Call Me American (Adapted for Young Adults): The Extraordinary True Story of a Young Somali Immigrant; by Abdi Nor Iftin (review)

Abdi was born in Somalia in 1985 to a family already grappling with change after drought forced them to leave their nomadic animal-tending life and move to the city of Mogadishu. In 1991, the Somalian Civil War erupted, and Abdi’s childhood became marked by deprivation, loss, and desperate attempts to find safety and home in Mogadishu and other towns as the battle for power raged and ordinary Somalians suffered. Entranced by cinema, Abdi fell in love with America, picking up on the English language and American music, which made him both a target with Islamist power structures and a popular young guy around town known as “Abdi American.” As he grew older, he began to report on life in Mogadishu and, after he fled, Nairobi for English-language media, and eventually with their connections and a bit of luck he managed to get a green card and move to the U.S. in 2014. In this young readers’ edition of his adult memoir, young Abdi is a tremendously appealing figure in his desire to enjoy music and movies and find an alternative to the only choices Somalia offers him (“You could become a sheikh and call the mosque your home, or you could carry a gun”). He’s so engaging, in fact, that it’s easy to miss how hard he worked and how astute many of his choices were, earning him every bit of luck he received. The politics of the civil war may not be immediately legible to American readers, but the book makes crystal clear the depredations of life under it, with starvation, death, and corruption part of Abdi’s daily existence for over two decades. Even though his biography makes it clear he made it safely to America, the narrative is genuinely suspenseful as he desperately negotiates bureaucracy and graft to find a way out. An epilogue describes where various people from the book are now, and a glossary will be included in the bound book.