-VTDigger
Brad Kessler’s 2021 novel North is a beautifully wrought chronicle of disparate lives: a Somali woman seeks asylum in Canada and is unexpectedly sheltered at a Vermont monastery. This sparks a crisis of faith; eventually she is aided by an Afghan war veteran.
While researching his fictional tale, Kessler met with a number of Somalis who had resettled in Vermont over the last 20 years. These conversations inspired the author to work with community members on a project that would preserve their stories. The result is Deep North (Onion River Press), a volume of first-person narratives that details survival and resilience.
The volume contains the harrowing journeys taken by a farmer, a camel-herder, and a single mother of seven after the 1991 civil war shattered their lives. As Kessler notes in the book’s afterword, “Stories and memories: the two things they were able to carry with them when everything else was stripped from them.”
Shadir Mohamed grew up along the lower Juba River in a farming community, but fled because, as a member of the Somali Bantu ethnic minority, he was attacked. Escaping to Kenya, he spent 15 years shuttling among a succession of squalid refugee resettlements. While in the camps he married and started a family. In 1999, the US Embassy in Nairobi accepted his application for a visa, which was finally approved in 2004. He and his wife landed in Burlington with one bag between them and four children.
Abdihamid A. Muhumed was a nomadic camel-herder, constantly moving with his family between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya with their animals. The civil war escalated and a gunman killed one of his brothers and father and stole their animals. He walked for weeks, wandered through the forests toward Kenya, and lived in desolate fenced-in camps with one brother and his family until, in 2008, they resettled in Winooski.
Fardusa A. Abdo and her family fled southern Somalia and relocated to Yemen. She did not attend school, staying home to do household chores. At 19 a marriage was arranged, and eventually the couple had seven children, two with disabilities. Her husband illegally crossed into Saudi Arabia to find work and was deported back to Somalia. She single-handedly raised the children. Her application to immigrate to America was approved in 2014, and they settled in Winooski.
Deep North chronicles the trauma of dislocation as well as what it took to rebuild shattered lives. The authors will be in conversation with community leader Abdirashid Hussein and editor Brad Kessler at the O.N.E. Community Center, 20 Allen Street, Burlington, VT, on October 8 at 4 p.m.