A Somali-born photographer traces his people's emigration in a sensitive new show.
With famine, pirates, religious conflict and warlords all running amok in Somali, bad news has become so commonplace that it's tempting to turn the page and ignore the place. After all, it is far away. Nothing seems to help. And who needs the emotional hassle that goes with thinking about a failed state and its ravaged people? Besides, don't we already know everything there is to know about Somalia?
Well, not exactly. We may know something about the wars and slaughter, but not much about the life that struggles on despite the trauma.
A remarkable new photo show at the Weisman Art Museum, up through Sept. 27, cuts through the miasma of dismay about Somalia. In 55 images it provides an eloquent record of Somali life that few outside the Somali community would ever see without the eyes and effort of Abdi Roble. Since 2003 the Somali-born photographer has been recording the daily life of his people in the United States and in the refugee camps of Kenya.
He has focused on cities with major Somali enclaves: Anaheim, Calif. (2,500 Somalis); Columbus, Ohio (35,000); Portland, Maine (5,500), and Minneapolis, whose 50,000 Somalis are the country's largest settlement, earning the nickname Little Mogadishu in some circles.
Journalism with heart
Economic stagnation prompted Roble to leave Somalia in 1989 when he was 25. He settled in Columbus, where he became a freelance newspaper photographer. In his "Somali Diaspora" photos he applies his professional skills with great sensitivity, bringing dispassionate sympathy and dignity to often shy and vulnerable subjects. Somalia may be a basket case, but the people Roble photographs are simply trying to get on with their lives, find food and shelter, educate their children and secure a semblance of normalcy in extremely trying circumstances.
About half of the show follows a family, Abdisalam and his wife, Ijabo, and their children, from a Kenyan refugee camp to the United States. Wounded in 1998 when fighting erupted in the Jubba River Valley where he was a farmer, Abdisalam walked with his family for 15 days before reaching a camp in Kenya that was nothing but a patch of sand and scrubby bushes. Roble's photos catch everything from the dappled light filtering into the family's makeshift home to the crowded platform on which they sleep. Abdisalam also writes in a journal; Ijabo carefully remuds the clay-and-dung walls when they're eroded by rain; children memorize verses of the Qur'an in an overcrowded outdoor school; women haul impossibly heavy bottles of water and bags of grain.
The family's first days in the United States are particularly telling. Wearing head scarves and traditional dress, the women are bewildered and despondent upon arrival at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. All avert their eyes outside the social-service agency on which they will be temporarily dependent. Anaheim's sun-bleached suburban streets appear alien and empty as Abdisalam bikes through them. Incongruities abound as the kids watch "Dirty Harry" on television in their strange new house.
Americanization begins
Brief text panels recount the family's story, the writing sensitively adapted from "The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away," by Roble and writer Doug Rutledge (University of Minnesota Press, $34.95). Abdisalam, seated on a child's chair, struggles to fill out a job application in English, a language he barely knows. Ijabo looks wary and tense during an ultrasound checkup given late in a pregnancy. Then they move to Maine in search of work, and suddenly the kids seem Americanized as they wait for a school bus, bundled into puffy down jackets. And so the assimilation begins.
The show's second half documents the lives of other Somali immigrants in Columbus and Minneapolis. They're shown at work, attending college, joining unions, protesting injustice, becoming politically active, marrying, voting, launching careers. Roble has a nice way with detail, focusing on the hands of women painting themselves with henna designs before an Islamic festival and closing in on the enraptured face of a little girl dancing with a Somali bride wearing a Western-style bridal gown.
He even photographs the former prime minister of Somalia, Ali Kahlif Galaydh, at the University of Minnesota. By 2006 Galaydh was a professor at the Humphrey Institute, wearing an argyle sweater and seated in an Arts and Crafts chair in a book-lined study. Like Dr. Saharla Jama, photographed in her dental clinic, and Ahmed Osman, whose Franklin Drugs is the country's first Somali-owned pharmacy, the professor is a lifetime removed from Somalia's endless troubles.
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431
Source:StarTribune.com
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