Harlem Roses
Tracing the Somali Histories of New York City. My latest research project: a close narration of the archives of Somali seafarers in New York City.
This essay introduces my current research project on the unwritten histories of Somalis in Harlem. It is a continuation of the work I published in my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto (2023).1 I am now continuing this multi-modal archival work in New York City with the support of NYU Steinhardt and others.
When author Abdi Latif Ega arrived in Harlem, it did not take him long to encounter a scent reminiscent of home. It was 1987, and he was a musician and student pursuing a degree in music theory. The scent, an oil sold in stores across uptown, was called Harlem Rose. But it was known by another name, Somali Rose, due to its traditional ingredients: frankincense, sandalwood, anise, musk and a twist of green moss. For Ega, who has now lived in Harlem for forty years, the smell brought into focus the long histories of Somalis in Harlem.
There are scientific links between smell and memory. Scents transmit olfactory signals through our limbic systems. Out of all senses, this triggers our sites of memory the most. It takes us back to our first encounters.
According to Somali elders, this Somali scent arrived in Harlem through a man named Haji Sateen Yusuf. He came to New York long before Ega. A Somali seafarer, he moved to the city in 1911 in search of work. To support himself, he helped build MTA subway stations including Jamaica Stn. He also found other hustles. Sateen was not isolated when he arrived at the turn of the 20th century. He met with a dozen other Somali roses who’d made a home in Harlem.
Sateen lived in the city for six decades before passing away in the late 1970s. To the many Somali elders still present in New York, he was a mentor.
One of his mentees, Dahir, has lived in New York for fifty-three years. He arrived as a teenager in the 1970s. Waves of Somali seafarers joined him during this decade. The new city dwellers looked to older heads for mentorship. Sateen was an influence on Dahir, who now reflects on himself at the time as a troublemaker in search of guidance. He is one of the few who hold the story of Sateen.
Dahir found ways to take care of his mentor, too. He was Sateen’s companion during trips to doctor’s appointments in Chinatown. This required lengthy subway rides from uptown. He would then watch Sateen stomp, cane in hand, through downtown. Sateen would yell to anyone in earshot about the mass gravesite of enslaved Africans below them. He would spend these trips telling a younger Dahir great details about the history of Somalis in New York. He offered him maps of Black life throughout the city.
It was during these trips that Dahir came to learn about one of Sateen’s friends: Mumin Hersi, who left during the Great Depression. The story of Hersi stuck with Dahir through many decades in the city. Hersi’s story was rare to him. He is one of the few early Somali seafarers who returned home.
It was the summer of 1925 when Mumin Hersi landed in New York through the city’s ports. He settled in Harlem in the 1920s, the height of the neighbourhood’s Renaissance. A seafarer since World War 1, he’d long made a home out of the ocean. At the brink of the Great Depression, as the preceding Black Arts Movement brewed, he found a home in New York. His ordinary life mirrored the detours and routes of the Great Migration. A nomad from Berbera, he swam his way into being part of the first wave of Somalis in America.
Along the way, he formed bonds with other Somali roses in Harlem. He did not take long to meet Sateen, a friend during his decades in the city.
At the turn of the 1930s, Harlem’s Black diasporic presence was undeniable. In the nineteenth century, African, Caribbean, and Asian seafarers arrived at ports across the northeast. Immigrants from colonized territories developed long-lasting communities in New York. For many Black migrants in and outside of America, Harlem is still home.
Somali seafarers arrived in the city during the 19th century. They found various areas to congregate and meet through difficult times. They lived along W 116th Street and Manhattan Avenue. They took long strolls together to find work. They found community in cafes. At the corner of Cornelia St in Greenwich Village was Café Aladdin. From the 1930s to the 1970s, it was a cornerstone in the lives of many African migrants. Somali seamen formed their own conclaves, such as the Somali Hajj Yusef’s Shoe Shine stand on 125th Street or tables at the African Quarter in Brooklyn.
Many of these seamen who arrived in early 20th century America didn’t return to the shores that brought them. Their wanderings through city life were cut short. Economic disparities, immigration detention, premature death, and the afterlives of slavery shaped their destinies. There are stories of men who died impoverished and alone, never returning to their lands of birth. We may never know if their intention was to return. Their archives only leave us with speculation.
But a few men escaped through the same seaports that first brought them to the city. One of those is Mumin Hersi.
Hersi briefly rented a room in a house with other Black Harlemites. The home was owned by a Euro-American woman who was financially in need of tenants. For work, he travelled daily to midtown, exploring work opportunities in high-rise buildings he could not enter as a patron during segregation. He worked as an elevator operator at the Empire State Building when its doors opened in 1931. In his spare time, he took strolls, finding places to play billiards and dominos. He made friends and met with elders, such as Sateen. Somali seafarers relied on one another during the political and economic strife of the period. Like others, Hersi lived a double life, using an alias to subvert strict immigration laws.
One eventful night changed everything. Over a decade of living in the city under an alias abruptly came to an end.
In the mid-1930s, while working in a residential building, Hersi welcomed a returning tenant into the building’s elevator. It was seemingly an uneventful meeting in their everyday lives. Unbeknownst to them, on that night, three strangers followed the tenant home. As the elevator door closed, Hersi watched the tenant’s body drop. He was shot dead. Hersi, albeit in shock, escaped unscathed. He later recalled the cries of the tenant’s wife and four daughters in the building lobby.
A subsequent and lengthy trial shaped Hersi’s life in the months to come. It also shaped the inevitable end to his double life in the city. He was now a witness to a mob murder. The tenant, a mob boss, had a loyal gang.
Hersi quickly became a target of their surveillance. Members would follow him home to ensure his loyalty. One day, after blindfolding him outside of work, they drove him to a basement at an unknown destination. He was greeted by other mob bosses. They bribed him with hush money. The continuous visits were a reminder: they knew where he lived.
Even when the court case wrapped up, the harassment remained. It was then that Hersi accepted his only solution. Using the savings he’d gathered from mob bribes, he left New York for good. He left behind dozens of friends: the many Somali seamen who never left Harlem.
Mumin Hersi settled in other places before returning home. He continued work as a seafarer for the British. He opened a motel in Sheffield. Once he retired in 1955, as per his seaman discharge book, he went back to Hargeisa to join his wife. Together, they had seven children and over forty grandchildren. At the turn of the 21st century, his descendants dispersed across the globe he circled himself many times as a seafarer.
I’ve spent some time researching his global archive. But I also know Hersi’s life intimately. A century after his arrival, I became his first grandchild to settle into the city that chased him out.
It was the summer of 2022 when I met Dahir. Wearing a 1930’s style fedora hat, and a crisp suit, we danced through Harlem to Midtown. During our adventures, he narrated a long diasporic history of Somali Harlem. The tale was peppered with frequent breaks as Dahir stopped to dance with anyone playing music in the streets.
I was in the midst of a brief trip to New York to dig into the city’s archives in search of my grandfather and his friends. Dahir and I connected with one another when I interviewed a separate group of Somali elders. He explained how the generation of Somali seafarers before shaped them. Sateen and Hersi were some of their diasporic blueprints.
The first day I met with these three Somali seamen, I shared my grandfather’s real name. They prodded their memories for someone they never heard of. An hour went by. I grew weary before a recent memory occurred to me. Before my trip, my cousin shared our granddad’s alias when he lived abroad. I shared the name with this small group of men. The inquiry shifted the room. Dahir, the youngest of the three, broke the silence. I clenched my recorder.
“Yes,” he exclaimed.
“Your grandfather was famous because he was one of the few who went back home.”
I never met my grandfather. He was born almost a century before me. It was not written for our paths to cross. But fragments of his story abroad have sat with me since childhood. As I became a writer and scholar, I turned to archives and oral histories to trace his past. I've long understood his life as integral to my family’s diasporic blueprint, too.
When I returned from my research trip to my home in Toronto, my summer was ridden with anxiety. The pursuit of my grandfather’s memory unravelled the stories of other Somali seafarers, all held now by only a few remaining elders.
I returned from Harlem with more questions than answers. I had restless nights. I thought about the weight of their memories, the celerity of life, and the fragility of time. From home, I continued my research. I confided in mentors. I prayed for the ancestors of these unwritten generations. I contemplated how to bring honour to their lives. I interrogated if, and why, I was the one to take on this task.
My restless nights found an opportunity. By the end of 2022, I had moved to New York as a professor. The anxiety shifted. Invited to as an educator and researcher at NYU, I am now writing about this vital history of Harlem.
Black diasporas have had long proximity within the borders of Harlem. They have rubbed against one another for over a century. These relationships helped shape the political, social, and creative landscape of New York.
There is no published writing on the history of Somalis in Harlem. This was a void author Abdi Latif Ega spent a great deal of time researching. He spent decades in Harlem chasing the roses of the city’s past. I am now honouring his legacy in my multimodal storytelling of this period. My forthcoming written and creative works narrate these archives of Somalis in Harlem
Recommendations
The New York Somalis Instagram page — where you can stay up to date about this research project
Abdi Latif Ega’s nonfiction and fiction writing — particularly his essay on Harlem
‘Somali Seafarers: Surviving the Sea’ short documentary (2018)
‘A Safe Harbour’ by Leyla Bile (2014)
Citations
Hassan, H. (2023). Ciyaal Baraf: Tropes, Fictions, and Self-Creation through the Somali Diaspora’s Aesthetic, Political, and Artistic Production [Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto].
Beautifully written. Can’t wait to read more.