THE NEW YORKER
Rebecca Mead
Monday March 6, 2017
Mikal Amin Lee, the manager of the Arts & Justice program at BAM—an
after-school workshop, in which a group of high-school students examine
social-justice issues through performance—selected this year’s theme,
immigration, before last year’s election made it especially timely. “I
have a feeling that Donald Trump is going to give us a whole lot of
material over the next four years,” he said the other day. Lee was speaking in a dance studio at BAM’s
Fisher theatre, where the nineteen students selected for the
program—many come back year after year—had been working in small groups,
using songs from their childhoods to create original theatre pieces.
Now it was time to walk around the block to the Howard Gilman Opera
House, to see “A Man of Good Hope,” a musical that tells the true story
of a Somali refugee named Asad Abdullahi, adapted from the book of the
same name by Jonny Steinberg and performed by the Isango Ensemble, from
South Africa.
The students sat in the rear of the
mezzanine, jostling one another. Many of them came from immigrant
families, or had immigrated themselves, and were concerned about recent
political events. Trump’s travel ban had made the play even more
relevant: Somalia is one of the seven countries from which the President
has sought to stop all immigration, even of previously approved
refugees. “I’m an African-American Muslim,” said Muneerat, a twelfth
grader at the Cultural Academy of the Arts and Sciences, who was wearing
a hijab. Her parents came to the U.S. from Nigeria. “I’m angry, not
scared—I don’t know what to call it,” she went on. “Anything could
happen.”
Her classmate Tishell, who
is from Trinidad, said that she had been surprised by the election
results. “I’m really disappointed in America,” she said. A tenth grader
at the iSchool, Eli, observed that Trump had rallied supporters by
identifying immigrants as a common enemy. “That’s kind of the Hitler way
to do it,” he said. Garl, a twelfth grader from Medgar Evers College
Preparatory School, chimed in. “It’s the land of immigrants, who come
here to be free,” he said. “If nobody comes here, it’s not the land of
the free.”The lights dimmed, and a child appeared center stage: the eight-year-old
Asad Abdullahi, who, in the first few moments of the play, watches
militiamen slaughter his mother. Orphaned, he is taken in by Yindy, a
female cousin; together, they flee to a refugee camp in Kenya. “What is a
refugee?” Asad asks. “A refugee is someone waiting to go somewhere
else,” Yindy tells him. They are waiting to go to America. “It is always
safe in America,” she says, to rueful laughs from the audience. Yindy
lists the country’s mythical attributes: there are no guns and no gangs;
everyone is rich; America has the biggest trucks in the world.
Yindy gets her papers to leave for the
U.S. Asad does not. At twelve, he travels to Ethiopia, where he grows
into a young man—now played by an adult actor—and marries. The
wedding-night scene, in which it is graphically revealed that his new
bride, Foosiya, has been subjected to female circumcision, prompted
squeals of horror and whispers among the students. Eventually, Asad pays
for passage south through Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe—nearly three
thousand miles, to the South African border.
At
intermission, the students had lots of observations, cultural and
artistic. “We learned about circumcision in boys in human biology, but I
didn’t think women had any extra skin down there,” Mahalia, a ninth
grader from Acorn Community High School, said, appalled. Ashanae, a
twelfth grader from the Cultural Academy of Arts and Sciences, who
emigrated from Jamaica three and half years ago, said that she was
affected by the moment when Yindy left. “That kind of reminded me of
when my mom went to America to make a better life for us, when I was
eight,” she said. Yosef, a tenth grader at Edward R. Murrow High School,
noted the raked stage—“It’s like at Shakespeare’s Globe”—and the way in
which the music of different African countries had been presented to
give a distinct sense of place. “People always lump the whole continent
together,” he said.
For the second
half, the students moved forward to fill a few empty rows—all wanted to
get closer to the drama, as Asad made a new life in a township. Racism,
South African style, was explored: Somali immigrants expressed disdain
for the locals (“We think of black South African men as teen-agers,”
Asad says) and were resented in return (“They steal our jobs; they steal
our women”). There were you-go-girl mutterings when Foosiya divorced
Asad in absentia.
Finally, Asad,
after all the horrors and hardships of his life, receives notification
that his immigration application to the U.S. has been approved. “I’ve
got the American papers,” he says. (The real Asad Abdullahi lives in
Kansas City.) There were pumping fists and quiet utterances of “Yes!” as
the students issued a welcome to, and a celebration of, their own
homeland, in all its vast, compromised promise. ♦
Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997