In his memoir, 'America Made Me a Black Man,' Boyah J. Farah tells of what American blackness has meant to him, from his childhood in Somalia to his adolescence in the Northeast, to his return to Somalia.
When Boyah J. Farah arrived in the United States as a teenager, he expected the country to be paradise. And for a while it was – when he rode his bike down the quiet streets of his Boston-suburb, past smiling neighbors with their perfectly manicured lawns."I really thought that God favored America," he said.But try as he might to hold on to that image, the reality of American racism eventually began to surface cracks in Farah's fantasy.
In your book, you talked about the fact that there was the image of America in movies, but then there was the image ofAmerica, and those things were often pretty different. What was your perception of Black Americans before you came? Yes. In high school I met Miss Parker [who worked at the school library]. And she's telling me that in America, I'm an."You're no longer African. You better get used to it." And if you haven't seen that, now you're going to see it. You know, it was like my first warning.
It seems like throughout the book you are regularly encountering people – Black people, like Miss Parker – who are trying to help you understand different things about what it will mean to be Black in the U.S. And at different stages of your life you had very different perceptions of that. So today, how would you define blackness?
Oh, yeah. I am my father's son. I carry his culture and his nomadic lifestyle. I'm an American nomad. You know what that means is freedom is number one – for me to be free until death is very important to me. So certain things I resist and resist and resist. But America does not allow that. It's hard to resist and still remain an American with a job.
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