REAL CHANGE — Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan declared Feb. 9 “Baro Af-Soomaali Day” during a celebration at the New Holly Gathering Hall honoring the families who created a children’s book for the Somali community. The celebration was the culmination of two years’ work by local Somali families, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) and the Seattle Public Library (SPL).

Over the past few years, organizations working with the Somali community became aware that many families in the community were worried about the loss of the language and culture, and that parents were concerned about their children not being given educational materials that reflected the Somali culture.

The book was a joint effort, involving the Somali Family Safety Taskforce, SPL, SPS and the Seattle Housing Authority. The project also received support from the Seattle Public Library Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a Race to the Top Deep Dive 3 grant from the Puget Sound Educational Service District and the Community Center for Education Results.

Over a four-week period, local Somali artist and poet Mohammed Shidane worked with four families to create “Baro Af-Soomaali.” The families were given a group of Somali letters and asked to select some items from their homes that illustrated the letter. The families decided as a group the layout, the illustrative photographs and the title.

The project allowed the families to explore their culture and language together. The parents and grandparents told stories about their home country of Somalia to their children and grandchildren, and, through the process, the children reported that they were proud to speak Somali.

The families and all the people involved in the creation of the book hope people enjoy reading it as much as they enjoyed making it.

In presenting the proclamation, the mayor cited the many contributions of the Somali community to the city of Seattle. “Somali-American families contribute to all sectors of our society, and we believe in ensuring that our public institution, our schools, our libraries and our community centers are responsive to and reflect the many diverse cultures that make up our city,” she said.

Applewood Books is publishing the book, and Ingram Distribution is helping get the book to libraries and schools across the United States and around the world. The book is currently available on Amazon.com. Royalties go to the Seattle Public Library Foundation and Somali Family Safety Taskforce to fund similar projects in the future.

Somali author Nadifa Mohamed says she is constantly enraged by conflicts and unrest across the globe and the only way she can calm herself and contribute anything meaningful is responding in a measured way through her novels.

“There has to be respect for human life that you don’t let people die. That’s the line you don’t cross. And I feel that this line has been crossed,” she rues.

“I am very aware of how much the present situation, present fears have impacted my ability to respond in any kind of measured way. And the only way I can respond in a measured way is through fiction and my novel,” London-based Mohamed, who was in India recently for the Jaipur Literature Festival, told PTI.

“I am constantly enraged by the news of conflicts, atrocities and unrest and the only way I can calm myself and contribute anything meaningful is through my novels written after adequate research,” she says.

According to Mohammed, economic depressions like the Great Recession always bring out the most violent, most irrational responses politically.

“That’s what we are seeing, we are seeing it in the West, we are seeing it in the Muslim world, we are seeing it in too many places. The underlying reasons have been there for long and probably they are recurring. The recent energy behind the conflicts we are seeing, the instability we are seeing may be due to the gratuity loss,” she says.

Mohamed, a Granta best young British novelist, is working on her third novel which is about miscarriage of justice and deals with a murder case from the 1950s. “The book has been in my mind for about 10 years. I intended it to be a very short and tight novel but it is now almost 600 pages long.

It is very, very historical. It has got real life characters,” she says.

For her, what becomes a novel is something that gets under her skin. “It might be personal too. I have written a lot about my family or something that relates to a feeling I have had for a long period of time.”

She thinks she has been getting deeper and deeper in trying to understand what people have been talking about constantly discrimination, justice, migration, self-identity.

“So I think the novel is still precious for that. There is no other way I know that you sit with someone, you sit with the story for days and days and really absorb it. I am not convinced that I have as much as of a transformative effect on the reader but it just grabs a more meaningful attention from them than anything else that I can think of,” says Mohammed, who was born in the Somali city of Hargeisa in 1981 while Somalia was falling deeper into dictatorship.

In 1986, she moved to London with her family in what she thought was a temporary move but a couple of years later it became permanent as war broke out in Somalia.

Her father’s stories were the basis of her debut novel “Black Mamba Boy”.

Mohammeds next work “The Orchard of Lost Souls”, set in Hargeisa, is the story of three women – nine-year-old Deqo, an orphan born and raised in the Saba’ad refugee camp; Kawsar, a well-off widow in her 50s whose late husband was the city’s chief of police before the public offices were purged; and Filsan, an ambitious young soldier in her late 20s.

On migration of authors to other countries, she says, I have noticed that many writers, not surely they are refugees, but they have moved either a lot or one big time in their childhood. So there must be something to do with leaving one world behind and entering a new world at a very formative age that enables or switches on the writer’s mind.

On the writing and publishing scene in Somaliland, she says, “I could still write and I could have published but the platform would be very different. The industry is Somaliland is in its very early stages. Selling is a problem there but it is also not so easy in the US and the UK either.

WCCO – CBS Minnesota — Mariam Mohamed said she wrote “Ayeeyo’s Golden Rule” because there weren’t many books for Somali children to read and see characters who look like them