qas be’qas inqulal be’igru yeheydal… little by little, an egg goes by foot…
*
After unpacking
and showering, I slept most of Day 1.
Above activity
was repeated on Day 3.
Accordingly, my
Uncle was able to remark gently, complimenting my display of fortitude on Day 2 as our car
first inched through the traffic jam of Piassa, and then snaked through the
dusty throngs of stuff-hawkers, stuff-shoppers and the occasional donkey or
sheep crowding the streets of Merkato --- “You have to be crazy to go to Merkato on your second day in Addis.”
*
Day 4, Sunday, I
took to the streets – be’iger, by
foot
*
My body, Addis
roads, diesel fumes, people’s stares, dusty shoes...
How did I become this person, and who is
she?
There is nothing
like traveling to get to know yourself as a stranger.
And strange
fruit this body is, amerikawit, mess
of a head of hair, qayo! qayo! (white
girl! white girl!), second-hand first-world clothing, damn i stick out like
a sore thumb, plump, how i move, heavy, here, and ain’t this the damndest irony
of all: ho-nee, wh’err arr you frr-ohm?
i wonder, how
are other ferangis made to feel their
difference here, their “marked-ness” as other, a kind of nakedness, a vulnerability
of being exposed, an objectification of being gazed upon without being fully
seen: hey-lo! hey-lo!
not --- “Soo, what
are you, anyway?” like in the U.S.,
questioning my very existence (do you
want my species and genus and type?)
but --- “Hey-lo! Wh’err arr you frr-ohm?” …Hey,
Stranger, from what lands do you hail? For you are clearly not one of us.
true, sometimes
i get --- “habesha nesh?” are you ethiopian?
my belonging is uncertain... as ever… (my nose, my forehead, my cheekbones… but
my skin color, my dress, my movements) --- “hind?
china?”
and people
stare, people stare, people stare. there are no boundaries, it seems, to me.
people see here, they see you, me, on the street here, they stare and they know
and they care about who and what they see in a way that is new to me. there are
no downy pillows muffling the shared (public, social, societal) reality between
me and my neighbor, self and other. we see each other on the streets, we say
hello, we ask how we passed the night --- selam
adersh? indemin adersh?, all-en,
all-en: we are, we are, egzhiabher
yemesgen, thanks be to God.
…where is my polite, bourgeois
unconscious hiding here??? the one that hides, ignores, pretends she didn’t,
doesn’t see? is my shadow in my shadow here?? or is my shadow… constructed in
particular contexts to serve others’ ends...?
what happens
when i feel the stares of others on my figure is difficult, uncomfortable, to
formulate in words… my own self-consciousness has been conditioned to an erasure
up to extinction, self-extinguishing, for so long: the fracturing of my being,
disassociation, up to the desire to disappear, to be completely annihilated… acts of body and mind turn the self on its
loathsome self… bodies battered and bleeding, baring the wounded, borne in
suffering, hanging, plump, bruised, left to rotting… gashes gushing, juices
oozing… the sentiment for religious release is not, for me, just this, a
departure from the harshness of life, and my desire to disappear is not just
such a departure either… but it is rather being conditioned to be just barely… and this
desire to disappear already implies a disappearance in self-consciousness, a
sense of self of nothingness, worthlessness, invisibility and void, a logical
conclusion of the double-consciousness that splits the self and causes it to further
refract… until left with a vision of self, very slim and silent,
gaunt, horrific, shut away in the attics, in the shadows, in the cages … a spectacular
silence so unspeakable that it groans and utters in ghastly, unhuman, agonizing
cries…
this is where
so-called critical theory gets me…
but what happens
when i feel the stares of others on my figure… here… where i appear, and desire
to appear, despite my history other-wise… to re-assume my subjectivity amidst
this extreme public-ness (& the visibility, legibility of my difference)
and (as i perceive it) insularity, to maintain my sense of coherence, there are
a few strategies that i have taken:
1. walk
straight, head held high, ignore all stares and comments.
2. stare back,
nod my head, and say --- “selam, indet
newo?” hello, how are things?
3. practice my śamatha meditation:
a.
ground down into my body,
b.
feel myself, rather than think (and move) conceptually within the shared
experience of encounter and intersubjectivity (that is, do my best not to
cement my experience verbally in thought, or in its self-consciousness, which takes
me out of my experience and imputes a presupposed conceptual framework onto the
event; that is, don’t tell a story in my mind about what is happening, the
story that i am telling here, about a mixed-up diasporic kid returning to the
fatherland to find herself as different),
c.
welcome the feelings of being strange,
d.
then, reorganize my conceptual scheme:
i
am a stranger in this land. but i come from a place, and i know where i’m
going. i know myself to reside in a not-knowing. my strange, fierce, beautiful being
is like that of a woman from Afar or Harar, or anywhere else. i am me, i am
here, here i am, here is me…
and i wonder,
how are identity and belonging constantly being negotiated by so-called
Ethiopian citizens within the boundaries of the Ethiopian state according to
religion, ethnicity, gender, language, region, and so on…?
*
I left home
trying to find my way to the University. There is nothing like getting lost to
find yourself, though.
After standing
at a roundabout trying to figure which way to go, I made the wrong turn,
unknowingly – or, maybe, the right one.
Trudging up a
hill, I paused to admire a grand cathedral across the way. Later, looping up
around the road past souks and young boys shining old men’s shoes and café
terraces crowded with young folks, I saw its cross-peaked spires poking up
above the trees. A shady, unpaved dirt road led the way to a gate. It was so
inviting that I didn’t think twice. I turned down the path.
Crossing the
church’s gates, there was some perceptible change. The grounds of the church felt
different. There was a coolness. A calm and peace presided there.
In the center of
the grounds was the church: large, grand, beautiful. Trees and a cemetery
surrounded the church within the bounds of its gates. People sat, hushed, on
low benches beneath trees, some alone in silence; others reading or writing;
and some in small groups, speaking together quietly. There were several groups
of young women with netela over their heads and shoulders sitting together talking.
After
circumambulating the church, I sat down on a bench. While enjoying the breeze,
the respite beneath the trees, a young man came and sat nearby. A guide
spotting a tourist, he struck conversation like gold.
Still ignorant
as to where I was, I asked him the name of the church. “Kidus Selase Betekristian” --- he replied. I gasped, awed.
Having left for the University, I wound up unwittingly at the second-most important church in Ethiopia after St. Mary of Zion, Tsion Maryam Betekristian, in Aksum. The
Holy Trinity Cathedral houses the bodily remains of Emperor Haile Selassie along
with those of his wife, Empress Menen Asfaw. In the cemeteries, notable
Ethiopian artists, politicians, and patriots who died fighting the Italian
occupations are buried, along with other citizens. There is also a memorial
dedicated to the ministers who were killed in 1974 for opposing the Derg, and a
museum with ecclesiastical artifacts.
*
Only afterwards
as I was recounting the magical magnetism of my first walk in Addis
to Holy Trinity to my father did he tell me that his mother, my grandmother, is buried there.
Serendipity upon serendipity, out of a Sunday walk. As it is said:
yerega wetet qibe yemetawal... out of milk left to sit, there is butter...
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