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Abstract
Somali refugees who fled the collapse of their homeland and resettled in the US narrate ‘who they are’ within a bewildering entanglement of cultural differences layered with diasporic tensions. This analysis examines the storytelling of a young woman refugee to Lewiston, Maine, who embodies the performative tensions that animate Somali identity at this intense historical moment and in this dense cultural space. I follow her unfolding counter/narrative dance within the confluence of gazes – feminist, colonialist, multiculturalist, and academic – which dialogically inform the possibilities of her identity as she contests definitions of Somali ethnicity, feminism, blackness, and Islam. Her storytelling circulates and reworks two dominant narratives used to explain Somali identity: identity-as-culture and identity-as-religion. Performance analysis of her storytelling makes evident that Somali culture and Islamic religion are co-articulated as well as inescapably liminal and localized by the bodily differences of gender and race in the diaspora. I problematize the narrative event as a dialogic, co-constructed, and transnational encounter in which the narrator reads and talks back to regulating discourses at the same time that I question my own complicity in dominant designs. The narrative performance and analysis display a Somali ethnicity fleshed out, critically inflected, and creatively nuanced by the diaspora which inserts an emerging Somali story in US immigration narratives.
Notes
1. Caaliya's interview was conducted in the summer of 2006 in Lewiston, Maine. It is one of 30 interviews in the larger, ongoing Somali Narrative Project, a collaborative of faculty and Somali students at the University of Maine that began in 2004. I acknowledge the ongoing contributions of Mazie Hough, Women's Studies; Kim Huisman, Sociology; and Carol Toner, Maine Studies and all the students with whom we have worked over the years. We thank the Somali community for their generosity with their stories, with special gratitude to Caaliya (pseudonym) for her generative story on Somali identity in the diaspora.
2. Systematic data on the intracultural variations of the Somalis of Lewiston are not available. However, descriptions suggest that Lewiston has tended to attract Somalis who are religiously conservative, rural, and with low adult literacy. See Note 5 later.
3. Lewiston's population is about 37,000. With Somalis and Somali Bantus estimated to number more than 3500, they are about 10 percent of residents (see Nadeau Citation2008). They continue to arrive each month, placing recent estimates at closer to 5000.
4. Maine and Vermont have recently alternated as the ‘whitest’ state. See recent American Community Surveys, US Census Bureau, http://factfinder.census.gov (accessed 11 May 2009).
5. In his argument for economic self sufficiency, Nadeau (Citation2008) uses the term ‘low-literate adults’ to characterize Somalis in Lewiston. Nadeau reports that estimates of Somali literacy in their homeland are still as low as 24 percent (see also Nadeau Citation2003).
6. Somali Narrative Project members often noted the Somali preference for collective and group interactions. We noted that either cultural members came to and participated in activities as a group or no one showed up. We observed that storytelling which flowed freely in group settings was more flat and stilted with the same individuals in one-on-one interviews. In light of this, we have shifted from the more traditional dyadic interview format to small group formats for project activities.
7. In the transcripts, ‘C’ refers to Caaliya, a pseudonym because the interviewee requested anonymity. ‘M’ refers to the interviewer who led the questions; and ‘K’ refers to the author. I transcribed tapes to retain the ‘sound’ and ‘feel’ of the storytelling and to promote readability. I preserve false starts, repetitions, and self-interruptions while segmenting the story into lines connected by a [/] that reflect the narrator's rhythms and meaning units. Indented lines are used to group phrases on a single topic that were spoken together. A hyphen [-] at the end of a word indicates an abrupt cut-off of sound, often a self-interruption or shift in direction of thought. Periods [..] mark a pause within a meaning unit. Longer pauses are indicated in brackets. Italic typeface denotes emphasis. Other notes in brackets [laughter] provide information by describing vocal or gestural qualities or other clarification. I further describe performance features in the discussion of the narrative.
The problem of transcription is discussed in Peterson and Langellier (Citation1997), Langellier and Peterson (Citation2004), and Reissman (2008).
8. The ethnic limits of the Somali nation are signified in the five-pointed star adopted at the time of independence in 1960. They include French Djibouti, British Somaliland, Italian Somalia, British north Kenya, and the Ethiopian portion of the Somali Ogaden. For a brief overview of pre-colonial Somalia, colonial partition and re-partition, and postcolonial Somalia, see Lewis (Citation2008).
9. Catherine Besteman (Citation1999) makes the argument that Somalia has a history of social stratification on the basis of race, status, region, and language in which she focuses on the ‘Bantu’ heritage and enslavement in Somalia. Some tensions between Bantu and ethnic Somalis have migrated to Lewiston, according to some informants.
10. For classic statements on Somali clanism, see Lewis (Citation1994, Citation2008). For alternative readings of clanism, see Samatar (Citation1994) and Kapteijns (Citation1994).
11. Among the strongest reasons for the injunction not to talk about clans is the intense and continuing trauma of the civil war and spreading clan divisiveness to the diaspora. Efforts to reduce clan ties in favor of a pan-Somali national identity after independence, followed by the campaign under dictator Siyad Barre's ‘scientific socialism’ to eradicate clan loyalties, have not extinguished the meaning of tribe in personal identities. Additional pressures in the diaspora include appeals to modernity and global Islam as the anchor of Somali identity.
12. One Somali interviewee suggested that as cultural outsiders, Somalis of different clans might be more forthcoming with us than with a native interviewer. See Langellier (Citation2008) for a fuller discussion.
13. In her bestselling memoir Infidel, Somali refugee Ayann Hersi Ali describes wearing pants and riding a bicycle in the Netherlands: ‘one Somali said, “you are putting us all to shame with your bicycle. When you ride toward us with your legs spread we can see your genitals”’ (Citation2007, p. 202).
14. The Letter, a film directed by Ziad H. Hamzeh (2003), documents this incident. Also see Finnegan (Citation2006) and Jones (Citation2004). Caaliya arrived in Lewiston after the episode but was familiar with its occurrence and aftermath.
15. Female genital cutting is complex, difficult, and unresolved issue within Somali culture. See Korn (Citation2006) for a memoir.
16. The naturalizing of sexual difference in Islamist thought also consolidates heterosexism and homophobia.
17. Interview #12 with an anonymous male, August 23, 2006.