This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman

Prologue

Thank you for helping to uplift so many girls from all over! Love from Seattle.

Salaam sister—from the West Side in Senegal to Detroit #13 strong. You continue to amplify us.

I don’t remember when they first appeared on the wall outside my office in the Capitol Building: the Post-it notes with words of admiration and encouragement left by people from as far as Duluth and Delhi.

Congresswoman, traveled from Oregon and HAD to see you! Thank you for being BRAVE, BOLD, AND OUTSPOKEN. If UR ever in Eugene, I can show you around.

Thank you so much for all you’re doing to protect our courts!

Keep fighting for immigrants.

I do know when they started to become a problem for Facilities. It was a few months after I became the first Somali American Muslim woman elected to Congress in 2018—right after President Donald Trump began his Twitter attacks against me.

Ilhan is an American hero!

No matter what they say, we’ll always have your back!

Overnight, a large mosaic of multicolored squares grew up around the American flag and plaque bearing my name and the name of the state I represent, Minnesota. Maintenance asked us to remove them, so my staff took the Post-its down and put them back up on a wall inside my office. But visitors to the congressional office building, open to the public Monday to Friday, 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., continued to put them up.

Thank you so much for being a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves.

You are a soldier of the people for peace & justice for all.

They just kept coming, so Facilities gave up. Now the patch of little neon notes is a permanent bright spot on the otherwise austere white walls of a municipal hallway.

What I am most proud of is not the visible expression of support for my work as a legislator, fighting for all my constituents’ ability to participate in our democracy. Nor is it the high praise or the depth of emotion—although these sentiments have gotten me through some tough times. What I am most moved by is the incredible diversity of the message writers. They come from different places and perspectives. There are Post-its from teenage girls, who dot their exclamation marks with little hearts, and from Senate staffers, who took a moment from their long days in a cynical city to jot down a positive word.

A blue heart-shaped sticky note with Republican women support you was stuck beside a regular yellow Post-it that read, From one black immigrant to another, please know that I love you. I learned the Hebrew letters on a light blue note, מיר וועלן זיי עיבערלעבן, were actually Yiddish for We will outlive them, which Hasidic Jews in 1939 had turned into a song of resistance in the face of a Nazi commander. That all these people and more would choose to stand behind me—a Muslim immigrant who had arrived in this country from Africa speaking only two words of English—is proof enough that there are stronger bonds than identity.

As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in—which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words.

You belong here.

1

Fighter

1982–1988

Mogadishu, Somalia

The teacher quickly put a student in charge of my third-grade class before she stepped out of the room. This was not unusual in my elementary school, where students stayed in the same classroom while our teachers for different subjects rotated in and out. When transitioning between periods, teachers usually designated one child to keep the rest from getting too rowdy.

Like all kids, we were prone to abusing this position. Today, though, the boy in charge really let his newfound power go to his head. Almost immediately, he ordered another, smaller boy up to the chalkboard to write an assignment.

I beg you, said the boy being ordered to the board, leave me alone.

But the tall boy in charge was determined to humiliate his classmate, who was a minority in every sense. Poor, small, and an orphan, he didn’t have the crisp white shirts, ironed uniform trousers, and shiny school shoes of the middle class that the large boy and I both came from.

The big boy continued to taunt his victim, escalating his threats when his classmate wouldn’t rise from his seat, until finally he shouted, "Hooyadawus! which means Go fuck your mother" in Somali.

I burned in my seat. I always hate it when people use vulgar language, but I get really angry when it involves mothers, who I knew from the beginning were sacred—even if I didn’t have one. I mean, everybody was always talking about how important mothers are. In Islam, my native country’s main religion, we learned that Paradise is under the feet of mothers. You were supposed to bow to your mother, abide by her every wish, not debase her.

There were also deeper forces at play than my seven-year-old brain could recognize in the moment. Although thanks to my older sisters and many loving aunties I didn’t lack for mothering, my mother, my hooyo, had died when I was a preschooler. I don’t have a single memory of her, even though I remember other things from that age—like family members fighting over whether or not I should start school. Some of my aunties and uncles thought I was too young, because technically you were supposed to wait at least until you lost your first two teeth. She’ll lose her books, someone said. She won’t know where to go, another argued, and the other kids will steal from her. But I didn’t stop complaining until they let me go. And, no, I didn’t lose my books or get robbed, even with all my baby teeth intact.

I remember all of that clearly, but my hooyo? What she looked like, something she said, even what she died of? Nothing. As an adult, I went to a hypnotist to see if he could help evoke something, anything—a voice, a touch—but nothing emerged. I still find it so odd.

Whether it was an early commitment to my religion’s teachings or the fact that an absence can loom larger than any reality, mothers were a big deal to me—and I didn’t like anybody to disrespect them.

He’s not going to get up, I said to the bully. You’re supposed to make sure nobody gets out of their seat, not give us assignments. So you’re just going to sit and shut up, and we’re going to wait for Teacher.

The boy, at least two heads taller than me, was not impressed. "If you don’t shut up, you’ll be sorry," he said menacingly.

I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else—even if I knew that wasn’t really the case.

I’ll meet you in the rear courtyard after school, I said. That was the place where all the kids went to fight.

Right before the next teacher entered the room, the boy who I had stood up for whispered to me, After school, I’m going to run, because after they beat you, they’re going to beat me.

If you don’t want them messing with you every day, I replied, you’ve got to stand up for yourself.

He might have been a wimp, but he was no liar. When school let out, he kept his word and ran.

With a crowd of kids screaming around us, the bully and I began fighting. I was small but a good fighter. I pulled the boy down and rubbed his face in the sand. When my brother, Malaaq, who was in the eighth grade, arrived to watch the fight and saw me grinding the boy into the ground, he shouted, Ilhan! What the hell?

My brother wasn’t actually surprised to see me at the center of a fight, just annoyed. There was always a slew of parents coming to our house to complain that I had hurt their children. My dad would just laugh. The only child nobody should be coming here to complain about is my smallest baby.

YES, I WAS THE BABY OF A LARGE FAMILY, AND YES, I WAS SMALL. But that had nothing to do with the sticks growing in the bushes by the gate outside our house, which were perfect for beating back any kid who chased me home from school. I had the independent mindset of an only child. I didn’t feel young, in no small part because I was never treated like a child. No one was patronized in my brilliant, loud family.

In our Mogadishu compound—filled with African art, books of history and Somali poetry, and music—the disagreements were constant. We were a multigenerational family—aunties, uncles, cousins, and siblings from my maternal side, all living together.

We were unlike a traditional hierarchical Somali family, where when the father or mother spoke no one else dared utter a word. Instead, everyone, even the youngest child, me, was brought into every decision. Sometimes I wished Baba, my grandfather, and my aabe, my father, would take on more authoritarian roles. They were annoyingly accommodating to each person’s opinion and patient during the ensuing arguments. Everybody was always screaming about what we should do, even when it came to what we were going to eat for dinner. The constant conflict made us at once close and distant from one another. Despite our differing points of view, we all were accustomed to disputes—we had that in common.

There was nothing typical about my family. To this day, I don’t know a family quite like ours. But in Somalia, where members of an extended family living together are almost always patrilineal, we especially stood out, since my aabe had moved in with my mother and her family after they were married. Sons usually assumed responsibility for supporting their parents as they aged. Hooyo, however, wouldn’t agree to marry Aabe unless she could stay with her family.

My father didn’t have a full appreciation of what he was getting into when he decided to leave everything he knew by the wayside for love. Although I would perceive different conflicts in him when I grew older, as a child, the greatest one I noticed had to do with his diet. Aabe, who won’t touch seafood, married into a family where fish was the primary source of protein. Furthermore, although he ostensibly fit into my mother’s world, as is often the case, he could never completely forget the ways he was born into. My father, an educator, came from a traditional patriarchal Somali family where the boys, the primary beneficiaries of educational investment, were raised to become the leaders of their future families.

Meanwhile, when my grandfather welcomed his firstborn child, my mother, he promised himself that she would be treated the same as, if not better than, any male firstborn. Custom dictated that only the birth of a boy was a moment for pride. But Baba, who had a huge presence, was nevertheless very proud. He was opinionated and sure of himself, but not without reason. He had one of the sharpest memories of anyone I ever met. Well-read, he had the knowledge of so many books at his fingertips. When he wasn’t working at his government job, helping to run the country’s network of lighthouses, he liked to fish and play cards. Baba was also a great cook. He was a purist when it came to the ingredients he used to prepare dishes of his specialty, Italian cuisine. His minestrone was my favorite food.

Just as he wouldn’t compromise on the quality of the tomatoes in his soup, Baba didn’t waver in his convictions. He stayed true to his vow to raise his daughter as an equal to his sons. When Hooyo met Aabe, she was in her twenties, which was very rare at the time, since women predominantly married in their late teens. Not only that, but she was also gainfully employed as a secretary for a government minister. I don’t know that my grandfather needed her financial support, but my mother had a sense of duty about living up to the responsibility and unusual privileges she had been afforded by her father.

Everyone knew that if you ever needed Baba to sign on to something or calm him down about a dispute, you needed to talk to his daughter. She was my grandfather’s true confidante. I wasn’t surprised by the stories I heard time and again about how while she was alive, whatever Hooyo said, went. That’s because Baba continued to invest a lot of time and energy in the girls of the family (more than he did with the boys, according to my uncles). He was extremely close to us and did not adopt the traditional patriarchal role of the protector that Somali men usually fall into with the opposite sex. He treated us as equals.

It’s always hard to say why a person goes against cultural norms. My grandfather’s freethinking partly stemmed, perhaps, from the fact that he didn’t come from one of the country’s formalized clans. The maternal side of my family was Benadiri, a Somali ethnic minority who trace their lineage to Persians, Indians, and Bantu peoples from West Africa and Arab Yemenis. Successful traders credited with helping spread Islam to Somalia, they settled in port cities like the country’s capital Mogadishu, where my grandfather was born and raised. I think Baba embraced the idea that if you don’t fit in anyway, you might as well do what you want.

THE ONLY PLACE WHERE I COMPLETELY FIT IN AS A CHILD WAS within the walls of my family’s compound. Otherwise, I wasn’t quite enough of any one thing. Although officially I belonged to my aabe’s clan—one of the most powerful in the country—I wasn’t fully Somali because of who my mother was. Not that anyone, other than our neighbors, really was aware of this, since we weren’t stereotypical Benadiri, known for their light skin and passive natures. Many of my aunties and uncles, as well as my grandfather, had darker skin like me. And no one in our family was remotely passive.

As the youngest, I was spoiled, but then again I really wasn’t. Our family of civil servants and teachers was well off enough to have a guarded compound and driver. But I didn’t like the attention I received from the other kids for the in-your-face privilege of our white Toyota Corolla and our driver, Farah—nor the constraints. I hated being driven back home after school and usually tried to walk, which meant trouble for Aabe, since that’s when the fights with other children took place.

I also wasn’t enough of a girl, at least in the traditional sense. None of the women in my family were expected to cook and clean—like most Somali women. We certainly had just as many, if not more, opinions than the men in the house. But I also did what boys did outside the house. I played soccer. I climbed trees. I snuck into the movie theater. No other girls I knew did any of that.

My tomboy ways only fueled the talk among the neighborhood women about poor Ilhan, a girl growing up without a mother. Never mind that I had all the love and attention of a crowd of caring adults, they reasoned, I must have been deprived of a mother’s affection and guidance.

There were so many assumptions about who and what I was supposed to be, and none of them fit the description I had of myself. But I wasn’t burdened by the discrepancy. Indeed, I never bothered to answer for it. Instead, I followed Baba’s example. If there wasn’t a world out there to fully embrace me for who I was, I didn’t have to worry about appeasing anyone.

2

War

1989–1991

Mogadishu, Somalia

I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people.

Bullets raining from the sky were a constant. Sometimes, though, the fighting got too loud even for us who had grown accustomed to it. During those times when the adults worried that the militia might be closing in on our neighborhood, we fled to our great-grandmother’s neighborhood. As the gunfire and rumors intensified, at least we weren’t sitting ducks. In the reality of war, sometimes running for shelter somewhere else makes you feel safer—even if it isn’t so. On the way to my great-grandmother’s home, I saw bodies piled up on the street. We stepped over them.

The adults didn’t know what was happening, even though I felt they should. Instead, I kept hearing them say the same thing over and over: I don’t understand how everything just turned.

I remember everything shutting down. School was the first institution to go, but eventually the mosques, the postal service, the television stations, even the market closed down.

The city’s major outdoor market was just to the right of our home. On the other side was a main thoroughfare. On a normal day before the war, it was a bustling spot with people and cars coming and going all the time. During the war, the activity was very different.

The Makka Al Mukarama, a nearby hotel owned by Ali Mahdi Muhammad, the man who would name himself Somalia’s new president, became his headquarters. As mortars and bullets flew from one side of the conflict to the other, they went directly over our house. The noise was almost constant, and they lit up the sky overhead at night. They kicked up dust all day when they hit the ground or concrete buildings. Our house was hit multiple times, although, thankfully, no one was ever hurt.

On the rare occasion when the ammunition and its racket would stop, we became uneasy. What was next? Once, during an unusual moment of quiet, someone opened the door to our compound and I spotted a mother walking down the street with her child. What is she doing? I wondered. Where could she be going?

What was once unremarkable—a mother and child walking down the street, a sky free of bullets—was no longer normal. That sight became a symbol