This Is What America Looks Like (2020) by Ilhan Omar: from refugee to Congress

The book

This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman is the memoir of Ilhan Omar, written with the American writer Rebecca Paley. It was published in hardback by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2020, with 288 pages (Publishers Weekly). Omar was born in Mogadishu in 1982 and in 2019 became the first Somali American elected to the US Congress.

What it covers

• Childhood in Mogadishu. The book opens in Mogadishu, where Omar grew up with her father, her six siblings, her grandfather, whom she calls Baba, and other relatives. Her mother died when she was two (Mail & Guardian; Publishers Weekly).
• War and flight. She describes the outbreak of the civil war, the breakdown of order and violence against neighbours and friends. The family fled to Kenya, and spent four years in refugee camps, including Utange near Mombasa, before obtaining visas for the United States (Mail & Guardian; Publishers Weekly). See Dadaab and the Kenya camps.
• Starting over in the US. She writes about her shock at seeing homelessness in New York, the fights that kept her in detention for much of her first year of middle school, high school, college in North Dakota, and family life (Publishers Weekly; Mail & Guardian).
• Politics. She traces her political views to her work as a nutrition educator in poorer communities in Minneapolis, and follows her campaigns and first year in Congress. She also apologises for using an antisemitic trope while criticising US policy on Israel (Publishers Weekly). Somalis in the city are covered on Minneapolis and St Paul.

How it was received

Reviews were mixed.

• Publishers Weekly called it "brisk and forthright" and "polished and frequently poignant" (Publishers Weekly).
• Ifrah Udgoon, a Somali-American reviewer in South Africa's Mail & Guardian, called it "brutally honest and definitively relatable", and wrote that she shared Omar's sense of being "not Somali enough and not American enough" (Mail & Guardian).
• The left-wing magazine Jacobin reviewed it favourably (Jacobin).
• Conservative publications were critical: the Washington Free Beacon published a strongly negative review, and The Spectator questioned how far parts of her account could be relied on (Free Beacon; The Spectator).

Where to read it

• In a library: WorldCat

Related pages

• Ilhan Omar
• Somali Americans in public office
• Somali authors and their books