Somali girls coming of age are caught in cultural tug of war

[Business_Man]

At gym time, teenage girls in the locker room strip off T-shirts and jeans and squeeze into tank tops and spandex shorts. But Fartun Nur, 17, peels off layers of shiny fabric that shield her from the outside world.

 

First goes the floor-length skirt. Then the long-sleeved shirt. She keeps the hijaab on, adjusting it to make sure it still hides her hair. Next, she slips on a knee-length tunic and billowy trousers and hustles to the "girls-only" gym class.

 

Nimco Ahmed, 18, strolls into the locker room, her headphones completing her western look. She trades her boot-cut jeans for track pants, not caring, as other Somali girls do, if they're too revealing. With one last look in the mirror, she trots to the co-ed gym class.

 

For Fartun (pronounced far-TOON) and Nimco, life is a daily test. Far from the civil war in their homeland, Somali girls confront a cultural war in a country so unlike their own.

 

America, with its melting pot, equal rights, and obsession with sex and youth, beckons them at every turn. These new values collide with traditional Somali values that call for clear roles for men and women, respect for authority and an identity based on family, not self.

 

Nowhere is this clash more visible than at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. Far from the days when Gov. Jesse Ventura and other working-class whites dominated the hallways, today's Roosevelt boasts the largest Somali student population in the city -- and perhaps the nation.

 

Nearly a third of the 1,550 students enrolled at the start of the school year were Somali, in part because Roosevelt offers special language services.

 

Roosevelt, with its clangy school bell and yesteryear feel, is a haven for Somali girls. School is about the only place where they can roam free of their families' scrutiny.

 

Somali families expect the females to carry the culture and maintain the family honor. So while Fartun's brother can blend in with male classmates who wear the same baggy jeans and T-shirts, she stands out in her Somali clothes.

 

Sons may visit restaurants or hang out on the basketball courts, but daughters are expected to stay home, out of public view, protecting their modesty.

 

It's at school, in the hallways, classrooms and cafeteria, where Fartun and Nimco confront America. Mingling with kids from Iran, Vietnam, Mexico, Somalia and the United States, they navigate the currents of the American mainstream.

 

Nimco: Life in two worlds

 

Like a turtle, Nimco has learned how to live both in water and on land. At home and at Roosevelt.

 

In her mother's clothing and perfume store in Minneapolis' Phillips neighborhood, she speaks rapid-fire Somali, laughing and joking with her relatives. "Galab Wanaagsan. Seetahay?" (Good afternoon. How are you?) At school, she expertly shouts, "Whassup?" to friends from all nations. "I'm kinda international," she explains.

 

Armed with a cell phone and a Discman, she weaves through the halls, waving and smiling at people who call her by name. "I like this guy. He is funny as hell," she says, passing an Asian boy with frosted hair.

 

Spotting some Somali girls, she playfully charges into them. They push back and laugh, and she walks away, grinning. All the while walking and talking, she fishes a piece of gum from her purse and places it in a friend's outstretched hand.

 

But for the transparent scarf wrapped snugly around her hair, Nimco looks like other American students. Same Mudd jeans and platform shoes. Multiple earrings on each lobe. A giant blue hair claw to keep loose strands in place beneath her scarf. She loves American fashions.

 

When she first got to Roosevelt in 1998, after spending eight years in Germany, Nimco didn't wear the hijaab (pronounced HEE-job)-- the Arabic word for "cover" used to describe the scarf Muslim women wear over their hair for modesty. The other kids saw her bare head and assumed she was Ethiopian.

 

"I started feeling bad," she said.

 

These days, she wears the hijaab, when she feels like it. She does it to let everyone know she's Somali, and so she can get used to the feel of the fabric tugging at her hairline, reminding her who she is, what she is. Somali. Muslim. Woman.

 

Someday, when she's married with children, she'll add another layer to her modesty, she says. She'll wear the jalaabiib (pronounced Jawl-a-beeb), the larger head covering that resembles a nun's habit. It's the one her mother and Fartun wear. By then, Nimco will stop wearing pants, too, she vows.

 

These changes she will make to set a good example for her kids and to raise them right in Islam, the Muslim religion. "I have a lot of respect for the religion," she says solemnly.

 

Which rules to follow?

 

Sitting in her bedroom, a pile of colorful scarves resting on her dresser next to a purple Minnesota Vikings cap, Nimco reflects on the challenge of living in two cultures. At school, she sidesteps the fistfights and verbal taunts that are common between Somali and American kids. "Some of them say, 'You smell bad,'" Nimco said. Some kids don't understand or flat out don't like Somali customs, such as washing hands and feet in the school bathrooms before praying.

 

To visit the Roosevelt cafeteria is to witness the cultural apartheid. Somali girls gather on one side of the room, apart from the Somali boys, the Asian kids, the whites and the African-Americans.

 

Immanuel Huggins, an African-American friend of Nimco's, counts Somali girls among his friends. "A lot of them are pretty," he said.

 

Most of the tension between Somalis and other kids stems from misunderstandings about the Muslim religion and Somali culture, he said.

 

"When you see a girl who wears the scarf, and she might speak another language, and then they think you're speaking about them, it starts making divisions.

 

"Their culture is probably the farthest thing from our culture."

 

At home, Nimco sometimes suppresses her outgoing nature to respect the reserved Somali tradition in which she was nurtured. She avoids eating at Somali restaurants and coffee shops, knowing that such behavior by a girl can set tongues wagging.

 

After all, a girl's reputation is all she has, and it doesn't take long in this cozy Twin Cities Somali community before your business is everybody's business. "If I do something bad outside the house, it's going to be inside the house. Somebody's going to tell," Nimco explains. "My mom -- she's not going to hurt me or anything -- but she's going to feel bad. I don't want her to feel bad. I want my mom to be happy about what I'm doing."

 

Therein lies Nimco's dilemma. How to live by American rules at school without upsetting her people? Sometimes, she finds, she must lie.

 

A member of the Roosevelt track team, she runs in shorts, exposing her legs in public. The instant the race is over, she pulls on her warm-up pants. But if her mother knew she wore shorts, she'd disapprove. So would others in the Somali community.

 

Once during track practice, a group of Somali men approached her, and panic swept over her and other girls at school. "What were those Somali guys doing here? Did they see her running in shorts?" they asked each other. Turns out the men just wanted to talk to Nimco about a summer athletic team they were forming.

 

The dating dilemma

 

In the perfect Somali world, boys and girls don't date. They marry. At school, Somali girls may disappear for a few days and return married to men twice their age.

 

Dates and school dances are tricky in a culture that prohibits unmarried males and females from even touching one another. Some of the girls at Nimco's school have boyfriends who walk them to class and call them on the phone, but they do it on the sly. Some girls dance with partners, but only a few dare tell their parents.

 

This year's prom proved to be more trouble than it was worth for Nimco. She'd planned to go with a friend, a Somali boy. It wasn't a date, she insists.

 

A week before the dance, her friends warned her that it might not look good to have her picture taken, all dressed up, with this Somali guy. She didn't want people talking about them like they were a serious couple, so she backed out.

 

On the day of the dance, Nimco stood barefoot with a curling iron in one hand and hair spray in the other, holding court before a small crowd of girls in the school locker room. Instead of going to the prom, she did hair for girls who were going.

 

Nimco's friend, Ifrah (pronounced EE-fra) Mohamed, a very westernized girl who doesn't "cover" like other Somali girls, squirmed in the chair and eyed the hijaab-clad crowd watching her. "I can't believe your parents are letting you guys go," Ifrah said to them. "Every place I go, I'm the only Somali girl."

 

Even Ifrah used to lie to get out of the house.

 

"Last year I had to throw so many fits," she said. At last she told her father: "Dad, this is America. Just let me have one night."

 

Nimco smiled understandingly as she twisted the curling iron. "Sometimes it's hard to follow the right thing," she said later. "We are different. We want to do everything that people our age here do. Most of them [somali elders], they really don't get it."

 

Fartun: Decidedly Somali

 

For Fartun, the tug comes from another direction, from Africa. In Kenya, where she grew up, she made a conscious decision to hide her dark brown locks from public gaze. She was 14, the age when many Somali girls start wearing the hijaab.

 

It was Eid, an important Muslim holiday, and her mother spread out an assortment of pretty scarves from which Fartun chose one. Admiring her new look in the mirror, she decided to make the hijaab a part of her permanent identity. Only at home among relatives or among women does she take it off.

 

At Roosevelt, she wears the full jalaabiib in a rainbow of colors: turquoise, eggplant, mint green, lemon. There's an elegance about her that must have followed her from Kenya. Her family moved there before the Somali civil war broke out in the early 1990s. There, she had a nanny and a spacious house. She never lived in the refugee camps that housed so many Somalis.

 

Her mother, Geni (pronounced GEH-nee) Nur, may speak of Somalia, but Fartun's memories of the country they left when she was a child are fuzzy at best.

 

Her home and life in Kenya are what she misses, and she plans to go back there one day. In her poetry book, she records her longings, writing about "the country I'll never forget."

 

"Kenya's where I grew up. ... It's just not the same when you start another different life."

 

'Things got changed'

 

In the bustling hallways at school, Fartun's no social butterfly. Backpack in tow, she heads straight to class, her face expressionless. She takes her schoolwork seriously, following directions, working diligently whether she's solving a problem in math class or lifting weights in gym class. In history class, when other students debate a point with their teacher, Fartun listens silently.

 

She wasn't always shy.

 

Back home, she was a real "little devil." She loved to torment the nanny and play practical jokes on her friends. Everyone knew her then.

 

Recently, one of her uncles said to her: "Is that you, Fartun? You're so quiet. What happened to the old Fartun?"

 

"Things got changed," she replied.

 

There are times, however, when she is laughing with her school friends or hanging out at the Mall of America when she feels American, Fartun concedes. But when she is home with her brother and sisters, playing a game of "Remember when ..." she feels a gulf between herself and her classmates that's wider than the continent she left behind.

 

"I lost my life, where could it be?" she writes in one poem that describes her painful "thunderous silence."

 

When the bell signals the end of the school day, she threads her way through the throngs of students running and hollering outside the building. Not until she walks through the front doors of the Somali mall off Lake Street, where she is surrounded by other Somalis, does she start to relax.

 

"When I'm here, I kind of talk a lot. I don't know why," she says, smiling.

 

Fartun and her mother trade shifts at the 10-by-12-foot store where they sell scarves, long skirts, fabrics, shoes, international phone cards and other items. Inside the stall, Fartun greets customers and arranges the inventory. When it's slow, she does her homework or talks to friends who drop by.

 

When her mother is working at the store, Fartun's at home in charge of seven of her eight siblings, ranging in age from 16 to three years old. "I'm like the supervisor. She's the manager," Fartun says. She puts the younger ones down for naps, cleans the house and whips up whatever's available for dinner. One day it was egg noodles and meatballs.

 

The decor of the third-floor apartment across the street from Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis breathes Somali culture. Large Persian rugs on the floor. Rich maroon curtains from floor to ceiling. The sweet, musky smell of spices and incense. Bunches of silk flowers hanging high on the walls.

 

Even so, American culture infiltrates. The children sit in the living room, crowded around the TV set. They are captivated by "Passions," a daytime soap opera offering the typical fare of sex and violence. But when a Victoria's Secret commercial comes on showing leggy lingerie models, Fartun immediately changes the channel. With one eye on the TV, she plops on the couch, cradling her cousin. "We call her Maggie, like Maggie Simpson" of "The Simpsons" TV show, she says, grinning at the pacifier-sucking infant.

 

The phone rings and Fartun shifts the baby and picks up the phone. "It's Daddy!" she announces happily, now talking in Swahili. She's one of the lucky ones. Many Somali teens are here without either parent, their families blown apart by famine or war. When Fartun's family immigrated to Minneapolis to join other family members, her father stayed behind with her baby sister. Fartun says he couldn't leave his truck delivery business, and he wanted his youngest child to stay in Africa, so that she would know where she belongs. Not since October 1998 has she seen her father, but she plans to visit him this summer.

 

Both: Trying to hold on

 

What will Nimco's future be like?

 

Her mom doesn't know.

 

But she is worried.

 

Mohobo Hashi, 51, sits behind the counter of her clothing and perfume shop in Minneapolis' Phillips neighborhood and studies her feisty daughter. Nimco, clad in a flannel shirt, plaid pants and hijaab, squats beside her and translates her thoughts:

 

"Here in America, to raise the girls, it's kinda hard. Back in Somalia, you can tell them what to do. ... Here in America, the girls tell you what to do!" At this, she throws her hands up and shrugs helplessly.

 

Earlier this year, a Somali man said he wanted to marry her daughter. Hashi laughed. Nimco has ideas of her own, she told him.

 

In many ways, Hashi resembles Nimco. She has the same high cheekbones and cheerful smile. They both wear sandals that reveal lacquered toenails. Hashi's are ebony, the color traditionally worn by Somali women; Nimco's are a metallic pink, the shade worn by many American teens.

 

As a teenager, Hashi's life was nothing like her daughter's. By the time she was Nimco's age, she already had two children. Her only education came in an Arabic school, where she studied the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book. There was no prom. No shopping at the mall. And certainly no dating. Islam prohibits it.

 

Sometimes she wonders if coming to America was the best thing for her family.

 

"I'm really worried about that -- that our kids will change," she said. "They're really young, and they're around other [non-Somali] people all the time. They're not seeing every day their culture," she says.

 

Wrestling with change

 

There is some good coming out of the changes in the Somali girls, some say. At Roosevelt, the girls are working hard at their education, harder than the boys, said Abdirahman (pronounced Ab-di-rah-MON) Mukhtar, another friend of Nimco's. "Back in Somalia, most girls didn't go to universities; they were expected to marry," he said. "Right now, once they get the opportunity, they want to work hard. They want to develop new paths for Somali women."

 

All the same, he and others share Hashi's concern that some girls and boys are changing too quickly, copying another culture and discarding their own.

 

Girls who are so quick to change on the outside are probably not very strong on the inside, observed Muse (pronounced MOO-sah) Mohamed, past president of the Roosevelt Somali Student Association. He didn't interact much with the girls because he didn't think it was appropriate, but he noticed some were starting to wear pants.

 

It is hard for Somali immigrants to swim against the current, Mohamed said. "It's like spilling a glass of water in the ocean."

 

Hashi wants Nimco to have a good education and to be a good person, a Muslim, and a mother. For a woman, education is good, but, "The most important thing for a girl is to have children of your own blood," she says.

 

Will her daughter make good on her vow to wear the jalaabiib, marry a Somali man, and raise her children properly in Islam?

 

"Allah knows," Hashi says, pointing to the ceiling.

 

Nimco knows the elder Somalis worry that the girls will forget their culture and take up the new one, but she insists that won't happen to her.

 

"I don't want to have a problem with my family. I don't want it to be different," she said.

 

When it's time to marry, and that time is drawing near, she says she'll choose a husband of her own, a Somali man who appreciates her independent spirit.

 

Talk of marriage makes Fartun blush. She declines to discuss it. Like Nimco, she shares a passion for knowledge. Both plan to go to college after they finish high school in a year or two.

 

Where they'll be, who they'll be in the future, neither one knows. "It's confusing," Fartun says.

 

Just before school let out for the year, Fartun and Nimco joined other Roosevelt students of African descent in celebrating their heritage. With African drums beating, they stepped on to the stage in the school auditorium. For once, they were hard to tell apart, not only from each other but from their American-born peers.

 

A long white gown and hijaab covered Nimco. Fartun stood nearby, wearing a new bold grin. The drums picked up. The emcee introduced them by name.

 

And just for a moment, Fartun and Nimco were the same. Somalis and Americans, too. Somali-Americans.

[LuCkY]

BatcherLor that was an interesting piece-thanks.

[Business_Man]

You are welcome sis. . I found this article on the net and I thought that I would share it with all of you.

 

Peace.

[LuCkY]

ITs quite true-such changes are hard to deaL with-especiaLLy for us SomaLi girLs.

[Business_Man]

I have so much respect for you Somali sisters. Its a shame my fellow brothers dont show my type of attitude in public!

 

Peace.

[LuCkY]

Yes it is a shame but hey at Least now we know there are brothers Like you out there. Maybe you shouLd teach them a few Lessons...huh?

[Business_Man]

Mali men need to educate themselves in life and deen before they approach you sisters!. I should really open up some sort of psychological analysis clinic for mentoring their behaviour!

[LuCkY]

That wouLd be a wonderfuL idea.That way they dont come off as being ignorant, arrogant, stubborn and disrespecfuL toward the sisters.

[Business_Man]

Ignorant Men made it difficult for us nice guys to find descent sista's!. Ladies heart get blown away like the way arnold was blown away in terminator and they become untrusting. So when a nice bro comes along, she wouldnt know if he is the real deal or just a fake marqaan!.

[LuCkY]

Thats true but hey thats part of Life. I guess you have to find a way to make them beLieve you and trust you.So Long as chivalry is aLive there is stiLL hope for you nice guys to prove us(Ladies) wrong.

[Business_Man]

You have wisdom!. No wonder you are called Lucky. You seem to give the right advices always!. We should work side by side at the psychological clinic!

[LuCkY]

Why thank you.WeLL i try my best not to misLead peopLe and offer them the best-which they deserve. Lucky is just a name that i Like. Yeah i guess we couLd do that.

[Business_Man]

Lucky sounds like a respectable name to choose!. It kinda reflects your personality I guess, your humble personality.

[LuCkY]

I guess it took me awhiLe to decide but eventuaLLy i got it and im happy with it.

I guess it kinda does.

[Business_Man]

I told u I was a true fan of you. I know this is the first time we are interacting for so long!.