Exiles on Main Street
Roughly 4,500 refugees will resettle in Texas this year, but few will have a tougher time adjusting than Ali Mohamed and his family. When they arrived in San Antonio from Africa in February, they didn’t know how to speak English. Or read or write. Or use a telephone or an electric stove. And in a few months they would have to start paying the rent.
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It’s the Bantu dream. “Now I live in good conditions,” says Nur. “I eat rice, spaghetti, chicken, potatoes, tomatoes, everything. I am not strong enough to work, I don’t know how to write, I don’t know how to speak English, I don’t even know how to write the alphabet. All I’m hoping for is to keep my stomach full. And I haven’t had any problems since I came. No one is discriminating against me, abusing me, pushing me or hitting me, or saying some bad words. Everything is okay for me now. My children, they are American; forever they will not go anywhere.”
Paula Walker, the refugee resettlement program director of Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of San Antonio, says that in some ways the Bantu have it easier than immigrants from, say, Cuba or Eastern Europe. They’re unusually eager, and they have few ties left to their land of origin. They work hard, they’re adaptable, they’re unfailingly gentle, and they’re deeply grateful to be here. “They’re very, very willing to just do what they have to do, to give up what they have to,” Walker says.
But in other ways, resettlement is harder for them. They speak no English, and the very idea of literacy is foreign to them; that also presents them with a greater obstacle than even the most deprived of refugees from the West must face. What’s more, they have so little experience with even the most basic of Western practices: using a bank account, for example, or paying bills. It’s not that they’re irresponsible; on the contrary, they’re known for their industriousness and adaptability. It’s just that so much of this is new to them; there’s so much to learn. In a way, America is a harsher environment than the one they’re used to, more demanding and less forgiving. In the camps you could count on the aid agencies to deliver food every couple weeks; there was no rent to pay, no electricity or telephone to be turned off. Refugees, like the citizens of tyrannies, have very little, but most of what they have is given to them, and however willing they may be to learn how to care for themselves, it can take a while to adjust.
In Kenya, Ali and Madina were given an introduction to American culture, though the lessons they mention learning seem almost comically random: no urinating on the ground; this is how you light a stove; men and women are equal in America, and so are blacks and whites; you can’t buy a car without telling the government; in an emergency you pick up the telephone, press 9-1-1, and say, “No English. Fire! Fire!” And female circumcision (a.k.a. clitoridectomy, a.k.a. female genital mutilation), they were told in no uncertain terms, is forbidden, though the practice is as traditional and natural to Bantu as male circumcision (which they also perform) is to Americans.
Still, anyone looking for scandal will have to look elsewhere. “It’s a sin for a woman to be uncircumcised,” one young Bantu woman told me. “The religion says so.” But when another Muslim in the room insisted that the religion said nothing of the sort, she seemed to have no interest in arguing. “Well, that’s what they told us,” she said. Anyway: “We’re afraid to do it here,” she went on. “Only the boys, no girls at all. In Somalia, it used to be very easy to find someone who did the procedure regularly. You say, ‘Circumcise my daughter or my son.’ But here you’re not going to find someone who’s willing to do it, and 911 would be called. I can’t speak for other people, but that’s okay by me.”
A deeper and more intransigent problem may be race, for within the insanely complicated patterns of American race relations, Somali Bantu have no status at all. They’re wild cards, their blackness means whatever an onlooker wants it to mean, and there will be times when it will work against them. Drive into Nob Hill, and the first thing you’ll see is groups of Bantu congregating on the sidewalks, a habit they’ve carried over from their life in the camps, where there’s really no such thing as domestic space. Some of the neighbors in the complex assumed these clusters of black people were evidence of gang activity, and while it didn’t take long for the matter to be sorted out, that kind of mistake will probably happen regularly, and, of course, it will go right over the Bantu’s heads.
Moreover, the black community has no reason to identify with the Bantu, nor the Bantu with American blacks. After ten months in San Antonio, young Bantu men have adopted the standard city-kid uniform of loose pants, basketball jerseys, and baseball caps. They listen to hip-hop, and they know all the new handshakes. But so, after all, do white kids; it signifies youth more than blackness. More Africans now immigrate into the U.S. each year than were brought here during any year of the slave trade—an astounding statistic, if you think about it—but they come with their own set of assumptions. A Somali woman who’s been here for some years told me she was riding a bus in Knoxville, Tennessee, when she heard someone refer out loud to “that black woman.” “And I swear I looked around,” she said, “and I remember looking at my arm, and I thought, ‘Oh! They’re talking about me.’ In Somalia you’re many, many things: You’re from a region, you’re the daughter of that person, you’re from a tribe. But ‘black’ doesn’t come up.” It will almost certainly come up in Texas, but in what form no one knows.
In the meantime the Bantu have set up a little African village at Nob Hill. They occupy about thirty of the complex’s units, and they’ve brought what’s left of their culture over from the camps. Tiny American practices remain puzzling to them. Bantu call “seven o’clock,” when the day is starting, “one o’clock.” For the first few weeks, many of them forget to translate the difference and show up for appointments six hours late. There has been some slight, semi-comical business around their unfamiliarity with shower curtains, and I once saw a woman knock on the front door of her own apartment from the inside, to signal to her friends outside that she was about to join them.
A city like San Antonio can absorb a few hundred refugees without even noticing: two hundred lives saved with no disruption to the city; a few women on the bus lines in colorful clothing; a few men in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant, speaking to each other in a language no one else understands. In other cities it hasn’t been as easy. Holyoke, Massachusetts, begged off a plan to resettle Bantu there on the grounds that doing so would strain the welfare, school, and Medicaid programs. Cayce, South Carolina, did the same. One of the school systems in San Antonio balked at the prospect of taking on a few dozen kids who didn’t speak English. “They didn’t think they could handle it,” says Walker. “But actually it’s going quite well.”
ALL THIS TAKES PLACE WELL outside Ali’s understanding. For now, all he knows is that he’s here, his family is here, and he’s impatient to get started. Ten days after arriving in America, he was standing on a sidewalk corner at Nob Hill, looking out of sorts. He hadn’t left the apartment complex since we’d been to the H-E-B; he was waiting for his Social Security card, which would be arriving the next day. He wanted to start work, any work. “Anything given to me, I’ll do,” he said. “I don’t like sitting around doing nothing.”
He sat around and talked to me for a while instead. The pictures I had taken, printed, and given to him were piled on the kitchen countertop, most of them bent and worn from having been handled covetously by everyone else in the complex (most Somalis have never seen a photograph of themselves, aside from the head shot on their ID cards). He and Madina were running out of diapers for their youngest child; they needed to go food shopping again; he wanted to get a telephone. All this will come when work comes. He talked about the future. “I want to learn. That’s something that I didn’t get in Somalia, so I want to learn how to read and write.” He talked about the traditions he wanted to keep—“I’m not going to stop praying,” he said—and those, like arranged marriages, that he would be content to abandon. “If my daughter brings me some future husband, and they’re in love,” he allowed, “they can go.”
He seemed to be both anxious and determined, and I remembered something he’d said the night he and his family first came to San Antonio. It was toward the end of the party, late that night; Ali was grinning so widely he looked like he was trying to swallow his own ears, and he gave voice to a sentiment I’ve encountered so rarely that at first it didn’t register with me, and it was only later that I realized what he’d said. “Where we come from, we think of white people as very generous,” he said. “By nature, we believe that white people, they will help poor people.”
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