Nomad (19 page)

I had come to America looking for a new home, but I soon found that I was living out of a suitcase, moving from airport to airport and from hotel to hotel. I began to consider the obstacles of modern travel to be similar to those of the caravans Grandma used to talk about. In her time the risks came from marauding warlords and their militias, from severe drought or floods, from beasts of burden that were overused and underfed. In modern America the equivalents were terrorist alerts and snowstorms.

After months of such nomadism, my American friends took pity on me. It was time, they said, to discover that life in the United States was not all about work. One friend asked if I had ever been to Las Vegas. My immediate thought was gambling. That was the only sin I had not yet committed that is expressly forbidden by Islam. “Not Las Vegas,”
I stammered. “It’s a place of crime, gambling, and fierce neon lights. I don’t think I want to go there.”

“Oh, come on,” replied my friend Sharon. “You don’t know what you’re missing. It is such a part of America, you must see it.”

So one weekend she drove me from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. L.A.’s sprawl can seem infinite, but as we sped along the highway the buildings eventually became fewer and fewer and the landscape became steadily less green until there was only desert, barren land with mountains, hard rock, soft mounds of sand whitish in color but brown and gray too. We passed by places with bizarre names like Zzsyk. My interest was caught by a sign proclaiming “Ghost Town Road.”

“Spooky,” I said pointing to the sign.

“Maybe we should stop in one of those places on the way back,” my friend replied.

After several hours of desert landscape we finally reached Las Vegas. I was dazzled. Turning right at Mandalay Bay was like entering a magic island with surreal replicas of New York, Paris, and Rome. At the Wynn Hotel, where we stayed, there were not only bedrooms and restaurants but also full-scale shopping malls; high-end European stores with the latest in fashion; jewelry stores displaying gold, platinum, and diamonds and other precious stones; and at the center of all this splendor, rows and rows of gambling machines and gambling tables. And of course, strip clubs for men and spas for women.

Sharon urged me to try one of the machines. I lost eight dollars and won a dollar twenty-five at one machine; at another I won ten dollars and lost twenty; and at a table we played a game called blackjack. Sharon and I put in a hundred dollars. We lost sixty. It was weird. We had to buy chips of five and ten dollars each; the game started with fifteen. A dealer gave you two cards while he held two. You could play a hand or ask for an extra card. If all three cards added up to twenty-one, you won—that is, you won more chips.

I must have looked as if I had walked in straight from the bush. To play, you had to make tiny gestures, like moving your forefinger back and forth or waving your palm slowly to and fro as if you were stroking the table without touching it. The dealer would nod and my friend would nod back in a strange way. Blackjack is supposed to be the simplest of the card games, but I felt that it would take me a long
time to grasp all the secret signs, and even longer to analyze the probability of what the next card would be. By then I would have run out of cash. So we stopped playing.

To round off the night we went to the Palace Hotel to see the musical
Jersey Boys
, which tells the story of a band of poor kids growing up in New Jersey. I was soon captivated by this classical American account of the price of fame. At first it seems like a good idea to form a band, though their path to success is strewn with obstacles. When at last success comes, not only has the band split up, but the protagonist’s marriage breaks down, his girlfriend leaves him, and he loses his daughter to drugs; sadly he sings about being abandoned by everyone. The show ends with solos from all four men as they look back on their lives.

On the way back to L.A. we stopped for gas very close to where Ghost Town Road went, winding up a hill of colored rocks. “Would you like to take a look at the town?” Sharon asked, remembering my earlier curiosity.

Why not? I was up for more adventure. We drove to the ghost town of Calico.

At the entrance to what was once the town is a cubicle with a thatched roof manned by a guard who collects a small fee from the tourists. The ghost town is essentially an open-air museum. A century and a half ago Calico was known for silver mining and attracted crowds of prospectors who wanted to get rich quick. It had had a couple of provisions stores, a couple of shops that sold garments and household goods, and a saloon with a brothel attached to it. A simple family home had been restored to give you a glimpse of how people had lived in the Wild West.

A nineteenth-century stove caught my attention because it was far superior to the charcoal braziers we’d used in our homes in Mogadishu and Nairobi and which are still in use in many African homes today. Even the rustic furniture in this old and abandoned home was better-designed and sturdier than ours. The townspeople of Calico had walked about two miles to fetch their water, as many Africans have to do; they washed their garments (uncannily similar to many still worn in Africa) by hand. Their woven floor mats, bowls, and placemats transported me back to Mogadishu, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi. Grandma used to spend hours weaving such mats.

The ghost town vividly illustrated the difference between my
grandmother’s traditions, which insist on keeping things as they are, and American traditions, which continuously innovate. The American mind seeks new, better, and more efficient means of cooking, washing, and finding fuel, the most basic and most universal activities of human life. In my grandmother’s tradition people get stuck, almost imprisoned, by the cycle of finding food, preparing it, and eating it. I can’t think of anything useful a Somali man or woman ever invented to make that cycle easier.

Even this long-abandoned ghost town in the no-man’s-land between Nevada and California contained relatively more luxury than my mother’s house did. Moving from that town back to L.A., I saw how incredibly fast the early settlers in America had moved forward, how swift their progress had been.

A couple of months before my Vegas trip I was back on the East Coast, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Wim Pijbes, and the Corporation of Tulip Breeders had proposed to hold a small ceremony in my honor. I was to be given a hundred Black Tulip bulbs as a symbol of (so Pijbes explained) diversity in the Netherlands. I invited some of my closest American friends, and Pijbes invited a few Dutch visitors. I mentioned that Chris DeMuth had a weakness for the artist Vermeer. Coincidentally the Met had just mounted as complete an exhibition of Vermeers as they could find.

Chris was late, but I went down to see the paintings, led by Pijbes. We paused for some time in front of Vermeer’s
The Milkmaid
. Pijbes went into an in-depth explanation about the genius contained in that small painting: the precision, lights, colors, shadows, and the choice of a milkmaid as a subject. But as I stared at it what struck me was the room; it was poor, dark, and small. Many rooms in the neighborhoods of my youth were just as small.

After the short tour of the exhibition I got into a conversation with another of the Dutch visitors. I was disappointed to hear her recite the usual prejudices about Americans being
plat
. This is a very difficult word to translate; it means something like “plebeian,” unrefined and with little or no history of art or proper culture. In this view
everything in American culture is pop, if not pap, and produced for the masses. Certainly much nonsense passes for culture in the United States, including an obsession with celebrities of all kinds. But that is scarcely representative of the vast wealth of extraordinary art, literature, and music produced by Americans in the almost two and a half centuries of the country’s existence.

As a stranger to America I often find myself excluded from conversations because so many references are made to musicals and movies I have never heard of. Once in Boston while chatting with friends, I let slip that I did not understand some of the cultural references in the conversation we were having about prejudice. “Did you ever see
South Pacific?”
one friend asked. For some reason it sounded familiar, but I had not. (It is typical that a lot of American references sound familiar but really are not.) She and her husband promptly invited me to join them in New York to see it.

A love story in wartime told on stage with songs and acting that left you more cheerful than if you had been to a comedy,
South Pacific
enchanted me. It was a relief too, after European opera. Opera’s love stories almost always end unhappily, even though the lovers are accompanied to their doom by the most splendid music. By contrast, couples in American musicals can sing and dance their way around massive issues like war and racism, only to end the love story on a happy note. At the end of the show I found myself humming the tune “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”

This show and the conversations that followed gave me a window into America’s seemingly endless struggle with the issue of race. More than any number of sermons from politicians or pundits, such songs designed for mass consumption served to weaken racial prejudice by ridiculing it.

Another couple took me to Leonard Bernstein’s ninetieth-birthday-gala concert in New York. I was a little embarrassed to admit that I did not know who Bernstein was. No problem, they said in unison. Tonight will be a good introduction. One of the performances that intrigued me was by a couple of poorly dressed teenagers who imitate an encounter with their neighborhood policeman and then sing about it:

After the show I asked my friends about that song with the teenagers. They were astonished. “Haven’t you seen
West Side Story?”
Just a few days later I was watching it on DVD and savoring the swings that the lyricist took at the soft psychology that talked teenage delinquents into believing that they were “victims of society.” I also heard for the first time the unforgettable immigrants’ song, “America.” It is a conversation in song between men and women immigrants from Puerto Rico. Below are a few of the lines that I think are timeless; they also illustrate the different perspectives that people from the same place, indeed the same family, have on America. For the women it is a land of freedom and unlimited opportunity, for the homesick men a place of poverty and bigotry if you are not white.

That dialogue still rings true today. For most immigrants, coming to America means exchanging a home plagued by joblessness, violence, and apathy for a new land where the alluring opportunities come packaged with residential grime, gangs, and organized crime.

By contrast, I have been exceedingly fortunate in having many of my American dreams realized almost on arrival. I have not only been to Las Vegas in the past year; I have been on a cruise to Alaska, where I saw high mountains, glaciers, bears both black and brown, and whales that sneezed meters of water straight into the air and then dove to show off their tail fins. At Thanksgiving another friend suggested, as if offering me a cup of tea, a ride on a four-wheeler on a Texas ranch. I ended up getting a riding lesson on a cowboy’s horse too. I have attended conferences at which the assortment of postprandial
activities ranged from playing golf to tennis clinics to whitewater rafting.

I am lucky to have come here in the way I did. I am lucky to have the friends I have. But that does not mean that I underestimate what it means to come to America as an illegal immigrant, sneaking across the Mexican border, or to be born in the inner cities of Chicago, L.A., or New York. On my visits to the Bronx I have seen that there are indeed pockets of America where people barely have enough food to eat, where girls get pregnant at thirteen, where teenage boys acquire guns all too easily and shoot one another, where school entrances need to be bulletproof and students need to pass through metal detectors. In some ghettos the life expectancy of a black boy is estimated to be only eighteen.