Maeve Higgins: 'This is America, and skin colour is what we can go by'
Abdi Nor Iftin was born in Mogadishu and won a place in the US green card lottery, allowing him to move to Maine. Picture: Carl D Walsh/Portland Portland Press Herald/Getty Images
Since moving to the US in 2014, Abdi Nor Iftin has indeed made an extraordinary life for himself.
I met Abdi in 2018 at a writing event that featured immigrant writers; we were on a panel billed as ‘New Americans’ with the Mexican-American writer Julissa Arce, and we have been internet friends since then.
Most often, I see Abdi’s portrayal of his life on Instagram. He’s usually grinning at the camera and doing something athletic and outdoorsy, riding a horse through the woods, trail running through freshly fallen snow, or sitting around a glowing fire pit with his family and friends eating dinner.
There are plenty of images of the beautiful Maine wilderness around where he lives and hikes regularly.
I suppose he sounds like some kind of lifestyle influencer, and maybe he is just that; he certainly makes a rugged Northern American life look peaceful, healthy, and fun.
We spoke this week, and I asked how his life was — had his childhood dreams of American life come true?
It looks perfect on Instagram, among the skis and the deer and the smiles.
But he is clear that his life here is not without friction and fear — even compared to the dangers he faced back in Somalia.
“In fact, it is a different form of injustice here," he says. "It was an army knocking at my door like it happened in Mogadishu, but it was the US police driving around with the mindset that a black man could be trouble in the neighbourhood.”
He points out that he ended up in Maine, which is the whitest state in the country according to the 2020 census. As a black man, he says simply: “I became very visible.”
I think about him going for a run on the quiet roads of his adopted home, and my mind goes to a murder trial that took place last month in Georgia.
Three white men were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man who was running through their primarily white neighbourhood in February 2020 when they chased him down and killed him.
Back then, it took more than two months for the men to be arrested despite lawyers for Mr Arbery’s family calling his death a “modern-day lynching”.
Next month, the killers face a second trial on federal hate crime charges, where prosecutors will argue that the men targeted Arbery because he was Black.
It is striking to hear Abdi Nor Iftin state with such clarity the danger and discrimination that face him today as a black person in America.
However, it should not be a surprise, particularly considering he arrived just as the Black Lives Matter movement was growing, with the need for a response to police brutality against black people more urgent than ever.
Abdi’s most potent memories of his first weeks in the country are of watching the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, that raged following the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager with his arms raised, who was shot to death by a police officer.
Like the rest of the US, Abdi did not know that the Ferguson uprising was a signifier of times to come.
”What was extremely shocking about the incident of the killing of Brown was the fact that it was the beginning of these long stressful months and years that led us into Trump’s America and into [the police murder of and subsequent protests about] George Floyd,” Abdi says.
In his memoir , Abdi’s recounts a life fraught with danger — born in Mogadishu to nomadic parents in 1985, he survived famine, war, and the threat of child soldiering.
As the Islamist al-Shabab rebel group took control of much of Somalia, a bomb hit the family’s home in 2009. Then Abdi followed his brother Hassan and fled into exile in Nairobi, Kenya.
There followed years of precarity in the city, which was increasingly hostile to Somali asylum seekers.
His luck changed when he won the diversity visa lottery, which admits immigrants to the United States from countries that do not send many people here and grants them a coveted green card.
As a refugee in Kenya and a newly arrived immigrant here, he has shared his story through Western media, including , the BBC, and .
As a teenager in Mogadishu, Abdi taught himself English by watching action movies like and .
He would translate these Hollywood blockbusters for his friends and neighbours, earning the nickname ‘Abdi American’ in the process.
Now, his language skills have once again met in the middle. In Maine, as well as writing, Abdi works as a translator for other Somali immigrants.
He tells me: “I work as a Somali language newsreader; I fight to counter the dominant narrative out there, even from the Democrat-backed radio or papers.
“It is important to tell our stories through our own voices in any language we feel comfortable with.”
There is more to his work than simply translating the language. “The goal of my work is to make sure we can also have our own voices in this country.
“Nothing makes a human story more real than themselves telling it or hearing it from someone who knows that story in their native tongues.”
Like every immigrant, myself included, Abdi was racialised when he moved here; racialisation is something that many of us don’t expect or fully understand until we live here.
When I first moved here, I began to realise that I was white and what that meant; and when he moved here, Abdi quickly understood that he was black.
“The words black immigrant, or African man, were not anything I had ever been called before coming here. At first, I did not know how to accept that.
“It was not an identity I signed up for. But sign up or not, this is America, and skin colour is what we can go by.”
Famously, James Baldwin said: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.”
I’m reminded of this when I hear both the push and pull of America in Abdi’s experience of moving here and becoming American. He became a naturalised citizen in 2018.
“I am glad to be here; at least here, there are still opportunities. I finished school here, I found a loving community, and made friends across the country. I found my voice within the biggest and dominant voices,” Abdi says.
He is keen to give back to America and contribute to the culture here. Ultimately, he hopes to be part of Somalia’s future too.
“I want to return to where it started, the place where I was born, my country of origin, and help rebuild that country with the knowledge, experiences, and skills I have earned here.”
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