82 pages • 2 hours read
Abdi Nor IftinCall Me American
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Cultural Differences
Cultural differences across generational, tribal, and national lines can lead to misunderstandings and violence.
The first big difference is between generations. Abdi’s parents, Madinah and Nur, were nomadic farmers, people who depended on the land to survive and who never stepped foot in the city until they had to. For Abdi and his siblings, such a lifestyle is unimaginable, creating a fundamental difference between the generations. Only when the family flees across the bush, does Abdi learn just how incredibly tough his mother is.
In Mogadishu, a cultural difference that creates tensions, often causing violence, is tribal or clan identity. In Somalia, this identity is a combination of religion, class, or ethnicity. Long-standing feuds between the country’s most powerful tribes erupt into civil war. Meanwhile, Abdi’s own tribe, the Rahanweyn, is considered so powerless that it is cast aside. At times, this works to the family’s advantage: When they flee Mogadishu, no one cares about the Rahanweyn enough to execute them. On the other hand, at one point Rahanweyn beggars are used as target practice by the militia snipers.
In America, Abdi notices new kinds of cultural differences. American men at his first job bully him. The first news report he sees on American television is about an African-American man killed by the police. At the same time, the Somali immigrant community insists on avoiding assimilation in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. Even in America, cultural differences lead to violence and tension everywhere, much to Abdi’s disappointment.
Loss of Innocence
The violence in Somalia affects the entire population, but the loss of innocence experienced by a generation of children has long and lasting ramifications. As young children, Abdi and his siblings witness an obscene amount of death and destruction. They see people gunned down in the street, people mutilated, corpses eaten by animals, and other violence.
Hassan, the oldest child, is the first to come to terms with the dangers of Somalia. When Hassan does not finish religious school, he is kicked out of the house. He announces to Abdi that he intends to leave the country and spends his time raising racing pigeons until, still barely a teenager, he makes the life-threatening journey across the Kenyan border. Hassan sells all of his beloved pigeons to fund his escape, pawning his childhood to preserve his future.
Nima is the youngest of Abdi’s surviving siblings. For years, Abdi worries that she is perpetually malnourished and prevented from playing with other children by Islamist laws. Nima’s life is one of constant suffering: She can barely remember the time when the family was happy and stable. As a young teenager, Nina has a marriage arranged to a man twice her age and immediately bears children. Nima’s loss of innocence is the most difficult for Abdi to examine, since Nima never has a happy time in her life, suffering constantly in impossible conditions.
Abdi’s own loss of innocence comes when he must acknowledge the difference between movies and reality. Surrounded by violence, he falls in love with action movies, where strong heroes swoop in to save the day. He is so invested in this idea that when international troops arrive, Abdi assumes they will fix everything, like in the movies. The departure of these organizations reveals to Abdi that the world is not like the movies. He loses his innocence, realizing that no one will save him except himself.
Individualism Versus Collective Action
Abdi’s uniqueness is a core aspect of the book. Even the title—a reference to the nickname he earned in Somalia for his unceasing devotion to American culture—points out how much he stood out from his peers. From this emerges the unspoken implication that Abdi’s success stems from his ability to commit, from his unshaken faith in himself, from aptitude and abilities that are intrinsically his. In other words, one way to read Abdi’s achievement is through the lens of the appealing American myth of “raising oneself up by one’s bootstraps”—a vision of individual achievement that dismisses systemic problems, community involvement, and inequity when explaining failure.
However, just beneath the surface of the book, we can see the ways in which Abdi’s remarkable journey could only have happened through the help of others—and just how many others were necessary for one man to escape the crumbling country of Somalia. From his fiercely protective mother, to his path-forging brother Hassan, to the western journalists who kept his voice on the air, to the American woman who paid his way, to the Mainers who housed and employed him when he first arrived in America, Abdi only thrives through the interventions of those around him. An incredibly large number of people helped him pull his bootstraps.
At the same time, the book is an indictment of systemic oppression—the result of situations in which, instead of offering collective help, a community becomes a collective hindrance. We see how groups originally allied for mutual aid, like tribes and clans, disintegrate into violence and chaos, how religious communities transform themselves into authoritarian regimes, and how systems meant to uplift—like the visa lottery—become mired in bureaucratic tedium and callousness.
