From Somalia To Snow: How Central Minnesota Became Home to Somalis

“On a Sunday morning in December 1990, I ran outside to play with my close friends. Before I finished drawing the lines of my hopscotch on the ground, I saw rebels hiding behind the walls. Some men began digging trenches…As I completed the last line of my hopscotch, my mom grabbed me by the neck with all her strength, her eyes wide and full of fierce determination and a mother’s instinct to protect her child…Within minutes, the city streets filled with the sound of artillery. The men who had dug trenches fired heavy rounds that rocked our house, rattling the ceiling and sending loose plaster upon our heads…My family huddled together like panic-stricken sheep.”

Hudda Ibrahim’s family was among the lucky ones who were able to survive being caught in the crossfire between Somali rebels and government forces in Mogadishu.  After a two-day ordeal, the family was able to escape to their car and drive away. “The bullets striking the back of the car were thunderous.”

After many years, during five of which Hudda was separated from her family, they were resettled in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Since then Ibrahim has become a leader in the St. Cloud, Minnesota, Somali community, teaching English at St. Cloud Technical and Community College and writing this book (2017) to educate non-Somalis about Somali history, their refugee and resettlement experiences, their culture, customs, and religion; their struggles in an alien world of American culture (including their adjustment to Minnesota winters!); their local business ventures; and their health challenges. Recently she has initiated a series of “Meet Your Muslim Neighbor” dialogues between refugees and traditional U.S. citizens in St. Cloud.

The book is a straightforward, matter-of-fact account that addresses many of the myths, stereotypes, and questions that non-Somalis have about their new neighbors.  One of Ibrahim’s achievements is her ability to take on sensitive and controversial issues directly, without apology, confrontation, or ill-will.  She is neither overly defensive of her people nor resentful of the barriers and at times hostile reception they have received.  A hallmark of her work is the mutual understanding she displays on both sides of the cultural divide.

It is a book that educates without alienating anyone.

In addition to the standard techniques of chronological narrative and factual exposition, the book uses excerpts from interviews Ibrahim has conducted among Somali refugees in St. Cloud.  These first-hand reports lend credence to her accounts and allow us to hear a range of voices, from the authoritative Imam to the college student who recalled asking on her first day in the U.S., “Where is the snow?”

The interviews for the book were completed before the infamous mall stabbing in September 2016, when a young Somali American man attacked several people in the local St. Cloud Crossroads Shopping Center. (http://www.sctimes.com/story/news/local/2016/10/06/falconer-cleared-mall-shooting/91660404/)  As Ibrahim recounts in her Postscript the community came together--Somalis, traditional St. Cloud residents, college students, city officials, other leaders, and faith communities—to mourn together, bind our collective wounds, and begin the work of both healing and recommitting ourselves to build stronger relationships across our differences of history, religion, and culture. 

A march was organized to demonstrate our unity, using a banner with the word “United” in English, Spanish, and Somali.  A local group distributed “Love Your Neighbor” signs which sill dot our cityscape on the property of homes and churches.

We still have a vocal minority of “nativists,” who are hostile to immigrants and refugees (http://www.sctimes.com/story/opinion/2017/11/18/stop-hate-falsehoods-being-spread-against-somalis/862449001/),  but Ibrahim’s book makes an important contribution to cross-cultural understanding both in St. Cloud and in the nation.

Wintering

Speaking of winter (see previous post) this 2016 novel by Peter Geye will make you feel it in your bones, even in August. Unlike Amy Lowell’s indoor winter world of human society, art, and civilization (see previous post), the winter of this novel takes place on what in Minnesota we call the North Shore (of Lake Superior), in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), and in the fictional town of Gunflint, which Minnesotans will quickly recognize as Grand Marais.

Its central episode involves a canoe/camping trip into the BWCA that starts in October and finally ends in January.  In between a father and son battle the winter elements, get lost, struggle to survive, barely do survive a confrontation with their human enemy, and eventually find their way close enough to home to be rescued by passing snowmobilers.

That central episode is like a story within a story in a story that is really about stories as much as it is about a winter wilderness adventure.

The narrator is Berit Lovig, whose late-life lover, Harry, having lost his memory to the ravages of age, disappears one day into the wilderness and is never found.  The year is 1996.  Harry’s son, Gus, brings Berit the bad tidings and begins reminiscing about the family history.  Berit recounts, not only her own memories from the time she came to Gunflint from Duluth in 1936, but also the ones that Gus shares with her, including that wilderness adventure with his father in 1963 when Gus was just eighteen. 

Between the two of them, Berit weaves a tapestry of alternating stories, flashbacks, and memories that follow similar patterns of journeying out, getting lost, experiencing a turning point or moment of truth, then finding one’s way, and eventually arriving home, though, of course, there are those that experience a moment of lies, never do find their way, and are never found, marked only by traces left behind, sometimes in physical form, like the cenotaph erected in honor of Harry, sometimes in someone’s fading memory, sometimes in a story that may or may not bear any resemblance to truth.  Disappearance, it seems, is as much a part of the story as being found.

History and memory, fact and fiction, truth and lies, knowledge and false belief are the themes that tie these stories together.  Harry has lost his memory; Gus is a high school history teacher.  Berit recounts her memories and the local folklore while at the same time turning the building where she had lived and worked with Harry’s estranged mother into a museum of local history.  She discovers some letters written by Gus’s great-grandmother to her parents in Norway but never mailed.  The letters are historical “records,” but they contain the lie that she had married and borne a son, though everyone “knows” that Harry’s father was a “misbegotten” child of rape in a logging camp.   Harry had witnessed a murder, but it is reported as a tragic accident.  Harry’s rival and enemy, Charlie, whose own life was based on lies and deceit, disappears in the wilderness and is never found, but Gus knows where Charlie’s “cenotaph,” a pile of bones, can be found. 

The word “wilderness” means “place of wild beasts,” and Harry and Gus encounter a few in their wilderness adventure, along with bitter cold, blizzards, huge snow drifts, rushing water, fog, and ice.  But men can also be beasts that prey on one another, and they can be found in town as well as in the wilds.  Similarly, the domesticated life in town can be a wilderness of stories, some of which pass as history and in which one can get lost in lies and may or may not ever find one’s way to the truth.  Such is the challenge of both ordinary people and professional historians.

Wintering is also a coming of age story for Gus, as he pits himself against the elements and ends up saving both himself and his father.  For Berit it’s the story of her adopted family, the Eides.  Rebecca, who had abandoned her husband and son early on and remained estranged, had hired Berit, at age 16, from Duluth, to live with her and work in the local “apothecary,” the original lighthouse keeper’s quarters, which Berit later turns into a museum.  Rebecca’s son, Harry, also age 16, witnesses his father, Odd, disappear, never to be found, when the ice floe he’s fishing from breaks loose and floats away..  He takes refuge in the apothecary, which also doubles as the town post office, and meets Berit for the first time.  It means little to him, but she falls in love, and waits, until after Harry’s divorce, when he shows up at Berit’s door with a bouquet of butterworts, her moment of truth, or, as she calls it, fate. Berit never has children, but, clearly, she is like a surrogate mother to Gus.  Thus the novel is a family saga and a story of late life, “winter” romance, as well as a coming of age and a journey into the “heart of darkness” to be found in the wilderness as well as in the human heart and mind.

What is the significance of these stories, some true, some false in the world of the novel, all fictional in the world of the reader?  Can “truth” be false?  Can recorded history include that which is false and leave out so much that it is hardly the “whole truth”?  Can fiction be true?  Can stories, which may be factually false, convey a symbolic or metaphorical truth?  I have argued so repeatedly in this blog.

The stories in Wintering embody age-old universal myths of trial and quest, initiation, the fall from innocence, death and rebirth (being lost and found), journeys outward, journeys to the self, homecoming, romance, good and evil, crime and punishment, love and hate, truth and falsehood, discovery, and disappearance.  We all experience these stories in our own ways and we can thus reenact our own stories as we read these “fictions.”

Historically, Berit’s memories, stories, and artifacts represent the immigrant experience in North America, the leaving of home and family, the journeying out, the encounter with an alien world that can be both sweet and sour, the struggle to survive, the building of a new life, the making of a family legacy, and the creation of a new identity.

Even when these stories are based on lies, they give meaning to our human experience, which is why we love to tell them, to hear them, to read and write them.

The Namesake

This 2003 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri captures both late 20th century American immigrant experience and a timeless coming of age narrative, with all the complexities, conflicts, confusions, and compromises that both stories entail.

The immigration of an Indian family to the American Northeast is complicated by the father’s love of Russian literature and the somewhat accidental naming of his son after Nikolai Gogol, transforming an immigration and assimilation story into one of more broadly multicultural significance. The three cultures-- Indian, American, and Russian—could hardly be more different. Yet Gogol must navigate himself and his identity through these conflicting shoals of influence to find his way toward authentic selfhood.

His parents were joined in a traditional arranged marriage and remained faithful to each other throughout their life together. Gogol and his sister, born and raised in the U.S., marry for romantic love. Gogol, by the time he marries, has already engaged in pre-marital sexual relationships, including an affair with a married woman. His own marriage to another second-generation Bengali immigrant ends in divorce after he learns of her adulterous affair.

Marital fidelity is just one manifestation of a larger fidelity theme—fidelity to the past, family, and cultural heritage, not to mention one’s name. Gogol resents his name, and, it seems, his Indian heritage, which sets him apart from his American peers. He loves his parents, though, and constantly struggles between loyalty to them and rebellion against them.

At an early age, he rejects the formal name, Nikhil, that his parents seek to bestow on him, preferring Gogol, but later, as an adolescent he comes to hate the name Gogol and eventually changes his legal name to Nikhil. Such is the confusion and conflict that plagues his struggle to define his own identity, as a Bengali, as an American, and as the son of a father who reveres a Russian writer.

Grief-stricken by his father’s sudden death, Gogol finds consolation in his family and Indian heritage. Later he falls in love with, and marries, a Bengali woman, whom he has known from childhood, after his mother urges him to call her, a kind of compromise between a traditional arranged marriage and a Western style romantic marriage. They even observe the traditional Bengali wedding rituals.

Though Gogol is the main protagonist, the novel is structured by shifting points of view--from the perspective of his mother as a newly married woman in a strange country, where her husband is an engineering student at MIT, to his own perspective as a youth and young man finding his way in his multicultural world, to the perspective of his Bengali wife, Moushumi, a feminist studying for her doctorate in French literature (yet another cultural influence in Gogol’s life).

This organization throws into relief the contrast, not only between first and second generation immigrants, but also between the traditional Indian wife and the modern “liberated” wife. It’s hard to say which is the greater burden—obedience and fidelity or modernity and liberation.

In the end, Gogol, having rejected two serious Western girlfriends and divorced his Bengali wife, seeks reconciliation with his past, his family, his culture, and his namesake. At the age of 32, for the first time, he opens the book by Nikolai Gogol his father had given him long before and begins to read.

We can only speculate on how the young man will come to terms with all that he has inherited, all that he has chosen, all that he has become, and all that he may yet be. What one hopes is that he will come to accept himself as a global citizen.