The Girl Who Wore a Hijab and Kicked Up a Hornet's Nest in Congress
By John Kendall Hawkins
The global refugee crisis has been with us for a while. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there's been a steady flow of displaced humans from their home nations into statelessness and then on to begrudged statefulness among strangers. According to the agency, there are 4.2 million stateless people right now. Some people are stateless within their own natal nation (Yemen). The number of refugees stayed at about 40 million a year until about 2012, when it began an unbroken rise upward to the 80 million mark today.
Why? The usual understated suspects - war, internal failure of governance, economic catastrophe, climate change. But, also, movement coincides with the rise of ISIS and the Levant, a militant Islamic insurgency created in the aftermath of the illegal 2003 Shock And Awe display in Iraq, which saw militant forces gather and claim a caliphate (a global statehood, in the Levant region, for radical Islam) - a claim rejected by the US "without prejudice," and leading to a reign of terror and counter-terror in the region, ending abruptly when Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi allegedly blew himself heavenward clutching two virgins. The mess that's been made in Syria by the post-Cold War exploits of Russia and America has sent hundreds of thousands of people toward an unwelcome Europe. Covid-19 has exacerbated their plight.
You could argue that statelessness includes the Apart-Hate system that saw The Daily Show's Trevor Noah come into the world illegally -- his journey across the birth canal a kind of fence-jumping -- that he recounts in his memoir, Born A Crime. It's a crazy world. More recently, I reviewed a book by Kurdish refugee from Iran, Behrouz Boochani, who tried to enter Australia by boat (illegal, and making him permanently ineligible for entry) and was sent to a detention camp on Manus Island, where he described conditions so foul and horrific to an advocate in Australia -- by way of WhatsApp -- that it became a best-selling memoir. Rules for a lucrative national award were changed to make the non-Aussie's book eligible for consideration and --voila! -- he won the $125,000 prize.
Today, thanks to more Aussie prizes, book sales, paid interviews, a gig at the Guardian, and his recent movie deal, Boochani nears millionairehood while he waits, in statelessness, in New Zealand, before, ostensibly, heading to America, where he has previously said he wouldn't go unless he was allowed to sue Australia for its atrocities and abuses. The kicker is, had he been allowed into Australia after Manus, he'd have been abused for his anti-Australian comments (guaranteed) --probably by some of the same Lefties who championed him. Being a refugee can mean crossing the border into Wonderland.
With Ilhan Omar's memoir (as told to Rebecca Paley), This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey From Refugee To Congresswoman, the reader returns to a more traditional tale of horrific displacement and resettlement with a happy ending. The book is roughly segmented into three sections corresponding with important phases of her life: early childhood in Somalia, teen to young adult life in Virginia and Minnesota, and the commencement of her political career in Washington, DC. Frankly, the first half of the account is thoroughly engaging, as she provides anecdotes of her trials and tribulations, mostly as a refugee and/or immigrant literally fighting for her physical and psychical liberty; however, her later political doings, despite her unique cultural challenges, drags a bit; and, the closing chapter is essentially a stump speech in sheep's clothing.
Omar's tale of growing up in Baidoa, a burb of Mogadishu, where she was born in 1982, only to end up in a burb of Minneapolis, where she was scorned, is compelling, poignant, and frank. As Omar tells Paley, right out of the chute she was a fighter and a social critic. Observing, one day in third-grade class, a boy taunting another aggressively, Omar's hackles were up, when the bully exclaimed:
"Hooyadawus!" which means "Go f*ck your mother" in Somali. I burned in my seat. I always hate it when people use vulgar language, but I get really angry when it involves mothers, who I knew from the beginning were sacred-even if I didn't have one.
Seven year old Omar told the bully to sit down and shut up, and he replied he'd beat snot out of her after school, and then, later, their battle ended when, "I pulled the boy down and rubbed his face in the sand." Her brother came along and shouted at her, "Ilhan! What the hell?"
Lesson: You don't mess with the Ilhan. For letting a girl force his head in the sand, the bully could barely save face and was forever ostrichsized; none of his peers wanted to, um, emulate him after that.
In the mid-80s, growing clan unrest, brought about by aging Somalian president Mohammed Siad Barre's agitation of the masses and move toward totalitarianism, saw the eruption of a civil war the effects of which continue to this day. Omar recalls, "I remember everything shutting down. School was the first institution to go, but eventually the mosques, the postal service, the television stations, even the market closed down." Subsistence diets were forced on them:
(To this day, I hate plain rice. It brings back that time when everyone smelled like a bag of rice. It seeped into people's pores like we had drowned in it.)
Omar relates that her family had to flee the country when she was nine years old, due to its level of violence, much of it aimed at her clan, and ended up in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya for four years.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
