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Written by Tsirha Adefris

1. THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

 

After having vented my pent up feelings about the people I met years ago, I finally decided to present it in some sort of pseudo academic format. Fortunately, I happen to be an anthropologist and of course the subject will neatly fall into the study of culture. I can even go further and call myself a “participant observer” in the ethnographic tradition.  It is either that or ranting from a psychiatrist couch. I will leave that to whoever may care to comment about this if at all.

I have made minimal contribution to any academic discipline. I have no one to blame this except myself.

My knowledge of cultural anthropology largely stems from having had to teach the course for a period of four years.

I would ask my class questions like “How many of you believe in corporal punishment” and proceed to tell them about how I feel bad about spanking my younger siblings. Too many hands had gone up; we really all should feel bad. 

I started reading the classics too late and forming my own opinions about things like. “Freud must be burning in hell and I can prove it”. Freud misquotes the bible and proceeds to suggest a revision, which, according to scriptural authority lands you in hell. If people bother to mention scripture they should care if it was St Peter or St. Paul who said what. It is like the heretic Richard Dawkins writing that Jonathan Kingdon formulated The Seed Eater hypothesis. 

I honestly realize that there are diligent scientists out there who have thought long and hard about the varied subjects I make incursions into and offering opinions that sound novel only to my own uneducated mind. 

I apologize to anyone who might look at this and feel insulted by my insolence.

I believe in the correct application of the scientific method and the paragraph below is an attempt to treat the story that follows like the datum from which I have drawn hypothesis. I am suggesting here hypothesis cannot be drawn out of thin air and they are immediate steps to establishing theories. I know this sound elementary; I somehow feel I need to say it. I am seriously trying to pass this as a scientific exercise.

 

    

 

I need not say here that cultural anthropology has moved way beyond producing “salvage ethnographies” into helping make informed decisions for the General Motors work force right here at home.  The present is as good a time as any that this discipline can actually flex its muscle. Globalization is a catch phrase and we all know it necessarily implies diversity.

However, the participant observation method remains the only tried and true method to undertake observation of any sort. Put very simply, you need to be there and see.

It would be possible at this point to tabulate the time, place, sample size and so forth. I am hoping this will be apparent from the story.

If I am to compare it with say, Evans - Pritchard who lived with and wrote about the Nuer. This “monograph” would be what Jomo Kenyatta never wrote about, his experiences while studying with Malinowski. 

Kenyatta, unlike Evans - Pritchard but like me was already entrenched in the trappings of the culture he was not to write about, while his writings about his own people, The Kikuyu are not considered anywhere near groundbreaking as The Nuer. 

I believe The Nuer had the advantage of drawing from the experience of culture shock.

 

I have learned that one of the more current trends in ethnography is the “reflexive “  and I  have an added methodological advantage   because  a diary is almost synonymous with  field note and that is the story which I have also labeled the datum.

  Cultural Universals

 

I always start my classes refuting Conrad Kottak’s claim that people are not the same all over. In everything that is worth anything people have to be really the same. Kottak is really my teacher of Anthropology.

The idea of “psychic unity” he puts forth. Just means we are all the same species. The idea that race does not exist also means the same thing.

Races of course were formed through the interesting process called “drift”. Beuttner- Janusch said people still marry within a circumscribed area and he was talking about modern day America.  B J is a geneticist, he was validating incipient speciation.  There is an Amharic saying that goes further, it is a cultural idea. The Amhara are expansionists. They formed one country out of a multi-ethnic mix. There is a model for globalization. “A husband and a wife are drawn from the same river”. It is not kinship or proximity that they are describing but the shared water you drink, the shared temperament and ideals.  You cannot expect people to mate and co-habit when they do not have much in common. So there you have it, the variation in the human species was formed by distance and isolation. Of course this novel combinations and mutations that let us tell apart blonde from brunette will always be around, If there is anything we learned from genetics is that inheritance does not cause blending.  People will continue to come in ivory and ebony shades and in between as well. 

The people in Arembe Kottak talked to, I am sure knew the color of their skin. It must be it is just not something that defines an Arembean. 

I insist the term African American did not start from political correctness, but to the actual definition of what we just call black. Of course, the definition of an Arambean is just that. Kottak actually asked people what they say the color of their skin is.  Unless he is blind, my answer would be “Look at me and decide”.  Hypodescent is a difficult notion; people have gone to court to settle issues of black and white. Well if Mendel is right and there is really no fear he is wrong no one is blending away.

 

I tell my students physical variation separates us, but culture has the potential to unite us.

The reason being you can make a cultural American out of anyone.  Just raise them on television.  What is impossible to do is alter phenotype or genotype. Ethnotype, a person’s cultural characteristics is alterable

That then is the potential of culture to help people understand and speak each other’s “language” in a global environment. 

The challenge for the anthropologist is to look for the common threads of culture and not focus on differences.

All people have basic generative grammar. If we are talking about human language, we have to have rules that apply to all. Looking at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for example should not make us discard it in favor of generative grammar , but help us realize the nature of language itself.  If we come upon an island of celibate males, we have to call it a monastery. There is no need to invent a particularity named “female exclusion”. The “Potlach” is really just a party and   the “Berdache”, a queen.

I would like to add:  I really do not make such a mockery of these concepts when I teach, I am here trying to make one point.

Of course Kottak has made cultural anthropology very accessible to me and I know my students find it loaded with volumes of information for such a small book.

  

1. Make New Friends and Keep the Old

Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening my friends: My bed time story tonight November 5, 2008  was  the speeches of two prominent gentlemen, It is ended one story .I was so moved  as I listened over my radio in the middle of the night.

Good night is a wishful greeting for peaceful slumber. I did thank The Almighty that I am not in Zimbabwe and said “I love you “to the world and. slept fully expecting to wake up. 

Well the story did move me; it was delivered with cadence and rhyme. It was the final revelation of what almost seems like a rehearsed game of chess, an exercise in a modern democracy that is aiming to include its own and finally bring home the revolution that started on its shores.

 One might hope the moon is blue cheese and have enough faith to seek it. But the dream is the pursuit of happiness and it is charity which receives as it gives.

As always, when I think of presidents, it took me back thirty years to a balcony in an auditorium in Atlantic City, where I peeked at another President.

So I remembered my room mate from my college years in New York, she was a dance student from Chicago me?  a biology student from Ethiopia. I will call her Wogene (my relative, my team mate). We were friends then, and she was the reason I was in Atlantic City.   It was 1979;      it was the meeting of The United Steel Worker’s Union.

I have a thing for peanuts. Not popcorn, for men who pray in public, and for people of seemingly exclusive principles who manage to reach across. I might add I had the honor of looking at a president, who, guided with divine wisdom, leveled the field between Ellsberg and Liddy: the unlikely Gordian knot of a traitor and a thief.

 

But I will stick to my own story, you will, I hope pardon my uneducated excursion into the unmaking of an American president who actually set back time.

This is how the whole story goes, it is set between 1977 and 1982 during the time I was a student at NYU   and worked part time for a maid service that operated from Minetta Lane. It is about the new friends I made and the old friends I met again.

Back in 1979 I and Wogene rode the bus from New York and I met her family. I felt I was adopted by her mother. She bought me a bottle of cashews and sent me the very red version of a blue dress she sent to Wogene. She was in Atlantic City on vacation with a union man, her boyfriend.  I was dismayed that the mother felt like a visitor at home. Well, wonders never cease, Wogene’s mother has a boy friend from Japan. I was told she will put the Japanese tea set I sent her for Christmas to good use. 

 I remember the euphoria of looking at fall colors as I rode Amtrak to Boston in 1977 to see Turquoise, an old friend. The bus ride to Atlantic City is non-existent in my mind, we might as well have energized.  I don’t remember any casinos or talk of one. 1979. It felt out of place enough in the diner. On the whole, I have decided that Wogene’s mother had we met in a different setting would really have been my soul mate. Wogene is more like my daughter,   born in 1987, than like myself.

I will continue writing my story. I will refrain from naming names. I have decided to name some of my friends out of my native emotions and others after precious stones. Mufu stones dipped and mixed with blood and gut, as I have seen it being done in Africa: To bring rain.

This is a list of new friends I made and old friends I met when I was a student in New York between 1977 and 1982.

It took me that long to earn an MA. There are those who do it in barely a year, in Britain at that, but this is neither my transcript nor my resume. On the whole it was a time very well spent. This story is a diary; I venture to hope a note from the underground. I used to think it was Ann Frank and Gorky who inspired me to write, but you live and learn I was blessed to listen to a lab rat venting its frustration from a hole.

The first person, I like to mention, not in chronological order, but to give rhyme to the story, I have named her Turquoise.  She had a yen for the color; I was one of her bridesmaids. She made much of the color of our dress. She also had a thing about birthstones, a Topaz ring, she let slip into my hands may have been sent to a mutual friend.

Turquoise said the word with a silent end; I am thinking right now, I am fortunate that someone paid for my expensive education. It is a definite asset. However, I am sure there are people out there with less credential, asking questions that beg solution, making observations no noble laureate dreamed of, reaching conclusions as clear as day.  There are people out there for whom the practice of the educated is the way they are. I suppose, they would know they would not have to pay just to think the way they do. Conversely, an expensive education, of course, never guarantees an educated person.

But we live by the rules, for Turquoise could clearly see that I was in graduate school and did not have the sense of an onion.

By now I am sure she has solved the puzzle of why children are dropping out of schools at an alarming rate. They have probably figured out they are being educated a bunch of nonsense by a bunch of morons.

Well going back to the story, I have kind of decided it’s going to be a sort of dance where the men and women are paired. So who does Turquoise pair with? Of course, she pairs with the father of my only child.  Thai is as it should be, she likes stones and he is a geologist. Turquoise had an appreciation for the finer things in life and maybe with her brilliant mind and her interest in stones of color, she would have made something of the pink specks on Bodo given the chance I got. Tourqoiuse is really a friend of my older sister Wolansa, my personal gold standard of friendship.

 I have always pictured a mate for myself in childhood after   the cover of a book where two children are sitting reading another book. We were in the same school in high school and we took classes together in college, and we met in Seattle and took a Geology course together where I was at the bottom of the class. 

I am guessing he just does not want to get tied up. I have heard him describe marriage as “being lynched”. He had an Italian word for it.

He was really one of the four of the Bone Trade Ethiopians.  We were all competing for the Prize. We all four have lived and we will die friends and soon follow Sleshi who came to see me in Seattle after all hell had broken loose for me. Ethiopians speak of a person with a black tongue. It is me if there was ever one. I used to just up and say “I will fake a nervous break down; if that is what it takes to go see Wolansa once I am in the U.S. 

But my mother calls me Geffi when she gets mad.  I tell you people die on me.

During the geology field trip: by the way this must have been my punishment from The Almighty for believing in evolution or something. I am in deep depression, high dose of Navane, mostly want to hide, throw up on the bus every day to UW and had to go to a field trip and bunk with a bunch of giggly 20 something’s. To top it off I stumbled and rolled down a hill and had to be paired with a girl wearing crutches.  The only thing nice and memorable about that trip was this guy who captured the sun’s rays with his lens (It is a tool to examine stones!) to light my cigarettes, I was in a panic, I had no matches. I would not speak with anyone; they had me take an ESL exam.

Anyway, my craziness must have rubbed off on him too.

                    

Since I am talking about Turquoise, the first American friend I made, invited me to stay with her, and brought me a turquoise ring from her native state of Arizona. I had brought her a picture of a boat; I had bought at the Peabody museum where Tourqoise took me when I rode the train in the fall to see her.

I cannot name an American after a stone. I have seen pictures, bath room sinks made of tiger-eye. Pictures, mind you and I had a tiger eye ring my father gave me. He used to say gold is insurance, keep it for hard times. So, I will call her Wulita (the feeling between remembering and longing), my favorite name. This word actually translates to addiction. It is the word I hear women use to describe a caffeine fit.

 Wulita was very kind and welcoming; she did not make me feel like I was different from her in any way. I was surprised at how all people are really the same. I know my feeling about cultural universals was conceived because of my experience with her. She really could have been any Ethiopian girl except she came with a massive head of red hair.  What can I say Darwin studied his own son; Wulita served a big bowl of salad, to me and a group of friends to examine how we all chew. She had intellectual ammunition and a dog named Daisy, who was supposed to discriminate the color of people’s skin.  I say this because she thought Daisy was nervous with me because she came from a shelter in Harlem and she was abused or some story like that. I agreed to walk Daisy, but I was kind of: What the hell? Why not just have a baby or something.  It was embarrassing to be asked if Daisy went. .I knew Wulita moved in a competitive world and it is hard to make a friend. It was also a problem I did not know dog language. Daisy was once excited to see me; Wulita told me and was cross with me that I did not greet Daisy. I had no idea dogs actually remembered people. I would also insist that it did not make a difference what language I spoke to Daisy. I might have taught that dog Amharic. 

The first friend I made once I was here actually met me at the airport. She was a friend of my sister Wolansa who I had actually shamed into coming to meet me at Kennedy all the way from Seattle. I kind of did some kind of scream when I saw Wolansa.  I have heard of people reuniting with a kind of return from the dead feeling. Now I know, I had the wrong script for a reunion and I must have made people nervous.  

I was excited to be here. The next day was a warm fall day in Brooklyn and Wolansa said “Indian Summer” I exclaimed ----- That’s in: To kill a Mockingbird!  Like it had been in the back of my mind years after opening the book what that kind of summer meant. I know it is the first word in the book. Wolansa must have been thinking Cuckoo’s nest, I had turned into a babbling idiot. I never felt I would see her again in this life. I never imagined that it was within my reach to pack a bag and fly across the Atlantic. She was not much at writing letters and she had sent me a picture depicting a scene from Dante in reply to my first so many letters. I had worried about her. I even started imagining that she was cloned. She looked different.

We all three went to the IIE where a smart young black girl confirmed my scholarship. She said she had lunch with an Ethiopian friend just the other day. I chose to think it was a man and wanted to meet the genre who made friends with this smart American. I knew she was a mover and a shaker. The two of them were embarrassingly giggly. 

I had brought a coffee set and made them coffee and Wolansa said my Amharic had turned archaic, hers had turned anglicized. My new friend commented I must be in culture shock. Wolansa left with a warning “You need to move out of here soon”. Well, I really had memorized the script. I approached, Wulita who, I was told had offered to put me up with the correct sentence. Wolansa had left the coffee set in New York. I worship at the temple of coffee but I had learned enough to wait until I moved into my own place before I ventured into the hallway with my Gabbi, I know Wulita was startled. She did not say anything about it, not to me.  Soon enough, my new friends would keep saying I was so white when I insist I could ride the subway home, no need to get out of your way. I really was not putting on anything.  Driving is just a way to get where you need to go.

 I ended up being the bridesmaid of my new Ethiopian friend. , she was no nonsense, lived by the rules, and certainly did not bother with stones. Of course I pair her with her husband and since I am fixated on stones, they do remind me of two soapstone candle holders, I carried from Nairobi as a wedding present, another place, another time. These two gave me a glimpse of what might have been had it turned out I went home with the boy I read with under the tree: The possibilities of a clean love and marriage which I had long lost the chance of. Yes, I hold a candle to them. I do give gifts. Wulita promptly gave them the toaster and me a much belated miserable blender, which could not even hold a candle to the Cuisinart they got right after.

 

I met another old friend right around the time of the wedding; he was married to a Puerto Rican girl who had a big family of what seemed like identical sisters. He remembered me from 5th grade and treated me with the benevolence of the big brother I never had. Through them I learned that love need not be so spotlessly sterile.  I have learned it is a give and take between people all too often imperfect. His wife was willing to bridge the ethnic divide and when she saw an Ethiopian guest apologize for her Amharic sneeze she commented “they sneeze like cats” However, I did learn that if you concentrate the sneeze can be cultivated.

I moved from the soapstone in Brooklyn to stay with Wulita and then they found me a roommate. Wulita wanted to “interview” my new roommate, but the new roommate side stepped the issue. Turquoise came to visit us in our new apartment.    She took me to see Mumenshanz.   It was obvious to me it was about evolution and I had long had a thing about the cultural attachment to toilet paper.  I had mentally coined the term   “Tissue paper civilization”. Even raised in an Ethiopian household I always felt a serious cultural malfunction was to occur if toilet paper disappeared. Mumenshanz was for me to see. It is the only Broadway show I ever saw.    My roommate roasted chicken for our guest.  Turquoise   pointed out about my room mate “That’s diamond, she is wearing!” so I will call my new roommate Diamond.

Turquoise told me I would have been better off in a more rural place so I get used to the States, I honestly did not see that. The only thing that bothered me is that it gets dark too early. Years later, I raised the concern when an Ethiopian wildlife official was negotiating exporting some animals to the U.S.  

The first week a friend of Soapstone ( the girl) took us to dinner  in  a Chinese restaurant and my fortune cookie read “ It always gets too dark before dawn”  I was grabbing at straws , but felt that someone ( Confucius?) may have understood my problem and felt comforted. 

I knew enough microbiology to understand that Montezuma’s revenge can be caused by the alteration of your normal flora and there was a definite bad smell in the city. But then I had travelled across a huge ocean to an entirely different hemisphere, you have to expect things to be different. Believe me I felt perfectly safe, I have stared at pictures of New York land marks for ages. I was delighted to be in the center of the world!

 

Diamond was petite and beautiful, as only a Persian girl in the eyes of an Ethiopian woman could be.  Ethiopians don’t even bother to say beautiful, they just say Turk! , but they do recognize the fluidity of the phenotype with different terms. There is one “Demam” that literally translates “bloody” and it just describes what catches one’s eye in different people. I like “Funga”: It kind of means, you’re ugly, you’re mine. 

Diamond spoke kind of haltingly and it did occur to me how she could be majoring literature. We never had academic discussions, I was poring over a genetics book that was impossible, and she must have noticed I was trying too hard. She and her friend were for a long while remarking about Don Juan. I know they were having a hell of fun about some course on the subject. 

I had read about the stories with Fellini’s film with the fantastic Donald Sutherland.   There was some craziness about reels of film getting stolen. I finally watched Satyricon. Some Ethiopian guy had said “No idea what it was about, saw it in Europe!”  , No idea, my foot!  I did not think the Fellini story would interest them. Maybe, I did not see the connection between the high art of literature and the making of movies. 

Diamond  had a guest one time who mentioned Haile Sellassie and of course I started badmouthing him as any red blooded HSIU student should, but the friend turned out to be black ( I did not know) and gave me a good lecture about the symbolism of a black king. I right out said that he does not consider himself black.  It is hard to remember at what point I found out that the girl was black, but I think it was when I made the pronouncement that she said something like, we certainly cannot have that kind of thing…She had  taken it for granted that I knew she was black. Diamond took me to a musical in the village one time; I think she was doing the black thing.

I took to Diamond just I do to any of the people here, but that is how one got ethnic in those days. You hitched your band wagon to jazz.

To be serious, Haile Sellasie could simply not be hung up over the shade of the color of his skin. Leave that to the fanatics who claim he was sired by an Arab. He got the crown from the dusky Zewditu. But there is a definite problem that feudalism presents; I may have been alluding to that. Eritreans are relatively free of this stigma. My friend Nura used to say with disgust “What’s all this? I could prove The Prophet is my apical ancestor for all it is worth.”  Ethiopia will keep carrying the trappings of serf and nobility long after Mengistu or even Meles. Do the Russian Oligarchs trace their root to Tzardom? You cannot possibly wipe away a whole stratum, neither their fortune nor their sentiments.

That is why The U.S. carries the burden of realizing the dream of the equality of peoples. 

Diamond remained my friend till I headed back home. She was generous with her soul. She fed me and clothed me: I took with me a long paisley dress.  Persian!  She said. She even reached beyond with a single letter expressing her concern about the Ethiopian famine.

She was upset that I called Persian Arabic (the script did look similar). She talked of Zoraster and overtakes of a civilization by Islam.

I had bravely told Wulita that I owned no bras, but diamond kept insisting that I wear one. Well I did shop for a few on my way home. Wulita just dismissed it with “You should get some”.

I was not willing to broach women’s liberation with Diamond and I think Wulita was prudish.  Of gays, Wulita declared “I think they should all stay in the closet”. I had seen a man coming out on a television programmed in Asmara and was awed. I did not even have time to digest it.  I don’t think I quite understood what the closet meant. If she had said lied or pretended I would have certainly fired back. I know she had decided I was a pistol whip. I don’t think I am, I use simple formulas for lies and I muse over things. I have been in a lot of situations where measured discussions are not possible, but I speak from my heart. I should have been able to see Wulita’s problem.  Here I am talking about bras and I cannot even give a platonic hug.     (I just didn’t know how to, you think this is strange?  I had a friend, been around the block, described being kissed like it was just invented… my guess is:  she did not waste her time with movies.  What was my problem?   I never hugged women, we just peck on the cheeks, but I hugged men! Maybe I would have been better off if I had never hugged anybody period. Then I guess I would wrestle down Wulita when she tried to hug me). I guess Wulita thought I was planning to come out or something. I have long stopped trying to convince other people or myself on the question: “Am I a lesbian or not”?  At the present moment all I know is that rape is different from sex. Sex and love should not be separated and as for me: Let anybody show me love and see if I do not love back. Of course this is now. I truly think that had always been my stand. The only thing I remember about the women’s issue is subscribing to the fist issue of “Self”.

I was educated with the boys and I certainly did not see the need to wear a bra on my flat chest. I know I took “bra burnings “too literal.

Diamond was doing Comp lit and I showed her a diary work based on a list of clients I cleaned house for. She never commented on its marketability which was what I was honestly shooting at. She stumbled on the word “Hon”---I put in referring how the husband of a client whose Opium, I added, I sprinkled myself with as I left the apartment. We talked about a client whose girl friend was Persian. Diamond insisted that it is unlikely in the late 70’s to suspect a Persian girl of having pre-marital sex. We never talked about the subject of a woman leaving soiled underwear to be washed for another woman to signal a hands-off.  The man really did not need to have me go over to his place of work during a busy work day and get me to dust. Any way I was just the maid and I clean when they say clean.  It looked like he owned some kind of company or something. With Diamond, we  had established that Persians were Aryan and rich enough to higher their own domestic from the East.

Diamond covered for me by lying that I went bonkers from studying too hard (none of us did). She took me to see the Statue of Liberty on my leave from the insane asylum        and bought me hot dogs.

I have to pair Diamond with her Persian boy friend and maybe I should have known why Persian girls dare not to engage in hanky panky. He was a fierce troubled man. This has nothing to do with Islam because I had a friend from Oman who was really decidedly different.  He refused to take advantage of me in any way. He visisted me in my room after I was released  from the hospital  and tried to get a smile out of me as he wore my underwear on his head. I insisted “Take me to Oman” He advised “You have a duty to go back home”. He was referring to the telegram from the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture which actually turned out to be an invitation to chase a hominid in the wrong direction. But that is a different story. He knew I was deeply disturbed, but he was irritated at my inaptitude in the kitchen. He actually cooked for me. Gesticulating, like there is nothing to it. I was sort of interested in cooking but I was I hate to admit, a free loader at home. I sincerely hope that I did not allow too many people to pick up my bill when I ate out with friends. It is possible that may have been my habit too.

Wulita, I will pair with my new boy friend. The one that met her approval although she admitted he is not my true love because she had met my old friend Gulu. He was the little boy who magnetized me with his big eyes my first day in our in 5th grade class in a boarding school in Akake. , I could not will myself turning back and again to look It was fated that he came looking for the new girl from home and it turned out to be “Pussy” Me!.   Named because of the song about the pussy willow, we used to sing about back then. He certainly did not have his head up in the air. He struck me as a man with a noble cause, maybe I was thinking of his famous older brother, who actually died in a successful coup.

There definitely was a problem of trust between us. Besides, he already had a girl friend.

He did the hospitable stuff and let me loose on a crowd, with a definite agenda. His only advice was that I should not try too hard to make friends.

He certainly did not seek me out to befriend me; it must be he needed info on what’s going down with the revolution back home. He took me to an Indian restaurant and I felt awful for ordering dessert. He is just a poor student.

He knew me from 5th grade, but he still felt suspicious enough to search my purse.

I soon learned not to ask Ethiopians about their line of work. He was very curt when I asked him about his studies. I knew he was at NYU via Brandeis, and he was doing very well.

I recently googled him, he has patents unraveling DNA. Well, we could have talked about DNA even back then.

We just gravitated away from each other. Gulu was handsome and skinny. Maybe the last time I saw him, one night from the window across the building from the lab where he worked. I looked out and I could clearly see him absorbed in putting on his coat to leave.

I remember, the guys in the Ethiopian center kidded him rather unkindly about something like “Here he is with his heavy coat and it is not even winter”. That night he was putting on his coat and his scarf and ceremoniously patting the paunch he was starting to develop. I thought:  Gulu wants to be fat? I know I made a hero out of him, but there is definitely a reason for his success. He watched his grade even back in 5th grade. I was in his class but my age set was younger, and I plumb refused to look at the test he was supposed to have sneaked out. I used to really be afraid of God. I also knew God did not require me to ace any sort of test.

Diamond’s boy friend, last I heard had headed home at the call of   a revolution brewing. I soon followed him that way to join one I left in the making.

If any one can imagine New York:  two grown women, a studio apartment their crazy boy friends coming and leaving at all hours. To put it very simply not one of us were in the same page. If only anyone can fathom to make a sit-com out of this. He was studying physics.  We all smoked and my boy friend, never a real smoker, abruptly said he will never touch the stuff. I had the strangest feeling that he was not acting using his own mind. He would bring what seemed like a memorized mathematical formula for a relationship and see if it worked? Diamond, it seemed was trying to change her boyfriend, like make him dress nice and stuff. Once he was furious and appeared dressed in rags or something.

Both our men had temper tantrums.  Both flaunted their cruelty. Mine told me a cruel homophobic story and Diamond’s said he punished girls he had taught that were dressed to provoke.   The last time I saw mine, I knew he had been married since we parted and had a child. I asked to see his child’s picture. There was some fixation in his mind that our relationship did not work because we were from different parts of Ethiopia. I think he actually put that one to the test. He took me a lot of places; we drove in his VW Beetle to Penn State. He lived in Hoboken and we would take the Path train.  He did not even try to hide the fact that there were other women in his life. I am certain he felt I was some kind of spy.  He took me to see Telephone. I knew all along he was trying to tell me something. I am impressionable; the movie convinced me that if I hold an alliance to a cause in my heart, I really am a sleeper of sorts. He was very cute and cuddly and he knew it: He was balding, but looked a lot like Martin Luther King II.

One unusual incident was that he found a note I wrote, I have the habit of scribbling my thoughts on pieces of paper, not really anything systematic, but it helps me make sense of things: It must have been like ten things I cannot stand about this guy or something. He took it very bad. We had the strangest arguments. It was important to him that I was no good and he will utter a formulated pronouncement and literally force me into admitting that my opinion on the said subject was the wrong one. One example I always remember is that he would tell me “The white man is your God” and I will say ”Yes, Jesus Christ is white” I remember years later  recounting this interchange to an honorable white man I was  almost literally holding hostage at Kennedy airport. I have no idea how it came up.

I must have been trying to let him know I feel comfortable being seen with white people. It is a whole different story, but this particular  man was neither interested in my “liberation”, my politics or the fact that he had to sit for hours at Kennedy having arrived to meet a plane from Europe before it actually took off from its destination. Why am I telling you this?  Because he reacted badly to the above information, so there must be something in it.  The simple fact is, as far as we Ethiopians are concerned, the Arabs are white. Let the Germans decide the rest. The other thing is, if a person speaks the Truth, I hope I am not inclined to ask “which side of the river were you born in?”   But I hope to cherish   the Truth.

I had told Wulita’s favorite I don’t remember him from HSIU and I know he was offended.  He had an Eritrean friend I knew, who actually made an impression on me when I met him in Asmara. All three of us were in New York and this friend who was a D.J over radio Ethiopia actually said he was a celebrity and women just think they know him. I refuse to believe he is that shallow. He was teaching me a lesson. I remember how once when I first met him and this was in Asmara, he was just back from the U.S., I had made an unkind remark and the way he said it: It must be an American thing “If you say that I am not going to like you” What a delicious way to reprimand. I felt watched over, concerned about. It was unbelievable. When I left Asmara for my second year at HSIU, he gave me a “Black is beautiful” poster He knew Me.! We met back in Addis. Both of us confused, he did call me. My girl but it was too late. I never sat and waited for anyone, I think Franco liked his poster

The story of a fish, always a small fish be it small pond, big pond.

My boyfriend, the one Wulita liked, decided at one point that I was acting on Diamond’s advice and playing hard to get. He was surprised that it was actually working. I am telling you that man would believe in love potions, if someone told him there is a formula in physics for it. Anyway Diamond is kind of like that. I never considered him a catch. But she would tell me she would cook food and have me pretend I cooked it. I am telling you, in any endeavor anyone telling you to pass off that kind of thing is not your friend. How are you ever to know what you can do?  I am polite, but nobody does my cooking, at least without disclaimer.  I did tell Gulu I am getting old. He was curt like:  you are how old you are, what of it?  It was the first time in my life that I felt old. I wanted some sign from him. I may have been trying to hint, I am younger and ipso facto: A match! I am not even sure about him having a girl friend.

The other one calculated the equation and that was the end of our relationship. That was my second year at school and I had already moved to Harlem.

Gulu liked to have an upper hand on information; I almost had to wrestle Gulu on Wulita’s couch once and it was really getting ridiculous about who knew what with him, me and Wulita’s favorite. It was like: Does he knows that I know that he knows. I seriously suggested to Gulu we all sit at a table and face one another. He told me to leave it, satisfied he had the upper hand. His famous brother was Haile Sellasie’s chief of security. It must be genetic.

 

 

That Apartment on 137 St. had a police lock, which alone was enough to terrorize me. I cannot stay out of trouble. I like to sing in the shower and I would sit in the bath belting out “Last Cries of a Dying Terrorist”. I have no idea what Wogene made out of that, she never mentioned it. Sometimes, I wonder what Wogene made of me. We got along fine. We met in the university housing office and decided to look for a place together. Diamond came over and helped us clean the place.  We had a studio with Diamond. This was a two bedroom apartment, but it was a badly kept building. I could hardly get to the mail box; I rented a box at the post office. I forget how many stairs, but we always had to climb stairs.  It was also a long ride to school. The subways had scared me the first time, like being buried alive. Now I was hopping from the local to the express. What truly impressed me about New York was the size of it all. 

 I could see Wogene liked my Ethiopian friends. I am absolutely sure that she could not fathom what they saw in me. She must think Ethiopians are very kind to their own lunatics, they actually socialize with them and they seem to have real things to talk about. We went to the Soapstone’s and cooked. I think my new Ethiopian friends were just curious, I don’t think their opinion of me is far from that of Wogene’s. I don’t know, maybe I expected an Angela Davis. She took me to a dance recital and I went on and on about how the dancer was actually wearing a dress. What do I know about ballet?  I even argued with her about how the spooky man that hangs out in the hallway was oppressed, until I came in one late night and the man looked at me and smiled.  I ran to the nearest door and pounded. A Spanish lady came out and scolded him:   Alejandro!  Something   something   He went away.  

Wogene is no fool and she never thought I had a single sane thought, but I kind of rooted for her fiancé. I think I almost said, if you are impressed with the Soapstones: here is your immigrant. To be fair the Soapstone was a serious hematologist. Well Wogene got married to a West Indian and I moved out. I knew I was welcome to stay and she never said the rental arrangement would cause a problem. I am pretty sure she would have said something. She is careful.

I will pair Wogene, not with her husband since I hardly knew him at all, but with another man, another new friend, an Ethiopian. I met his sisters in 3rd grade and we lived in the same neighborhood.  That man cared for women in a protective way. He was the one concerned about Tourqoise mis-education and mentioned Wulita’s favorite was keeping a girl uninformed. He also rebuked me for not interfering with Wogene’s marriage. Like 

“You must know he just wants a green card! “ The fiance was really sullen and did remark in a threatening way “Don’t you dare mess this up for me”. That was the one and only exchange between us. I was witness at their wedding. She was not mine to give. I know the difference.   Wogene was a catch and had way more than a green card to offer. May be the guy felt he had nothing to offer back.  I would be crazy to feel bad about this.  Wogene had taken a trip to the islands and came back disappointed at the poverty she saw. I don’t think she met the guy at school. Anyway, she must have known what she was getting into. It is like her mother asked her to check with me and that is when the subject of the Japanese boy friend came up.

 I know Wogene’s pair taught at a college, and he advised me to take courses at Columbia. I once looked at stuff he taught with.  It was the same stuff: cultural anthropology.  I told him I wrote a horrible paper and the professor said “What are you trying to say?!” or something.  He said he would like to see it. I was too embarrassed to show it to him.  

Actually, then and now I have found that what people spend good time and money to learn seldom comes up in real conversation. I have found myself feeling like a show off or looking to steal someone else’s idea.

I know I often rub people the wrong way, this one had a thing about a comment he must have thought I was tooting my horn. He took us to a jazz club in Harlem and pointedly asked Wogene if I had yet told her who my father was? He advised me to read Marx, in the original. He did not have to spell it that he knew I was distributing the rag.

He actually became the object of my own highly misguided affection about a couple of years late. My father is actually of very humble origins compared to his uncle, a cabinet minister with a child from a bonafide Ethiopian princess. I have never pretended that once you manage to get a college education, you are automatically out of what they call the category of the “oppressed” and we both were. I was not willing to sit pretending that I was oppressed by whomever for whatever reason. That is really the game of my Eritrean classmates. This guy was not one, but he sure thought it.

Actually, my dilemma was I had not kept pace with the so called “mass movement”. I liked to think I can preserve my own outlook and obey the law of the land. I do swear I was not thinking of Martha as I sang. To my mind she remains the wonderful, trusting person she was. There is one thing she taught me and that is a job is a job. Knowing this, if one keeps trying, she/ he will discover his/ her strength. To sum up there is nearly no excuse for not putting up one’s best effort. This is strange, the lesson comes from both of us trying to pry open a door someone has bolted to a sauna (someone said) inside a tukul in a compound of a house me and another friend had rented at Nekempte during the Ethiopian University service. Martha was in Nekempte with a group from the medical school. I and my friend were teaching in the high school. The door would not budge. My first reaction: Go and find some man.  Well, she managed to open what seemed like an impossible door.  I must have sensed that she could see I was not trying hard enough. That was the lesson. A woman is tough.

The lesson I had already taken for granted is that we were breaking and entering. We exchanged watches, I insisted “So we will be sure to see each other again”.  She never lived to take back her watch and it kind of went the way of the Topaz ring.  

Well here comes the detrimental paradigm Marx,  Is there just two kinds of people  fighting for the same thing or are there more people out there  who don’t even sense  a contradiction? Oh man that I admire greatly I am happy you kicked Malthus to the curb. Why were you so excited about Darwin, he simply reiterated what Malthus said? I know it makes for good math to divide people into the haves and have-nots. There is a host of people who don’t dwell on what they personally have or what others do or do not. I was taught you emphasized the virtuous man and how he was shortchanged because society was unjust. Remember this is from a woman, who in obedience to the law of the land lived to don a communist uniform while a hero of the mass movement, one Martha barely made it to age 21. Well there was no class struggle between us, we both liked cheese cake. She said she wrote a letter to the queen and received a reply to prove it. Martha remains my hero, because she never put me in a position that she had to do my thinking for me and Marx does.

Well I had to read Marx; it was actually part of my coursework. He actually believes the wheels of history turn in farms and factories and these wheels are driven by the energy of the contradictions of elements that are mortally opposed to one another. If enough of these elements are organized they can arise against their oppressors. According to Marx that is the science

A terrorist, and, I am told Marx does not approve of this is the element which tries to shift the energy of this contradiction. Well science has to also address terrorists. Most are fat cats like Marx who are trying to shift the balance of the wheels of history just like Marx did with his pen. Where does it get us to say history moves according to its own laws and then conclude that we have to organize to make sure it does?  I don’t remember the words to dying terrorist but I hope it is the same as St Stephen’s. Since he is a martyr for Christianity, Terrorists must be the martyrs of Marxism. 

I think I know why Marx liked Darwin; he helped convince him that he is not simply the Sheriff of Nottingham’s kid brother pretending to be Robin Hood. Show me a theory about slavery written by an actual slave and then we will talk.

If he was serious, he should have started a religion to die thinking of.  Maybe one that worshiped the idea of the absence of money, or one that made a god of it. In the world as we know it, people do grasp the fact that if you have to die for something, it better be worth going to heaven for.

Well these are my thoughts here and now, but certainly not crystallized then when I moved in with my friend and comrade Weini (Grape-Eritrean name) to Brooklyn Heights. That was the practical part of my education about the then “mass movement” here. Gulu might have liked me to be active with the Ethiopians. During my interview, I insisted that a lot of children were being slaughtered and put in harms way because someone was simply put they were “brainwashed”. I did not use that term. Although very familiar and often used, it is always in the context of being “Americanized”.  I just said, they were not being protected. I met stiff opposition about how the kids have actually discovered a party to die for. Actually, at that point there was a battle between Anglophone and francophone battling it out with the actual blood of kids fully armed while Mengistu was watching from the shadows. As I left Ethiopia, Anglophone was in its death bed and Francophone was beating a retreat. A massive display of an army fully dressed with Kalashnikovs from the windows of an apartment where some of the Francophone used to hangout remained etched in my mind and was re-awakened when I saw The Lion King. It is not just Weini that contributed to my education, but also two Eritrean girls - real long time friends. They were Pearl and Sapphire. Pearl was my high school buddy, not my classmate. We had an almost two girl Y- teen club. I love my Eritrean friends from high school.  My class mates, their favorite name for me was “nappy hair” They had to get back at me with something, they don’t know any other kind of Abyssnian. It was almost like they suspected the Oromo had tails. I know once they tricked me into a bare faced lie. It was strange; I developed the habit of going over every word I uttered during the day with the utmost remorse right before I fell asleep. There was no competition; the educational experience was that it made school work so easy to the point of making it boring. I always looked back to the school I left in Dire Dawa, thought of the boy I used to sneak a look at and everybody knew. To reading “Wuthering Heights” and  our beautiful library and getting a present from the Russian Embassy for naming Valentina Terechkova, to the  Peace Corps math teacher who explained the number line and was getting me through my fear of math.. A word about my education in math: I was left wondering on and about an infinite number line. By the time I reached college, I knew calculus was not for me. Anyway, you only needed it for med-school. I had decided by then that eternity was way too long. I was interested in this life and planning to get hitched soon.  I used to nonchalantly remark that limits are my limit. If you are lucky to live, you learn. There is really an end to infinity and to my surprise they say that is the limit.   I had memories of the school election when I thought I must have been the only one who voted for the nerd and a teacher we called s Serious who just said about whom?  “ I came down from the mountains –to educate the peasants”, and  playing volleyball and tossing  the sling ball and the  my gardening club  where the only thing that grew  on my plot was a single pepper bush, while everyone else harvested tomatoes we ate right from the vine. All these happened in just one half of eighth grade.

What luck!  Asmara would really have been a total lose if it wasn’t for one Nura.

 

Anyway, I do digress, I met pearl, must have been at Columbia university. I also went to see her at a place she worked at. She brought me a latte. She was surprised I remembered that she once told me she wanted to study insurance. She did not say what became of it.  She trusted enough to take me to the Eritrean place – political meeting place, kind of the Ethiopian counterpart. I think because, I kind of never say goodbye.  The Ethiopian place was multi ethnic, I still have not heard of any one but an Eritrean joining the Eritrean revolution.  I think it was just once that I went there. I had seen enough at the other meetings. I would not want to listen to what they had to say about anything. I had already asked whether Eritrea will manage on its own while I was still in high school and got a resounding yes!  There was a classmate who actually took my question seriously. I thought I have some nerve, but he showed me an actual map and estimate of natural resources. I was totally convinced there is a serious plan.   They had lots of minerals. I remember thinking Teff might be a problem.  It was a mutually respectful interchange; I really wished it had been between him and me to arrange matters. So I was hoping for the victory.

Anyway, Eritrea was not really a real focus point for me, except that they were the representative African revolutionaries where I went and I had to deal with that.  Forgive me for blaming a nation on one loudmouth but in such a solemn meeting one of them expressed the view that the steel drums were tacky and the theory of three worlds was being beaten to the pulp. I was offended. I take my religion too seriously. Any way, the focus was Tirana, we even had a cat named so. And one foolish Ethiopian (me) and another foolish Albanian met representatives from their respective countries at one of these meetings. We both said it’s my first time. I think I expected to see a halo. Now that I think of it I hope he was not looking for horns He might have been. Almost all this meetings were in the Columbia campus.

Pearl and I talked about smoking; she said she picked it up after quitting without being aware at all during one of their meetings. That, I thought, was strange. It kind of made me feel there must be some earth shattering discussions which go on that transport you to some kind of parallel universe, maybe that is why I never went back. I am sure it would have been just improper.  I represented the enemy and I was not going to make no bones about it. We all three were riding the train to or from a meeting must be and Pearl told Weini she always remembers me baking cookies, I still don’t know why I felt embarrassed. I only remember her talking for very long periods and being scared that she would catch that I never heard anything she said. It was a dangerous friendship. Pearl is O.K., but I designed and my sister helped me sow aprons for our club. A lady told Pearl and I she liked them and Pearl right out there told her that she made them. She never made anything! She just talks. 

Of course I have to match Pearl with Sol, another Eritrean friend. He is a free spirit.  He is hated by all revolutionaries and he was a devoted pothead. I met him first in Wollega and Martha was there. He had a thing with her and I think that is why I thought I should take him seriously. Come to think of it that is also why I still think it is O.K. to smoke stubs, Martha used to do it. My role model is a hippy terrorist? I also had another friend who spoke volumes of him, so when I met him back here; I said “Let me check this guy out”

Well I checked and confirmed. Too much pot can drive you nuts. At least that is the story I heard.

To be honest about the whole thing I just was not his type of woman, he was really doing O.K. then. It even occurred to me that he may not be even interested in one. Like I am sitting here writing this, as for me my life has now some kind of meaning, I am absolutely sure Sol has experienced a fulfillment of his wishes, answered his own questions, and travelled in the dimension of his dreams. Whatever they said may be true it is not at all far from what eventually may be my own fate.

Sol worked in a bar, had a nice car and a done up basement. If you see that from faraway Ghimbi: There is the American dream.

My other friend Sapphire, I also first met in Wollega, She was actually my student. She keeps telling me I am her role model. The girl has never smoked in her life. So is she modeling herself after me or just competing with me. Well God decided to give me a daughter who without even admitting it is on the direct track of committing each and every mistake I ever made in my life and some more.  But I am an old mother. I cannot make my daughter answer to my own Stone Age values. Even my own mother had me confused. Cultural values were changing so fast, she kept changing the rules on me. Sapphire and Pearl are cousins, but I met those years apart. How does this little girl, Sapphire ,  be almost witness to the death of two of the better known couples of the Ethiopian revolution?  Proud to call them my friends “Oh she died of constipation, oh, him he was shot by a lunatic, nothing to do with a battle” Thus rested in my memory the loss of two unlikely lovers. What is it Marx?  It must be greed. Their song used to be “The harder they come --- the harder they fall----“We all had such good times, until the so called sought after revolution blew everything to smithereens.   It was told to me with the proper decorum, I still feel shame at calmly resuming eating the food in front of me.  You know for all his high faulting title “Secretary of the Party” I am almost sure my friend who was shot by the lunatic would have chosen Sol’s fate. I am ashamed to add that what Martha called cheese cake is really not.  I had to come here to find that out.   

 

I had planned to couple Weini with Gulu. But there is a generic similarity between Gulu and Sapphire. Both appear to have been political, most especially Sapphire.  I have never considered politics an extra curricular hobby.  The kind that was going on in Ethiopia was kind of a fight to the finish.   The way it was being practiced here is different and markedly by us foreigners.  It is almost like you could come to America and open a shop called the something liberation front. Of course, you could diversify your portfolio with a degree from Brandeis and so forth.  Sapphire headed from the fighting fields of wherever to Stony Brook. 

 I stuck with the programme. I was educated by the peasants of Ethiopia and I have served, thanks to a good man who negotiated my return. My dilly dally with communism could have cost me my present peace of mind. Some one said about the papers I travelled back home with “Like a criminal?” This is years later. My whole clan met me at the airport and when I tried to leave again I had to prove I had the last name of an Amhara and a friend. 

 Nura is as internationalist as any. All she said was “We are better off alone”. In the kind of the Ethiopian ethnic mix, on top of feudalism, this world is a dog eat dog world and you can easily lose site of a common purpose. I see good things in the Eritrean independence.

 Weini is a Jewish girl, her father  was with the UN.  I met her mother  who   was something important at Cornell. I distinctly felt Weini was just doing this revolution bit to get back at her mom. I hope she is in a three piece suit somewhere running a corporation or something. I was Elizabeth, my underground name, I think she had long figured the whole think was a put on so she did not mind letting her real name slip. Maybe I will google her, maybe she became an accomplished artist. Her Mom had a drawing she told me  Weini  made. I know she was worried we maybe planning to be married or something. Weini was for me a complimentary soul.  I liked the way she was teasing about me and others and she would take my opinions seriously. She would take time to explain things. We had stuff to talk about. There was a South American girl, who was impatient with my gossipy talk. What else was there to talk about anyway? She actually gave me something to read aloud while she was cooking and she was offended I named the wrong country as hers. Weini   felt I needed to know things, like she made me diet.  I know she may have been reprimanded by the comrades about that.

I know one time Weini wanted me to see the July 4th fireworks and she just did not show up at our appointed place.  She really wanted me to experience stuff. Well, the South American was married to Weini’s ex-boyfriend and I was rooming with Weini then and I would show up a lot. There was some commune like feeling to the whole thing.

I remember telling them about taphonomy.  We had all missed the entire message and I was not paying attention to my studies anyway and cultural anthropology was so complicated, I had no idea who was saying what. I had never read such books before, just stories really, not good ones at that.    She unsuccessfully tried to teach me to drive.  She told me to stop baking. That is when the dieting started. I made some beef stock kind of soup with veggies and she turned it into matzoh ball soup the next day.  

I left for the summer and did not come back and I really regretted missing her friendship. She had sent me a letter with a recipe for stuffed grape leaves.  When I returned to New York a year and a half letter, I went straight to her house. We were friends on better terms now, because I had my own place.

Weini and Wogene’s match were the two people I wanted to see again. Diamond had graduated and was “just hanging around” as she said. Her boy friend had left.  My boss at Minetta told me he knows a lawyer, I did not have the right visa to “hang around”. But I chose to follow a different set of rules.  I was really being practical. To travel here I had to fill out a form at the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa.  One of the questions was: Are you a communist?  I smiled because by then Ethiopia has declared itself communist. So it was one of those N/A questions. Now that I had sort of joined a communist party, the only way it is going to add up is if I am back in a communist land. Of course there is nothing a communist hates more than a different kind of communist.  I was surprised that an American communist party was officially represented when Mengistu was elected president. How do these things work?

Wulita’s favorite had married and had a baby. I met someone who said that he (the favorite) claimed he had a tape that proves I am a spy.  He used to tape me without me knowing it. .

 After I got back, I stopped taking Navane, I felt better. I don’t think I knew I was not supposed to stop. I would not have. I have also found out that you still relapse under medication. 

This was a long stretch. Remember, I do go to classes and also clean apartments and sometimes went to the library, kind of rarely really.

When I was hospitalized in Seattle, in serious crisis, I kept thinking of a ghetto I chanced into (gotten off the wrong stop). I withdrew in shock because all the people were white. In my delirium, I was thinking of that ghetto: but I kept saying “I have seen Albania”. There was some loose connection.

I also kept seeing a woman whose daughter’s husband I cheated with. (That was really not voluntary or in any way scheming, but it still troubled me deeply).

Well I was happily recovered and  for the first time in my life I had my own place and one morning I woke up with a vision of a burden under a cross and I know Jesus found me or I found him, it is really kind of the same.

I took a Yoga class and a drawing class over the summer. I continued attending Yoga sessions. I was happy and I could see even the Soapstones really warmed to me. I spent weekends at their new place in New Jersey. I also hunted down Wogene’s pair and had an affair that ended the next morning. When I started going into the mania, he was the one in my mind. I just got on the train and started looking for his place and soon found out I did not have his key, an appointment, I am not marrying him etc… craziness has arrived.

 Before all this, I apologized to Weini about my conversion; I actually told her I was converted by a guy that worked at the dental school, which was partly true. She thought he may be a love interest and asked. I said no. And I added that the revolution is still important to me. See we never really talked about what the revolution is, what we believed in or what we were fighting for, as far as I know most of it was really hush, hush,. Once I expressed my own opinion on The Deer Hunter, we were having coffee, some place and one somebody insisted oh yes that was in The Worker’s advocate. Well just last week I happened to read about the exploits of Hardial Baines.  I find out who he is thirty years later. He was a fascinating man. We all did not need to follow him around sharing in his personal experiment with how to organize. It has been already done to a tee time and time again over the Marxist banner, and it has repeatedly fallen off its mark.

 

I did have school friends besides Wulita,.  Those were Walta and Wodere (my measure).

Walta was an Irish girl. She probably was the sole real person I was around through the whole period. She knows more about me than I care to admit. The only real man I met then was Kofi and she is going to be paired with him.

Well truly Wulita is my favorite name; it was given to me by an aunt of sorts. But walta is part of a house; it is the window through an Abyssinian tukul through which you can see the sun. If you call a person Walta, it means that person is almost the center of your universe.

Such is my gratitude to Walta, I left simply unexpressed.  But then, she was just one of my new friends. Friendship does last, if you live. She is actually the silver which turned into gold. I met her mother. She referred to her father as a Leperchaun.  We were doing dissection and I wiped her nose for her, she was only worried the other natives may misunderstand. We shared my bed during the comps. I think we were both wrong about the comps. If you have to worry and study for them that hard, you might as well forget about it. I have seen Wulita sort of get up one morning and almost declare “I might as well type up my theses and leave town” and calmly sit at the type writer. Walta considered it a favor that she was staying with me. You would have to see my room to find out who was being paid a favor.

The comps did not go well for either of us. I had to do cultural over. She was very concerned about her mother and I know she bears a feeling of gratitude for the hard work that her mother had to do while raising her. Maybe that is the proletarian culture the comrades were talking about.  I never gave it a second’s thought. She was just a woman who actually got where she is through hard work. Proletarian! Walta has first hand contact with the struggle of the generation.

The headline item that year was the IRA hunger strike. She said she was going to some church uptown for a big event. What any Marxist will tell you is that you have to show support for anyone’s just struggle. So, in part from this new found faith coupled with the Ethiopian custom of attending funerals. I declared.” Of course I will be there.” I know she said there is no need. She might have almost there “It is not just done”. But me, I know I was adamant: If there is anything that needs our support, I have never heard of anything more. I did go and I expected to see a demonstration or something.  It was very quiet and dignified. I was thinking I will meet up with her there. It was a big hotel and kind of up scale. I asked one man whether he would know where people are. He said “Ask a priest, they are the ones who are running this thing”.

 

I talked to Weini and friends about the hunger strike. I am sure they had no idea what the party line was.  I think my experience at the hotel is what gave me the courage to profess my faith with the addendum of the importance of the revolution. Just look at what Irish priests are doing.

Wodere, a girl from Harvard was headed for greater things; she remains my friend to this day. How lucky can an Ethiopian woman get? She had a dinner for me and my Omani friend at her place in Hoboken.

Well Wodere, like him, thought I should go tackle the fossils at home. 

Around the first time I befriended Wodere, I was told I had a desk at the department. That was really a lost opportunity. I saw people doing electrophoresis once I returned home, it might have helped. I considered myself good in microbiology lab.  I was fascinated by the fact that the air all around us is enveloped with life. Simple sanitation starts from simple acts like covering a container. You could make sauerkraut with salt and water and better still anaphylactic shock is deadly. We had superb training from a group from Tel Aviv.  Well they were from Israel and Jesus is a Jew: This, with a smile to Solomon.  I think I stayed away because someone got alarmed that I lost Eric Delson’s theses. I just left it in the drawer. I don’t remember if they found it. We took an electron microscopy   course at the dental school with Wodere together and she knew I did not tell the difference between a human and a monkey tooth.  She is a serious scholar and knew her business. We exchanged letters a few times. I had trouble starting my dissertation and she was very perceptive. She sent me a letter that read “Just look at the skull and start writing what you see… It is big   … “It was as if she put her hand on top of mine and willed me to start writing. Of course then I had the lost skulls of Weidenreich and the Zinjanthropus Monograph. As well as the very much alive Timothy D. White. 

Back in New York, I had withdrawn from the anatomy class. I had no idea which way to go by that time; I was so numbed with Navane. To add to my troubles, the embassy would not give me a passport. So, in April 1982, I arrived back in Addis Ababa after five years, with a laissez passez, an MA in anthropology and a box full of hominid casts. 

I was once in a delirium and decided to rest by the sidewalk near a mail-box. I had the distinct sensation that the mailbox did not want me around. I also knew that it had nothing against me. It was just a mail-box with its own issues. It cannot afford to have me sit near it. I got up exclaiming. Just my luck! I had to come and sit by a mail-box with a problem. We still drive by that mail-box and the feeling was real. All the men I came across those years right now remind me of the mail-box. The mail-box  with a problem.

 CONCLUSION

I know I gossiped on and on, but what was it I sought.  I used to say I would like to go study something abroad. I don’t care if it is the art of arranging flowers in Japan. In fact Japan would have been my destination of choice. I had a high school friend who had a pen-pal who sent her post cards of Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms and stuff.

My father had visited and I have always wanted to do everything he did.

May be a few words about my actual course of study I will put in here. I have decided that people should really strive to study that they find hard. It is just an idea. If something is explained to you and you pore over it and it still does not make sense, then maybe there is a basic flaw in the explanation. If one considers himself bad in math maybe that is just what he should train himself in and will arrive at a breakthrough for everyone. At least that would be a course for higher education. As for me: The first question I was asked was about the monkeys at Andalee and Issie, I was asked as if what I say matters. But I still don’t have much to say about them but I often think of them.

The lectures were over my head, I read stories with ease, some even good ones. If you give me “towards a heurmeunitcs of quantum gravity” I am that reviewer that let that one pass. In the past my mind completely shuts up.  I did biology because, by chance, it does not have those kinds of linguistic trappings. I was really not grade oriented, for some reason I wrestled about some grade with an NYU professor.  If I was at HSIU then, I am telling you I would definitely flunk. I had stopped doing homework or studying in Asmara. I think I had next to the highest GPA in the school when I graduated. Who needs to study? They knew what they were getting, my GPA was just over 2.4 and I got up and walked to take the GRE, I don’t remember what I got. I did not find cultural systematic I liked archaeology better. Physical was easy, except one exam where I was sure I got every question wrong. There were some exchanges   a moslem girl in cultural class defending the use of washing up (tissue paper culture?) and me in physical claiming sickle cell is actually advantageous. A girl was describing to me the direction of gene flow in the Awash hybrid zone. We were walking to anatomy class and even then it made sense. That girl is on the faculty now.  Two things I am proud of in my academic career is an exam answer for a HSIU ecology class where we were allowed to plan a study of a locality and I let my imagination go. It was just an exam question. I somehow feel it evolved into the Biosphere project. Another one I am proud of is a paper I wrote at NYU. Another project, the method not even capture and release crude, but the theory was Darwin’s female choice. Wogene saw it and she commented that I spelled choice with an s. I still sometimes do. The best book I read is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some scoffed when I told them it appears in every course, I was actually trying to start a conversation about the paradigm in Berkely. 

Georgetown does not even teach physical anthropology, but The Appearance of Man is freshman fare. I know a little bit of physical anthropology. The hunt for hominids is sensational.  However, Teilhard de Char din’s scheme from the 50s remains intact.   The Phenomenon of Man is an alternative, maybe mystical theory of evolution. It is not creationism.  

I think we need more theories competing against the selection model. 

 

I have seen an author criticizing selection, spend a good amount of words confessing he is not a creationist. Selection is only easy to swallow if you think you are on top of the game. If competition is truly the vital game of nature, evolution would be roughly equal to extinction and we know the simpler organisms still thrive.

Are we searching for new evidence? 

 Augusto Azarolli once challenged my assertion of the impossibility of an European Australopithecine. I now see it will not prove much. Maybe Jon Kalb’s fictional New World hominid will be a reality. Even then it will all have to fit in the same scheme.

Are we looking for new species? 

I have not heard the word allometry in connection to Homo floresiensis.  Everyone is so hung up on her “small” brain they seem to forget the person is 3 ft. tall. If that person had a brain the size of Bodo, it would have to be a Martian.

I once heard a lecture where a student remarked that cladism will provide us with the periodic table of nature. I wonder if palaeo anthropology is a science of adventure or a game of spore.