AFAReads discussion

Dear reader,

What does it mean to be American? That’s a question I thought of often when I was reading Abdi Nor Iftin’s moving memoir, Call Me American (Vintage, 2018). Our October AFAReads book club selection, Call Me American is presented this month in partnership with the United Nations Association of New York(UNANY).

I considered those closest to me: My parents, who are from the Midwest but met in the Peace Corps and raised me and my siblings in Germany, Indonesia, and Japan. My husband, who grew up in Puerto Rico as the son of Cuban immigrants. My best friend, the daughter of a Black Trinidadian father and a Filipino mother who lives with her partner in a tiny town in Missouri. Like 328 million other people, we are all American, yet the stories of how we came to live under the banner of the stars and stripes are vast and varied. And for so many—including Iftin—oh, what a story it is.

As a young boy in war-torn Mogadishu, Iftin first learns about the United States through the screen, watching films like Rambo and The Terminator, and connecting the words he heard in English with what he read in Somali subtitles. In 1992, Iftin finally meets Americans—or the Mareekans, as they’re known in Somalia—during a ceasefire, when they roll into the capital as part of the United Nations–led Operation Restore Hope. “The Mareekan flag was waving, stars and stripes,” Iftin writes. “That’s when it hit me: I had seen that flag in movies! These Mareekans were the movie people, and this was a real movie happening in front of us!”

But though peace was short-lived and the Americans eventually left, Iftin continued his American immersion. He practiced English phrases and began listening to hip-hop, so much so that his neighbors dubbed him “Abdi American.” Iftin’s English eventually led him to become an on-the-ground source for the journalist Paul Salopek, who quoted Iftin in his Atlantic story about Somalia, “The War Is Bitter and Nasty.”

As Iftin’s proficiency in English grew, so too did the risk of speaking it—and engaging in anything American: Much of Somalia was under control of the Islamist Al Shabaab militant group, and Iftin, fearful of being killed, fled to Kenya. In 2013, after countless visa rejections, Iftin won a golden ticket: the U.S. diversity visa lottery.

Iftin’s story, though, doesn’t end there. As you read and learn more about him, you’ll see that in many ways, it’s only just begun.

Yours in good books,
Katherine LaGrave
Digital features editor