My one-year old mind was surely not concerned with such lofty revolutionary thoughts, but rather with getting through the day without crying. I think I made it, since I have never been one to cry.
My Casa di Bambini, this Italian pre-school which was formed by Catholic nuns who spoke Italian and a smatter of Amharic and Tigrigna, gave me the word bambini (no matter that I didn’t understand it meant “little children,” but how can things go wrong with a word that has “bam” in it”?), a playground and my “abc’s, which, despite their foreign origin, I realized later on were the same in many other languages.
These Italians, or the ambassadors of Italy, felt some kind of benevolent connection with the Ethiopia that they tried to pull into their quest to gain lands in Africa. Their neighboring, and rival, European countries had done so with great success, so why not them? But fortunately for the Ethiopians, or unfortunately, as some modern post-colonialists (including Ethiopians) might say, arguing that Ethiopia lost at gaining European civilization. But, these hardy Ethiopians deterred the Italians twice. The first time, they roundly defeated them, and by the second, the Italian incursion triggered international rebuke especially as the emperor pleaded his case in front of the League of Nations, that impotent body of bureaucrats, precursor to its more nefarious inheritor the United Nations. The emperor’s plea was to no avail, and it became a landmark in history, not because a small country was invaded, but because it signaled to Hitler, a few short years later, that he could march through countries and annihilate peoples without any consequence.
But, thirty some years later, Ethiopia had forgiven those Italians, who were lively and boisterous, and some of whom had stayed on having married Ethiopians. People picked up a smattering of the Italian language, and ate meals of pasta and fajiole alongside the traditional dishes. And coffee houses, serving dozens of brews, became part of the city’s attractions. Other than that, Ethiopians continued to be Ethiopians. And even colorful crayons and a sing-song language wouldn’t convince me otherwise either.
My youngest brother was born in the Italian hospital in Asmara. It is through photographs that I remember this occasion, although I vaguely recollect the sensation of having a new baby in the house. My parents named him Abraham, in honor of these northern Tigray people, who have a fondness for that name. My second brother is only a year younger than I am, and I have no memories of his infancy, or sensations, I should say, since memories can influenced by photographs.
The Tigray people are forthright and direct, and righteous, being strict Orthodox Christians, and have quick and hard tempers when wronged. But they also have an attachment for those they feel they can bring closer. We were lucky to have received some of their benefits, despite our antagonistic mission.
Once my father completed his mission, a short two years after we arrived, we went back to Addis Ababa where he resumed his post in the ministry of education. And I was expected to go about the business of learning things.
My parents wanted nothing but the best for us. And the best, in the pedagogical mind of my father, who was then Assistant Minister of Education (and was to reach Vice Ministership as the pinnacle of his career in Ethiopia), was to send us the the English School, then also known as the Sandford School. It is apt that the school was named after Mrs. Christine Sandford, wife of Colonel Sandford, who:
...along with Cunnigham and Wingate, led the British contingent that was dispatched by the British Government to help Emperor Haile Selassie I and the Ethiopian army reclaim the country from 5 year[s] occupation under Mussolini’s Government. [*]Here we were, coming from Eritrea, where we were asserting our territorial ownership over this same (past) enemy which the valiant Colonel Sandford had helped Ethiopia defeat.
Our lessons were in English, and we only had class periods of Amharic. We spoke Amharic at home, but we had some pretentious friends who felt the need to keep on speaking English even out of school, who prided themselves on their modern outlook, and had mild disdain for all things traditional. My precise mind was already observing their inaccuracies in grammar and pronunciation.
I did well at school, but one merit that might signal where my talents lay was the selection of my poem for the school’s year book shortly before we were to leave Ethiopia. I was nine years old. I called my poem “The Raggle Taggle Snake,[1]” and I am sure it was some kind of class assignment. But, mine was not only a poem, it was a visual piece as well. The poem curves and swerves as I describe my encounter with a snake, shaping its sinewy body with my words.
I am also concerned with the snake’s aesthetics. It may be wiggly waggly, but it is also ugly. Surely snakes cannot be beautiful?
I end the poem with:
This is a snake I know from the Bible, which was in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve. I’m bowing my head mimicking what I’ve seen countless of times do those pious Christian women, who pray to God in great humility to deliver them from whatever evil is before them, with their kind heads bent in supplication.
My prayers, in that moment at least, were answered. The snake’s poison, which would have fallen over me, is replaced by the syrup of happiness. My head bent saved me from evil.
Another year, at around age eight, I won the "General Knowledge" prize, and asked for Laura Ingall's Little House on the Prairie. This feisty little girl, battling nature, family and community to arrive at her understanding of the world, coupled with her intense desire to make things right, was certainly one of my role models. I even remember the cover, a dark backgrond background with an ink drawing in black of a log cabin on a hill. The dog-eared book is long gone now.
And Laura and her cabin in the Minnesota farm has disappeared from modern folklore, only to be replaced by another sitcom. Fast forward some thirty years and we get Canada's CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie. But its only commonality with the original Little House on the Prairie are four words in the title, and the semi-autobiographical episodes of show's creator Zarqa Nawaz. Even the mosque's town, Mercy, is fictional, unlike all the real places that Laura wrote about. This is our post-modern, post-Western, post-Christian version of our settler families, where we've landed in a well-established prairie small town, and not in the depths of farm country. A small town replete with coffee shops and gas stations, and houses furnished with electric and lights, and garages for multiple cars. Whatever this Muslim community has acquired rests on the laurels of the previous non-Muslim residents, who had already built and maintained the town. Including the mosque which, for now, is a rented activities hall from an Anglican church.
Besides Laura and Biblical snakes, my literary interests lay in stories of the Bobbsie Twins, Fairy Tales (I had two books of fairy tales, books of Cinderella, the Grimm store The Goose Girl and the children's version of a beautifully illustrated Swan Lake, among those that I remember as favorites.
That same year, I won another prize. I was selected to present flowers to the emperor at the International Book Year organized by the Ethiopian National Commission for UNESCO, where my mother was working. The dress and cape were especially made for the occasion from cloth which had the events' logo on it of an open book. I wasn't really instructed on what to do, how to do it, and what to do after I gave the flowers. But, I do remember following closely behind. I was rewarded with a call from the Emperor to join him at the end of the tour. He took my hand, my wrist as I remember and as the photo shows, and led me toward the exit, asking me my name, and questions about my school. I was not shy at all, and talked, like little girls do, to this nice old man, with the pleasant smile who didn't seem at all like the imposing figure that everyone seemed to fear.
Later on, people were gently admonishing me for looking straight in his eyes when giving the flowers. But look at how seriously he took my small task of giving him the flowers. And he must have found me just a little amusing, with his interested and gentle smile as he took my hand.
Within a year of my flower presentation, my family left hurriedly for France, which projected me into a whirlwind of cities and countries from Paris, to Dover (England), Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut in the US, and now in Toronto Canada.
And not short after that, the Emperor was no more.
My teachers, those English expatriates, showed great excitement over our destination. “Paris,” said one, “You will learn French there!” I was being introduced to the subtleties of French-English relations, where antagonism may come camouflaged with admiration, and maybe even envy.
Our departure for Paris was only a continuation of our pattern of travel from place to place every half decade or so. Prior to Asmara, my parents had lived for a couple of years in the city of Harar, in the southeastern province of the country. This time, my father went as a principle of one of the schools. Although I was not born there, my parents remained until the last month of my mother’s pregnancy before returning to Addis and its more modern medical amenities. And for my christening, they made the long trip back by car with my godmother to have my baptism in Kulubi, an the old Christian shrine dedicated to Archangel Gabriel, and attributed with many miracles. It is deep in Muslim territory, and this holy Christian place stood guard against all those hostile forces, keeping Ethiopians safe from the invasions and incursions that other countries in the region couldn’t stave off.
Part of my father’s mission was to tame these Islamic forces by teaching their children the secular culture of Ethiopia, and training the young men and women neutral vocational skills, and above all to do so in Amharic. And, as the wily and experienced Amhara knew, everything is infused with spiritualism, and no culture or language is neutral. The Amhara culture, where when one says Igzabier Ystilign (May God Grant You Riches) as a way of thanks, and and Abro Yistilgn (And May He Give You Likewise) as the response, is no different. If a Muslim woman can say thank you in Amharic, then she will certainly thank the Christian God, and not simply thank him, but thank him in the name of the person she is interacting with. The multicultural and multi-ethnic nature of Ethiopia was tolerated to a point, where even mosques were allowed in this southern region, and the Muslim food and clothing were accepted. It was through subtle psychological means that the Amhara’s superiority was maintained, to include these disparate areas into the beneficent fold of the Greater Amhara. That is, unless it was necessary to go to battle.
Thus, like true Amhara, my parents left an imprint with a personal record in these regional outposts. With me it was my baptism, where I would feel a life-long attachment to that area (and it worked). With my youngest brother it was his regional name.
This constant dislocation and manufactured association became part of my education, and I learned to accommodate myself and blend in with whatever culture we happened to inhabit without losing my identity. I became adept at it, although my brothers less so, where I have an uncanny ability to find something familiar (or make it familiar) in an ocean of hostilities.
Paris became my testing ground, where I was old enough to learn on my own, and where I acquired many of my survival tools.
We arrived in the late evening at Orly, which was Paris’ international arrival airport before the cosmopolitan and modern Charles de Gaulle. I don’t remember who picked us up, but there was a tiny group (perhaps less than ten) of Ethiopians in Paris, which included the embassy’s staff and a few students. I do remember the drive from Orly into central Paris, where we drove to Rue Crillion (which we would learn to pronounce with perfect French accuracy - criyon, not crilion, and the “r” needs that French roll), our new home. It was in late December, just before Christmas.
As we left the airport, I looked around for signs of people. But all we could see was a long road, filled with fast-moving cars, and then we entered a never-ending tunnel, winding us around to its exit. Later on, I understood that the road was the ubiquitous autoroute, or highway, and the tunnel was one of a series of underground routes. I looked for buildings as we sped across these roads faster than I had ever gone before, but they were as absent as were people. Still later, we saw buildings, tall ones, (but no houses yet) and still no people! As I got to know Paris, and its western temperament, I realized that we had come at the least hospitable time, cold and dark, and Paris would show us its more cheerful and sociable side.
We lived close to the Bastille, in the city center. Ironically, this was the center where the French Revolution started. And we often went to another battle field for recreation, the Champs de Mars, originally a training ground for the military, and across from the Ecole Militaire. We not interested in these reflections of history, but in the Eiffel Tower, located in the Champs de Mars. We went there to walk in the gardens, to ride the various carts and ponies, and to eat ice cream. Pistachio was my favorite. And if we were allowed a double scoop, it was always with strawberry.
Only a few months after we arrived, we would hear the news that Emperor Haile Selassie was unceremoniously removed from his throne. And soon after, a vicious communist regime would take over, and would run the country for almost two decades. My brothers and I were oblivious to these faraway political turmoils, as we had turmoils of our own, childish but serious: how to make sense of this new and bewildering country.
A junta had taken over Ethiopia. People were getting killed in the streets. Relatives, friends and close family members had been imprisoned, which some would endure through the almost two decades of the dictatorship that emerged from the junta, if they hadn’t been killed already. Sixty men, all committing the crime of being feudalists and imperialists, were hanged for their untried crimes at the very beginning of this “Dergue’s” takeover, giving people a preview of their vicious agenda. Thousands others perished, were killed, or otherwise died in those jails. Still thousands were rounded up by this “government” and murdered, wounded, or thrown out of their homes. Kay Shibir or The Red Terror, as this period was called, was surely the most violent and bloody period in Ethiopia’s history, and not even Muslim Jihads could equal it. Hundreds of thousands fled whichever way they could: by plane, car, and even foot; across deserts, into neighboring Kenya or Somalia, and the lucky ones to America.
Ethiopia became a changed country. And we began to see inklings of that terrible change through footage of what was happening to the poorest of its citizens, who had no way to even grow their food.
The terrible famine became a backdrop of our years in France and England, where we lived amidst so much beauty and bounty. Those infants lying listless in their emaciated mothers’ laps became the icons of my childhood.
I am constantly surprised that I wasn’t much more affected by these images. At one time, even rock stars were putting them as backdrops for their charity concerts. The most famous ones are of the infants and mothers. I think I sensed the biblical scale of this famine, and interpreted these images into a distorted Mary and infant Jesus. My young mind relinquished the horror to God (I never prayed about it, so it was an instinctive, intuitive, reaction), where I believed there would be a day of judgement for them, and for the culprits. I believe the culprits know who they are, and it isn’t Mengisut Haile Mariam, the brutal, uneducated petty-officer dictator, who momentarily out-smarted the generals and ministers of the time, and dug into murderous barbarity to maintain his crass authority. One co-ordinated swipe would have got rid of him for ever.
Haile Mariam landed into a coup. The “elites” were busy trying to find a way to get rid of Haile Selassie, to remove what they believed was an archaic ruling system, and to bring Ethiopia into modernity. Of course, Haile Selassie also pushed the country along those lines, and chose and encouraged his ministers to do so. Yet, how they deceived him, and gave him to the hyenas to advance their agenda.
Or so they thought. History went just a little faster than they anticipated. Or they were too comfortable with their shiny prizes to see beyond the reflections.
But, some understood. And made a clever exit, quickly, quietly, leaving the rolling ball to continue on its path.
We left a year before the final demise, when the emperor was put on house arrest in his palace, secretly, and mutiny and mayhem broke out in the streets of Addis Abeba.
This is one of the first photographs of me after my family and I left Ethiopia. It was taken in Champs de Mars, the park underneath the Eiffel Tower, in June of 1973, only a few months after we left Ethiopia. It is already summer, and Paris was now warm and friendly. It is a decisive moment in my life, only a few months after we left Ethiopia, and about a couple of months before the terrible “Ethiopian Revolution.” My brothers and I were oblivious to these faraway political turmoils. We had turmoils of our own: how to make sense of this new and bewildering country.
Champs de Mars, the Roman god of war, would have surely approved of my expression: defiant, cautious, self-aware, and surveying whatever is before me.
I am ten in this photograph. I had celebrated my birthday only a few months ago, in January. My birthday is for ever linked with that frantic period, when I gauge the number of years we have been out of Ethiopia by the numbers in my age. My brothers and I were in English-language French schools, since we knew no French having received our primary education in English while in Ethiopia.
What am I thinking in my ten-year-old mind? I think I knew I had some battle to wage against this world which unceremoniously picked my up from my familiar surroundings, and put me in this new and bewildering place.
It was hard for us children to visualize the horrors of Ethiopia in this beautiful city of Paris. I knew how bad things were from frequent calls from friends and family left behind. “Vous avez un appel d’outre mer,” would notify us the operator, telling us the all was from overseas, and we would hear a familiar voice, usually a male’s, starting, calmly, with the traditional greetings (Endminalachew, Dehna, Igzabher Yimesgen. Wozero M____? Lijochus?: How are you [all]?, We’re fine, thanks to God. And Woizero M____? And the children? Then, there would be a long, incomprehensible conversation, citing names we didn’t know, and events that seemed so boring that we went back to sleep.
My brothers and I knew of the situation was grave, or at least we understood that things were not going well, without knowing the details. That was for the grown-ups to decipher. We came close to grief when a cousin (a second cousin? All Ethiopian relatives are called by the generic name zemed unless it is a close member when he would be called beteseb or family). Her father, an important and high-ranking official in the Haile Selassie government had been hanged, along with 59 others. She came over, having heard the news probably through some late-night phone call, as we had, and sat on our red velvet sofa, quiet. My mother made her some tea, and warmed up a meal for her. She left as quietly as she came, but she visited us periodically (“where have you disappeared to” would be my father’s fatherly greeting, to let her know that this was her home. “I am busy” she would say, and leave and disappear once again. She was a kind woman, young enough to be my older sister, and she would take me out to see a few of Paris’ sights. “You can tell me anything. You know how parents can be,” she said once. But of course, I never did, shy and reticent that I was.
And Paris was a godsend for me, where, separated from the horrors of our faraway land, the exquisite beauty of the city soothed me. I was too young to analyze and understand beauty, but I felt it viscerally. Everywhere we went, there was beauty: in the immaculate gardens, the delicious pastries, the lovely fashionable stores, and even that guttural language which I would learn close to fluency. I became the ideal student: receptive, unbiased, sensitive, and independent.
I had big questions to answer, which I couldn’t articulate for many years to come. Why was I here? What should I do? Where do I go? When will I feel at home? Who are my allies? And How do I find them?
I listened and watched, camouflaged by my young age, and protected by our distance from that Babylon - America - where most of our family went.
Paris saved me from this normal “migration” route of Ethiopians: Addis to Washington D.C. and/or New York and/or Los Angeles and/or Atlanta. Ethiopian traveler’s itinerary was surprisingly mundane, there was no Duluth, Minnesota, or Anchorage, Alaska, or even Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Because of my father’s work in UNESCO, we were stuck in Paris. We had to learn French, appreciate the ornery but polite Parisians, make salad from endive, and move around the Parisians streets and boulevards with the impatience, of Frenchmen - or at least we tried to project such a native air.
Paris, in its exotic aura and distance from Ethiopian “civilization” became our Duluth, and for me a wild outpost where I could mature independent of the usual prejudices.
Paris saved me from the deep-felt grievances of these Ethiopians against whites, these American whites. Had I been in America, I would have been pulled into that world. At my young age, I began to understand what hypocrisy meant, which I analyzed under the tutelage of Paris. We got glimpses of these people as they planned lay-overs in Paris on their way to America, which they would arrange through rushed, long-distance phone calls before their departures from Ethiopia. Some even arrived unannounced, to our lucky abode in Paris. They would while their time away in Gallerie LaFayette to buy “Parisian” fashion - on sale - and yet spend half the night talking, in deep disdain, about the “prejudice” of these “ferenge” (whites). My later travels to America confirmed these impressions that this was a common behavior of Ethiopians.
These prejudices and hypocrisies were not lost on me. These visitors had a constant, and deep critique of England, America and the West, but somehow kept quiet about Paris. Perhaps it was because the French themselves never made it a secret their disdain for Les Anglais (although this was equally reciprocated by the English), and a subtle, perhaps natural, antagonism towards American, where maintaining French culture and protecting it from Americanization, was a constant theme of discussion. And these America-bound migrants were greatly amused by the feisty French standing up against those colonizer English, or those world imperialist Americans. I noticed a dangerous fervor in their disdain for these Western civilizations, where if pressed further, they might declare that it should be destroyed.
Yet, these disclaimers of Anglo and Franco Empires and civilizations, these Ethiopians, showed their true colors when they came to visit us in our simple Parisian abode, where I had to give up my room and sleep on a sofa-bed in the living room so they could lounge in comfort, and all they wanted to do was to drink the whisky and cognac which my father bought for the men or for my mother to take their wives shopping to the “sales” sections of second rate Parisian department stores, whose merchandise they still could barely afford. And during all this flurry of activity, they found time to generously bestow their wonder at the those bridges! that silk scarf! the formidable cognac!.
So what did Paris teach me? Under her tutelage, with me as her only student (in my class)? She gave me my first instructions on beauty.
I learnt that beauty is not common, that it occurs because people fight for it, and are willing fight for it, that it stands close to battle, and that is not some little girl’s pretty dreams but the architecture of grown, intelligent, industrious men. I also learnt that this formidable beauty is surprisingly vulnerable. It requires time, patience, instruction, perseverance, skill and talent to grow and flourish. It has many enemies, who enviously seek its destruction. Its friends need to be, must be, cultivated.
Paris became a perfect training ground where I learned to rely on my wits to understand the often confusing and contradictory worlds I would inhabit for the rest of my life. I learned to be independent in Paris, and to understand my surroundings based on my own deductions, childish and simplistic at first, usually through quiet observation, and more sophisticated in my later years, and up to this day, through additional support from books and study. I became an avid reader in Paris. Almost all my books were in English, although I went through phases of reading some French classics, mostly because of my school requirements or my holiday French Language immersion classes in which my father (ever the pedagogue) enrolled us during our summer vacations in Paris. THese texts included Jean Racine's Iphigenie, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Emile Zola's Therese Ranquin, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile, I also visited museums with regularity, skilfully knowing my way around the Louvre. The more modern galleries never attracted me since they added to my confusions, until I realized much later on, while studying film and photography, that confusion, or distortion of reality, was their very purpose. I used my instinct to include things which I felt benefited me and to mercilessly discard those that didn't. I understood that time was not on my side, and indolence or bad judgment would cost me dearly.
But I had never really belonged in Paris during the eight years when I was officially a citizen of that city, not to the French, nor to any Ethiopian community, which was so small as to be non-existent. I learned on my own what culture and society meant. There was no aggressive Ethiopian group to pull me into its callously benign fold, and no French educational system to immerse me into its culture. And this saved me for the predictable prejudices I would have acquired had I such an ethnic group or a cultural guide to follow. Ironically, both these disparate groups, the ethnic Ethiopians and the cultural French, would have instilled in me grievances and outright prejudices against France, and Paris, and ultimately the West, as our infrequent, but memorable, guests showed us, with their language and logic of “hate” for whites, and as the multicultural ethos infuses French culture.
I was able, through the grace of circumstance, to separate myself, culturally and psychologically, from all this, as I became Paris’ strongest ally, her fervent defender, her closest Ethiopian friend. And in her detached manner, she gave me much. But was always on guard to see how good a pupil I would be, and what more she could expose. Her reticence and distrust is understandable. Every foreigner after all is there to take from her what he can while giving back as little as possible. And even as her own people began to desert her, she was right in her suspicions. And I accepted the challenge of winning her over.
Through Paris’ tutelage, I learnt to view things with an outsider’s eye, a sympathetic outsider’s eye.
I was in Paris at the rise of the Maghrebian confidence. Paris was still very much French, but there were Arab communities which were gaining presence. Subways were beginning to fill up with Arab teenagers, rowdy, rude and ready to pick a fight. Angry French men and women, mostly elderly, would scold these boys, and were often met with verbal assaults, which if maintained could turn physical harm. People began to keep quiet, and police were visible in the subways and some neighborhoods.
I once took a couple of American friends for a tour of the city, nice older women who were calm but excited to be in Paris. I met them in their hotel, and walked them slowly to the subway. Along the way, a young man ran over, bumped against one of them, and skillfully and rapidly pulled away her handbag. He ran off, and by the time we realized what had happened, he had disappeared. I was so contrite, I had no idea what to do except to escort them back to their hotel. They immediately, efficient travelers that they were, reported the bags’ contents, cancelled the traveler’s checks, and called the American Embassy. They calmly resumed their visit, although I was not asked to assist them anymore. It was my fault. I should have heeded my instincts, I should have asked Paris to be my guide as I took these nice ladies though her streets. But I had been away from Paris for too long. I was on holiday from my English school, across the Channel in England.
Once again, the pedagogical excellence which my father wanted for us convinced him that the best place for us to study was in English, and in England this time, although we could have gone to any number of English-language schools in Paris (the American School, the English School, etc.), and we went to a bi-lingual school, mostly learning French and nothing much else, for our first eight months in Paris. An English colleague convinced him to send us to England to a boarding school (as he had his children), rather than to one of the English language schools (American or English) in Paris.
We visited schools in England our first summer in Paris. One was a lovely manor converted into a school, in the deep Kent countryside. I remember getting excited about joining, even if it meant leaving home and our parents for several months at a time. And this isolated outpost, this tiny village in the middle of fields and forests, became where I received further instruction on independence, and an unchallenged participation in Western studies.
My preparatory education in England a stroke of luck for me, as was our arrival in Paris.
English elementary and secondary schools, at least the “preparatory” schools which guide their pupils through the arduous training to finally take the grueling national “Ordinary” and “Advanced” levels, give a broad and strong foundation for learning through the “old fashioned” way: rote learning, repetitive exercise, and step-by-step, incremental addition of knowledge. If you come in a little late in their academic program, like I did, you could fall behind, and I did in Maths and Physics, and Latin. I redeemed myself in Maths and Physics, passing my “O” levels with reasonable grades (B for Maths and C for Physics), but I gave up too quickly on Latin and never took the national exam. But my brief year of Latin instruction gave me an important, albeit disjointed, basis for my understanding of English. And add German to the mix, which I studied for four years having arrived at the beginning, and I could twist around Dative, Genitive and Gerunds (that complex German grammar) with fluency. All this, with the accumulating years, has been essential in my understanding of language in general, and of English in particular. My relatively fast grasp of language showed my teachers that my talent clearly lay in the arts (although I often got associated with my Parisian residence, which to the unimaginative gave me an unfair advantage. One of my French teachers was surprised when he learned that I lived in Paris, and attributed my linguistic and literary achievements to that fortuitous circumstance).
Our haven in the Kent countryside, with the pleasant teachers and strict but quite manageable academic life, prepared us for all things English. Once again, I had the fortune, the blessing of God, that we were in this paradisaical place.
As Paris taught me beauty by man’s constructs, so Kent's countryside showed me nature’s artistic hand. I had two of the most generous teachers: the civilization of Western man, and the bountiful nature of the southern England countryside.
Betteshanger school (now called Northbourne School) was deep in the Kent countryside, with rolling hills, wide meadows, and quaint, tiny villages. I was a good student, and excelled in some things. I played two instruments, the violin and the piano, and sang in the school choir. I played sports, both the English netball, and field hockey and was in some lower varsity teams. I won the poetry and Divinity prize one year. I was never confirmed into the Anglican Church, remaining the Orthodox of my birth, but I attended many months of confirmation class where I enthusiastically studied the Bible, perhaps the reason I was given the Divinity prize. I was awarded the French prize another year. I received third prize for the ballet prize, which was an enchanting little book, barely fifty pages long, on the various ballet steps as demonstrated by a little girl. I did a bit of self-conscious acting, although I can blame our over-enthusiastic headmaster/self-appointed theater director who would cast me in “stereotypical” roles, which for him meant anywhere I could let loose my large bushel of East African hair (once as a mad woman and another as Potiphar’s wife in the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). I would always oblige and let my hair loose, although my ballet teacher admired how neat I could make it into the required bun, and perhaps that is why she presented me with the Ballet prize. I became Head Girl of Betteshanger my last year, and won an Astor Scholarship (for all round excellence, as the scholarship states) to my secondary school, Dover College. My required essay was a book report, several pages long and worthy of any college paper, on Marie Antoinette. Novice as I was in literary and historical analyses, I used only one book on which to base my project, and I used photocopies and direct (unattributed) quotes from the book to write my thesis. But, I was representing my French Queen, to show her off to these English neophytes. I still have the paper, which must have cemented my "French" origins to my English instructors. I am one of the few who has his (her) name engraved (in gold, no less) on both the Head Boys’ and the Scholarships board.
And Dover showed me another part of England. The rough English Channel was minutes away from the school. We went often to those beautiful White Cliffs of Dover which we would climb down to some secluded cove and the customary pebbled beach and choppy waters. These waters would for ever be my standards for guaging a body of water. Calm lakes would not do, and even the seemingly unrufflable oceans of the Caribbean never attracted me. I am in perennial search for cliffs and high waves.
But, I was less sociable in Dover. It could be that by nature I am more reticent, or that perhaps there was some real resentment over my presence by one unusually precocious German girl, who make my life difficult, and so I decided that I had to do this alone. But I was not intimidated by solitary pursuits, having had many years of practice. I did well in my endeavors in Dover. I was awarded the poetry prize one year, and wrote about a dancer on an empty stage, where I used a lone dancer braving a stage as my theme. I looked up some of the words in Roget’s Thesaurus, and I think I found the right “big” words. The poem was me, in disguise. It is my story, my touch of doubt, my entrance, my lively conveyance, and my realization that this is going to be a fight. In fact, my winning the prize was a testament to my perseverance. The usual body of applicants were my adversaries. I was the odd one out. But, I submitted my piece anyway, and I won, much to the consternation of my loftier competitors.
The Dancer
By: Kidist Asrat
With gliding entrance, and touch of doubt,
The dancer makes her entrance.
As supple as a feline, ready for attack
She lunges into lively conveyance.
Hers is the stage, an empty stage,
Earthly, and void of enchantment.
A magical message she has to disclose,
And does so with fiery entreatment.
One perceives a sudden change of mood,
And the stage has lost its drear.
Her audience now she tries to lure
As her final act draws near.
Dover College
England
1978
I chose (I was asked to choose) my prize, and I selected a thick, bright book on the Impressionist painters to have a record of my visits to those Parisian museums.
I received the music prize another year, a two-volume book of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas, a couple of which (parts of others which) I have performed in public. Again, I requested for this book. I wanted the complete Mozart works and not disjointed student copies.
I sang in the choir, which took us to various parts of England and Europe to perform. I would have never seen these places otherwise. It was an itinerary based on Cathedrals: Chichister Cathedral, Winchister Cathedral, Saint Paul’s Cathedral. And we went twice to the Bavarian city of Wurzburg in Germany, where I stayed with an accommodating German family, where the lively mother would say “Prima!” whenever she liked what I did.
We sang difficult, complex choral music, written for Anglican church services. I still know by heart many of the service’s parts, including the Nicene Creed, albeit in English, but in its non-modern English which the choir would lead. And there were hymns I liked and hymns I didn’t like, but which I sang, and still sing, in the musical way we were directed by our choir master.
The final year before I left for America, I acted in a French play as Madame Smith in La Cantatrice Chauve, the modernist, absurdist piece by Eugene Ionesco. For all the incomprehensibility of the play, and modernist literature in general (we also read Sartre’s Huis Clos in my A-level French class), I seemed to have grasped its meaning well enough, much to the amusement of the French faculty, one of whom I could hear guffaw at my delivery.
Perhaps part of the humor was incongruity of an Ethiopian girl playing an English bourgeois housewife saying lines like this:
Tiens, il est neuf heures. Nous avons
mangé de la soupe, du poisson, des
pommes de terre au lard, de la salade
anglaise. Les enfants ont bu de l'eau
anglaise. Nous avons bien mangé, ce soir.
C'est parce que nous habitons dans les
environs de Londres et que notre nom est
Smith[2].
Look, it’s nine O’clock. We’ve had some
soup, some fish, potatoes in butter, English
alad. The children drank Englsih water. We
ate well, this evening. It’s because we live
in the Londen area and our name is Smith
[My translation]
I was then in deep preparation for the pre-university A-level exams, where a two-year preparation would qualify me to take the examinations to determine which university I would be attending. I was preparing in the sciences, biology, chemistry and geography, since my ever-pedagogical father decided that the sciences is what I should focus on. I loved biology, hated chemistry, but found Geography (it was that or Physics) surprisingly stimulating, especially Physical Geography, where I participated in field trips to geologically important regions of England. One memorable trip was to the moors, in northern England, where I began to realize that this small island is as diverse as the whole of Europe,
Then suddenly, as I was deep in my A-level preparations, my father announced that I was going to America to start my university education. I was accepted based on my O-level exams, even before I had completed my A-levels. My father decided that I would be enrolled in the Biology department.
And that fit what seemed like a haphazard pattern of my life.
My university was in another remote country-side, this time by the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania.