Rebecca Fisseha's Blog, page 3

Prompt # 7 – books

More Notes from the Canadian honey jar…

May 09, 2017

The very first English book I remember coming across is “Thorn Birds”. It was high up on the top shelf in the dining room. Both of my parents had read it, I think. It must have been very popular when they were becoming adults. One of those books everybody read. At least everybody from their circle. University students. It might have been one of those books I “fake-read” when I was little, making those ‘English’ sounds. Other books I remember on that shelf are “Ye-hilm Ijat” (which I eventually read when I was old enough), and the sequel, which I forget the title of. I’m sure that eventually, “Fikir-Iske-Meqabir” made it up there too, if it wasn’t already there. What else what else what else.

I wonder what it was about “Thorn Birds” that made it so popular, popular enough to reach Ethiopia. At its core, it is a standard story of star-crossed lovers, lovers who can never be together because the man is a Catholic priest and so he is celibate. That forbidden passion. If I remember from the movie, he did end up sleeping with the woman. They had a son, whom she loved more than the daughter she had by her brutish husband. But then the son drowned. And the daughter grew up unhappy and had a bad relationship with her mother because she knew her mother didn’t love her (or not as much as the son) but she never understood why. I remember the ending when both the man and the woman are old. Very sad ending. So it was a story of a grand passion between an older man and a younger woman in which the obstacle between them is God himself!

Come to think of it, it’s no wonder that it was a hit in Ethiopia. (Maybe it wasn’t such a big hit as I think it was.) We are ones for epic lovers’-separation stories. Think Makeda and King Solomon (technically, she left him, and they were never a couple, and there is no grand love angle to that story, more like coerced sex). But definitely “Fikir Iske Meqabir” is star-crossed lovers.

Where does that expression come from? Star-crossed. It sounds like it should be a good thing.

So that book on the shelf, the traditional songs, Fikir Iske Meqabir, Ye-hilm Ijat and its sequel. I would like to say that these conditioned me from early on to view love and romance, life in general, in a certain way: a bit defeatist, melancholic, etc. Except I didn’t read any of them until much later, and I have yet to read Thorn Birds…

I’m not getting much juice out of this prompt…

The only angle I can think of is how those novels I read in the Kennedy Library made me view love and romance as something secretive, furtive, intense, troubling, irresistible. I never borrowed them. I always returned it to the shelf and picked up where I left off the next time I had to wait for my mom. (That’s interesting. The beginnings of a ‘private’ life secret from my mom?) Maybe I always took a second book from the shelf, so that it would look like I was reading that instead? Did she ever ask me what I read while I was there? It would have been hard for me to hide what I was reading.

Skin Deep

She was three years old at the time. We were watching Frozen…again. Out of the blue, during one of the Elsa scenes, she turned to me and said, “I look like her.”

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a challenge. It was a statement of fact.

Except she didn’t. At all. So naturally, I said, “No, you don’t.”

She disagreed. I disagreed back. And so we went. Back and forth. I forget how it ended. Who won, who gave up, etc. But one thing I am sure of is that she was just as brown-skinned and black haired as me by the time we moved on to other topics, and remains still. She probably forgot about it all within seconds. I, of course, continued to be bothered by it. Why is this little habesha girl so convinced she looks like Elsa? How much damage is growing up in a country where she sees few reflections of herself doing to her?

[image error]Alarm bells everywhere, I tell you.

Years go by. Well, 2 years and change, to be exact, and I tell this anecdote among a group of adults during a discussion on the effects of racism on children. I told it as an example of early-onset-effect-of-racism-on-one-particular-child.

That’s when one of the women in the discussion (white, in case inquiring minds want to know; Jewish, in case those inquiring minds like specifics) said to me, “Maybe she meant I’m beautiful like her.”

Oh shit.

That hadn’t even occurred to me. If that was the case, the little girl was much more sophisticated in her thinking, more profound, more wise, than I gave her credit for. And that’s not a farfetched idea. After all, during her Doc McStuffins phase, this little girl never said to me, “I look like her”. Why? Because, intelligent person that she is, she didn’t see need to state the obvious. But when it came to Elsa, she must have felt it was a point worth making. She needed to say: even though mine and Elsa’s colouring is different, our beauty is the same. It just came out as: I look like her.

That’s some deep stuff yo! (Do people still say ‘yo’?)

And there I was, old fart, with my perceptions made overly literal by too many years on this sunless side of the planet, drilling into her head that she doesn’t look like her. Which probably translated into her head as: No you’re not beautiful.

Holy crap! She was saying, in three-year-old-speak, I’m beautiful like her. And I, in thirty-something-year-old-hear, heard I’m white like her. So I said, No you’re not white like her. And she heard…No you’re not beautiful like her.

???

This where the authorities confiscate my backstage pass to the lifelong show called Raising Children.

Like I said, the little girl and I dropped the subject, with me thinking: oh poor child, she’s so mentally colonized already. And the child probably thinking: oh poor old person, she’s so beyond colonized.

But thankfully, based on what I know of this little girl so far, it doesn’t look like I did any inadvertent damage to her self-esteem or altered her understanding of beauty.

With most anecdotes, you kind of know what reaction you will get each time you retell them, because your perception of the situation was pretty accurate to begin with. No matter how many times you retell it, there’ll be only subtle variations in your listeners’ responses. But once in a while a listener gives you a strikingly different interpretation of the situation that takes you for a brain-spin and reveals a lot to you about yourself & about the characters in your anecdote. More than you’d like to know sometimes. So, what’d I learn once I stopped spinning? Just because a kid’s vocabulary or ability to express herself is at a three year old level, that doesn’t mean her thoughts are skin deep.

So the next time she makes a statement that sounds like an adult-trap, I’ll think twice before responding, and maybe even first, carefully ask, What’s your point, EXACTLY? What do you MEAN mean?

…Speaking of Doc McStuffins, listen to comedian W. Kamau Bell’s bit on Doc McStuffins on his Netflix special Private School Negro, around the 7 minute mark! lol’s for days!