On seeing & remembering
As my ancestors would say in Tigrigna:
ዓሻ ዝተኸሎስ ለባም ነይነቕሎ (A tree planted by a fool is not uprooted by a wise person).
There is a temptation, when surveying the current state of the world, to locate a single moment of origin. A single decision, a single election, a single man, whose removal would in principle allow a return to what came before. This temptation is understandable. It is also, the old saying tells us, a mistake.
There is a Tigrigna joke my people tell.
A child comes home from school and asks his father: is it true that we came from apes? The father thinks for a moment and says, I don’t really care where we came from. I am more concerned about where we are headed.
I have spent years watching war films. Not for entertainment, exactly, though they are entertaining. I watch them the way some people read history, to understand how catastrophe arrives, and more specifically, to understand the people who saw it coming versus the people who didn’t notice until it was too late. Downton Abbey, where a family discusses the approaching war over dinner as though it is a weather system that will pass. Winds of War, where Herman Wouk traces the slow accumulation of the inevitable through the eyes of one American family moving through Europe in the late 1930s. The New Look, about Dior and Chanel navigating occupation and liberation and the strange moral compromises that survival requires.
One day when my son was around four, he curiously asked me about an event happening during the upcoming weekend. Neither of us remembers what it was about. Perhaps because I was preoccupied by something, I told him we will find out when we get there. His response stopped me in my tracks and has been the subject of numerous conversations between us ever since:
Dada! You don’t go to the future. The future comes to you.
This story occurred circa mid-September 1991, four months after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia. My college education at Addis Ababa University was interrupted in my second semester of freshman year and I was back in Eritrea with an uncertain future.
It had been two weeks since my friend Tesfom and I arrived at Maria Tselam (ማርያ ጸላም) as middle school teachers at Asmat Boarding School as part of a national service that had yet to be declared officially. We met in high school a couple of years earlier. I knew Tesfom very well as he was a top student and organizer of all things fun in high school and our freshman year at Addis Ababa University the year before. I doubt he knew much about me other than my existence. I mostly kept to myself and did not participate in the soccer games that bound together most of our class.
Today is the 50th birthday1 of my name. It was the exact midpoint of my life in my mother’s womb.
A few weeks earlier, my parents traveled to Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) for vacation and business. My mom (mama) returned home to Asmara (then part of Ethiopia) two weeks earlier than planned to attend the funeral of a close relative. But my dad (baba), who worked as an independent accountant, stayed behind for two more weeks to file the financial statements of one of his long-time clients. The day before his travel, he sent a telegram to another of his clients in Asmara. He does not remember the exact wording now, but it was terse and said something to the effect, “I am done with the business. I will arrive tomorrow”.