Caught Between Two Cultures

Yankee, January-February 2004

Within the past three years, hundreds of Somali refugees have started new lives in Lewiston, Maine. The city, and the Somalis, will be forever changed.

The first Westerner Said Mohamud ever met was a young American named John, who came to his village—Dhusa Mareb in central Somalia—in the early 1960s, when Said was 6 or 7 years old. John was a Peace Corps volunteer. He had blond hair and blue eyes, and was often funny. With the help of the villagers, he built a two-room schoolhouse of wood and clay, where he taught the village children to read and write English. The children liked him, or wanted to; they called him Uncle John. At the same time, they were confused.

“We had been taught that people with white skin and light hair and colored eyes—they are the devil. They have horns growing from their heads. They are very bad.”

Said himself has skin the color of dark chocolate. He is small and lean, in his late forties, though he looks younger. His black hair is close-cropped and receding; his eyes are very large. He speaks English with a phonetic, book-learned exactness (“peopl-ee,” “color-ed”), smiling often, always widely, showing teeth the color of new piano keys.

The first time we met, outside the Lewiston, Maine, city hall on a weekday in early August 2003, he was wearing a red paisley tie over a white dress shirt with no jacket, dark pressed pants, and brown oxfords. He was returning from a job interview, he told me: this one with the Lewiston school system to teach high school chemistry (he has a doctorate in chemistry, from the University of Padua in Italy, and speaks five languages), though there had been many other interviews, he said. So far he had found nothing—“but there is time, something will happen for me.” Meanwhile, he was taking a course in computer programming at a local college, and working to improve his English skills.

He lives, with his wife, Shukri, and their seven children—ages 2 through 19—in a rent-subsidized five-bedroom walk-up in a neighborhood of warehouses and cracked pavement a few blocks from Lewiston’s downtown. The living room is a 12-foot square of worn carpet, with two stuffed chairs and a sagging sofa covered in a faded yellowish bedspread—all of it dwarfed by the silver, giant-screen television that covers most of the front wall. (“It is so the children will not argue, so they will stay quiet,” is all Said will say about it when I ask.) In an alcove just out of sight, 15-year-old Abdirahman, a handsome, gangly six-footer who plays guard for the Lewiston Middle School basketball team, sits quietly in front of a computer screen.

Said, when I met him, had been in Lewiston only eight months, though Shukri and the children, he tells me, had come more than a year before that. Exactly how they all came here, and what transpired during that year-long separation, turns out to be elusive—for reasons, as near as I can tell, that involve a mix of pride, pain, and cultural outlook. But some things, the fundamental things, are clear: that Said, some 12 years ago, was separated from his family in the chaos and carnage of Somalia’s latest tribal war (“People are dying in front of you, everybody is having a gun in his hand, you are stepping over dead people, it is unimaginable”), during which his year-old daughter was shot to death in Shukri’s arms; that his family, like tens of thousands of Somali families, were held in a series of refugee camps; and that, for the last half of the 1990s, Said worked as an itinerant bookkeeper, homeless and without papers, through half of the east African subcontinent—Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Zaire.

He washed up in 2000 in Alexandria, Virginia, by way of Johannesburg and Mexico City (there was a black market passport involved somewhere along the line here, but that’s as precise as he’ll be)—then on to Atlanta, which by then had become a processing center for Somali refugees. It was in Atlanta that he was reunited with Shukri and the children. There was a “disagreement” not long after (“These sorts of things we do not talk about”), and the family came north to Lewiston alone—part of a resettlement of some 1,100 Somalis, all of them relocated from other points in the U.S., who have come here since early 2001, most in the first 18 months alone.

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The full story (as well as sixteen others) is available in the collection, ‘The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train’ (click title to access the book).