personalities 44 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine In the movies, there are good guys and bad guys. Where I lived, there were no good guys. Embedded in Maine 5 I n Call Me American (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), Abdi Nor Iftin, 33, chronicles his life in war-torn Somalia from his child- hood to his immigration to the United States. It’s a harrowing reality that few U.S.- born citizens can fathom. “Mogadishu had become a city of women and children, a city of graves. The streets were littered with bullet casings and un- exploded bombs. Exhausted militiamen roamed the empty neighborhoods, roofs and doors gone, carrying the goods they looted going from house to house, leaving nothing behind. The great capital city of the nation had become the valley of death.” —Call Me American. “It’s important that we share these sto- ries with the entire world so they know,” says Iftin, who first began telling his story as a correspondent for the BBC and NPR in 2009 via secret cell phone recordings after meeting Pulitzer Prize-winning journal- ist Paul Salopek in Mogadishu. Salopek was there covering the U.S.-backed Ethiopian occupation. At the time, Iftin was 22, had witnessed more death as a child than most adults, had buried his infant sister, had lived on the streets, and was threatened with a gun to his head. Each day, for most of his life, presented a thin line between life or death. “Living with violence was the only thing I knew,” Iftin says. From avoiding the mili- tant group al-Shabaab and navigating the sheer chaos around him, it seemed there was no escape. Well-known as “Abdi Amer- ican” for his obsession with Western cul- ture, he was watched closely by the group. Iftin learned English from Hollywood movies starring Sylvester Stallone and Ar- nold Schwarzenegger screened in a neigh- bor’s home. It was an escape as much as an opportunity. “In the movies, there are good guys and bad guys. Where I lived, there were no good guys.” With a Madonna post- er hanging in his bedroom and rap music playing, Iftin could tell his mother was at a loss. “She had never seen someone so ob- sessed with Western culture.” On top of it all, Iftin was teaching Eng- lish to others, drawing more attention to himself. “They [al-Shabaab] were trying to recruit me. I hid in an area al-Shabaab was not controlling at the time, and, luckily, I met Paul. He listened to me. I was so frus- trated, and I unleashed all the frustration and anger I had. I told him, ‘Life here sucks. I can die anytime any moment.’” Salopek brought the accounts back to the U.S., writing a piece for The Atlantic, “The War Is Bitter and Nasty.” It was the in- citing incident in Iftin’s trek to the U.S. With the help of the NPR team and the McDonnell family from Maine—who’d lis- tened with rapt attention to Iftin’s story on the airwaves, Iftin escaped to Kenya, where he entered the lottery for a green card and was selected to immigrate to the States. Arriving in Boston, where Yarmouth’s Sharon Mc- Donnell and her daughter Na- talya were there to greet him, Ift- in recalls seeing headlines on Mi- chael Brown on the televisions at the airport. Having finally made it to Maine, Iftin spent his first night with the McDonnells in Yarmouth. “The next day [in Yar- mouth] they took me around the neighborhood…it’s really, really less diverse. Basically, we went to the neighbors and we told them, ‘Please, don’t call 911, I am a local who just came. I am not a trou- blemaker, and I’m so excited to be here.’ So, that was my introduction to America, un- fortunately. “Maine did not look like the America I had imagined. In Yarmouth, people have horses, chickens—there are deer, turkeys. I thought, ‘Why does this look like the scary movies?’ Two years into Maine—once I got my car, a job, and I met some friends— I moved into Portland. I’m going to the ocean in the warm weather. In the winter, I had people show me how to do ice skating, and I got snowshoes—everything many Mainers do.” Though he’d been sending ground re- ports and recounting his daily survival, If- tin says it was tough to invoke those dark childhood memories for the book writ- ten with Max Alexander. “It was difficult writing those things,” he says. “My moth- er is in Somalia, and my brother is a ref- ugee in Kenya. It was difficult because I called my mother and asked her to describe what it was like in the civil war. I asked her about the survival, her strength, her no- madic skills she used, and we’d cry. She just wanted to forget it and focus on surviving. I could feel the nightmares. They felt like fresh memories. My mother felt the same way. But this was my memoir, and I want- ed to write down these things so the whole world had to read about what it is like to grow up in civil war Somalia—how easy it was to bring down a government, how easy it was to get into a civil war, but how hard it is to get out of it.” Today, Iftin works as a translator; as an author, he’s tour- ing the country he’d By olivia gunn kotsishevskaya Abdi Nor Iftin has everyone talking.