Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: Immigrants to the US often arrive with a tremendous hope for a new life as well as a deep sense of loss for the one left behind. Those themes plus culture clash and the resilience of youth are at the center of the play Snapshot Silhouette, a product of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis.

The play has, for the past month, been providing Twin Cities students a glimpse of what life is like for some of the region's newest immigrants. It is built around two 12-year-old girls, one Somali and one African-American, who, as circumstances have it, find themselves living together in the same Minnesota home. Here's an excerpt from one of the most dramatic scenes in the play. It captures the tension of opposing stereotypes.

SPEAKER 2: Let me get some Christian Children's Fund posters, starving babies and flies with big eyes. Then you can think of your sister.

SPEAKER 3: I was trying to be nice, stupid. I was trying to get along.

SPEAKER 2: I thought Somalis didn't know how to get along. Oh, your great-great grandfather killed my great-great-great-- oh, you stole a chicken from my 14th cousin mother's side. Gotta kill you now. Wah wah wah.

SPEAKER 3: I tried to give up the clan thing, but kind of hard. Come here, you people clan away from us.

SPEAKER 2: What people?

SPEAKER 3: African-Americans. Huh, you're all about as African as George Bush.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER 1: To get a better sense of how the issues the play addresses resonate with the Somali community, we talked this week with four Somali high school students-- Hibo Farah, Hamdi Sahal, Mulki Mohamed, and Abdi Awal. They all attend Abraham Lincoln High School in Minneapolis, a special school exclusively for immigrant children. From the perspective of these Somalis, relations with Americans of African descent are no better than with others.

MULKI MOHAMED: African-Americans don't particularly like us. We don't know why, but we do try to be nice to them. And we try to communicate with them, but they don't give us the chance to communicate with them a lot. And we don't have the time to tell them. We don't have the strength or energy to tell them what we want to tell them so we just don't bother.

SPEAKER 1: Why do you think there is that? And you would think there would be a closeness, being African-Americans and new immigrants from Africa.

ABDI AWAL: My name is Abdi Awal. And again, I think it's ignorance mostly, I can say, because we are the same people. The difference is they just came here before us a long time ago.

And we're just new here. We have language problems. We have education problems. We mostly-- they have a little bit of experience in this country. We don't.

So I think the problem is they see us as very less smarter than them mostly. I think the misunderstanding comes from is, we see everything as serious, and they see everything as a fun and everything. So that's, I think, the most problem comes from.

MULKI MOHAMED: My name is Mulki, again. I think that is so true. You get everything for free down here in America. In Somalia, in order to go to school, you had to pay money every other week and so on. And you had to do a lot of things in order to have the privilege to go to school.

Here, you get education for free. They have scholarships, funds, and all that stuff. You basically don't have to do anything except attend school. And to my parents, that was very amazing.

The first time they came down here, they thought that they had to pay something. So my mom wasn't thinking about sending us to school for a while. And then they said, it's public school and it's free. And then she sent us to school. And it's a very easy life down here in America though, very easy.

SPEAKER 1: One experience that separates these students from others is that many have a mother or other close relatives still back in Somalia, waiting for immigration visas and often in dire straits. These teens work after school to send money home to Somali relatives. It's an issue the Children's Theatre play highlights with much emotion from the central character, a girl named Najma. And it struck a nerve with the Somali teenagers we talked with.

ABDI AWAL: I think the part that touched me was when Najma was talking about her mother. And she was saying, I want her to come over. You didn't send her money. It was real touchy because that's what we feel in real life here. You cannot relax while your mother is hungry or your mother is somewhere very insecure. And I almost cried when she was saying, you didn't send money for that time. So it was real touchy.

SPEAKER 1: Do you have a mother over there or other close relatives?

ABDI AWAL: Yes, my mother is in back Somalia. So I feel the same way. If I don't send money one month, I feel like she may die from hunger or something. So it's really important.

SPEAKER 1: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the primary method for Somalis to send money home was shut down by the US because of alleged connections to Al-Qaeda. Alternative money transfers are available, but Somalis consider them less reliable. For Somali adults here, the reality of starvation plus the chaos and death from Civil War are imprinted on their memories. These Minneapolis high school students were mostly too young to remember, but do want Somali history to remain fresh in their own lives, the bad and the good.

SPEAKER 4: Even though it's not me, it's my people. And it's happening to them, and there's nothing I can do for them. I don't want to let go of my religion, and my traditional-- and the things I used to do back home, which is my culture and my religion. So if I know I'm in America and I'm supposed to-- some people said, oh, you're in America. You can do this and you can do that. I know everything is free in America, but, still, I need to keep my culture and my religion the way it was.

SPEAKER 1: And what would be some examples of that?

SPEAKER 4: Some examples are, here, most of the girls, when they're back home, they have to cover their-- wear hijabs and stuff. Most of them, when they come here, they don't wear that stuff. So to me, it's like, you still are who you are before you were there. So why take it off? I mean, why change?

SPEAKER 1: And you're wearing a full traditional dress, right?

SPEAKER 4: Like you said, the thing that I want to hold on to the most is to know that I'm a Somalian. My roots are Somalian. I want to-- one day, if I have children, I want to tell them they're Somali. I want to be able to show them what we used to do back then. I don't want to forget it just because I came to another country. I have my own roots. I should remember my own roots.

SPEAKER 1: What is it like for you to be in this school, where you are with other Somalis and others from East Africa, West Africa, but it's a school for and full of immigrants, new Americans?

ABDI AWAL: I think what is unique about this school is it's the character that the students have. They all have one aim to just be part of the American dream is. We never have fight, university students fighting, university students joking about each other, because everybody knows that there is one aim, and they want to educate themselves and want to be better because they know where they come from is really bad.

MULKI MOHAMED: Everybody has a background. And a lot of them don't know English. A lot of us don't know English. So we can't sit there and make fun of somebody because they don't know English because every single person in that school, basically every single person has been through that. And nobody can point fingers. It's very comforting to know, when you go to school, you won't have enemies. Instead, you will make more friends.

SPEAKER 1: What do you like most about being here?

MULKI MOHAMED: Instant everything. Everything is instant. You get a microwave, you put food in it, it's done. In Somalia, you had to take charcoal. You had to start the fire and everything. Everything is so simple done here. You don't have to take the hard way to get everything. That's what I like about here. [CHUCKLES]

SPEAKER 1: How about you?

ABDI AWAL: I think I like about the opportunities, the jobs, where you can go walk to a Kmart today and fill out the job. And you get it, and you can support yourself and be independent. And I also like about the education, where, you know if you put time in it, you can get rewarded as much as you put it. I think I like about that.

SPEAKER 1: Would you want to go back to Somalia to live, to visit?

SPEAKER 5: When it gets better.

MULKI MOHAMED: Hopefully, yeah, just to go visit. Until we're done with our schools, we can't do that though. But when we finish schools, and we close everything, and we actually have a steady job, like-- what do you call it?

SPEAKER 1: A career?

MULKI MOHAMED: A major.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah.

MULKI MOHAMED: A career. Then, I want to go visit Somalia. I want to actually take time and try to figure everything out and try to get used to that place for a while.

SPEAKER 4: Definitely, I'll go back to my country someday. It's just I don't know when. I do have a dream that maybe someday, when my country is peaceful place, I could go back and tell my kids the things that I missed about my country, how I used to look, and this and that, show it to them and stuff, and live there.

SPEAKER 1: 17-year-old Hibo Farah, 21-year-old, Hamdi Sahal, 18-year-old Mulki Mohamed, and 20-year-old Abdi Awal. All attend Abraham Lincoln High School in Minneapolis, a charter school for immigrants. The Children's Theatre Company production, Snapshot Silhouette, runs through this Saturday.