| Abstract: | Somali refugees who fled the collapse of their homeland and resettled in the US narrate ‘who they are’ within a bewildering entanglement of cultural differences layered with diasporic tensions. This analysis examines the storytelling of a young woman refugee to Lewiston, Maine, who embodies the performative tensions that animate Somali identity at this intense historical moment and in this dense cultural space. I follow her unfolding counter/narrative dance within the confluence of gazes – feminist, colonialist, multiculturalist, and academic – which dialogically inform the possibilities of her identity as she contests definitions of Somali ethnicity, feminism, blackness, and Islam. Her storytelling circulates and reworks two dominant narratives used to explain Somali identity: identity-as-culture and identity-as-religion. Performance analysis of her storytelling makes evident that Somali culture and Islamic religion are co-articulated as well as inescapably liminal and localized by the bodily differences of gender and race in the diaspora. I problematize the narrative event as a dialogic, co-constructed, and transnational encounter in which the narrator reads and talks back to regulating discourses at the same time that I question my own complicity in dominant designs. The narrative performance and analysis display a Somali ethnicity fleshed out, critically inflected, and creatively nuanced by the diaspora which inserts an emerging Somali story in US immigration narratives. |
