April Reynosa and Dr. Julie Hartly, Anthropology

Introduction

This study evolved out of my experiences as a volunteer under Project North Star, a literacy program headed by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) that serves refugee women from Somalia. From September of 2006 through December 2006 I worked as the Child Development Instructor for this program. While working in this role I investigated and gathered details of the Somali Bantu women’s daily experiences involving urban immigrant acculturation and assimilation.

In order to investigate the processes of refugee adaptation in relation to environmental influences, I analyzed the relationship between the hegemonic perception of the Bantu lifestyle (here represented mostly by the publications and interviews with members of the International Rescue Committee, a sympathetic resettlement organization) and the actual everyday experiences of individual immigrants that I observed during my time spent in their homes, and accompanying the women around town as they went about their daily routines. My focus has been narrowed to patterns of city navigation and space adaptation of several of the refugee women enrolled in the North Star literacy program in Lynn, Massachusetts.

My hope is that my observations both illuminate and accentuate the dynamic and adaptive qualities of Somali Bantu female culture and the difficult identity negotiation that they undergo in the American urban environment. This paper also offers my own personal narrative; details of my own subjective experience, and the difficult act of recreating a challenging, yet fulfilling, story of forced migration cultures in the urban United States.

Somali Bantu Background

The IRC Boston is one of the many refugee resettlement agencies the International Rescue Committee has worldwide. The Boston branch has worked with more than 13,000 refugees from countries spanning the world. IRC case workers and volunteers meet newly arrived families and individuals at the airport and immediately become primary advocates providing housing, clothing, food, cash, and other assistance. They help orient clients to life in the United Sates and offer them ways to gain skills to improve their language and vocational skills so they might secure employment. One such program developed by the IRC Boston is Project North Star.

Project North Star was developed specifically for Somali Bantu women with young children. The program was created in response to the lack of public program availability for this specific group. I learned that in the Massachusetts welfare program recipients, such as the Somali Bantu, are required to take English classes, but only adults with school-aged children are eligible. The majority of Somali Bantu women do not qualify for these classes because they have children too young for school, thus the need for an English class that offered free daycare. Twice a week at the YMCA in Lynn, the women can come to a two-hour English class while their children participate in a child development program.

The initial meeting with the Somali Bantu women was the first day of Project North Star on September 26th. I arrived at the YMCA at 8 am to set up. Each morning we transformed a large basketball-court sized room into a schoolhouse, with separate classrooms for the women and children. To divide the area we constructed curtains using about 5 white sheets stapled and tied together with old jump rope.

Nancy Sullivan, the ESL instructor, gathered us together to explain that the Bantu women speak very little English and are illiterate in their own language, so when the women arrive we should offer a specific greeting:

“Hello how are you?”

“What is your name?”

“My name is….. and nice to meet you.”

The women arrive at 8:30am. Their arrival is a metaphor of their state of cultural transition. Through the double glass doors of the classroom, they arrive in waves of color and sound coupled with their bright traditional headscarves, layers of skirts, jewelry and sneakers. Some women enter with babies tied to their backs secured by brightly ornamented cloth, while others use strollers. Their heads are veiled in Islamic fashion, some more than others. The children are all dressed in western styles.

I extend my hand and greet a woman and ask her name, she quietly responds, but I cannot understand her. Next, I meet Binti who has a large smile but humble composer. I then meet another women who appears to be very confident speaking several English phrases. She shakes my hand and says,

“ How are you today?”

We lead the children, all dressed very much in American fashion, to the blankets and toys spread out for them on the floor while their mothers cross through a curtain that divides the English class from the daycare. Even at their young age I can’t help but think about how different these children’s lives are going to be from their parents.

Somali Bantu refugees have a history strewn with oppression and persecution. They are the decedents of slaves brought to southern Somalia from other countries south along the East African Coast. It is believed that their roots can be traced to Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Botswana. They had been forced to Somalia in the 18th and 19th centuries where slavery lasted until the early 20th century. The Somali Bantu are not one homogenous group, but claim diverse tribal affiliation. When civil war broke out in the 1990’s many of these groups fled to refugee camps in Kenya. During their more than seven year stay in Kenya the many groups united and called themselves “Bantu” so that they might be recognized as a special interest group by US immigration officials, thus making them automatically eligible for asylum.

There were no pre-existing Somali Bantu communities in the US prior to the spring of 2003. At this time 12,000 Somali Bantu arrived in the United States, being resettled in approximately 45 different cities. In Somalia they had been an agricultural people farming in the Jubba Valley. They lived without electricity or running water, in hand made homes. Access to education and medicine were limited. The Bantu speak a language called A maay Maay, but many also understand Somali.

The transition from such a rural habitat to the American urban landscape has caused significant cultural changes for the Somali Bantu, but they are also involved in adapting the American environment to meet their own needs and habits. One of the ways that this is most easily realized is the Somali Bantu’s use of space in both their homes and communities.

City perception and adaptation- cognitive maps

All cultures use some system of categorization to make sense of their experiences. Anthropologists try to understand what categories are important to people. They seek to understand how they are arranged, and what values are attached to them. This is called domain analysis. James Spradley theorizes that people do not live in the city so much as they live in their socially constructed versions of the city. “To the extent that the physical space and the objects in it are socially constructed, we can be sure that people that live in the same city find themselves in cultural worlds that are totally different” (Spradley, 1972).

Somali Bantu Women are a subgroup with unique perceptions of their surrounding. Thus, prior to entering the field I conducted preliminary research focusing on cognitive maps. It was my goal to understand how Somali Bantu women perceive urban space. After I had been in the field for over a month, had established relationships with the woman and my co-volunteer workers, and had conducted participant observation, I arranged with the ESL teachers to lead the women through a lesson on city places. I hoped to collect data that would reveal which city places were important by having the women draw maps of the city. I had hypothesized that because their English is limited this would be a communicative tool. But, what I found when I put this method to work was quite daunting.

Prior to my big cognitive mapping lesson the teacher had prepared several weeks worth of lessons discussing places in the city, preparing the women to understand maps and how they function. About a week before my lesson I was able to observe and assist a session of the women’s class. There were only five women in the class this day: Halimo, Zienab, Megany, Amina Abdi, Amina Farah. Nancy was showing them pictures of different places in the city. She was holding a drawing of a women going into a market. She began going over what things are in the market and why we go to the market.

Amina Abdi said, “Market. Food too much. Too much.”

Next Nancy held up a picture of a school. “ High School, where?” She asked the women. Halimo, thought for a moment, looking up and concentrating and then she had it. She said to Nancy, “ High school and Library.”

Nancy then said, “ Is the High school on Boston Street?”

The women answered, “ High School next to library.” They did not respond nor recognize the street name Nancy had referred to, but they knew its location in reference to the library.

Next we asked them to draw a map of the street with a playground and a library. I demonstrated and drew a playground. I drew a box with a squiggly line that to me represented a slide coming down from it. I moved my picture away and told them to draw a playground on their map. They froze and looked very uncomfortable. I asked Amina Abdi to draw a playground on her map. She shook her head and pulled her paper away and waited. I encouraged Halimo, who shook her head. Then I showed her my paper again. She then attempted to draw a playground that looked like what I had drawn.

When I took a closer look at their maps I realized that the symbols we had given the buildings, rectangles and squares, were new shapes for the women to create. They were not able to make a straight, even-sided rectangle. It became clear to me that using a pencil and paper was still a new task for them. They had only recently begun using them to learn to write roman characters, but had not yet been familiarized with drawing and shapes. The symbols I use and understand as an American are not ones they are familiar with. Something so basic and fundamental in our own very visual culture had never been a functional part of cognitive abstraction in their more oral/audio-based society. Perhaps the act of abstracting physical space into pictograph maps was not a common practice in Bantu culture. I was forced to come up with a different, more culturally appropriate, method of abstraction.

This experience had a profound effect on my research. I had to step back and reassess my methods and what exactly I was trying to learn from the women. Being in the field had changed my initial research plan and it was time for me to adapt. After considering the experiences working with the women, and entering some of their homes I began to ask myself better questions.

Why is it necessary to discover how members of a particular subculture define the features of a city?

Anthropology is a mechanism of enablement. It functions like a Rosetta stone, discovering and using common symbols to uncover and understand uncommon ones. These small discoveries enable cross-societal communication, allowing the human family to navigate its relationships over gaps that prior to the anthropological enlightenment seemed unassuagable. How a group prioritizes its space and time is fundamental to every other action. Where and how a group chooses to spend its time will demonstrate what it values. Discovering its values allows us to have more complete communication.

The author Katherine Bestman, lived in Somalia prior to the war where she observed the routines and way of life of the Bantu people. She observed that the Bantu whom were once slaves, “ both transformed societies and adapted with them” (Bestman, 1999). She described the Bantu as being examples of ex-slaves who claimed autonomous control over farmland and it’s products. Thus I believed that understanding the Bantu’s relationship to the environment could help me understand a number of things about their identity. Environmental transition is an interesting stage for the study of culture. People caught in the middle of transition are forced to make compromises. During these instances of compromise a person’s value system is partially revealed by what they choose to discard and what they choose to keep. Such decisions may illuminate an individual’s understanding towards phenomena like sacred and secular differentiation, gender structures, and family and kin relationships. When studied in relation to other individuals from a similar ethnic group, patterns may emerge that the anthropologist can label as cultural. This indication of values would be useful to resettlement organizations such as the IRC.

Small scale manipulation of space: Description of Bantu home

The IRC found housing for the Somali Bantu in the city Lynn, 12 miles north of Boston. “The reason we chose Lynn was because Lynn is cheaper than other areas such as Dorchester, Roxbury, East Boston and the Chelsea area.” Said Marco Wek, the IRC caseworker who facilitated the Bantu when they first arrived in the USA. He himself is a refugee from Sudan. Brenda Bednar, the director of Project North Star explained that when the IRC placed the Somali Bantu families in apartments, initially there were three clusters based on how well the IRC knew the landlord. “There were some instances where one landlord owned two buildings that were right next to each other with several available apartments.” She went on to explain,

After a few months some of them found cheaper apartments or they got evicted because they weren’t paying their rent or they weren’t keeping their house clean enough. So there was this migration and they all, well not all, many of them moved to the same street so it was all Bantu and they kind of took over the buildings. And then after some time, I don’t know if they were again evicted or found something cheaper, but they all moved to Vine Street, it was the new big place, before it was Laighton Street. They tend to take over one building almost or two buildings. They really stay close in that way. Anyone else living there tends to move out who is not a member their culture. They take it over. Strollers are everywhere, children running up and down the stairs. The common space becomes everyone’s space. The extra space like the stairways and areas outside their doors become part of their community space. It starts to look like the community back home where the families all live on one piece of land. They are turning it like that here.

“Modern society is characterized by a considerable contrast between that private sphere of the home and the public sphere of the outside world. The cultural significance that people attribute to public spaces differs” (Doorn 2004). My first visit to a Somali Bantu home inspired me to examine the transformation of space caused by the entry of Somali Bantu into the Lynn area. By claiming the city as their refuge and establishing themselves here they are changing the environment that existed previous to their migration. While visiting a Somali family in their home, I was able to see a pragmatic transformation of space that fit their needs and wants. For example, the apartment space was used differently than the average American’s apartment, they changed the function and purpose of the that space.

After class on October 5, 2006, Nancy took me to Chelsea to visit her friend Sadiya at her home. Sadiya and her family fled Somalia and were granted refuge in the United States after spending almost 12 years in the refugee camp Kakuma in Kenya. Sadiya and her husband have two daughters, but lost two children who died in the refugee camp.

They live in a three-story house that has been converted into an apartment building. Upon entering the home I noticed immediately the lack of furniture and the abundance of décor. In the kitchen there were no tables or chairs. There were two refrigerators, a small sink area piled with dishes and an oven. Hawa, who is four years old gave me a tour of the kitchen. She opened every cupboard, a total of three, to show me their food and cooking supplies. She also opened the oven to reveal that it was not used for cooking, but rather for storage of pots and pans. The stovetop looked like it had been well used. “They only use the range to do their cooking.” Said Nancy. She also explained that they had recently moved into this apartment and the oven had been new, but was already covered with leftovers from cooking.

We were next led into the living room. The door had been removed from the door way and two long colorful pieces of cloth were hung in it’s place. I later discovered that all the doorways in the house were divided with the two layers of cloth. When I asked why the use of the layered cloth instead of doors Sadiya shrugged and said that it was religious but that she didn’t know exactly why they did it. Upon entering the living room I felt that the cloth must be a method of separating clean from unclean space as the living room had been transformed into a beautiful sanctuary. Again there was no furniture in this room, but there were layers of mats and rugs on the floor with pillows lining the wall for us to sit against. The wall was draped with ornamented tapestry and several majestic brown and crimson woven rugs. There was one prominent tapestry large enough to encompass all three walls. It was pink with flowers and Arabic calligraphy. In this room I did not see the walls or ceiling at all. It appeared that all the tapestries and hanging rugs were leading to a small table that served as an exhibiting table for their more valued objects. Upon the table, surrounded by food and expensive candies, was a moving picture screen that had scenes of New York City and a large silver clock that had moving light up plastic fish swimming in it. The moving screen of NYC and the light up fish clock were objects that I would later find in every other Bantu home that I visited.

There was an area of the room designated for electronics. There was a pink boom box radio with speakers that lit up green and red. Next to it was an old rice sack full of cassette tapes. There was a mid sized Television, a DVD player and a VHS machine. On other visits to Somali Bantu homes I observed that all have TVs that are almost always showing the same hand held recorded film of an African dancing celebration. The film features an older man who dances in the middle of a circle of clapping and drumming.

Later during the visit, Sadiya took me back into one of the veiled rooms. She wanted to show me her “husband’s room.” There was black with red, yellow and green designed material draped across the walls and ceilings. The bed had been transformed into a large sultan-esque canopy bed. This room like all the other rooms had no visible windows because they had been lost behind the heavy layers of colored tapestry and cloth.

Since this first visit I have entered many Somali Bantu homes and noticed the unique transformation of space. I found that there was a significant social experiment happening as the Somali Bantu’s ability to transform space began to extend into the public sphere.

The City

The week after my visit to Sadiya’s house I recruited a capable interpreter named Amina Mode, one of the few English speaking Bantu’s who had mastered the language in school while still in Africa. I presented a three parts lesson meant to determine what city places were important to the women. First, as a group and individually we used a chart to determine how frequently the women go to specific places in the city. The frequency was measured by Daily, Often, Weekly, Monthly, Sometimes, and Never.

The second part of the lesson involved posters with pictures of city places. Each place was mounted on a specific color. The city places were: Library on purple paper, Post office on blue paper, Fire Station on red paper, Hospital on yellow paper, Food Market on pink paper, Somali Bantu Friend Houses on black paper, English class on white paper, Public Transportation ( Bus, Train) on green paper, Bank ATM on orange paper. The purpose of this activity was to collect data about the women’s weekly schedules. I gave them each a paper that had columns marked by the day of the week. Each woman was given one of these calendar marked papers. I had prepared colored square pieces of paper that would represent the different city places. The women then glued the representational colored square under the day of the week they go to the place it represents. We started with the white squares. I told them that they would each need two white squares. I then asked them what days of the week do they come to English class. Tuesday and Thursday they answered and then glued their white squares under the column that was marked with these days of the week. They understood what they were supposed to do and also understood that each woman’s calendar may look different.

Lastly, I showed the women a picture of a Somali Bantu woman and told them to pretend this was a new Bantu woman who moved to Lynn and didn’t know anything about the city. What are the most important places she needs to learn about? If you had to show her around what places in order of importance would you take her to? The women discussed this and decided upon the order. I then gave a poster of the city places to each of the women and asked them to arrange themselves in order of importance. This is how they arranged themselves:

1. Hospital
2. Grocery Store
3. Somali Bantu Friend’s Houses
4. English Class
5. Public Transportation
6. Bank ATM
7. Post Office
8. Library
9. Fire Station

The Lynn Community Health Center

Analysis of my data revealed that each of the women, both as a group and as individuals, believed that the hospital was the most important place in the city. I initially assumed the practical reason they valued this city space was because they had young children who were constantly sick. But as I began frequenting the Health Center to collect data I observed a significant social pattern that differed from this assumption.

The Lynn Community Health Center is located downtown, a straight, short walk from the YMCA. The Health Center is three stories high and serves a large population of Lynn Community members with ethnicities vast and varied. A community member, Pam Freeman, told me that there are more than seventy different languages spoken in Lynn. The Bantu Women are served on the second floor. There is a large waiting room with rows of chairs grouped throughout the area. On my numerous visits to the Health Center I noticed that groups of Bantu women would congregate in the waiting room. An employee of the Health Center said that the Somali Bantu women often gathered here. She concluded that they go there for social purposes and are present even when they do not have an appointment. IRC Case Worker Marco, a resident of Lynn himself said, “ Somali Bantu are always inside the Health Center, there is no single day that you will go there from morning until evening that you do not see a Somali Bantu women.”

My observations verified this. The women would come to the Health Center in large groups. I would often ask them if they were there to see a doctor and they would say no. Once I asked a group of four mothers and their children why they had come and they said, “ Megany appointment. She see doctor.” One woman out of the five actually had a medical reason to be at the community center, yet all five women, with three children apiece, sat in the waiting room. The women were comfortable there, sitting and talking while their children played together on the floor, looking at waiting room books and playing with waiting room toys. It appeared to be a social meeting place. I asked North Star director Brenda Bednar about this phenomenon and she said, “Maybe they have a good connection with the Somali caseworker there, she works hard with them a lot. Maybe because it’s a space they can go to, it’s consistently there, it’s consistently open.”

The Somali Case worker is named Amina. “Like the little Amina’s. The two youngest girls in the community are named after me,” she says smiling. Amina is the primary translator for the women when they come to the Health Center. She is not Bantu, but ethnic Somali. She has excellent English and is fluent in several languages. Amina is thin, with long narrow features, her skin is lighter than the Bantu womens’ and she dresses in conservative slacks and a buttoned down shirt, wearing a more modern headscarf. She is in her twenties.

“It is always very busy.” she said looking around. “ There is no such thing as an appointment. They come in whenever, unexpected. We are very busy so I have a new assistant.” She pointed to another girl dressed similarly. Amina told me she had worked here as an interpreter for about 2 years. I asked Brenda about Amina and her relationship with the women,

It’s hard to say, it must have changed within the last two to three years.
In the beginning it was very difficult. Amina didn’t seem to have worked
with the Somali Bantu before, well no one had worked with the Somali
Bantu before, being a Somali and working with the Bantu was more difficult
then working with regular Somalis because in their mind they were like,
‘these are just other people from my country’ and didn’t necessarily
understand that they would be so uneducated and illiterate. Whereas
someone that couldn’t communicate with them at all might not be surprised, but it was different for her.

I once asked one of the Bantu women the name of the translator at the Health Center and she answered, “Amina Lynn Community Health Center.” In personal interviews with the Bantu women they seemed to feel a strong sense of comfort with her. On many occasions I observed the women in the Health Center waiting room, holding envelopes and paper to have Amina translate. I would always ask these women if they or their child were sick, and the answer was always, “ No no sick.” I asked Nurto. “ Today, why come to hospital?”

Nurto answered, “ Paper.”

“Amina help you with paper?”

“ Yes”

I asked Brenda Bednar about the women’s relationship to the Health Center when they first arrived in the country. She said that learning to use the Health Center, in the beginning was very confusing. “They were confused about when to go to the Health Center and when not to. Sometimes you would see that they wanted to go for things they didn’t need to go for like a cold or a tooth ache, but other times they wouldn’t go when it was a definite need.” She explained that the first time any of them went to the Health Center was through IRC staff initiation and referral. IRC took them for the first time, “after that we didn’t know when they had appointments, we didn’t follow up after that. They then worked through the Somali case worker.”

Marco noted that lately they do not see as many Bantu coming to the office for help with reading bills and letters, that they seem to take these things to Amina at the Health Center. “ She has helped them with many things, she helps them apply for subsidized housing. She is helping them.” He said that there are two Somali Bantu organizations with the purpose to strengthen and assist the Somali Bantu community. These are organized and run by Bantu men. This has facilitated a sense of unity among Bantu men and offers a way for them to unite socially. Another male-only meeting place is at the Lynn Community Center where the men are allowed to come and pray. Brenda commented, “The women and men differ in this. I tend to see the women in places that are between school, the health center, laundry mat or the grocery store. The men I might see them in other places. Hanging out, just in other places.” Both Brenda and Marco expressed that there is no real social meeting place outside of the home for the women and thus it seems that within the past two years the women have created their own place where they could gather as women and mothers with another female advocate, “Amina Lynn Community Health Center.”

This ethnographic study has uncovered information relating to Somali Bantu women and how they perceive and alter urban American space. The Somali Bantu’s use of this central city place in Lynn is an example of pragmatic manipulation of space that differs from how other subcultures in America use this same space. They have transformed both the feeling and function of their private spaces, such as their apartments and their public spaces, like the Lynn Community Health Center, to create a new American place that meets their unique cultural needs.

Works cited

• Bestman, Katherine. 1999 Unraveling Somalia. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press
• Doorn, Lia. 2004 Perception of Time and Space of (Former) Homeless People. Paper presented at The Dutch Long Paper Workshop 4, London, September 6, 2004.
• Spradley, James 1972 Culture and Cognition: Rules, Maps and Adaptive Processes. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press