In early 1990s, I read Amy Tan’s wonderful novel, The Joy Luck Club, which was about four Chinese women who got together and formed The Joy Luck Club. These ladies would play mah-jongg, share gossip, exchange their personal struggles and challenges they faced. Their informal gathering allows them to escape the world they are in and reminisce about pasts studded with tragedies and ruminate about their contemporary struggles with life in America. These women pass their time to create a world of their own which is filled with nostalgia but they also provide a tacit repudiation of how their four daughters have turned. It was a taut and gripping novel because it gave a unique reflection of immigrant life in the U.S, both the struggle and the triumph. Reading the novel made me wonder if there will ever be a poignant portrait of the Somali immigrant especially the Somali women in America and their relentless-but unheralded-struggles in a world that seems to be stacked against them.  

Nomad Diaries featured at LATimes book Fair ( UCLA)

Enter; Yasmeen Maxamuud’s
Nomad Diaries and the answer to my long-awaited prayer. This novel chronicles the lives, struggles, ambitions, setbacks, and triumphs of a Somali family coping with a world replete with cruelty, corruption, ignorance, violence, and deeply-ingrained set of values that demand certain protocols and rules. Yasmeen masterfully captures the ebullience of the life of a Somali immigrant family featured by Nadifo, the main character, who tries to cope with the double-edged sword of American dream and American tragedy. Nadifo’s personality is contorted by pain as she holds together a fissiparous family. She begins her early life as a simple woman thrown in a new life pregnant with danger and opportunity. Nadifo marries
a government cabinet minister and starts leading a life of well-to- do person filled with fun and adventures, but her new-found wealth and ties to a corrupt and brutal regime abruptly comes to an end---after all, it is the nature of power to be ephemeral. Nadifo and her husband become the victims of the new order when the country becomes engulfed in a tortuous civil war. The family flees Somalia to Kenya and becomes commoner. Nadifo’s real challenges, paradoxically, begin when she embarks upon a new life in the USA. Her husband, the former high government official, fades into obscure jobs and Nadifo, who had dodged bullets and extermination in Somalia, now faces the biggest trial and tribulation of her life; being an immigrant woman and a mother who is raising her children in an environment that is so different and presents unique challenges on a daily basis. It is the classic case of reconciling two cultures that oddly seem irroncilable. One of the Chinese women in Joy Luck Club lamented about it when she said,” I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix”? Being an immigrant woman in America is hard, but it is even more difficult being a black immigrant and Muslim in America. What follows in the novel is the mechanics of living in Minneapolis; a life that seems to be slow and plodding but, at the same time, allows past issues that spent in hibernation to re-emerge.

I have been touched by this novel because I can relate to Nadifo. This character reminds me of the very people that I have been dealing with since 1991. Once upon a time, I was a Case Worker for many Somali and Iraqi refugees in California, and I have seen the daily struggles of these people and witnessed their capacity for resiliency.  I have seen many of the immigrants I dealt with whose lives were strewn with setbacks but still managed to attain the American dream by producing remarkable progeny that attended Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley. In addition, I was raised by a strong woman who embraced life’s challenges and never wavered. My mother was a simple woman who dealt with the world around her with strength. I have always been a true believer of the Somali women being the bedrock of our immigrant community. In essence, Nadifo’s story is the scintillating story of all immigrant women, regardless of race, background, and national origin.

Initially, I had beef with writer Yasmeen Maxamuud because her novel is a thinly veiled satire of Somali men, who come across as uninspiring, inconsiderate, and unhelpful, but then I realized that the novelist has actually done a great job of interpreting a Somali immigrant life in America.
I have seen former Somali government officials and ambassadors working in the USA as general laborer in warehouses, as security guards, or taxi drivers. I know some of today’s cabbies may have a bright future in Somalia. A good example is the president of Puntland who was once a cabbie in Australia.  Somali men have generally been on the back seat for the last two decades when it comes to the family. It was men, mind you, who started the civil war and are still perpetuating it. I do not see Somali women in coffee shops or restaurants engaging in vacuous chatter like the men do. Somali women are the ones who have taken the leadership role in shaping our immigrant outlook.

All in all, Nomad Diaries is a book that captures the essence of being an immigrant in America. The story presents personal struggle, violence, rape, forbidden love, youthful hubris, discrimination, culture shock, and the will to withstand life’s daily challenges. Yasmeen writes with forensic clarity and deft understanding of Somali women in the Diaspora. I would highly recommend the novel to anyone who wants to read and see Somali lives, beautifully and meticulously, captured in print. Readers will also witness the birth of a star: a writer who has a talent to spare and a penchant for pungent language.
 
By Hassan M. Abukar
Email:abukar60@yahoo.com         

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