Although born into a loving and relatively well-off family in Mogadishu, her mother died shortly after her birth, and she was raised by her father, grandfather and a close aunt. Tragic loss began early on in Omar’s life. As she counselled her cowardly classmate, ‘If you don’t want them messing with you every day, you’ve got to stand up for yourself.’ A challenging start However, this anecdote is a fitting starting point for understanding a figure whose life has been defined by resilience in the face of adversity and a drive to stand up for social equality.
Omar’s past scrappiness will probably come as a surprise to readers who are only familiar with the very warm and poised, albeit forthright, manner of the left-wing legislator today. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else – even if I knew this wasn’t the case’ (p.7). The runt who always got bullied at school. ‘I was a particularly small child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. She explains her unusual feistiness thus: While the child she was defending ran home scared, Ilhan stayed on to administer justice by ‘pulling down’ the bully and ‘rubbing his face in the sand’ (p.8). And when the harrier threatened her with physical retaliation, it was Ilhan who invited him to rumble in the courtyard after school. The book begins with a story of her at the age of seven telling a much bigger boy in her class to ‘sit and shut up’ when she heard him harassing a fellow pupil. In her recently released autobiography, This is what America Looks Like, we learn that the US’s first hijab-wearing congresswoman, perhaps best known today for boldly facing down Donald Trump’s racist remarks against her and fellow ‘squad’ members last year, developed an early reputation as a brawler of bullies at her primary school in Somalia. Ilhan Omar, This Is What America Looks Like (Hurst 2020), 320pp. Kate O’Neil reviews the autobiography of the progressive Somali-American representative Ilhan Omar has always been a fighter, and not just in the rhetorical sense.
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