The forgotten ones

Part 1: The Arrival

Ismail had little memory of the trip to America, but his parents’ stories painted vivid pictures. His mother would describe their escape from Somalia as a modern-day epic, filled with danger, hope, and loss. They had left a civil war-torn nation in the dead of night. In her version, Ismail was barely three years old, clinging to her, wide-eyed but quiet, as they crossed the border into Ethiopia.

The dusty streets of the refugee camp were his first real memories—strange, fleeting flashes of heat and hunger. His parents never spoke about those years anymore, their memories of the camp as unwelcome as ghosts. His father had buried the past beneath layers of optimism about their new life in America, where anything was possible if you worked hard enough.

But as Ismail stepped off the plane in Minneapolis, the cold slapped him in the face, and he knew things would be different in ways no one had prepared him for. The winter winds cut through his thin jacket, and he clung to his mother’s hand as they waited for a cousin to pick them up. His father’s eyes scanned the crowd with the quiet determination of a man ready to start over again.

Other Somali families who had also fled the war settled around them in a small apartment in the middle of the city. The community was tight-knit, and in those early years, Ismail’s world felt small but secure. Everyone spoke Somali, cooked the same food, and attended the same mosques. But as the years passed and Ismail grew older, cracks began to appear in the foundation of that safe world.

School was the first place he felt it—the divide between the life his parents had built and the one he was expected to navigate. At home, they spoke of the importance of maintaining their culture, their language, and their religion. But at school, none of those things seemed to matter. They made him different, made him stand out in ways that attracted the wrong kind of attention.

By the time he was twelve, Ismail had learned to keep his head down. He’d slip his headphones on the moment he left the house, drowning out the world with rap music that pulsed through his veins like an electric current. Nas, Tupac, Biggie—they were his constant companions, their words filling the empty spaces inside him.

He liked the way their music made him feel—like he belonged to something bigger, a history that stretched back through the pain and struggle of being Black in America. He wanted to feel that connection, but it always slipped through his fingers. His Somali background made him different—a part of the African diaspora but not quite African American.

In the hallways of his middle school, the black kids spoke with a kind of effortless cool that Ismail couldn’t replicate, no matter how hard he tried. Their slang was fast and fluid, full of inside jokes and references that left him feeling lost. He’d laugh along anyway, hoping no one would notice how out of place he felt.

At home, it was a different kind of isolation. His parents spoke to him in Somali, but his grasp of the language was weak, fraying at the edges with each passing year. He could understand them well enough, but when he tried to respond, the words came out wrong. His mother would correct him, her voice tinged with frustration.

“Ismail, sidee baanad luuqadaada ugu hadli karin?” she’d say, shaking her head. “Maalin walba waan kugula hadalnaa, sideed ciyaalkaaga u bari? Sideed dhaqankaaga iyo dadkaaga u baran haddaad dayacdo luuqada?” Sometimes his mom will say that in a broken English. “Why don’t speak your language? Why don’t you learn your Somali culture? Do you want marry Cadaan girl?

He didn’t have an answer for her. All he knew was that his words never seemed to fit anywhere—too foreign for his friends at school, too broken for his family at home.

So he stayed quiet. He became an expert at blending into the background, nodding when his parents spoke, and keeping his responses to a minimum. In school, he let the music speak for him, hiding behind his headphones and the bravado of lyrics that weren’t his own. He scribbled in notebooks during class, filling the margins with cryptic lines of poetry that no one ever saw. The words were his only outlet, a way to make sense of the confusion that followed him like a shadow.

But no matter how hard he tried, that shadow always lingered. It was the unspoken thing that stretched between him and everyone around him—the feeling that he didn’t quite fit into any world—Somali, Black, or American. He was always in-between, lost in spaces no one talked about.

And so, the years passed, each marked by the same silent struggle. His parents pushed him to excel in school, reminding him constantly of the sacrifices they had made. “We came here for you, Halkan dartaa baa u imaanay.” his father would say. “Your education is the most important thing. Waa muhiim waxbarashadaadu.”

And Ismail loved learning; he did. But he hated the way his classmates would snicker when he raised his hand, mocking his accent or the way he mispronounced certain words. He hated the way he had to fight just to be taken seriously, not only because of where he came from but because he didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories they understood.

In those moments, the music became his shield, the only thing that made him feel like he belonged somewhere, even if that place was only in his mind.

As he got older, he realized that the battle was not just external—it was inside him too, a conflict that he couldn’t seem to resolve. He wanted to be Somali and make his parents proud, but the stories of his heritage felt like faded photographs, distant and blurred. He wanted to be black to connect with the culture of his friends, but he could never quite find the rhythm. He wanted to be American, to fit in without standing out, but his accent, his skin, his name—everything about him reminded the world that he didn’t fully belong.

He wondered if he ever would…