82 pages • 2 hours read
Abdi Nor IftinCall Me American
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Cinema
One of the most common motifs throughout the book is Abdi’s love of cinema. It affects his entire life, filling him with ideas of America from a young age. He visits the makeshift cinema in his neighborhood on a regular basis, the movies he sees there become a symbol of freedom and escape. Movies become a reference point in Abdi’s life, affecting how he presents himself to the world and to the reader. Often, he likens moments in his life to movies like The Terminator and Titanic; Abdi uses film references as cultural shorthand to demonstrate his proximity to American culture.
When Abdi is young, the cinema is an escape from religious school and the horrors of war—a portal to another world. Abdi sees famous actors speaking a language he does not understand and feels inspired. The cinema becomes an oasis of ambition, symbolizing life outside Somalia.
The effect movies have on Abdi is profound. He decorates his room with movie and music posters, angering his parents by this break from his strict religious upbringing. The cultural pull of America drags Abdi away from his Somali roots, toward something else—a pull that proves dangerous when Islamists soldiers enter Abdi’s house and search for taboo artifacts that prove that he is not pious enough. The bulldozing of the cinema symbolizes Abdi’s dashed hopes and his desperate need to escape.
Guns
Guns symbolize similarities and differences between American and Somali culture. This is especially pronounced at two points in the text: when Abdi is watching American action films as a boy and when he talks to his co-workers in America. American actions films such as Rambo and The Terminator feature many guns. Growing up in Mogadishu, Abdi distinguishes between the violence he sees on screen and that doled out by the militiamen patrolling his neighborhood. As the civil war escalates, every home in Mogadishu has a weapon for protection, while untrained teenage militiamen—presented as psychopathic, violent drug-users—also have guns. These facts of life have little in common for Abdi with the guns wielded by action movie heroes. However, Abdi can’t help but conflate the foreign troops arriving to distribute aid in Somalia and the movies stars: Guns in the hands of westerners become cultural items.
American gun culture seems strange to Abdi. His co-workers all own guns. They go hunting and talk about their guns often, since the guns are a hobby and a lifestyle choice. This astonishes Abdi, whose hobbies are music, movies, and dancing. It is hard for him to comprehend how guns (so associated with violence and conflict in Somalia) could be a pastime. Moreover, when a disgruntled former employee brings a rifle to the workplace, Abdi sees the darker side of American gun culture.
Animals
Animals point to differences between the various clans and tribes of Somalia, and between Somalis and Americans. Abdi begins the memoir with a description of his parents, nomadic people who herded their animals across the Somali bush, relying on plants and herbs for medicine. In the city, Abdi’s mother pines for the closeness she had to her animals. She remembers her goats and her cows, recalling the sights, the sounds, and the smells of moving through the bush with her herd. To her, it was a simpler, happier time.
For Abdi and his siblings, this nomad past is not familiar. They struggle when walking through the bush. Monkeys and crocodiles fascinate the boys who have never seen them before, while Madinah’s stories of lions and hyenas scare Abdi whenever he thinks about the possibility of walking through the countryside. Abdi and Hassan do not share the close relationship with animals that their parents have—for better or worse, they are city kids.
During Abdi’s time in America, he faces a different relationship to animals. In Somalia, dogs are considered dirty and are not allowed in the home. Abdi frets when he sees an American friend’s dog in the house. This relationship with dogs is an echo of his mother’s longing for her herds and a symbol of cultural difference that Abdi must overcome to truly understand his new life.
