CIAO DATE: 05/2013
Volume: 12, Issue: 0
2012
Editor's note (PDF)
Ahmed I. Samatar
As we welcome another year in the life of Bildhaan, I want apologize for the relative delay in the appearance of this volume. The major reason for this is my absence from St. Paul between April and the end of October. As many of you may have heard, the political party Hiilqaran put me up as a candidate for the presidency of the Somali Republic. I was not successful but it was, on all accounts, an instructive experience-one worthy of an article or two in the future. For now, suffice it to say that I found an opportunity to bring my accumulated insights from scholarly thinking and studies and civic activism alluring enough to have entered the fray.
Gaariye Hadduu Tegay, Ma Goblamay Afkeenii (PDF)
Bashir Goth
With the death of Mohamed Hashi Dhamac (Gaariye), the Somali people lost a great poet and literary custodian. Apart from the many masterpieces and deeply intellectual poetry that he left behind, Gaariye will be remembered in particular for his monumental efforts in founding and teaching the metrical structure of Somali poetry. He is to Somali poetry what Al Khalil ibn Ahmed Al Farahidi is to Arabic poetry.
Tacsi for Maryan (Aryette) Omar Ali (PDF)
Lidwien Kapteijns
On December 7, 2011, Maryan Omar Ali, also known to people as Aryette, passed away in the McCall Medical Center in Etobicoke, Canada. She had struggled with breast cancer for many years.
Somali Bantus in a State of Refuge (PDF)
Catherine Besteman
In 1999, the United States government decided to accept up to 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees for resettlement. The refugees, who had lived in Kenyan refugee camps since fleeing Somalia's civil war in 1992, were the largest group of African refugees ever accepted for resettlement in the United States. As illiterate, non-English speaking, uneducated, rural subsistence farmers, they were also markedly different from most previously admitted refugees. Only a miniscule number of African refugees had been accepted for resettlement during the Cold War years, when the U.S. defined a refugee as someone fleeing communism and almost all admitted refugees came from Soviet Bloc countries, Cuba, and Indochina. To many observers, the decision to accept Somali Bantu refugees appeared to mark a new direction in U.S. refugee resettlement policy from one motivated by foreign policy concerns and national interest priorities to one defined by an ethic of humanitarianism.
Social Integration and the Sense of Hope among Somali Youth in Austrailia and the United States (PDF)
Yusuf Sheikh Omar
This study is a qualitative investigation comparing the experiences of young men born in Somalia and now living in Minneapolis, United States, with those living in Melbourne, Australia. The study took place over a two-and a-half-year period and involved fieldwork in the two communities. The overall study design included a mix of methods including unstructured interviews, in-depth interviews using a theme list, and examination of secondary data sources, including newspapers, statistical information, and print and media materials. The total number of formal interviews conducted as part of the study was eighty, representing thirty young participants and fifty other interviewees, including parents, key community members, and six focus group members. The study also included participant observation in both study settings. This study was carried out in two field sites, the northwest suburbs of Melbourne and the Cedar Riverside neighbourhood of Minneapolis. According to the 2006 census, Melbourne is home to 2,593 people who were born in Somalia, most of whom arrived after 1991 as a consequence of the civil war. The majority of Somalis settled in northwestern Melbourne, although there are communities in the inner-ring suburbs and the west. The northwest suburbs are culturally diverse and the specific areas where Somalis settled can be characterized as low-income with a high proportion of public housing.
Racial Formation and Anti-Somali Ideologies in Central Ohio (PDF)
Anita M. Waters
The central Ohio region, including the city of Columbus and its environs, is home to the second largest population of Somali-born residents in the United States. In the decade after civil war broke out in the East African nation of Somalia, about 30,000 of the million-plus displaced Somalis were resettled in the United States by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Once resettled in various cities around the country, many then chose to relocate to central Ohio, where a small number of earlier,
pre-war immigrants had settled, and where earlier arrivals welcomed newly arrived extended family members. A few "pull" factors prevailed in Columbus until 2008: inexpensive housing was abundant and unskilled labor was in demand. These secondary migrations complicate population estimates, but the foreign-born population of Franklin County went from 32,235 in 1990 to 84,854 in 2003. Community groups estimate that the number of Somalis in the central Ohio area, including foreign-born immigrants and their children born here, is circa 45,000 people. Others suggest that a more accurate count, based on extrapolation from the number of Somali youngsters enrolled in schools in the Columbus area, is closer to 15,000. No one disputes that the Somali-American community in Columbus is second in size only to that of Minneapolis. Its growth can be traced by the number of times the word "Somali" was mentioned in The Columbus Dispatch, the city's only daily newspaper.
Diaspora, Memory, and Ethnic Media: Media Use by Somalis Living in Canada (PDF)
Charmarkeh Houssein
In the United States, numerous studies have reported a significant increase in the use of ethnic media and their audiences. However, the area of research studying ethnic media, located at the intersection of media, minorities, and immigration, remains underdeveloped in Europe,which could explain the existing confusion about the concepts of "community media" and "ethnic media." In France, instead of the concept of "ethnicity," an elaborate list of euphemisms was constructed to serve as a semantic repertoire describing the same phenomenon, even though the phenomenon in question has been extensively defined. This confusion seems to be a product of disinterest on the part of the social sciences in France in the studies of minorities and interethnic relations, a phenomenon that involves multiple factors. Therefore, it appears pertinent to clarify these ambiguities. Ethnic media and community media are used in conjunction with three developments: international migration, increased privatization and commercialization of public spaces, and, lastly, the development of information and communication technologies.
Gender, Islam, and 19th Century Brava: A Brief Note (PDF)
Deeqa Mohamed
The study of gender in Islam underwent a reformation in the last quarter-century largely due to the emergence of post-colonial theory and its formidable works such as Edward Said's Orientalism. Scholars were tasked with(re)examining the distorted histories seeped in Western predispositions. As empire unraveled, so did the traditional narratives to which it catered and a defined body of scholarship tailored to reassessing these narratives emerged. Leila Ahmed wrote that in Islamic history, "the constructs, institutions and modes of thought devised by early Muslim societies that form the core discourses of Islam have played a central role in defining women's place(s) in Muslim societies." Nonetheless, it was Western discourses reared by colonial domination that determined our perception of women in Islamic societies. Imperial powers used the position of women as a point of departure for a broad attack on Islamic cultures. Often opponents of female liberation in their respective countries, colonialists used feminism as a tool to denigrate "Other" men and to justify the policies of "actively trying to subvert the cultures and religions of the colonized." This rhetoric was an emblem of European chauvinism and orientalist literature. For a while Western feminists would also employ this framework in their analysis of Muslim women. The presumption was that Islam fundamentally constricted women's status and identity in a way that Western women did not experience. While in the West, women could criticize, challenge, and redefine their culture, women in the "Islamic world" had to part with their culture and beliefs when pursuing self determination. It was this perspective vended in Western academies that engendered relevance to contemporary counter-discourses.