Book: Westward Bound, Western Bond
Total anticipated pages: 195

1. Summary

Westward Bound, Western Bond recounts the experiences of an Ethiopian who has lived in the West for the majority of her life, and who is a staunch supporter and advocate for this Western culture which she feels is disappearing.

2. Overview

Westward Bound, Western Bond is a memoir of my experience as an Ethiopian who left her country as a young child due to the Ethiopian Revolution in the late early 1970s. I am an artist, and I bring an artist's eye to my writings, and especially on how I became a staunch advocate of Western art and culture. My vision is unique because I have a non-Western view on the West, one which is positive and optimistic. My art and imagination thrived because of my Western experience and education. I wish to share these views.

My family and I left Ethiopia in 1973, a year before the “Ethiopian Revolution” which occurred in 1974, when Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and a communist regime ran the country for almost two decades. I was ten years old. My father secured a post in UNESCO in Paris. My brothers and I initially attended school in Paris, but our parents sent us to England to boarding school a year later.

That dramatic, but fortuitous exit sent me across the globe from France to England and America to Canada. Our first landing point in Paris separated us from the usual flow of Ethiopian emigrants and refugees who set sail for America (and fewer to Canada). We were alone in our havens. My eleven years in France and as a student in boarding schools in England gave me the unique vantage point of discovering the West without the biases and interpretations of other Ethiopians and Africans. I was able to discover them on my own terms. I learned to love the West through the beautiful city of Paris and the paradisiacal countryside of southern Kent.

My informal education had taken a Western orientation, but my formal education, upon my father's insistence, was in the sciences. I eventually obtained Bachelor and Masters degrees in the Biological and Health sciences in the United States. While pursuing my PhD, I lived in Mexico for two years working on my research work in clinical nutrition. The results of my PhD research eventually produced a unique testing method which was published in various academic science and medical journals.

By the end of my doctoral studies, my father obtained permanent residency for us (my two brothers and my mother) in Canada through sponsorship by his brother who lived in Toronto. In Canada, I was finally stable and able to make decisions about my activities without affecting my residency status. In Toronto, I obtained various certificates and qualifications in film and photography. I also studied textile design, and painting and drawing. I was determined to become an artist.

My constant displacement, my rigorous science education, and my artistic training allows me to ask: What is art? What is beauty? And why is Western beauty and art so singular? I have tried to answer these questions over the years. My memoir Western Bound, Western Bond attempts to answer these questions in a more complete and personal way through my experiences and insights.


3. Felt Need

In this era of multiculturalism, when any defense of Western culture produces backlashes, few Westerners will openly defend their culture. Instead there is a tacit agreement that multiculturalism is the best direction for Western countries and individuals. Any publicly displayed disagreements to this constructed norm could result with serious legal repercussions, financial losses, and social ostracism.

Many times. non-Westerners can present truths more directly by the very fact that they are non-Westerners. And very few, if any, do so. Those that might broach this subject have other agendas, some as mundane as selling their books (often in the form of memoirs), others to maintain lucrative jobs and positions which they might lose with such frank disclosures.

I will present the truth as I see it, which I have documented for over ten years as a writer and an artist. I have already gone through the many hurdles I have mentioned above, and come out stronger, wiser and even more determined.

I have lived in the West for the majority of my life, but I started my Western education very young as a preschooler in an Italian Montessori school in my birthplace of Ethiopia where, and as an elementary school pupil in the country's then acclaimed The Sanford English School. There, I mastered the English language and culture through my devoted teachers, as well as through my own love of the language. I was an avid reader, and requested Laura Ingalls' Little House on the Prairie for a general knowledge prize I won as a nine-year-old. By that age, I was also a budding poet and had my sophomoric masterpiece published in the school's year book. And that was the year we left Ethiopia due to political unrest which would have harmed my family.

4. The Market

I have contributed to various online journals and forums for over a decade. My blogs Camera Lucida and Reclaiming Beauty have a following where I am periodically cited in other website articles and blogs. My longer articles have been published in renowned websites including Frontpage Magazine and The American Thinker. I have written for artistic publications, including The Botanical Artists of Canada.

I can personally reach some of this audience through the contacts I‘ve established with the editors of these journals and magazines.

I will publicize my book on my own blogs and request that the blogs and websites that follow me do the same.

I have contact with my community’s libraries and other art and cultural centers, which I will approach to provide me a setting to publicly present my book. I have been involved in various discussions and forums presented by these public organizations, and I am recognized for my unique views.

I have recently been in contact with Television Ontario’s The Agenda, which is a news and cultural program. The programmers showed interest in presenting a condensed version of my memor. The show is widely watched throughout Ontario and other Canadian provinces, and also has some following in the US.

5. The Competition

There has been a plethora of memoirs in the last couple of years. I became especially interested in memoirs since a fellow-Ethiopian published her work about a year ago, which also happened around the time started I writing mine. Many of these memoirs are by non-Western Canadians or Americans, often first generation immigrants who were born elsewhere but grew up in these countries. Almost all of them recount the difficulties they have in integrating into Western culture, often with subtle negative implications. None have the overall positive and inspirational stance of Western culture that I take with mine, and they write with a critical eye toward their new land and with a nostalgic glance back to the lands they left behind.

Here is a review of a sample of recently published memoirs:

i. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
By: Mona Awad
Mona Awad writes that her mixed heritage background (Egyptian and French-Canadian) makes her “an outsider even to outsiders.” She tries reconcile these difficulties by embracing a “broader identification of Canadian.” But this does not resolve her issues with her identity, and instead makes her “Canadianness” even more amorphous and untenable. She

ii. Troubled Pilgrimage: Passage to Pakistan
By: Balwant Bhaneja
Bhaneja, returned to his ancestral Pakistan after decades of absence. Despite living in Canada for those many years, and having married an Irish Catholic woman, he still describes himself as "a Hindu Indian from Canada."

His journey back to Pakistan was to resolve these issues of identity, if not for him then for his children. Instead he skirts around these questions, and provides a facile yet conventional answer:
“[My children] are all evolving a new personality that is expansive, multi-cultural, non-discriminatory, and global and so forth. Canada provides that space and opportunity.”

The reality is that this ethnicity-based global world will not provide that expansive Canada. We are seeing communities closing in on themselves and Canada becoming ever more fragmented.

iii. Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space
By: Arun Prabha Mukherjee

Although this collection of essays is not a memoir, it still demonstrate the topics that the majority of Third World writers and essayists broach.
In an interview Muherjee states:
As ethnic minorities and identities are on the rise in North America, both these concepts [Canadian multiculturalism and the notion of the Canadian mosaic] are being stretched. Of course, as a result, Diaspora literature and studies is flourishing!

She dismisses generous grants by the Canadian Arts Councils grants to artists and writers of non-white backgrounds: “This move is a redress to past grievances, to see ethnic writers as "the Other".”

“Aesthetics is a worthy work, but it also has its moments of cultural blindness.” writes black Canadian author George Clarke. He continues:

If Third World novels attempt "to project a vision of the individual within the community, the individual under the sway of large movements of history," so too do the works of Hugh MacLennan, Antonine Maillet, and other authors. Mukherjee's text would have been more rounded had she noticed correspondences as well as differences between eurocentric Canadian and Other writing.

His concern is Mukherjee's lack of reference to these “Eurocentric” writers, rather than a critique of her harsh and racially negative views of the Canadian arts and literary world.

iv. Firewalkers
By: Bethlehem Tereffe Gebreyohannes
An Ethiopian family travels across desert and hostile territory to arrive to safety with the help of Somali nomads.

Writes Sarah Murdoch of the Toronto Star:

Beth Gebreyohannes, 14, her brothers, 16 and 18, her father, stepmother and infant sister left
their home near Addis Ababa for what the kids thought was a short trip but was in fact an
escape from the brutal military regime that had seized control of Ethiopia.

Geberyohannes’ book stops at the family’s arrival in Canada and only briefly informs us in the epilogue of their subsequent lives in Toronto, including her marriage to a fellow Ethiopian and their two children born about a decade later. We gain no insights on her acculturation into Canadian life, how her son and daughter are juggling two such different cultures, and how she contributes to their Canadianness.

The book’s setting seems to have been chosen more to alarm the reader rather than to inform him on the difficulties of leaving behind one’s native land for good. This literary strategy is adopted by contemporary memoir writers, and is often used as a selling point in the heavily saturated market of memoirs.


v. Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Hirsi Ali’s first book documents her account departure from her native Somalia, her stop over in Kenya and Ethiopia and her first long-term Western residence in the Netherlands. It was in the Netherlands where she learned political intrigue for the purpose of disclosing Islam’s infamies. Her final destination, which perhaps she had planned all along, is the United States. She has several books to her name including religio-political books, but it is her first memoir Nomads that is the most revealing, starting with its title. Ali has never become a true Westerner despite her many accolades for the West’s cultural and religious achievements. She is instead still very much a Somali, and a Somali nomadic woman, who is willing to travel to the most convenient place which will allow her to stay.

She left the Netherlands under controversy, accused of having forged her documents to enter the country as a refugee. She had even changed her name. “I pretty much lied my way in,” she writes. As the controversy erupted, she once again packed her bags and left this place to which she clearly had only superficial attachments, and with whose laws and rules she had tried to help her own Muslim women whom she feels Islam has wronged, including her. She came to America. And came to do pretty much what she had been done all along in the West: to continue her advocacy for Somali Muslim women. She has never become a true Westerner.

6. Chapter Summaries
Each chapter will discuss personal episodes within the context of larger social, cultural and political events.

Chapter 1: Departure from Home
My family has left “home” many times. In Ethiopia, my father in fulfilling the Emperor Haile Selassie’s country-building national program, was stationed in various provinces from the southern region to the north. He worked as a principal of schools and colleges. His final position was as Vice Minister of Education.

Haile Selassie's plan was to overhaul the education system and bring in less educated (and less able) students into the mainstream system in Addis Abeba University, as advised by my father, who was then Vice Minister of Education. There were strong disagreements to this agenda. The Amhara were especially suspicious of the attempt to "ethnically" unify the country which had until then developed carefully constructed divisions (and unifications) to avoid dangerous inter-ethnic conflicts. Disgruntled students from across the country felt their regional and rural schools did not meet the standards of the urban (Amhara) schools aired their grievances and staged uprisings throughout the country.

Nobody was satisfied.

Finally, the military was called to intervene, which resulted with thousands of deaths and a destabilized Selassie government. The bloody "Ethiopian Revolution" ensued. Sixty government officials were publicly executed, and Selassie was imprisoned. Later his remains were found in a cell under the palace and the speculation is that he was murdered.

My father left for UNESCO about a year before all this and with the blessing of Selassie, promising he would be back in a few short months, a promise he knew he wouldn't fulfill. As Vice Minister of Education, and as a key player in the educational reform which was known as "Sector Review," he anticipated the uproar even as he planned these reforms, including warnings from his colleagues.

We left for France a few weeks before my tenth birthday and just a few weeks short of the Ethiopian Christmas. We would celebrate both in our apartment in Paris.


Flowers for the Emperor: One Year Before We Were to Leave Ethiopia

Chapters 2: Lessons in French
True to my father’s cosmopolitan nature and his commitment to education, he sent us to the best possible schools. His UNESCO post covered the majority of our elementary and high school education costs. I began to study and to love the French and English cultures in Paris and England, isolated from other Ethiopians and their influences. I went to school only for the first six months of our life in Paris. All my junior high and high school education was in boarding schools in England.

My French studies were through French language schools I attended during our school holidays, as well as my own independent studies throughout the city including museums cultural houses, and visits to nearby historic towns and cities.


Champs de Mars, Paris. A few
Months After We Arrived

Chapters 3: English Schools
I joined the choir in my English schools, and performed in several school plays. I continued with my piano performances where I would I give at least two school presentation every year. I was awarded the music prize twice. My singing performances were in the school choirs. As well as Sunday services, the choirs traveled to regional and European churches and cathedrals. I was able to visit some of England's famous and beautiful cathedrals, and we traveled to the historic city of Wurzburg in Germany's Bavaria region twice. In Wurzburg, I stayed with a local German family both times, where I learnt that the exclamatory "prima" of my lovely hostess meant she was impressed that I had learned their culture so well.

Reading in an English Garden

Chapter 4: A Summer in New York
I spent an important summer in New York when I was fifteen years old, with an aunt, a sister of my father’s. This trip would begin my admiration for America, which would remain for the rest of my life. My aunt who was then a single New Yorker lived on Park Avenue - more her ability to save and budget rather than any exorbitant salary. I learned to ride the bus everywhere which I preferred to the rattling subway. We shopped at the nearby Macy’s, a department store so large and full that even the luxurious Paris Gallery Lafayette didn’t come close, in size or choices, and even luxury goods. I loved the diners at every corner where anyone could go and have coffee and a full meal, unlike the coffee-oriented cafes of Paris.The huge Central Park had nooks and crannies to explore, and stretched for miles like a full forest in a city. And Americans were so friendly! From the doorman to the bus driver, and even strangers on the street, people would start conversations with us. My favorite place was way downtown, in the Village, where we would go in the evenings for coffee and pastry in one of the famous coffee houses, and walk through Washington Square Park to see the artists who, Amercan style, would entertain us with jokes and banter. I felt more American than French or even English. And certainly not Ethiopian. Then, there was much less emphasis on multiculturalism, and there was a distinct separation between blacks and whites. I believe it was the free, uninhibited nature of the people and their authenticity which attracted me, rather than some cultural affiliation.


In the Village New York

Chapter 5: Aspiring Scientist
Soon after, barely seventeen, I would enter a small college in Pennsylvania where I enrolled in the Natural Sciences program. I would obtain my biology degree but I would always be involved in the college art and cultural events, from performing piano pieces to acting plays.

Cycling Through the Central Pennsylvania Valley

Chapter 6: Back to Africa
At the end of my undergraduate program, my father took us all back to Ethiopia for a short visit. There he introduced me to various health and nutrition institutions. He had decided that I would study nutrition for my Masters degree, which I understood to mean that I would be solving the hunger problems we watched the country face over the years, the televised images of the Ethiopian famine forever embedded in my mind.

These were the years when he had taken up a post in Harare, Zimbabwe to establish a new UNESCO liaison office in the newly founded (liberated) country which was formerly the English colony of Rhodesia. He had arrived under contentious conditions where there was internal disagreements on the direction the Senegalese Director General AMadou M’Bow was taking UNESCO. It was more a battle of loyalties rather than principles. The American government was insisting on having more say in the funding allocations of the organizations since it provided the largest contribution. But the loud (and majority) voices of the Third World country representatives refused to co-operate. America finally left UNESCO. My father supported the non-American votes as of course did M’Bow. It was the post-American power debates that caused the friction and which resulted with my father obtaining a post in Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe officials adored my father. Here was the Ethiopian who looked like the Emperor Haile Selassie the African reconciliator of the continent.



Chapter 7: My NAFTA before NAFTA
I would do my field research in Mexico for my PhD, still in nutrition but this time of another country. Although I am an ABD (All But the Dissertation), I was the primary researcher, including designing the hypotheses, collecting the data during a one-year field research stay in Mexico, completing the clinical data analyses at a state-of-the-art laboratory in California, and finally presenting statistical analyses of the results. All that was left for me to do was write the dissertation.

I learned to speak Spanish in Mexico, improving on my college-level elementary courses. But I had French on my side, and learned the language fast and well. During (long) periods of research inactivity, I studied the language, literature, art and music of the country through short courses designed for foreigners. I performed in two recitals of Mexican folk dances, and would often be the instructor's chosen partner. I traveled the country from north to south, and east to west. I befriended a Mexican family (through a colleague at the nutrition institute where I was based) who welcomed me as their own in their home in the eastern Gulf coast province.

In Mexico, I decided I would be an artist.

Chapter 8: Canadian Integration: The True North
My father finally acquired a safe haven for us in Canada initially through the refugee sponsorship of an uncle. But the application was rejected and we applied through our own merits as immigrants with high education levels and sound employment prospects. My brothers and I had several degrees between us had a wide range of experiences. We could speak both official languages: English and French.

I received the news while in Mexico. I abandoned my science studies, and traveled directly from Mexico to Toronto to start my new life. I soon began my education in the arts, unencumbered by visa and passport problems. I began to take short courses and workshops on art, design, film and photography.

I paid for my courses with my salary from a job at an immigrant and refugee acculturation center, which was set up for people coming to Canada from Africa, Asia and Latin America. I was hired based on my own recent “immigrant” experience.” I never saw a single European during my four years there. My job was to counsel "new comers" on their educational options: high school certification through night school, vocational schools, and for a few, degree transfers from their countries' colleges and universities.

Here, I began to learn about the complex and intricate immigration system and the various ways that people would enter Canada. Many were perfectly legal, but others would stretch the rules as far as they could. A good number would also lie about their qualifications, the risks and dangers they faced in their countries, their financial records, and some would even have "alternate" names. Since my office was not a policing agency, we would refer suspicious files to the regional immigration bureaus. I rarely did so, preferring to "close" my files rather than face hostile managers who were also privy to these discrepancies. The fewer references we made the better.

I applied for full-time studies after about a year of my part time courses, submitted my student loan application, and gained admission into Ryerson University. Two weeks before I planned to resign from my job, I personally submitted my letter of resignation to my incredulous supervisor. He had thought I would build a career around "immigration."

Northern Spirit: Lake Ontario
Photo by KPA

Chapter 9: Citizenship and Transforming Society through Art
As soon as I was able, after the four-year residency requirement, I obtained my Canadian citizenship. I went alone to the ceremony, since my parents and brothers would wait some more years before they acquired thers. I felt a weight had been taken off my shoulders. Then, I started to seriously work and think as an artist. The modernist, multicultural direction of contemporary art shocked me at first but then I took it on as a challenge to revive the beauty of the Western art I grew up with in France and in England. I started several art and culture blogs, I wrote articles and commentary for journals and papers, I presented papers at conferences, and eventually I found like minded people to help me with my mission to replace and revive Western art. I became an unlikely voice for this endeavour but the novelty helped more than it harmed me. I could say things more truthfully and more directly as a non-Westerner. My final endeavor is to start a project I called “Reclaiming Beauty: Saving Our Western Civilization” and which I have recently renamed: “Movement for the Reclamation of Western Beauty.”

Trillium and Queen Anne’s Lace
Textile Design by KPA
(Trillium is the Provincial Flower of Onotario)

Chapter 10: Movement for the Reclamation of Western Beauty
This chapter will deal with an idea which I put together about five years ago for a book on how Western Civilization set the standards for beauty and for art. I developed these ideas mostly through my blog Camera Lucida and then eventually on a blog of the same title: Reclaiming Beauty. The latest stage of this idea is to start a movement where beauty can be reclaimed and put in its right place in society through the efforts of a group of like-minded people.


Screenshot of website