-generation public housing."
Sahara in class in Atlanta.
A basketball court outside her office was filled with children. Some of the bigger boys, Somalis and a couple of white kids, were playing an intense half-court game. The Somalis had already mastered some advanced moves. Around Lewiston, which is a sports-mad town, the talk these days is about a couple of promising Somali soccer players at Lewiston High. Somali girls are expected to come straight home after classes to help with housework, and most of their parents refuse to allow them to wear American-style athletic outfits. Still, some play on sports teams, in some cases wearing spandex under their hijabs or, for basketball, replacing the head scarf with a bandanna.
Harris showed me the community center at Hillview. "We don't have a Christmas party anymore," she said. "And dogs are really not O.K. A cop brought Sarge, the police dog, around, and the Somali kids were intrigued. But they couldn't come near. We wouldn't do that now." (Many Muslims consider dogs unclean.) She went on, "We've got a lot of good programs for kids. Bates students are a big part of it — they do the tutoring. We've got a marching band. We got a Stephen King grant for band equipment."
I was surprised, knowing how controversial music was among the Somalis.
"Well, we've never had a Somali kid get involved in the music program," Harris said, a bit sheepishly. "Now we're calling it Music Education, saying it's not for fun. We'll see if that flies." (Several Somali children have since signed up.)
I asked about the Somali Bantus. "They seemed behind at first," Harris said. "Their knowledge of indoor plumbing, thermostats — stuff like that — wasn't up to speed. I wasn't sure what was going on between them and the other Somalis. Then I had one of them hang back after a meeting with our translator, and when everybody was gone he said to me, 'We were their slaves.'"
Harris tilted her head, as if recalling a moment of shock. "But it'll be O.K., I think," she said. "They seem to get along."
I went to see Sheikh Mohamed in his Hillview apartment. The rooms were tiny, boxy, with print tapestries on the walls. He was putting on a Wal-Mart smock for his evening shift. During the day, he takes classes at Central Maine Community College, where he is working toward a degree in public health. There was African pop music blasting in the kitchen, and I could see his wife swaying to it as she cooked. I remembered Mohamed saying, of non-Bantu Somalis, "They're not African. They're part Arab. We're pure African." I had come to see an Af-Maay-Maay dictionary — thought to be the first of its kind — that Mohamed and some of his friends were helping to put together. While I leafed through the dictionary — handwritten, very much a work in progress — Mohamed looked out a window.
"Hillview is the safest place I ever saw," he said.
His mother was still in Somalia, farming in the Middle Jubba Valley, where he grew up. Mohamed was worried about her. "It's not peaceful there, and not possible to phone." He and some relatives had fled in 1991, after militias began attacking the Bantus. On the trek to Kenya, they hid in the bush from bandits. Three people in their group died of hunger and thirst.
Mohamed had to leave for work. I asked if his Wal-Mart job was difficult. He paused, gave me a long, slightly embarrassed look, and said, "No."
1
On a misty autumn morning in south-central Maine, a small group of Somali women--Seynab Ali, Hawa Ibrahim, Habiba Nor--are harvesting organic vegetables in fields near the town of Lewiston. There are orders from a couple of high-end restaurants in Portland: Ten pounds of tomatoes, four pounds of kale, five pounds of chilies; green beans, a watermelon, six butternut squash, thirty-five pounds of potatoes. The women wade into the fields, yellow cornstalks rising above their heads. Each has her own plot. Seynab Ali loses a shoe in the mud, and peals of laughter echo to a line of trees in the distance.
Ali emerges, her arms full of produce. She is a short woman with a commanding gaze. She holds up a dark leafy vegetable. Collard greens, she says, through an interpreter. There's a lot of this in Georgia, and African-Americans like it; she learned that in Atlanta, where she spent seven months before moving to Maine, in 2005, with her husband and five children. Another son, who is twenty-two, is in a refugee camp in Kenya. Ali was a subsistence farmer in Somalia before fleeing the civil war that has consumed the country for the past two decades. Like the other women in the fields, she speaks very little English, and is illiterate in her own language.
The women come in from their plots, their head scarves gilded by the mist. They carry sacks of carrots and corn for their families, along with the produce ordered by the restaurants. The women also sell vegetables, two afternoons a week, at local farmers' markets. They got their start--leased land, tools, seeds, even a van they take to the fields--from some of the foundations and charities that have taken an interest in the Somali refugees, who started arriving in Lewiston almost six years ago. But their income from farming is minuscule. Ali's husband sometimes works as a janitor in a hotel near the coast; that helps to pay the rent. Their children are in school.
A lanky young American, William Burke, waits at the edge of the field with a scale and a notebook, ready to record the women's contributions. Burke is an AmeriCorps volunteer, working for the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project. As a college student, he cooked with one of the Portland chefs whom he has persuaded to order from the Somali farmers.
I ask Burke if the menus will note that the butternut squash was grown by local Somali refugees.
"We haven't done any real branding yet," he says, his tone finely balanced between earnestness and irony. "That will become more of the project later."
"Who authorized this?" Lewiston officials say that this is the question they heard most often when the Somalis began showing up in town. The answer was: Nobody did. The Somalis had simply decided to come. Most had been resettled by government agencies in large American cities like Atlanta and Columbus, and were not happy with the crime, drugs, and schools they found there. The first few families had landed in Lewiston in February, 2001, after housing could not be obtained for them in Portland, Maine's largest city. Word quickly went out that Lewiston had good schools, a low crime rate, and cheap housing. By Greyhound bus and minivan, Somali families started arriving, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds.
Lewiston, an old mill town on the Androscoggin River, is known to out-of-staters--if it is known at all--for having hosted, in 1965, in a converted high-school hockey rink, a heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali. (The bout had the lowest attendance of any title fight ever.) With a population of thirty-six thousand, the town was until recently ninety-six per cent white and predominantly Catholic--French-Canadian and Irish--and was slowly losing its young people as local mills and factories closed. Unlike towns on the Maine coast, it didn't even see tourists. Then, practically overnight, the streets seemed to be full of black African Muslims. Today, there are about three thousand Somalis in Lewiston, and dozens more arrive every month. Before the Somalis arrived, the Lewiston school system employed one teacher of English as a second language. It now employs fifteen, for five hundred students, nearly all of them Somali. At parent-teacher-conference time, the schools hire extra interpreters. An improbable migration has turned into a large-scale social experiment.
The mayor, Laurier Raymond, tried to call the experiment off. In October, 2002, consulting no one, he wrote an open letter to the Somali community, asking people to stop bringing their families and friends to Lewiston. "Our city is maxed out financially, physically, and emotionally," he wrote. The Mayor was responding, in part, to the complaints of some constituents. Everyone had heard rumors: that the Somalis were getting free cars and vast sums of welfare money and preferment in public housing, and that they would soon bankrupt the town. The rumors were unfounded, but the fear and resentment they signified were real. It was not the best historical moment in which to be a Muslim immigrant in America, particularly not a Somali. There were the September 11th attacks, and then the release of the movie "Black Hawk Down." One of the American soldiers killed in the battle in Somalia which was depicted in the film had grown up near Lewiston, and images of his corpse being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu had been broadcast worldwide.
The Mayor's letter became a national news story, especially after a white-supremacist organization, the World Church of the Creator, based in Illinois, announced a rally in Lewiston to repel "the Somali invasion." The Lewiston Somalis were baffled and scared. An anti-racist counter-demonstration was quickly arranged. In January, 2003, state officials, including the governor and the attorney general, addressed a passionate rally at Bates College, in Lewiston, that drew forty-five hundred people. Meanwhile, across town, the neo-Nazis drew a crowd generously estimated at thirty-two, most of them out-of-staters. The white supremacists have not been heard from since, at least not formally. Mayor Raymond retired, and Lewiston got on with its experiment.
This article originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine on December 11, 2006 and appears here with permission from the author.
2
On Lisbon Street, the main downtown thoroughfare in Lewiston, many of the buildings are shuttered. The old red brick factories that still line the riverfront, and that used to disgorge thousands of workers at shift changes, are now crumbling hulks. Old neighborhoods of three- and four-story apartment buildings, all within walking distance of the mills, are now inhabited largely by Somalis. In the park next to City Hall, Somali boys on bicycles tear around a Civil War monument, while Somali women, dressed in full-length flowing jalabib, babies strapped to their backs, walk slowly, in groups of two or three. Several Somali shops -- the Mogadishu Store, the African Multipurpose Store -- have opened on Lisbon Street.
But this, in a sense, is all that many of Lewiston's longtime residents see of Somali life. Even though hundreds of Somalis are enrolled in English classes at the Adult Learning Center on the edge of downtown, relatively few speak enough yet to hold a real conversation, or to explain why they're here.
Omar Ahmed, a tweedy, genial man in his fifties with a scholarly-looking beard, speaks English well, and is a welfare case manager for the city. He had an idea about how to break through to the Americans: he would write a play--in Mogadishu, he had been a teacher and a playwright. In 2003, a Lewiston theatre company agreed to produce his latest work, called "Love in Cactus Village," which Ahmed had translated into English. It was the story of a rural Somali girl who defies her father's wish that she marry a rich man. Ahmed described the play to a local reporter as his way of thanking his new neighbors for their hospitality toward him and his fellow-Somalis.
Ahmed had other motives as well. "I wanted to convince the local people that we come from somewhere, that we had universities, that we don't just come from the bush," he told me. "We have such a rich literature, which has survived from our oral traditions. It's so important not to lose our culture. Only a very minute amount of our literature was written down, and even that portion was destroyed in the war. Even our national museum was destroyed, and wild plants are growing there. You can go see."
Ahmed's play was well received by Lewistonians but the local Somalis found it controversial. Even though most of the roles were played by Somali students from Lewiston High, few Somalis attended the performances. And their absence revealed at least as much about the Lewiston Somalis as anything shown onstage did.
"There were so many different objections," Ahmed told me. "People said, 'They will see us as camel riders, camel herders.' But it's true--we have a feeling for animals." The imam of the local mosque demanded that the town ban the play, because it had men and women performing on the same stage. Theatre itself is haram--forbidden--according to a certain interpretation of the Koran. "These people are saying, 'We cannot have theatre,' " Ahmed said, in exasperation. "I say, 'How can we live?' Other Muslim countries--Indonesia, Egypt, even Saudi Arabia--they have theatre."
Other denunciations of Ahmed's play may have had little to do with piety or propriety. People are loath to talk, at least to outsiders, about the clan system in Somalia, whose rivalries have helped fuel the civil war there. But it survives in the diaspora, and it continues to divide expatriate communities, where different groups scramble for access to resources. (A young Somali social worker told me that he'd stopped going to the Lewiston mosque, because it was dominated by members of the Ogaden clan. "I refuse to pray next to someone who sees me first as an Isaaq, not as a Muslim," he said.) Omar Ahmed's job as a welfare case manager had been widely coveted among English-speaking Somalis, and some of the disappointed candidates, particularly those who happened to be members of other clans, were perhaps nursing a grudge.
Lewiston officials, though taken aback by the intensity of the protests, remained enthusiastic backers of the production. After all the bad feeling over the Mayor's letter and the visit by the neo-Nazis, they saw Ahmed's play as a step in the right, pluralist direction. But notice had been served: Somali "unity," much proclaimed by self-appointed community spokespersons, was an illusion.
Mainers are known, traditionally, for their self-reliance and insularity. Anyone whose grandparents weren't born in the state is an outsider, "from away." But migrant workers have been a pillar of Maine's economy for many years: Jamaicans and Haitians pick apples, Mexicans pick blueberries and keep the fish-processing factories in business; Guatemalans and Hondurans are loggers. Indeed, lobstering is practically the only traditional Maine occupation still performed exclusively by local whites. But the other racial and ethnic minorities mostly depart at the end of the season, leaving Maine the whitest state in the nation. The Somali refugees can't go home.
Nearly every Somali family in Lewiston has survived terrible things. Of an estimated prewar population of nine million, at least a million people are believed to have fled the country. More than a million are believed to have died in fighting and famines since 1991. A recent survey of Somali patients at Portland's Maine Medical Center concluded, "The prevalence of trauma in this population was 100 percent." The "trauma events" listed in the Portland study ranged from rape and torture to enduring sniper fire and witnessing killing. It found "considerable psychiatric symptomatology." Yet there was no interest in Western psychiatry: distraught Somalis traditionally take their troubles to the imam at their mosque, and they continue to do so in Maine.
This article originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine on December 11, 2006 and appears here with permission from the author.
3
Most diaspora Somalis are in constant touch with people back home, by telephone and e-mail and much needed hawala (money transfers), and they follow events there closely. The big news recently has been the growth of the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist movement that originated in Mogadishu's neighborhood Sharia courts, which had emerged to fill the vacuum left by the state's collapse, sixteen years ago, after the overthrow of the longtime dictator, Siad Barre. The I.C.U. amassed a formidable militia and last summer won control of Mogadishu from several contending clan warlords (some of whom the C.I.A. had backed, disastrously, on the ground that they were "antiterrorist"). The I.C.U. has since gained control over most of the country. According to American intelligence, the I.C.U. is providing a haven for Al Qaeda.
In Maine, the first Somalis I asked about the I.C.U. were enthusiastic about its achievements -- reducing crime, opening Mogadishu's port for the first time in years, encouraging foreign investment. But one man, a former teacher, sitting in a fast-food restaurant in Lewiston and listening to a friend extoll the new rule of law, smiled sadly and interjected, "Do you think they will give back our houses in Mogadishu if we go and ask?" His friend fell silent. Many Somalis are skeptical of the idea that the I.C.U., because it is Islamist, is pan-Somalian. The movement, they say, is strongly associated with the Hawiye, a major clan. And the repercussions of the fighting, which has been intense recently, and may soon explode into regional war -- Ethiopia and Eritrea are backing opposing factions -- are felt directly inside the refugee community. In one case I heard about, the Lewiston relatives of a man who had been killed by the Islamists learned that one of the killers was now living in the United States.
Forgetting the civil war got more complicated for many people in Lewiston after the Somali Bantus started showing up, two years ago. Somalia, for all its clan strife, has often been cited as an example of one of the few relatively homogeneous nation-states to emerge in Africa from the colonial period. Everybody spoke the same language, and shared the same ethnicity, culture, and religion. The Bantus were the principal exception. They were the descendants of slaves brought to southern Somalia from farther down the East African coast, and they are, on average, more "African-looking" than ethnic Somalis, who have thinner features and straighter hair. Emerging from chattel slavery in the early twentieth century, most Bantus became subsistence farmers in two river valleys in the south. (Seynab Ali and the other organic farmers are Bantus.) They speak a local language known as Af-Maay-Maay, and have developed their own exuberant form of Islam. Second-class citizens in every sense, they were not provided with schools, health care, or other services, and remained largely preliterate.
When civil war broke out, the Bantus had no weapons, no mobility, and no protection--but they did have food. They were robbed, raped, and murdered en masse. Those who fled languished in refugee camps for a decade or more. In 2003, the United States began to admit twelve thousand Somali Bantus as refugees. Most were resettled in major cities and some started searching for a place that seemed more hospitable. For many Bantu families, that turned out to be Lewiston -- there are roughly five hundred Bantus in town now -- even though the Somalis already there were, at least by extension, the very agents of the catastrophe they were fleeing.
"Here there is a government," Abkow Ahmed, a soft-spoken thirty-five-year-old Somali Bantu, told me. "There are rules and regulations. Everybody has a role. It is safe." Abkow Ahmed spent thirteen years in a camp in Kenya before he and his family arrived in Boston, in early 2005; in December, they moved to Lewiston. He works nights as a production fryer at a plant that makes doughnuts for Dunkin' Donuts shops. Abkow Ahmed told me that the Somalis in Lewiston had welcomed the Bantus and helped them get settled. "We all know what happened in Somalia," he said. "We know who we are. We know who they are. But nobody can do anything to us here."
University of Pennsylvania Press (1999).
The smooth surface of relations between Bantus and Somalis in Lewiston began to change last January. On Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Bates College hosted a panel on "Recent Shifts in Lewiston's Refugee Population," with the participation of four newly arrived Somali Bantus. Catherine Besteman, a professor of anthropology at Colby College, in Waterville, fifty miles north of Lewiston, was invited to make opening remarks. In 1987 and 1988, she and her husband, Jorge Acero, a photographer, had lived in a Somali Bantu village called Banta, in the Middle Jubba Valley, and she wrote a book, published in 1999, called "Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery." After the dislocations of the war, Besteman spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to track down some of the families she had known in the Middle Jubba. She had since moved on to other topics. When she arrived at Bates, she was introduced to the other panelists, and after a few minutes she found them gaping at her and exclaiming, "Catherine!" "It was a true goose-bump moment," Elizabeth Eames, the chair of the Anthropology Department at Bates, said.
"Three of them were from Banta," Besteman told me. "They didn't recognize me, because they didn't know I was blond. I always kept my hair tied up there. And I didn't recognize them, because they were just the little kids who followed me everywhere, and now they're grown men. But as soon as I said that I'd lived in Banta they said, 'Catherine! We're looking for Catherine!' "
Stunned, she gave her introductory speech. Then each of the men told his story. They were harrowing narratives of cruelty, loss, and escape; two men talked about seeing their fathers murdered. Afterward, Besteman and the Bantu wept together. They made plans for a meeting of the entire Lewiston Bantus community. Besteman and Acero would present a slide show of his photographs from Banta.
This article originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine on December 11, 2006 and appears here with permission from the author.
4
"So we did it," Besteman recalled. "Most of those who made it over here were babies then. They never knew their parents. People in the audience were seeing their moms and dads for the first time. It was very, very moving. There were a lot of stories being shouted out about the people in the slides. We had hundreds of pictures, and they made us show them over and over. Even the pictures of the fields, they were just incredibly excited to see. And just incredibly sad. It was everything they had lost. We played tapes of someone's dad reading his poetry. He had never heard his father's voice before." Besteman had conducted a census of Banta in 1988, when the population was five hundred, and now she presented it in the form of a chart of families. "People went crazy over it. They could account for everyone on the chart. This guy was shot in his field by a Somali. This guy was hacked with machetes and died of infected wounds. This woman was taken by militiamen from a fleeing group, right near the Kenyan border, never seen again. Et cetera, et cetera."
Besteman and I were sitting in her office at Colby. She showed me a color photograph of a family group in an African village, with a grinning little girl in the center. "This beautiful little girl lives in Lewiston now, on Bartlett Street," she said. "Married, with five kids. Her family"--Besteman indicated the others in the photograph--"are all dead."
"Catherine's two events were the turning points--the Bantu got more confident from them," Sheikh Mohamed, a twenty-nine-year-old Bantu, told me. (When I asked about his unusual first name, he laughed and said, "I was a beloved child, so my mother called me Sheikh.") Among other things, the Bantus began requesting, in hospitals and public offices, interpreters who spoke Af-Maay-Maay. Previously, he said, many people had pretended to understand the Somali interpreters, because they feared that the interpreters might get angry if they asked for someone else.
Sheikh Mohamed works as a cashier at Wal-Mart. He is lithe and frank, and his English, which he learned in the camps in Kenya, is good. He did not seem afraid to speak up for himself. But he found the insults and racial slights that the Bantus experienced in Maine--from other Somalis--to be unrelenting. A Bantu friend of his had gone to the Lewiston mosque to pray, "and they told him to come back with six guys to wash the mosque. For free! They still think we work for them!"
One Somali word for a Bantu is Adoon, the same as the word for a slave, and Somalis did not hesitate to use it. At school, according to Sheikh Mohamed, Somali kids were even involving unwitting white kids in the abuse: "A Somali boy tells a white child to go say 'Uf!' to a Bantu child. To us, that means 'You smell bad.' So the Bantu child starts fighting with the white child. But the white child didn't even know what he was saying!" Mohamed described an encounter he had just had with a white child in the public-housing project where he and his family live. "The white child tells me he hates Bantus. I ask him why. He says his Somali friend hates Bantus, and so he does, too."
Seynab Ali and Hawa Ibrahim, the organic farmers, are enrolled in a beginning-English class at the Adult Learning Center. On the afternoon I visited the class, the teacher, Kelley Rudd, was engaging her students in a series of skits. In one, Ali was trying to borrow mangoes from her neighbor, who asked how many she wanted. Ali hesitated, then blurted, "Five dollars!" The class broke up in laughter, and Ali gave me a wry look.
Rudd, who grew up on the northeastern Maine coast, recently spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Turkmenistan, teaching English. Her Turkmen students, she said, were literate in their own language. "Here we're trying to do everything at once," she said. "Speaking, reading, writing, numbers, oral comprehension, plus literacy itself."
Early on, town officials decided that recipients of general assistance could fulfill Maine's welfare work requirement by taking English-as-a-second- language classes. This has been expensive: federal funds for refugee resettlement do not follow people who pursue "secondary migration" -- who move, that is, from the cities where they were first resettled. But the state has begun to help with funding.
Some Somalis have managed to acquire English in Kenyan refugee camps or have middle-class multilingual backgrounds or have already picked up some English in the United States. These students often go into job-training classes with white Americans. But others, particularly the Somali Bantus, have never even held a pen before. There is also the local climate to confront. "In every class with Somalis, we're trying, this time of year, to get them ready for winter," Anne Kemper, who runs the Adult Learning Center, told me. "Talking about snow and ice, how to dress their kids properly for the weather, what a smoke alarm is and what to do if it goes off."
During a break in Rudd's class, I talked to a couple of Bantu men. Our conversation was disrupted, however, by an older, rather imperious Somali woman with a humorless smile, who kept interjecting, "We all Somali. We all same." She wouldn't leave, and the Bantu men withdrew behind polite masks.
I did manage to talk to one young man, an eighteen-year-old Bantu named Osman. He spoke little English, but he made me understand that he had attended high school in Syracuse before moving to Lewiston. He showed me his school I.D.: he had got through two years of American high school with a handful of English words. Refugee children are placed in schools according to their age, not their academic level. Somali parents have been confused by this practice, asking why their illiterate teens are not placed in kindergarten. To an American, the answer--the social dimension--is obvious. But the result is a growing population of alienated, disenchanted Somali youth, unable to compete or succeed.
This article originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine on December 11, 2006 and appears here with permission from the author.
5
Unemployment in the Somali community is estimated at fifty percent. Alex Nicolaou, an employment counsellor for Catholic Charities in Maine, who works mainly with Somalis, told me that in the Lewiston area a number of refugees are employed by the Dunkin' Donuts plant, a printer and a tampon manufacturer. In Freeport, twenty miles away, L. L. Bean has a giant packing facility that hires many Somalis, particularly during the Christmas season. L. L. Bean's call center, however, like the many telemarketing companies in the area, has few jobs for people with less than standard English.
In some cases, Nicolaou believes, employers use his clients' lack of English as an excuse not to hire them. "If language is a problem, we provide interpreters, free of charge," he said. Many jobs, for that matter, don't require more than a small English vocabulary. But some managers don't bother with excuses. "I have actually had employers say, 'I won't hire black people,' " Nicolaou told me. "Or 'I won't hire Muslims.' I had an H.R. person -- this was at a big firm -- tell me, 'People need to have been in the country at least one year.' I said, 'That's illegal. Why?' She said, 'Because they might be terrorists. They might plant a bomb or something.'
"A lot of companies have uniform requirements," Nicolaou went on. "No hijab, or it has to be modified. People want to pray five times a day, and employers ask about that. We explain, 'Just give people a place and a few minutes a day.' That is easily handled. Really, my clients just want to work."
In July, a local man threw a frozen pig's head into the Lewiston mosque while people were praying. He claimed that it was a harmless prank, but almost no one believed him, and there were calls for a federal hate-crime prosecution. Top state officials, including the governor, came to Lewiston, just as they had during the duelling rallies of 2003. But among the Somalis, Omar Ahmed told me, the current imam "counselled people not to overreact, to show we are good people by being cool." The man was barred from approaching the mosque and faces a variety of criminal charges, but by fall the incident seemed largely forgotten.
The mosque sits behind a scruffy unmarked storefront on Lisbon Street, next to Caveman and Associates Tattoo Studio. Nuh Iman, the imam, is slight, dark-skinned, and full-bearded, and, on the day I met him, he wore a black-and-white-checked shawl and tinted glasses. With a show of reluctance, he took me to a large upstairs room. Persian rugs covered the floor and windows. The room was a mess, and the building seemed to be falling down around us. "The financial condition of this mosque is very low," he said.
Iman came to the United States in the nineteen-eighties, he said, as part of a military training program. He was then in the Somali Air Force. But things were deteriorating in Somalia, so he stayed. He had come to Lewiston only in 2005, and he planned to return to his home, in northern Virginia, soon. He found life in Lewiston "a bit slow."
I asked him about the Bantus in Lewiston.
"These people are not Bantus," he said. "They just say that so they can get distinction as refugees." He told me (contrary to all historical scholarship) that the people known as Somali Bantus are actually members of minor southern Somali clans, and that the real Bantu "were indigenous people all over Somalia--hunters, like the Indians here, who don't want to settle in cities."
I asked if the Bantus were not, then, the descendants of slaves.
"No, they were not slaves," he said. "Nobody slaved nobody in Somalia."
The imam began to talk about religious doctrine, explaining which local jobs were haram. "If you're a drinks waiter, you're poisoning people -- that's haram. But if you're just clearing dishes it's O.K." He went on, "People in Somalia like plays and concerts. But every concert is no good, especially when they talk about love and sex. You are waking up the population. Big band is not allowed in Islam. The big drum, saxophone, trombone, xylophone -- Satan created those things."
Other Somalis in Lewiston take a less puritanical view. The young social worker told me that when Somalis asked him whether it was haram, for example, to deliver a pizza with a bacon topping, he told them to worry about keeping their jobs. Still, there has been a distinct shift, in the past few years, among the Lewiston Somalis, toward stricter religious observance. Women who never wore hijab in Somalia -- where miniskirts were once popular in the cities -- told me that they always do in Maine. Prayers and fasting have, by all accounts, become more common. In part, this revival predates their migration. Fatuma Hussein, a young mother of five, who fled Mogadishu as a teenager, recalled that during the civil war "people were saying, 'Why did this happen to us? It must be loose women, and drinking alcohol, and going to cinemas.' Even my mother, who is still in Nairobi, she wears the hijab today." (In contrast, the traditional practice of female-genital mutilation, which is almost universal in Somalia, seems to have been abandoned in Maine.)
For some, religiosity is a reaction to cultural dislocation. One Somali college student I met who wears the hijab--in her case, an ankle-length black tunic, worn over pants, and a scarf, covering everything but her face and hands--told me that she had begun to do so only six years ago. She spoke immaculate Society of the Serpent English and could knowledgeably discuss hip-hop videos one moment and, in the next, citing the Prophet Muhammad, argue that music is haram. ("It deadens the heart," she said.) For her, living in a non-Muslim country, she said, "My ethnicity is my anchor."
This article originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine on December 11, 2006 and appears here with permission from the author.
6
Fatuma Hussein cast a kind of sidelong light on this issue when she described the shock that she felt on arriving in America. Having escaped the horrors of the civil war and spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya, she was resettled, first, in suburban Atlanta, where she was sent to an all-white high school. "And I tell you," she said, "American high school is the cruellest place I've been."
Omar Ahmed, the playwright, is one of the few Somalis in Lewiston who have been able to get a mortgage and buy a house. "I asked the real-estate guy, 'Who are the neighbors?' He said, 'How should I know? All I know is this house, what's wrong with it, what's good with it. Are you crazy?' I said, 'I need to know who the neighbors are.' He wouldn't help me. So I went next door, knocked on the door, and an old French lady answered. She was scared, hard of hearing, and then her son came, very big, very aggressive. 'What you want?' I told him, 'Don't worry. I am a black man, but I come in peace.' And so they invited me in, and we talked, and we became friends. They told me about the other neighbors. They've helped us so much. I never owned a house in a cold place before. What's a furnace? There is a lot to learn. But this is why we love Maine so much, because the people are so kind."
We were sitting in the living room, where Ahmed's wife, Barlin, was trying to watch "Enemy of the State," starring Will Smith, on a flat-screen TV. Barlin, who studied economics in Mogadishu, speaks Somali, Arabic, and Italian better than she does English. She now works in the escrow department of a bank in Lewiston. A grown daughter, who is a packer at L. L. Bean, walked in, exhausted, from work.
In Ahmed's job as a welfare case manager, he must inform applicants for general assistance whether they qualify for benefits. "At first, when I had to give a negative answer to Somalis, they all said, 'You're like the whites!' And when I had to give whites a negative decision they said, 'You're against us!' But now I start by explaining the system in detail, the guidelines, before I tell them the decision. Then they understand. And I can give them referrals to other agencies for food, and so on, which makes them happier. There is an answer for everything."
When the Bantus started arriving in Lewiston, Omar Ahmed was one of the first local Somalis they turned to. Since he came from their part of Somalia and knew their culture, he was sympathetic. He became an advocate for them. And, as it happened, he was one of only two non-Bantu Somalis present at the slide show presented by Catherine Besteman. Afterward, however, according to Besteman, Ahmed was distraught. Why had only Bantus been there? Why had the whole community not been invited? Besteman thought the answer was self-evident. But Omar Ahmed couldn't see it. And he is no longer perceived in Lewiston as an advocate for the Bantus.
Sheikh Mohamed, the young Bantu who works at Wal-Mart, calls the Hillview public-housing project, where he lives with his family, "paradise." It's on the eastern edge of Lewiston, out past Insane Car Audio, just under a wooded ridge. In the fall, the trees form a blazing, colorful backdrop for an array of fifteen two-story buildings, containing ninety-four apartments. Somali women chat on cell phones on their front stoops while their toddlers play on the neatly mown grass.
"For a lot of Lewiston Somalis, this is the place," Carla Harris, the manager of resident services for Lewiston's public housing, said. "It's like a village." Seventy percent of the Hillview population is now Somali. Harris still hears complaints from local whites. "Just the other day, I had somebody tell me, 'I heard you guys get twenty thousand dollars for every Somali family you take in.' " Harris made a rueful face, as if to say, I wish. "But it's gone well. There used to be more of a crime issue here, before the Somalis came. Now there's nothing. The kids are becoming Americanized, but there's still no drinking, no drugs. We see their kids going off to college. They are not going to be second-generation public housing."
A basketball court outside her office was filled with children. Some of the bigger boys, Somalis and a couple of white kids, were playing an intense half-court game. The Somalis had already mastered some advanced moves. Around Lewiston, which is a sports-mad town, the talk these days is about a couple of promising Somali soccer players at Lewiston High. Somali girls are expected to come straight home after classes to help with housework, and most of their parents refuse to allow them to wear American-style athletic outfits. Still, some play on sports teams, in some cases wearing spandex under their hijabs or, for basketball, replacing the head scarf with a bandanna.
Harris showed me the community center at Hillview. "We don't have a Christmas party anymore," she said. "And dogs are really not O.K. A cop brought Sarge, the police dog, around, and the Somali kids were intrigued. But they couldn't come near. We wouldn't do that now." (Many Muslims consider dogs unclean.) She went on, "We've got a lot of good programs for kids. Bates students are a big part of it -- they do the tutoring. We've got a marching band. We got a Stephen King grant for band equipment."
I was surprised, knowing how controversial music was among the Somalis.
"Well, we've never had a Somali kid get involved in the music program," Harris said, a bit sheepishly. "Now we're calling it Music Education, saying it's not for fun. We'll see if that flies." (Several Somali children have since signed up.)
I asked about the Somali Bantus. "They seemed behind at first," Harris said. "Their knowledge of indoor plumbing, thermostats -- stuff like that -- wasn't up to speed. I wasn't sure what was going on between them and the other Somalis. Then I had one of them hang back after a meeting with our translator, and when everybody was gone he said to me, 'We were their slaves.'"
Harris tilted her head, as if recalling a moment of shock. "But it'll be O.K., I think," she said. "They seem to get along."
I went to see Sheikh Mohamed in his Hillview apartment. The rooms were tiny, boxy, with print tapestries on the walls. He was putting on a Wal-Mart smock for his evening shift. During the day, he takes classes at Central Maine Community College, where he is working toward a degree in public health. There was African pop music blasting in the kitchen, and I could see his wife swaying to it as she cooked. I remembered Mohamed saying, of non-Bantu Somalis, "They're not African. They're part Arab. We're pure African." I had come to see an Af-Maay-Maay dictionary -- thought to be the first of its kind -- that Mohamed and some of his friends were helping to put together. While I leafed through the dictionary -- handwritten, very much a work in progress -- Mohamed looked out a window.
"Hillview is the safest place I ever saw," he said.
His mother was still in Somalia, farming in the Middle Jubba Valley, where he grew up. Mohamed was worried about her. "It's not peaceful there, and not possible to phone." He and some relatives had fled in 1991, after militias began attacking the Bantus. On the trek to Kenya, they hid in the bush from bandits. Three people in their group died of hunger and thirst.
Mohamed had to leave for work. I asked if his Wal-Mart job was difficult. He paused, gave me a long, slightly embarrassed look, and said, "No."
This article originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine on December 11, 2006 and appears here with permission from the author.