Cspan, your unfiltered view of politics. Host representative omar, democrat from minnesota has a new book out. Here is what it looks like and this is called what america looks like. Congresswoman, thank you for joining us on book tv. There are two characters in your book and who are they . My grandfather and father. Abba is the word we use for dad in somali and abba is the Traditional Middle Eastern name for father since i was born as his child that is what his children call him and we continue to call him that as well. They were both father figures to me and so i continued to call them abba and abba. Host what were the first eight or years like for you . Guest peaceful. I had a really enjoyable childhood and i grew up in a household where we had, not just you know my siblings and my father, extended family lived with us, my uncles and aunties and grandfather and my greatgrandmother was always around and so it was a very loving environment and i was raised by educators so education was a big part of our life and we all loved learning and we were very curious kids. My grandfather and father grant grandfather encouraged discussions and debate and curiosity and i was known as the why kid when i was little and so i had a lots of intimate time with my grandfather and father because i was always around them asking questions and as a mother now i know how annoying that can be at times but they never let on and it was a very protective, enriching environment to grow up in. Host that was in the Mogadishu Somalia area, correct . Guest yes, the capital city. Mogadishu was a very different place at that time then it is now. It was very culturally enriched environment. My earliest memories really are of music and art and plays in part of the Education System was that you learned poetry some called somalia nations of poets so poetry was a way you express yourself in songs and plays were the way in which this originally nomadic culture passed down information, not much of somalias history is written so everything was done through song and dance and as part of our Education System we would have times in which throughout the day we would sing and dance and my aunts and uncles brought that home and so they would have my siblings and i pair off and do duets so we were often busy writing songs down so we could memorize them because none of us wanted to be outperformed by the other. Host you did not mention your mother. What happened . Guest my mother passed away when i was very little and i have no memory and, you know, i really didnt have much of a missed experience with her not being around because there were so many adults who provided build that space for me. When i became a mother myself for the first time really was when i understood the concept of what it would have meant for her to be in my life and i remember being very young and pregnant and going through that experience and wanting to lean on my father and him falling short. It was the first time when he really could give me proper advice and cannot really have adequate empathy and sympathy for the things that i was experiencing. I remember he really wanted to be in the birthing room with me and i remember my friends thought that was really odd but he knew i was really nervous and i had friends who had had infection so i was paranoid about going through that process and he wanted to provide comfort for me and eventually my First Experience at giving birth was like a communal experience in the way in which i came into the world i suppose so all of my family was there and the nurses and the doctors didnt know what to do with a room full of 20 plus people who would come to experience it with me. Host you talk about that in your book this is what america looks like and you talk about the quote unquote eyes of somalia that have followed you around so what does that mean . Guest when you grow up in a family that is as big as mine was it is as if you were going up in a sport town where everyone knows one another, not only was my family huge but also everybody else was in my family and so that kind of followed us when we came to america and moved to minnesota with their all were also somalis so i always kind of grew up living in a fishbowl in the way in which i am now where everybody had an opinion about how i was being raised in what i was learning and how i was spending my days in what i was wearing and we are very expressive community and people arent really shy to share their opinions and you know, it was hard being a teenager in that environment because you are not only accountable to your parents but you are accountable to whole set of the community that often doesnt fully have a comprehension of what values they are speaking of and so there was always a push and pull in many contradictions and hypocrisies that showed up. Luckily i was growing up in a family that had an open dialogue so i could question authority and i could ask questions and i could challenge their assumptions since i grew up being balanced that way and knowing that people can have their opinions and it doesnt make it fact and that is okay and you take what this into the set of facts that you have and what doesnt and you know, you allow it to shape you as much as you are willing it to. Host so the fact that you grew up in a relatively boisterous school did that help prepare you for your work today . Guest yeah, the thing you have to learn growing up in an environment like that is that your sense of self rapidly develops, right . You become acutely aware of who you are and what you are about because there are constant voices around you trying to shape you and so you know, i grew up really feeling comfortable in my own skin and developing my own identity and feeling proud at times of my ability to defend myself from the opinions people had of me and i think, you know, to now exist in an environment where i am equally as unique as i was to my family that people narratives of me or ideas to me dont really matter, as long as i know who i am and what narrative i want to shape of myself. Host congresswoman omar, you also write in your book that you were known for defending yourself with your fists as we well. Guest yeah, again, i grew up with a big family where it was really important and not only learn how to defend yourself verbally but also physically and you know when you are a very small person in School Environment and a lot of people will pray on you and, you know, i had a brief time with my fathers father who did not help raise me but was there influential in my earlier years and really made me believe that the physical can always be overwritten by the internal and so internally if i felt confident and brave and courageous externally if i looked weak and small and tiny and it didnt matter and so the shock and surprise of many of the bullies that i would take in concert of my life i am much stronger than they imagined. Host congresswoman, you write in your book as well that your relatively private person in this book is pretty relatively tory. Was that tough to put down and to put out there in the world . Guest i would say it is like giving birth to children and running from congress was probably the hardest thing to do. It was a very painful experience to, you know, have walked people intimately through my Life Experiences and to have really engage in a process where i was also analyzing my life and in these moments what they meant fully in the context of who i am today and what i wanted to convey for the leaders. I think for someone that much is talked about but less is known felt important to give people the opportunity to get to know me and the ways in which i know myself. Some of my friends have read the book and are surprised how revealing it is because i am not a very revealing person because again when you row up in a place where you are always exposed and you want to keep speaking for yourself and so i have always guarded some aspects of my personal life and i do that a little bit here in the book but i wanted to really give people the opportunity to get to know me. Host how did you get from mogadishu to minneapolis in short form . Guest we left mogadishu through the middle of the first wave of the civil war and what eventually make it to mombasa in the refugee camp and we lived in there for four years and ultimately got the Golden Ticket to come to the United States in early 1995 and started out in arlington, virginia where i went to middle school for a couple of years and minnesota at the time was number one in the nation for educational outcomes and my family was interested in having the best opportunities available to us and so we were one of the first families to come to the soda and eventually would find a community of other somalis who were also making their way here in search of a better life. Host you recount that when you landed in new york city that your father told you this is not our america. What did he mean by that . Guest so, an aspect of the refugee journey that people might not know is that that process is very long and one of the last things that happens before you get your Golden Ticket to get on that plane is orientation, that gives you an opportunity to understand what your new home will look like and how to adjust once you get there because you dont really have a lot of resources for refugees to acclimate to life here in the United States or to many parts around the world and so that orientation process was one th that, looking back at it was very revealing, about the american exceptionalism that existed in many of us and i when many of us people say youre american exceptionalism is a showing in the ways of which i talk about america sometimes but it is a visit image of, you know, america the great and there are scenes in the videos you watch of white picket fences and families who have not only the opportunity of the resources to be able to fully seed themselves but everything is shiny and beautiful and really fits, i think, to our image of how we see ourselves and we are so good at exporting that image to the outside world that what we have not been good at is working really hard to have that be actualized here for every person in that american exceptionalism is one we fight every day to live out in this ideal. I didnt imagine because it wasnt presented to me that i would arrive in america and see americans homeless sleeping on the side of the street. I didnt imagine that there would be in america the didnt have the white picket fences and the Beautiful Homes that had a lineup of trash in the street which i now know like that is life in new york and the system that he had up and at the time it was joined to go from that image ingrained in my brain for a couple of weeks as you go through orientation to come in the next image of the actual country beat that and i had had a hard time consuming it and as i was known as the white kid i had to ask the question of my father why this was happening and why nothing looked like it did in the videos into him obviously he understood right in america was a very much more complex person or place then what we have seen in that video and he said we just hope that we eventually will find our america and to his credit arlington was much closer visually to the america we have seen and, you know, i think my political work in my organizing work in my efficacy was born out of that moment of wanting the images to match and i do everything i can every single day in showing gratitude for my new home to drive it and look as beautiful and clean as resourceful as it did in the video. Host congresswoman, one who got to minneapolis you got your undergraduate degree at north Dakota State University so what were the circumstances that took you to north dakota from minneapolis . Guest yet, we were, as a nation, really going through, you know, a breakdown in the economic crisis and at the time i also was experiencing my own personal breakdown of really living a life that ultimately got tired of pushing against the grain and found a way to assimilate to the ideas of me that everybody had and eventually felt stripped of who i really was and felt drowning in a life that i didnt really want for myself and so i wanted to have the opportunity to really escape and start anew and find myself and, you know, took on a journey to disconnect myself from everything that was familiar and found myself with my two Young Children in the interestingly diverse State College and i ended up going to north dakota and i think that the landscape is befitting of north dakota was wide enough for me to breathe and reconnect wi with, you know, the image of me i had always had, someone who was passionate and someone who fully understood her purpose in life and felt dignified in that and eventually found my purpose in leading a life of efficacy to try to work, not only for the betterment of my life but for my children and future generations. Host when you return to minneapolis you wrote some letters revisited some people so what did you do on your return . Guest i watched a facebook clip of an interview that oprah was doing and in this interview, you know, she was talking about the process she has gone through and i cant remember it correctly right now but it might have been a conversation with maia angelou, the late maia angelou and she said forgiveness is not for the person you are forgiving but for yourself. It is the ability to let go. Everybody that wrongs you often does not even remember or has an idea of them wronging you and it is not that wronging that has a chokehold on them but has a chokehold on you. When you let go you are freeing yourself not for them but we often think about forgiving others that it is a gift for them but it is a gift for ourselves. That was like my hot moment as all process. I knew that i had had a lot to forgive in order to free myself of everything that had brought me to that moment and that was, you know, forgiving my siblings for not being what i wanted them to be for me and forgiving my father for not showing up in the ways in which i wanted him to show up. Forgiving my mother for not living long enough for me to know her and forgiving you know the country i was born in for engulfing itself in more with lots of continued childhood there and forgiving my aunt for not having the strength to survive malaria and continue to be a part of my life in that refugee camp. I had a lot to forgive so that i can let go and that was really a very healing process that was expedited by my visit back to somalia and kenya in 18 other refugees who were in a similar position i was 20 years prior, nearly 20 years prior to that and reliving, i think, that experience also gave me an understanding of the choices that my family had to make which i cannot fully understand for a long time. When you are a kid you want everything to stay still and you want to be around your friends and your family and you dont really understand why people are making a decision different from everything familiar. That, i think, put it into the context for me and allowed me to continue in that process of healing and, you know, ultimately, i think made me a person that doesnt live in a blackandwhite state but really lives in the extreme gray and understanding, you know, the context of things and how, you know, we might not get everything we might not understand the decision points that bring people to different places and where we should not be entitled to that but we should work really hard in trying ourselves there so that we can at least have some sympathy for what they must have experienced in order to make a particular decision in life. Host you mentioned that you took some of your children up to north Dakota State University with you so who is ahmed . Guest i took my oldest daughter indra and my son amnon, their father committed, would continue to be a part of their life and visit and i think you know to me it was an important or an important thing for me to separate myself and disconnect the kind of entitlement i felt people had to my life and my life decisions that i didnt want to rub my children of that connection and that ability to have the continuum of having the presence of both of their parents. Host congresswoman, one of the things names i found in iraq was the importance of plans in the somali culture but also the paternalism. When you first got married you werent even present at your first wedding. Is that correct . Guest that is not a somali concept but its an islamic concept and some countries obviously have different cultures and traditions in the somali culture when we do our, essentially the formal ceremony here when you are getting your marriage officiated by a priest or a rabbi de mom would have the groom and a representative of the female and that is often tradition for somebody first marriage, for a womans first marriage. And so, luckily my father was alive and so he, in those cases, played the primary representative and it is almost exclusively male. Behalf, and some people who dont have a father or brother would have a distant relative and that becomes essential to have that sort of power attorney but your father and your brothers often will have your best interest. At my age there would be not too many worries that my father wouldnt be a good representative for me. Host unfortunately we are running short on time so two final questions, congresswoman. You have a chapter in your book called walk in like a white man. What does this mean . Guest there is an essence of the spaces in which we exist where there is an expectation of how you show up in that environment. Expectations exist for every Single Person except for are the dominant cultural presence of a white man, and this was a concept that i would ultimately learn as people have had discomfort in the ways i show up places without permission or invitation. Host and your district is where the tragedy in minneapolis has happened. Whats next . Guest we are going through a painful moment not just hear in minneapolis minnesota, but across the country and its important to remember thereve been many movements that brought us to this moment and many tragedies that brought us to this moment and so we have and opportunity to not listen to the traditional voices that have told us to go slow or that have told us to expect incremental changes but to be bold not only dealing with issues of Police Brutality and systematic racism but also the social and economic neglect that has created the conditions that have led to the unrest that we have in our country right now. And i dont believe that we can use this moment to produce anything less than great. We are not only dealing with a pandemic thats brought a Public Health crisis that produced an economic crisis, but also a pandemic that weve had for a long time, which is racism, in this country, and this is our opportunity to use all of that at this moment to really allow for transformative change to take place where we address the deep roots of the problems that we have and really hone in on what problem investments for the society should look like. She also talks of her time in congress, views on president trump, relationship with nancy pelosi, etc. We appreciate you sharing your back story with our viewers on the tv. Guest thank you for the opportunity to do that. You are watching booktv on cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. The weeknight we are featuring the tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan2. This offers perspectives into the lives and events that forged the pressure of his leadership style. To learn more about all the presidency and the books featured historians, visit