Speaking of Nobel Peace Prizes, just as the Nobel Committee found the Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 and the Iranian Shirin Ebadi in 2003 worthy of the Prize because both women represented and kept alive the dashed hopes of their fellow countrymen and women, so does Ethiopia’s Birtukan Mideksa who is in a far worse condition than the other two women, and who symbolizes the plight of the dashed hopes of 80 million Ethiopians. If Western national interest calculus does not get in the way (and there is little chance that it would not), Birtukan would be a runaway Nobel winner in a breeze.
In the meantime, back to our literature and its place in the world.
While Somalia has world famous writers in Nureddin Farah and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kenya Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Ethiopia has none. Our neighbors, the Arabs, have produced one of the great works of Arabic literature, the “One Thousand and One Nights”, also known as “The Arabian Nights”, consisting of such stories we grew up reading as “Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”, and “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”. A distant neighbor just across the Indian Ocean, India, has had a flourishing literary age churning out world class writers from its artistic mills.
Even in the arena of intellectual debates in Africa regarding literature, we are missing. One of the main debates in African literature over the last several years has been whether or not African writers should primarily (and at times exclusively) write in their own African indigenous languages. Thus a Swahili speaker would write his work in Swahili (and only after that in any other European language, and that if necessary). This line of thinking has been popularized by Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’O of Kenya, currently teaching at UC Irvine in California. On the other side of the argument have been the late Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Professor Chinua Achebe, the famous Nigerian writer, whose most popular book and enduring contribution to African literature, is perhaps Things Fall Apart. Professor Achebe, also currently teaching at a US University, Bard College, argues that Africans should write in both European languages and in African languages as they deem necessary. But the point is that there are no Ethiopian writers of the stature of these writers that are part of this and similar intellectual debates.
Of current and deceased Ethiopian writers, perhaps the late Laureate Tsegaye Gebremedhin comes close to taking Ethiopian literature to a higher level. Unfortunately, while wildly popular at home, Tsegaye could not scale the local fence to enter into international pre-eminence. Ato Haddis Alemayehu’s work, Fiqr Eske Mekabir, a masterpiece by Ethiopian literary standards, again has not garnered the international acclaim, say, as the Arabic works of Mahfouz. Nega Mezlekia, a Canadian resident, whose 2000 first book, Notes from the Hyena’s Belly, won the Governor General’s Award for English Language, non-fiction, was unfortunately mired in controversy that ended up in court when another Canadian writer claimed that she wrote the book for him. Hama Tuma’s anthology, especially, The Case of the Socialist Witch Doctor, has recently seen some staging as a play in Israel.
Moreover, most of the great works of our literary giants were published in the waning years of the Emperor, or during the early phase s of the Dirgue rule. Very few, if any, notable literary works have enjoyed global success over the last 40 years of uninterrupted dictatorship. While this may hold sway over almost all genres, our love and skill for poetry may plead for exception. This passion for poetry was recently expressed on a massive scale in pouring out hearts for mourning the death of singer Tilahun Gessesse, a national treasure.
While some oppressed cultures turn their oppression into a literary cause where their various literary genres bloom riling against the oppression, others simply recoil into their shells. In the former case, in fact, oppression and the fight against it are used as thematic options for the flourishing of genres of literature.
The recoil factor seems to hold in our case. It seems Ethiopian literary potential is taking a decades-old slumber, except for occasional sightings. Almost all the creativity and brilliance have gone into political tracts and manifestos in a linear and a one- way direction. And the majority of those not on this path appear to be engrossed in the admiration of the creativity of others, such as the obsession with the English Premier Soccer League games. Dictatorships hurt their victims in more than one way. It is not so much their censorship as their stifling overreach.
Fortunately, there is a glimmer of hope in a sector of the younger generation from whose ranks very promising Ethiopian writers are emerging. One such writer is a woman by the name of Maaza Mengiste whose novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, has received rave reviews.
Another is Dinaw Mengistu, whose work of fiction titled, An Honest Exit, was recently published in the July 12/19, 2010 issue of one of the most famous intellectual magazines, The New Yorker. He is the author of two novels, “The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears”, and “How to Read the Air”, which will come out in October.
In An Honest Exit, Dinaw’s main character, a high school English teacher, teaches a course in Early American Literature to what he calls “privileged freshmen”. The teacher, instead of teaching his class from the course syllabus, regales them with the refugee story of his late Ethiopian father who managed to slip to Sudan, and then as a stowaway, to Italy, thanks to the merciful acts of (or the mischievous calculations of ) a Sudanese he befriended. To illustrate Dinaw’s brilliance, we cite here two or three sentences from his fiction: one, describing the different city possibly the hot city of Port Said, Sudan, becomes at night, the writer says:
“It was as if a second city were buried underneath the first, and excavated each night.”
Any one familiar with Assab, Massawa or Diredawa can attest to the fact. Second, describing the unrealistic expectations and imagery immigrants have of the West, he says:
“When it came to Europe or America, even people supposedly hardened by time and experience were susceptible to almost childish fantasies”.
It ought to be clear that Dinaw’s fictionalized story is not just pulled from thin air: it is a mirror reflection of the dictatorial conditions that drive tens of thousands of Ethiopians and other Africans from their homes into a life of uprootedness – taking a chance with rickety boats, and killer border guards – if they make it alive, to a life of humiliation and misery.
Thanks to writers like Dinaw, Ethiopian literature’s golden years may just be ahead. The fictional works of these young writers would possibly focus on interrogating the past they did not know, and in mocking the silliness of the present.
