When I moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 1973, I was struck by how many of my new friends were also migrants from other states. A native-born Californian was a rarity in those days. Many years later, after spending a quarter century in a military town where most of the population was transient, moving to rural, mostly white Maine in 2016 was a bit of a culture shock.
Originally part of Massachusetts, Maine seceded in 1820, and is celebrating its bicentennial this year. It is the oldest state in terms of population, having a median age of 44.6 years. But it wasn’t just the number of grey-haired heads at the local supermarket that was striking, but rather that their families had lived here for generations. Few that I have met travel far from their New England home. A medical assistant, in her early 30s, upon hearing I was originally from Chicago, asked me if it was safe there.
In a way I can understand the attitude: Maine, like California, has both mountains and oceans, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor recreation, leaving little reason to travel far. But the state has no deserts. As a former desert dweller myself, I was surprised to find that so many had immigrated from the arid lands of Somalia to Lewiston, Maine, just a few miles down the road from my new home.
Lewiston made national news last November when it elected its first Somali-American to the City Council. At just 23 years old, Safiya Khalid also may have been the youngest-ever Council member. Khalid was born in Somalia, and spent the first few years of her life in a refugee camp before eventually settling in Lewiston when she was seven.
One of her high school acquaintances described her as “fun, funny and friendly with everyone, not just the cliques.” In a new book about her adopted hometown, Khalid is described as a hard worker who, when her team was short-handed, managed to cover two workstations at the L.L. Bean plant in town. But before she ran for the City Council seat, she was just another young Somali girl, trying to fit into America’s culture while still being bound by the culture of her first home.
Safiya Khalid, who works on a boot-making machine at L.L.Bean, was accepted to the University of Maine at Orono. She was excited about living on campus and studying psychology. Then her mother, who is disabled, asked, “Who will take care of us?” Safiya had a brother right behind her in school, but the assumption was she’d look after the rest of the family while he went off to college. So now Safiya commutes to nearby USM as a day student. “I work full-time, go to school, pay bills, that’s it,” she says. “I love my family, but that’s the double standard for men and women in my culture.”
In Home Now: How 6000 Refugees Transformed an American Town, Cynthia Anderson examines the impact that refugees from Africa had on the mostly white city of Lewiston, in the mostly white state of Maine.
Using the power of the Androscoggin River—which forms the boundary between Lewiston and its near neighbor, Auburn—the city was once home to thriving textile and shoe manufacturing. Those industries attracted an earlier wave of job seeking French-Canadian immigrants during the last half of the 19th century. Many of the current residents still bear the French names of their ancestors who arrived between 1840 and 1880, an era when the city’s population grew tenfold to19,083.
After World War I, the textile mills found labor, transportation, and power were all cheaper in the South, kickstarting the town’s slow decline. By the 1980s, the young people began following the jobs, moving out of town in search of employment, not unlike their ancestors. What was left? A town struggling to get by.
“Welfare set in: subsidized housing and unemployment benefits, food stamps—a sadder kind of commerce that swelled City Hall and social agencies,” according to Anderson. The shops and offices downtown began to vanish; chains like Sears moved to the outskirts of town, and others simply closed. Just like hundreds of towns across the nation’s Rust Belt, Lewiston was dying, despite a slight resurgence in the 1990s, which saw health care, banking and other service industries providing some employment.
Then, beginning in February of 2001, came the latest wave of newcomers: the Somalis fleeing the horrors and the terror of the civil war that was tearing their homeland apart. By the beginning of 2003, there were 1,400 new Somali residents in Lewiston, thanks to the available housing, low cost of living, and very low crime rate. Currently, an estimated 6,000 residents from African nations now call Lewiston home; It is their story that Anderson tells in Home Now.
Spanning from 2016 and 2019, the book follows the daily experiences of a handful of Lewiston residents: Fatuma Hussein, a 37-year-old mother of eight, is the founder of the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine, formerly the United Somali Women. Frequently called upon to give testimony about the immigrants by the legislature in Augusta, Hussein’s days are filled with advocacy and fundraising, as well as maintaining a home for her children, and her husband, whose work as a long-haul trucker often takes him far from home.
Abdikadir Negeye fled Somalia with his family after militants invaded their village in the Jubba Valley. Just five years old, he was often carried by family members as they walked for two weeks across two hundred miles of desert.
The hunger was terrible; the thirst, worse. At night they hid from animals and bandits while an adult went sleepless to keep watch. Night or day, roving militias made the journey even more dangerous. Conditions in the part of Dadaab where the family wound up were makeshift, with hunger and disease still constants.
Negeye is a Somali Bantu, a marginalized minority from the south of Somalia, who were often sold as slaves during the Indian Ocean slave trade. Although slavery has long been abolished in Somalia, the descendants of these tribes are looked down upon by ethnic Somalis. When he married an ethnic Somali, her family objected, but eventually relented. This was a marriage that never would have happened in Somalia.
What had seemed big differences in Somalia seemed less so in America. Longing supplanted so much else. People missed different things—a white stucco house, a camel herd, the rain-swollen Jubba—but everyone missed something. There was also the fact that as a group Somalis had suffered deeply—many were physically or sexually assaulted, or endured famine, or saw loved ones die. “Some people lose everything, everyone,” artist Jawab Aden told me in in 2006. “Only his or her life is left.” Because of the depth of loss, many Somalis fixed firmly on the present. “We don’t have a back. Only a front,” another man said.
Carrys Ngoy is an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where thousands of young men have been killed or forced to join a militia group. Ngoy wants very much to go to college, but is limited by the catch-22 facing asylum-seekers: They are not allowed to work in the States, or to get federal education funding.
As an asylum seeker, (Ngoy) can’t apply for federal loans, and though he filed for an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services soon after he arrived, a large backlog of cases means it could be years before he learns whether he can stay. Meanwhile, even if he can get a job permit and work full-time while in school, it will be hard to cover the costs.
Jamilo Maalim is a young single mother of two who was separated from her parents as a toddler after their village was attacked by warring factions during the Somali civil war. She wound up in a Kenyan refugee camp, where she spent eight years before coming to America. Many years later, discovering that her birth family had survived and was living in the same Kenyan refugee camp, she returned for a long visit.
She liked her time in Africa but wouldn’t leave Lewiston permanently; she’s a single, working mom who values health care, education, the conveniences of Wi-Fi and big-box stores. She arrived here with the malleability of youth, and in many ways the city has formed her. In Lewiston she’s worked as a customer service rep and now at a resource center as a youth specialist. She gets some assistance—a partial housing voucher and fuel credits—but pays the bulk of the cost of babysitters, utilities, groceries, and rent.[...]
Like many young immigrants in Lewiston, she seems less interested in conventional assimilation than an additive acculturation in which her American identity exists alongside her Somali one. Her computer fluency, close ties to Kenya, love of hip-hop, her hijab and full-length baati, her trilingualism and abstinence from alcohol—all of it is who she is. Or as she puts it, “Somali and Mainer and American are parts of me.” On Friday nights she gets pizza from Papa John’s and lets the kids watch cartoons on YouTube while she and a friend dig into their caches of makeup to try out different looks on each other. She’s devoutly Muslim—follows salah and when stressed turns first to Allah.
Seventeen-year-old Nasafari Nahumure is a high school student living with her conservative Christian parents in downtown Lewiston. Hoping to eventually become a lawyer, Nahumure’s story opens with her efforts to achieve an SAT score that will get her into St. John’s University in New York City. Like many children of African immigrants, Nahumure is kept close to home outside of school and the volunteer work she does at the youth center.
Anderson also profiles a retired middle school teacher and grandfather named Jared J. Bristol, who became radicalized after the events of 9/11 led him to some of the deepest, darkest corners of the right-wing Islamophobic blogosphere. He eventually found his way to the SPLC-designated hate group, ACT! for America. Bristol eventually became the local chapter head of the single-issue grassroots organization, which pushes hate for Islam into the mainstream political arena. He began recruiting new members in 2008.
Bristol also pushes anti-Muslim legislation, including a ridiculous bill to ban Sharia law in Maine. The bill never made it out of committee. Bristol got marginally better results with a bill to ban female genital mutilation (FGM) that ultimately failed to pass. Bills that criminalize FGM are more difficult to defeat, because who doesn’t want to outlaw this practice? The fact is, the horrific procedure is already prohibited by federal law. However, what the immigrant community needs is education, not criminalization. And most Somali women are happy to learn that in America, unlike in Somalia, FGM is not needed to insure a “good” marriage, and so are quite willing to allow their daughters to forgo the ordeal.
Following the lives of these individuals over a four-year period exposes what’s good and not so good about the sudden influx of a large foreign population into a fairly insular homogenous population. There were complaints about the amount of taxpayer dollars that went to the refugees to assist them in settling here. What the complainants failed to recognize is that most of those dollars stayed in the local community, as the recipients spent the money on food, clothing, medical care, and rent, all to the benefit of the city.
Fortunately, most of the town welcomed the new immigrants. After a 33-year-old man rolled the head of a pig into a mosque while several dozen men were at prayer, the community came to the defense of their new residents:
Even among those who didn’t embrace the newcomers, there were limits to what was acceptable. The comments sections of local papers filled with condemnations, and people rallied around mosque members.
The townspeople also turned out on behalf of the refugees when a white nationalist group decided to hold a demonstration in Lewiston. In January 2003, the Illinois-based group planned an anti-immigrant rally in the city. Two pro-immigrant demonstrations were held on the same day, including one at Bates College that drew over 4,000 people.
On the January day of the rally, more than four thousand people showed up at Bates. To enter the auditorium, they walked through metal detectors and past bomb-sniffing dogs and a line of police. Those who couldn’t fit inside chanted and sang outdoors for hours. The turnout included both of Maine’s US senators and its US representatives. The state Speaker of the House read from a resolution unanimously passed by the legislature that said in part, “Hate and bigotry have no place in the great state of Maine.”
Several hundred more met at the armory where the racists planned to hold their rally. In the end, just 40 members of the white nationalist group showed up.
That’s not to say that all’s well for our new neighbors here in Maine. It is not just their religion or their attire that sets the newcomers apart, but the color of their skin as well. They are black people, living in a nation that elected Donald Trump. Theirs is not an easy road, but it surely pales in comparison to the road they travelled to get here.
In Home Now, Cynthia Anderson presents the people of Lewiston and their stories in a way that allows the reader to feel like we know them. We sit in on the family conferences and cheer for their victories. We are there when a child is born and when the community celebrates the end of Ramadan, and we are reminded, again and again, that the Republican Party is missing the boat entirely when they demonize these immigrants. Many Somalis, especially the men, would likely be most comfortable in the older Republican Party, the party of fiscal restraint and “traditional” family values.
Of course, that party no longer exists, and Donald Trump has made it clear that Lewiston’s new residents are not welcome in the current party. They are, however, welcome in ours. Not just in Lewiston, where Khalid ran as a Democrat, but also in places like Minnesota’s 5th District, which is now represented in the U.S. Congress by another Somali immigrant, Ilhan Omar. In 2019, Rep. Omar and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib became the first women of the Muslim faith elected to Congress. They joined the House Democratic Caucus, which includes members of other communities traditionally underrepresented in our democracy.
Former President Bill Clinton, speaking Monday at an event honoring Martin Luther King Jr., talked about our common humanity, which Anderson so richly describes in Home Now:
“America, at its best, is a country of inclusive tribalism,” he told an audience of black leaders, public officials and activists. “Our churches, our synagogues, our mosques or temples, we like diversity but it only works if you think our common humanity matters more.”
Home Now: How 6000 Refugees Transformed an American Town
By Cynthia Anderson
Published by PublicAffairs, a part of the Hachette Book Group
October 29, 2019
336 Pages
