Click on photos to enlarge
The year was 1973. I traveled through this area where highland farmers met and traded with lowland caravans who traded camel dung as fuel and other goods for food grown by the farmers. I ended up living in Ethiopia for a year and a half, mainly in Addis Ababa.
For Throwback Thursday–a glimpse into the past.
Poor Sport
From the Rockies to the Tetons, I’ve avoided climbing rocks.
They crumble as I climb them and wind up in my socks.
I do not like their labyrinths that make you find a way
to snake up on their surface without a game of play.
Don’t expect me to climb mountains. Don’t even think to ask.
I’ll sit here in the shade and watch and sip upon my flask!
Prompts for today are labyrinth, snake, flask and Tetons.
That’s me back in 1973. I didn’t climb mountains then, either. You can tell by the shoes. This was taken in Lalibela, Ethiopia, a very mountainous place. Didn’t make any difference. I flew in on a tiny plane and rode a mule up one or two. That’s as far as I went.
Wax and Gold
(This is the introduction to a book I have been trying to finish for years.
It is about what I experienced while living and working in Ethiopia
during the fifteen months leading up to the revolution.)
One of the aspects of the rich Ethiopian Tradition that has always been most interesting to me is that linguistic oddity of the Amharic language that has been described as wax and gold. It is an allusion to the lost-wax system of creating jewelry, wherein the brooch or ring or earring is first carved in wax, then surrounded by a plaster mold. Molten gold is then forced into the mold by a process involving centrifugal force. The gold melts the wax, which it displaces as the wax melts and then evaporates or flows out.
When a person versed in the Amharic language—a person such as a lay singer or a lawyer who depends upon the use of words as a profession—or a teacher or scholar or anyone who just loves words—when such a person speaks, it is often a statement of levels. The primary level is the utilitarian one, where he says what he means. He is hungry. He is given food. But for one in love, that simple statement “I am hungry” can have an additional meaning. On a symbolic level, it can mean that he wishes for the company of the one he loves, or for a kiss or for some other act that will slake this deeper hunger.
In these two examples, we have two of the levels of words. But there is yet a deeper level. This is the level at which words acquire the richness of gold. It is a subtler layer that dips into philosophy, allusion, an almost archetypal world where those meet who are cognizant of a world of deeper meaning that can be expressed by words. On this level, there is a more complicated comprehension of not only words, but also actions. How the action of one person may affect the whole. How words may express things beyond the justice of set laws. It is the place where minds play, but also, often, where they weep.
In the years that I’ve been writing many shorter pieces about Ethiopia and considering turning them into a book, I have considered many titles, but it is this title, Wax and Gold, that I keep coming back to. It most clearly represents the story of how the most precious events and memories of a lifetime may come from a time of extreme pressure or danger or threat. It is in times like these that we sometimes empty ourselves out and redefine ourselves and are jettisoned into a life much richer in significance than we ever might have imagined.
Of further significance is the suggestion of a hidden meaning beneath what seems to be, and certainly, when I journeyed to Ethiopia in my twenties, I was totally oblivious to what lay below the surface. In the forty -eight years since I left Ethiopia, I have told a few stories about my life there. How I came to be there. How I came to stay for a year and a half when I’d meant to be there for a few weeks at most. How it came to be a period that has influenced the rest of my life.
Many have asked why I have written six other books and thousands of poems, stories and essays when this is the story that I should be telling. I always tell them that it is because I still haven’t made sense of the story. Still have not, perhaps, seen the truth of it. Perhaps it is also true that I’ve been running from the story and from what may have been my part in bringing about the death of at least one whom I have held dearest in my life.
Only recently, when four separate people have asked me, explicitly, to please finish my story, have I begun to see its telling in another light. I have often said I don’t know what I think or believe until I write or say it. Perhaps this is also true of what happened during those years of my life when I ran away from home to try to find a world where I felt comfortable, or if not comfortable, at least acceptable. I wanted to use those parts of myself that no one in my experience had ever seemed to either understand or find valuable. Perhaps I was looking for my own tribe, but to me it seemed as though I was looking for adventure and experiences and a strangeness I had sought during my entire life of living in places where strangeness seemed neither to reside nor to be tolerated. In retrospect, I realize that I was wax , waiting to be transformed into gold.
For RDP: Waxy
Image thanks to Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash.
I’ve excerpted a number of other chapters from the book on this blog. If you want to read it and can’t find them, I’ll establish links here. Just ask.
These are my answers to my own question Challenge, Nosy Questions.
Ta Da!!! Finished. Now you tell me your stories!!!!!
ForgottenMan gave me permission instructed me gave me his blessing said it might be a good idea … to inform you about the project I’m working on. He added this photo of me in Ethiopia in 1973. The book I’m writing is about this period during which the Ethiopian Marxist revolution was brewing. My friend Leslie offered to come over for a three day intensive where we would both work only on our books. It worked so well that we’re doing it again for four days, starting tomorrow. Here are a few shots of last week’s session. I’ll see you on Monday! (Click on first photo to enlarge all and read captions.)
Coffee With No Ceremony
I lived in Addis Ababa adjoining Mexico Square.
I ate injera every day. Had cornrows in my hair.
I thought I knew it all, and though my language skills were poor,
I knew enough Amharic to get by in any store.
Seated in a circle, on low stools around a flame,
We watched Demekech fan the fire—this ritual the same
in every house and every village all throughout the land.
The thick and sludgy coffee was always ground by hand.
Boiled in a clay carafe, then set aside to brew
as in another little pot, some corn kernels she threw.
The popcorn taken from the flame, the colo nuts were next.
Except—we found that we had none, and we were sorely vexed.
The coffee jug was sealed up with a fresh-wound plug of grass
ready for the pouring, but one aspect of our mass
was missing, so I said I’d go to buy some at the souk,
lest our hospitality give reason for rebuke.
These little shops were many, lining both sides of the street;
and at each one, I knew the custom—always did I greet
the owner with proper respect, and always, he said, “Yes!”
when I asked if he had colo, but I couldn’t guess
why no one ever seemed to want to sell any to me.
Always the same reaction—first the shock and then the glee.
So, finally, I walked back home. My failure I admitted.
Departing, I had felt so smart, but now I felt half-witted.
What had I done wrong? I knew that every shop had colo.
The problem must have been that I had gone to get them solo!
Returning empty-handed, I felt I was to blame.
Coffee without colo was a pity and a shame.
But my roommate and our guests and cook were really most surprised.
I must have asked for something else than colo, they surmised.
What did I ask for? When I told them, they dissolved in laughter.
They said that I was lucky not to get what I asked after.
For colo had two meanings, depending on the stress
put on the first syllable, and I had made a mess.
Instead of nuts, they told me (and this was just between us,)
I had asked each souk owner—if he had a penis!
(This is a true story of only one of the gaffes I became famous for in the year and a half I taught and traveled in Ethiopia in the period leading up to the revolution that deposed Haile Selassie.) I published this four years ago but I think few were around then to read it, so here it comes again as I think it is a good example of how far I’m willing to go to extend a little hospitality.
The Ragtag prompt today is hospitable.
Footnote to the Revolution
The red clay from the cane field in your hair,
leaves pressed into my neck from lying in the tall stalks,
we heard in the trees
the movements of the shepherd
who had watched.
Later, at the Filowaha baths,
we washed ourselves from each other
and slept in a room
rattled
by the eucalyptus.
I would have wanted you more in that room
if I’d known about the bullet
already starting its trajectory through the minds
of men spending youth fresher than ours
in revolution.
I remember watching your shave
in the lobby barber shop,
your face mummied by the steaming towels.
I tasted bay rum afterwards
as we shared cappuccino.
Parked at the roadside near enough to hear our parting,
I imagine they drank katikala,
its bite sealing brotherhood
your blood would buy in the street
outside the Filowaha baths.
In 1973-74, I journeyed to and lived in Ethiopia. It was not my original intention to do any more than visit and pass through, but fate had a different plan in mind. I was first detained by violence, then by love. The Filowaha baths in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, were probably the equivalent of the “No Tell Motels” in Mexico, but for Andy and me, they were a place to be alone, to soak in hot water together and to make love with no listening ears. I guess that is what they were to everyone who visited, but there was nothing illicit in our relationship. We were both single and in what at the beginning we thought was a committed relationship that would end in marriage. His family had accepted this. My parents, thousands of miles away, had long ago given me the message that they did not want to know anything that, as my mother had stated, “would make them feel bad.” My sister knew, but they never did.
This poem actually chronicles two different visits to the Filowaha baths–one near the beginning of our relationship and the other our last night before I departed to fly back to the United States. On this second visit, we both knew we would probably never see each other again. Once again, we had figured out that the relationship wasn’t going to work, and our own feelings were complicated by the revolution that was already raging around us. We had both just spent a month in the hospital–Andu Alem recovering from the bullet that had gone all the way through his body as he defended me from a man whose intention was to kill me. Not able to return to my house, I had stayed in the hospital with him so we could both be guarded by his father’s soldiers.
Years later, when I made my first assemblage boxes, I made this music box that told the story I’d already told in the poem years before. The song it plays is “The Way We Were.” I’m now trying to tell the story a third time in a book. Now that I know the true ending to our story, I might have changed the poem, but I leave it as I once thought it was. There are many truths in our lives, according to which vantage point we are telling them from. This story is as true as the very different story I will eventually tell, if I have the courage to face up to it. Please enlarge the photos go see the details which should be self-explanatory. The hand I sculpted out of clay. I photographed the assemblage box on the table where I had been rereading letters I’d written home from Ethiopia as well as letters Andu Alem and other friends living in Ethiopia had written me once I returned to the states.
Three days ago, I started thinking of an old friend from 43 years and 8,000 miles ago, wondering if there was any way I could locate him. We had known each other in Africa, both having come to the U.S. when Ethiopia fell into its violent civil war, leaving our mutual friend (my lover and his friend since childhood) in Africa. He had worked diligently to get his friend to leave Africa and I had urged him to as well, but he had repeatedly refused to do so.
Half a country apart, we met only once after coming to the States and talked twice on the phone—the last time when he informed me of the assassination of our mutual friend about a year after I’d returned to the States. Since then, I’ve gone on to new loves and new lives, but I’ve written many times about those years in Africa, idealized my lover and imagined him to be the hero in death he’d always been to me in life.
Then, miraculously, two days ago (one day after I’d thought of trying to locate him myself and over forty years since I’d last talked to him on the phone) I received a message from my old friend asking me to friend him on Facebook and yesterday, we shared a two-hour phone call. Much of that phone call was taken up by his telling me the whole truth about my lover’s death in Africa forty-three years ago.
“He loved you, Judy. He really loved you, and he was a different man with you. Perhaps if we had both stayed in Africa, his story would have turned out differently, but when we both left at once, he was lonely and looking for friends. They saw his charisma and charm and they drew him in. They gave him power.” This was when he told me the part of the story he had not told me so many years ago. This is when the truth of what happened after I left Africa came out. It has been a hard truth to swallow. My sister, who visited me in Africa and who knows more of that story than most, told me I should perhaps not talk to anyone else about what I had just revealed to her—to remain quiet for awhile and think this out for myself. Perhaps to write about it.
It is hard to write about such things without trivializing them, and I have tried for the past 24 hours to avoid doing so just as I’ve tried to avoid thinking about it. Neither plan seems to have worked. It was what I thought about all day, the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep, the first thing I thought about upon awakening when I saw today’s prompt, and it is what I’m thinking about now as I write the introduction to this poem. What do we do with old shattered memories that we’ve held in esteem for more than half our lives? What do we do with the favorite photographs? How do we write about a love story turned into a horror story? I guess we do the best we can. This is my first attempt to deal with that whole truth.
Swallowing Truth
My life for now grown raw and hollow,
this bitter pill I cannot swallow.
Which path of memory to follow?
That handsome man, arms filled with flowers,
love-filled nights and fun-filled hours
held fast in each others’ powers.
A small-town girl who lived through books,
twisting on romance’s hooks,
could not resist your charm and looks.
I could not guess the other side—
the violence your looks belied—
that truth that I must now abide.
New truths cast old beliefs asunder
as they gut and rip and plunder
those short years of joy and wonder.
Your truths are painful—sharply tined.
Miscast as hero in my mind,
you chose the other side, I find.
This is what your old friend said.
He said your power went to your head—
so many slaughtered the streets ran red.
How could the one who turned my heart
liquid from the very start
have torn so many lives apart?
These stories spun far in the past
have come together here, at last,
can’t be forgotten, the die is cast.
Beware the truths that you might seek.
Truth has a non-discerning beak
that rips asunder the frail and weak.
Be careful what you ask and do
in opening the past anew.
The truth you swallow may swallow you.
The prompt word today is swallow.
If you’d like to read how I shocked every souk owner on my block when I lived in Ethiopia in 1973/74, read this old post from three years ago:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/10/10/coffee-with-no-ceremony/
The prompt today is shock.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 