Thursday December 5, 2024
By Atra Mohamed
Marian Hassan will use a Minnesota Legacy grant to interview Somali elders, documenting poetry and songs used in child-rearing for future generations.
Marian Hassan, pictured October 30, 2024, has received a grant to help preserve Somali oral histories. Credit: Aaron Nesheim | Sahan Journal
As a young mother in Somalia, Asha Mohamed raised 10 kids in a tight-knit community rich with support from nearby family members.
Traditional lullabies, songs and sayings were woven into her child-rearing. Earlier this fall in Minneapolis, the 64-year-old grandmother remembered one such rhyme.
“Hobeey hobeey hobeeyaa,” she chanted, reciting the familiar nighttime call to bed for Somali children.
But in the Somali diaspora, the lullabies sung by mothers and grandmothers, the folktales passed on by fathers and grandfathers, and the poems recited by community elders are quickly disappearing.
Minnesota educator Marian Hassan, who has written bilingual children’s books of Somali folktales, has launched a project to preserve this oral treasure trove.
This fall, she received a $121,000 Minnesota Legacy Cultural Heritage Grant to launch the Sing-Again Lullaby and Oral History Project, where she and her team collect and preserve Somali language oral traditions.
She has been holding story circles with Somali elders to capture their experiences, which she will turn into a book along with video and audio resources.
“The project includes collecting children’s oral traditions, such as lullabies and songs we’ve used to soothe and nurture our children, which are beautiful and rich, but many of them have not been committed to writing,” she said.
The Somali language had no single standardized script until the early 1970s, when it became the official government language. That made oral tradition important to preserving cultural knowledge.
Many of these lullabies and children’s oral traditions have not been committed to any form of documentation, which is why it’s important to preserve them before it’s too late, Marian said.
“Our elders were the preservers of the language,” she said.
The Sing-Again project will showcase the elders singing lullabies and reflecting their method of childrearing, Marian said. It will include bilingual materials for young people who are struggling to understand the Somali language.
“We want to make it relevant and balanced in a simple and creative language that children can access and understand, and the goal is to have something that’s not already on the bookshelf,” she said.
Elders looking back
On an October morning at the Brian Coyle Center in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, Asha reflected on her experience as a mother and grandmother.
Raising 10 children was a demanding job, she said in Somali. However, she lived among grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles in Somalia, who were always ready to help when needed.
“In my home country, when someone sees a child who’s misbehaving out there, we redirect them. We never let them continue the misbehavior because everyone was like a father and mother to all the children in the community,” she said.
Previous generations used nurturing language with their children, including proverbs that conveyed life lessons and lullabies that gave babies a sense of comfort.
Younger Somali parents in the United States struggle to raise fewer children, she said, and the cultural knowledge that knit the community together is disappearing.
A shift to language preservation
Across the river in St. Paul, Abdisalam Adam, the principal of East African Elementary Magnet School, said the decline of Somali language and culture is a huge concern within the community.
“We not only want to preserve the Somali language, but there is a huge need for it in the diaspora,” he said. “We are seeing families who can not communicate with their children, teachers who are having difficulties communicating with students, and health care workers who cannot communicate with their patients.
He said the school recently started two seal of biliteracy classes with the goal of helping students get the certification by the time they graduate from high school.
The seal of biliteracy is a certificate that districts award to students who demonstrate proficiency in the language they are learning.
“Our end goal is to preserve and spread the language to our larger community,” Abdisalam said.
During the 1990s, Somali families who arrived said they wanted their kids to learn from English-speaking teachers. Back then, the Somali community was newly arriving and they wanted their children to learn the English language for school and job preparation.
But today, it’s the opposite because many Somali families are seeing their children lose the language that holds the community together, Abdisalam said.
“It’s been a huge shift,” he said.
A welcome resource for students
Deqa Muhidin, a former school teacher, children’s book author and Somali language heritage program coordinator at the Minneapolis Public Schools Multilingual Department, said the Sing-Again project would be a great addition to what was already in place.
The district’s Somali Heritage Language Program was launched in 2021 and has grown to 270 students in kindergarten through fourth grade.
The program is more than a language-learning program, she said. “We teach our students the Somali language and culture. We want to ensure that not only do our children know the language, but [they] are also culturally competent.”
“I think our program will benefit [from] professionally produced Somali cultural elements, such as songs, poems, and lullabies,” she said.
The Somali language has its own cultural insights, which are only spoken by Somali elders, and once they are no longer here, those insights will be lost, Deqa said.
For example, elders might use the phrase, “Look at something in your foot.” Metaphorically, it means to run. Another example is when a merchant sells products, they often say, “I’m going to close my eyes,” meaning this is my last price, she said.
According to many Somali academics, these words and phrases are the substance of the Somali language, which is only spoken and understood by the previous generation of Somalis, Deqa said.
Somali is the third-most common language spoken at home in Minnesota, after English and Spanish, according to data compiled by Minnesota Compass. But that is changing as young people grow up in an English-dominant environment.
“This is urgent for Somali people because they have not been here too long, and it is alarming to see the fast rate at which the language is disappearing,” Marian said.
In most Somali households, “People speak in small colonies,” she said. For example, children speak to each other in English, and adults speak to each other in Somali, making learning and retaining their language almost impossible.
“This project has been in the works of my mind for a long time, and the time was never right, but I feel especially urgent because our elders are the only ones who are the preservers of these kinds of oral traditions,” Marian said.