A poster who goes by the name
The World is Roses, which is also
her blog, has left this comment on my post about
Glazov and Ma:
How can we trust YOU not to relay important information about the US to Ethiopia?
I will just re-post what I've already written:
Ma left China around the same age I left Ethiopia. She came to America as an immigrant (legal immigrant, she is happy to inform us). She left China because her parents were looking for better economic prospects. I left Ethiopia because it was a matter of saving my father's life. We were political dissidents. My father was part of the Haile Selassie regime, and he secured a post in the Paris-based UNESCO months before the regime fell apart, and the brutal and vicious dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam took over. Many of my father's colleagues, and friends, were imprisoned. Some were excecuted. This would have probably been the fate of my father.
But, by the grace of God, we ended up in Paris, the most beautiful city in the world! My young years until my late teens were spent between school holidays in Paris, and boarding school in England. My brothers and I got the best of the Western world. We were hardly wealthy. Most of my father's assets had to remain in Ethiopia (and were later confiscated). We lived in cramped apartments. And UNESCO payed the bills for our primary and secondary education. My parents then sent us to college in the U.S. Only one child could secure UNESCOS's college education assistance (which I received, being the eldest), and later, I managed to get a collection of scholarships and grants which took me through graduate degrees.
Soon after we arrived in Europe, we had very little relations with Ethiopia. There were a handful (three of four) Ethiopian families in France since almost all who left Ethiopia had gone to America. I speak Amharic, but my youngest brother barely speaks it. All my post-Ethiopa life has been immersed in the West. But, it wasn't for lack of opportunities that, for me, Ethiopia was in the background. New York and Los Angeles have a huge hub of Ethiopians. When I went to college in the U.S. at seventeen, I could have resumed "where we left off," and started a whole new chapter of "Ethiopianness" with the huge community in New York, but for I opted to stay away from that. I couldn't understand the nostalgic relation to a country which is so far away, culturally, geographically and for me, emotionally.
My blogs and writing will show that I am a unique (odd, some will say) defender of the West, and Western civilization. I have tried to include some Ethiopian elements, primarily its Christian heritage, but that seems to be the only, significant, point of intersection with my Western-oriented work. I have been asked, both in my writings and in my design work, why I don't focus on Ethiopia. Each time, I have ignored those remarks, or made a quick, dismissive reply in order to be left alone. The questions have never been genuine, and were by people who were in some way trying to belittle Western civilization.
And I have been rewarded for my reticence. I have been discovering the extraordinary gifts of Western art and culture since I was a ten-year-old in Paris.
I have maintained this blog (or series of blogs), without any interruption, and without changing my original message and direction, for abut ten years now. And the fruit of that labor is that my writings have enough articles and thought-out arguments that can be published in a book. I hope that will interest, and attract, a much wider scope of people than blog readers.
The book will not be (is not) a "personal" memoir, a la Hirsi Ali, and now Ma, but a theoretical and cultural analysis of art and culture in our West-phobic world, with the aim to reclaim what has been cast aside, and to revive Western culture to the best of my ability, and the best abilities of those whom I hope will join forces with me.
