Read an Excerpt
I was born in the year of the paradox, in the labyrinthine city of Jijiga. After a three-year absence, the rains had come, swelling the rivers and streams. The clay desert, as dry as the skin of a drum, became green once more. Queen Menen, wife of King Haile Selassie, lay dying. She was as reluctant to leave this world as I was to leave the womb.
My father sent for the neighbour, a nun who also practised as a midwife, to assist my mother in this difficult birth. Queen Menen, far off in her palace, sent for fortune-tellers and Deviltamers-modern medicine was failing to cure her. In our small home, lost somewhere in the tangled paths of domestic Jijiga, the midwife pronounced her certainty that there was not one child, but two—with golden crowns on their heads—fighting against their own birth. This nun could interpret the language of the unborn and the dreams of the dead, and had heard the twins whisper their belief that they had been delivered to the wrong universe.
The nun needed help. She asked for the assistance of another midwife, Mrs. Tsege Kebede, who was found at a local bar celebrating the deliveries of six children just the day before. Tsege was already quite drunk when she walked in, and bragged about her legendary success in delivering the unexpected. Tsege had once helped a passing angel, caught between the two worlds, with the agony of childbirth, successfully delivering her young with wings intact.
Now, as the two women bickered over how to convince the twins to be born, how to assure them that they had, indeed, been sent to the right universe and that, though this world might be tarnished, violent and rife with pestilence, it was nothing one couldn't get used to, in time, my father stubbed out his last cigarette and came indoors to announce the dawn of a new day. As he pronounced his sentence, I slipped into this strange bickering world that smelt of incense and ood.
"The sun has risen," my father said. I was named for his words: Nega.
With sunrise the farmers' market on the other side of the city came alive. Somali women balanced fragile pots of milk and butter on the crowns of their heads-each vase a necessary and natural extension of the bearer, as if a second head had appeared over each woman at dawn. On their backs they carried sacks of grain to sell at the market. The Somali men led caravans of camels into the city, loaded with sacks of sorghum, corn or charcoal. Some camels bore stacks of firewood that reached far into the sky-each camel dragged forward savagely by a rope tied to its upper lip, splitting it in two.
In our home, my mother's eyes reflected the two bickering midwives as they peered down at my emerging head and fell strangely silent. Shaking their heads in disappointment, they told my mother that her new son had a head big enough to give the illusion of twins. They told her that her son would lead the life of a rebel, as he had refused to be born wearing his golden crown. Tsege went back to the tavern to have another drink. The nun went home to her morning prayers. Looking back, I am relieved that my father came in when he did. Had it not been for his announcement of dawn, the two disappointed midwives might have convinced my exhausted mother to name me for the size of my head.
Meanwhile, somewhere far away, the Devil-tamer pronounced his cure for Queen Menen: the sacrifice of the young. "Candidates must be free of any form of body piercing; they must have no wounds or scars that would compromise the quality of the blood," he announced. Countless messengers were dispatched from the palace to scour the countryside looking for children who had neither bruises nor scars.
In 1958, the year of the paradox, I was born in Ethiopia, in a hot and dusty city called Jijiga, which destroyed its young.
Jijiga is built on a vast, unmitigated plain, with no greenery in sight except for the occasional cactus bush used as shelter by the wandering hyena, and the inevitable sacred tree in every compound. The city is surrounded by rocky mountains on all sides save the north, which is open as far as the eye can see. The northern horizon is curtailed only by the sun's mirages and the eternal dusty winds of the dry season. Jijiga is in an arid part of Ethiopia, a dry, sandless desert where even the smallest wind creates devilswhirlwinds of dust that rise high into the heavens and are visible from miles away.
By day we children chased wind devils, poking holes in their bellies with knives. By night we, huddled in bed, remembering our mothers' warning to tell all strangers that our ears were pierced so that we would not be snatched up and sacrificed for the ever-dying Queen. We could hear the wild howls of hyenas from the desolate mountains and knew that any cow or donkey left outside the gates of the compounds would spend its night in the hyena's belly.
There is a story about the donkey and the hyena called "The Donkey Who Sinned."
The other animals looked at the leopard, whose skill at hunting they all admired, and protested:
"No, no, that is not a sin! In fact, if you hadn't eaten that goat, God would have been angry with you."
The hyena then spoke:
"Well, I think I am the sinner. I once snuck into a village, caught a chicken by surprise, and ate it all at once."
"No, no," the animals protested, "that isn't a sin. God would have liked it if you ate two of them."
Then the donkey spoke:
"Once, when my master was driving me along a trail, he met a friend and stopped to talk. While they were talking, I went to the edge of the trail and nibbled at a few blades of grass."
The other animals looked at the donkey, whom no one feared or admired. After a moment of silence, they shook their heads sadly and said:
"That is a sin! A very terrible sin! You are the cause of all our misery!"
And so the lion, the leopard and the hyena jumped on the donkey, cut him up into pieces and devoured him.
We children lived like the donkey, careful not to wander off the beaten trail and end up in the hyena's belly.
Jijiga is a divided city-by common, though unspoken, consent. The northern half is inhabited by Christians, mostly Amharas, and the southern by Muslims, mainly Somalis.
The Somali man is easy to identify: he is almost always dressed in a sherit, a long multicoloured garment stitched like a sack, which is tied about the waist, hanging loose at the bottom. Most carry a cane in one hand, and a piece of twig in their mouth, with which they brush their teeth if they happen to have nothing better to do. The nomads who venture into town may wear huge daggers at their waists. They are usually barefoot, though they may carry sandals to wear in town balanced carefully over the shoulder, hanging from the end of their canes.
Somali part of town that sold kitchen supplies: sugar, cooking oil, flour, pots and pans, readymade clothes, fragrances and the like. When Mustafa was in need of money, he would send me, note in hand, to his brother. I never knew what was written on the note, as it was scribbled in Arabic, but knew that my arrival signalled terrible news to Mustafa's brother. He would grumble the moment I walked in, but usually gave me some money in an envelope to deliver to Mustafa. Good news to Mustafa meant a quarter to me.
Sometimes his brother would refuse to send any money to Mustafa, which signalled sibling warfare. Mustafa had various options in his arsenal, but his favoured weapon was the mansion the two of them had inherited from their parents. A huge building with many rooms on its two floors, it was fenced in by stone walls and located in a lively part of downtown. Mustafa owned the whole ground floor, which he rented out to a renowned contraband smuggler, who I suspected was Mustafa's accomplice in his various schemes. The upper half of the house was the residence of Mustafa's brother and his family.
The day after he had been snubbed by his brother, Mustafa would dispatch a team of masons, carpenters and hauliers to his house before the break of dawn, with orders to disassemble each room, brick by brick, stone by stone, so that it could be moved and readily reassembled for an unnamed purchaser. But, before the demolition started, he would alert his brother to the sale, advising him to prop up his rooms and avoid expensive losses. His brother had never been able to buy Mustafa out, because no matter what price Mustafa set there was always someone, somewhere, who doubled his brother's bid. Building materials were not expensive in Jijiga, and nobody knew who would pay such an insane price for something so worthless, but in the end a settlement was always reached in which Mustafa got some money in return for promising not to sell the building for another few months.
A few years passed before this perpetual circus finally folded tent. Dad intervened: Mustafa was cajoled into selling his half of the property to his beloved brother, and was forced to concentrate his resources on original schemes.
Property tax is one of the most unpredictable expenses in the life of an Ethiopian landowner. No one knows for sure what the rate will be and when, if ever, someone will be dispatched to collect it. Some people live and die without ever hearing from the taxman, while others may get a surprise call decades after they register their land.
The tax collector in Jijiga was a rather eccentric man, about the same height as Mustafa but much older. He wore an eye patch and carried a huge leather bag and a cane with a retractable knife. As he walked from door to door, collecting taxes, he was escorted by a man in uniform who carried a rifle. He was said to be a wealthy man, with money buried in various places in his backyard. The money had been wrapped in antelope skin, sanctified by three sorcerers, two medicine men and a renowned curser-a treatment that would render completely blind anyone who tried to open the bag, except the taxman. This, however, did not deter some desperate souls from attempting to share in the loot. In fact, not a single month passed without someone perforating the dark soil in his backyard under the cover of darkness. In the morning light, it looked as if the gods had turned up his backyard with a diabolical ferocity.
Mustafa did not dig in the taxman's backyard. He merely tried to look like him and act like him. He bought himself an eye patch and clothes that might have come from the taxman's own wardrobe, and sprinkled some wet ash on his hair to close the age gap. He hired himself an escort, whom he dressed like the taxman's guard, and armed him with a borrowed rifle. He then dispatched two respected burglars to buy him old tax receipts, if they could, or retrieve them from their hiding places, if they could not. The landowners on the new taxman's list were, like most Ethiopians, illiterate. They would only look for the familiar insignias on the receipts, not the words that were written on them.
Ms. Yetaferu was, in many ways, a sad foil for Mustafa. She was somewhat deficient in her sense of humour, quite predictable in her manner, and she walked about with a nervous and suspicious look on her face, as though the world around her was conspiring to pull the ground out from under her feet. She was no relation to us, nor had anyone in town ever come to visit her, and yet she had been around for as long as I could remember. Mother gave her shelter because she and Ms. Yetaferu happened to be from the same home town.
Ms. Yetaferu was an Orthodox Christian, like us. She believed in the sanctity of the Orthodox Christian Church, and in its superiority over all the other churches that had followed in its footsteps. But most of all, she believed in the saints and their ability to mediate or intervene on behalf of parishioners who found themselves at odds with Christ. If one needed any kind of help, she was convinced, one could always appeal directly to the saint-for rains, say, or a good harvestand the saint would deliver, unbeknownst to Christ. After all, there were far too many saints for Christ to keep track of.
Like us, she also worshipped the Adbar-the traditional sacred tree of the family. The huge tree rooted in our front yard was like no other tree in the compound: its roots needed frequent watering, and incense and ood needed to be burned under its huge trunk. She made sacrifices before the Adbar at the beginning of each month, and knew to make only small requests of the Adbar, for the sake of expediency.
What annoyed Dad most was how she worshipped, with equal fervour, the spirits of her ancestors. The old woman burned incense and ood behind her door and invited the spirits to sneak in, camouflaged by the smoke. Her Wukabi, or personal spirits, required three days of uninterrupted blessing each month and endless festivities. So Dad tried to get rid of her by wedding her to a solo barroom entertainer and then chasing him out of town, with his new wife and his violin in tow. It didn't work. What Dad failed to understand was that the woman was married already, to her Wukabi.
Ms. Yetaferu never worked a day in her lifethough, unlike Mustafa, it wasn't because she was lazy or loathed work. Everyone knew that she was the first to get out of bed in the morning; that she was the one who prepared the household's first of three coffee ceremonies each day, waking the neighbours and inviting them to join her; that she read each individual's daily fortune from the dregs in the mugs, before sending them off to work; and that she never went to bed before the hyenas had reclaimed the town, descending in droves from the mountains like an army of ants tracking sugar grains. The reason Ms. Yetaferu never worked at all was because there was not a single day in the year that was not sacred to her.
The Ethiopian calendar is divided into thirteen months, each thirty days long except the last, which is only five or six days (depending on whether it is a leap year). Every day of the month is assigned to a saint or two: day one is dedicated to St. Raguel and the Adbar, day two is St. Samuel's, day three is St. Libanos's, and so on. Of course, not all saints are created equal. Indeed, only a few of them are considered saintly enough to warrant an official holiday, preventing the farmer from tilling his land and the carpenter from felling a tree. No fisherman, for instance, can fish on the nineteenth day of any month, because it is St. Gabriel's day; nor on the twenty-third day, as he has to pay his respects to St. George; nor on any one of the other nine days throughout the year assigned to the saintliest of saints. Other individuals have their own favoured saints throughout the year, further reducing the number of days they are allowed to work.
Compounding Ms. Yetaferu's scheduling problem was the fact that some of the saints' days coincided with spirit days, forcing her to make a grave decision, choosing one over the other. She always placed her Wukabi ahead of any saint, though in some cases she was able to go to church in the morning and return home early enough to reconcile with her spirits. On such days she would close the door and windows of her room and use pieces of rag to plug any crevice that might let in light, to avoid detection by the saints while she communicated with her spirits.
All told, Ms. Yetaferu's holidays, each of which demanded prayers and sacrifices and prohibited doing any form of work, consisted of 263 saints' days, 52 Sundays, 9 other Christian holidays, i3 Adbar days, 36 Wukabi days (some of which coincided with saint's days) and 12 days to worship her ancestors' spirits. Altogether in an average year there were 368 consecutive days on which she was not able to work. Alas, the calendar was three days too short for her to complete her prayers.
