by Camilla Gibb
I listened to the men talk about waterborne diseases and some recent decision made by the council of elders concerning alcohol. They talked about pollution in the river from a factory in the nearby town of Babile, about the price of electronics on the black market, about a musical group that was using an electronic keyboard. Their talk was alien to me. If they had relayed legends of the saints or debated the best method to teach Qur’an, I would have had much to say. If they had discussed how best to sort grains, how to diagnose affliction with the evil eye or how to keep flies at bay, I could have contributed.
Even the girls offered occasional comments, and while mostly spoken quietly to the men they sat beside, they clearly had their own opinions about whether the elders should be allowed to ban the electronic keyboard, about alleged banditry in the foothills of some nearby mountain, about water, about a corrupt imam, about the inflated prices of imported goods.
How strange it all seemed. Men and women in the same room, people speaking English. And then, when the conversation subsided, Dr. Aziz making great ceremony out of getting up and unveiling a sacred object in the corner of the room. A television. I hadn’t known there were neighborhoods with electricity.
A small white dot in the center of the screen ballooned into a picture, not of a football match, as I expected, but of the emperor greeting the officers of the Imperial Guard. He was a tiny man packaged in a neat suit with a regal robe hanging from his shoulders. His head, with its trim salt-and-pepper beard, appeared to sit apart; a distinguished face, like that of a statue, perched atop the neatly packaged body of a boy.
The palace loomed behind him, though the small black-and-white picture did not do it justice. Standing before those gates, Muhammed Bruce’s letter in hand, I’d felt utterly daunted by the begging mass of humanity there, the women wailing as they waved notes at the stern row of guards. Ours was but one of a thousand letters, I’d realized, crushing the paper in my hand.
“You go,” Hussein had said, nudging me forward. He insisted I had a much better chance of attracting the guards’ attention since the emperor had a notorious love of foreigners, especially the English. “And besides, my English is terrible,” he said.
“But look at me!” I’d said, fed up with his excuses. “I might look like a foreigner, but I’m filthy.” I’d been wearing the same dress for months. We’d done our best at a public bath, but the unmistakable smell of camel had worked its way deep into our skin.
In Ethiopia, television seemed to be devoted nearly exclusively to broadcasting the events of the emperor’s day. We watched a convoy of cars push through crowds of people. A royal hand passed bills out of the window of a Rolls-Royce and people kissed the bonnet in gratitude. We watched the emperor emerge from the car and tour a school.
“That’s where we studied medicine,” Dr. Aziz told me, nodding at the screen. “Haile Selassie I University. Me and Munir and Tawfiq were in the same class,” he said, indicating two of the other men in the room. “And Tajuddin and Amir”—he pointed at the others—“were one and two years ahead of us.”
“We still are,” Amir ribbed.
“Not forever, my friend!” Munir answered back.
“We’re hoping to continue eventually, Munir and I,” Dr. Aziz said. “But to continue we must go to Cairo. And to get to Cairo we must study and pass the university’s entrance exams. The difficulty is, in order to study, we need textbooks from abroad, and more times than not they are lost in the post.”
“People steal them,” Munir said.
I recognized him then—the doctor who had stopped us in the hall of the hospital that day.
“They don’t steal them,” Dr. Aziz said. “Why would they steal books in English?”
“I don’t know,” Munir said with a shrug. “Perhaps they make good pillows, or excellent flames.”
“Will the exams be in English?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s all in English—the textbooks, the medicines, the curriculum—all of it comes from the West. Even some of our teachers at medical school were farenjis. From the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And from Johns Hopkins University in America. That’s partly why people resist the hospitals, particularly the older people. They prefer their traditional practices, the things they know. They feel insulted by the suggestion of alternatives, especially Western ones.”
“But these things can work,” I said, “the amulets and the herbs.”
“Because they want to believe they work.”
“I’ve seen them work.”
“Have you heard of spontaneous remission? The mind is a very powerful thing.” He pointed at the television. “The drama is about to begin.”
The program, like the news of the emperor’s day, was broadcast in Amharic—the national language, the language of education and state and, because it was state owned, television and radio—a language of which I knew only half a dozen words.
Dr. Aziz translated in whispers for my benefit.
We watched a line of people dancing in white, their shoulders moving swiftly up and down, their eyes thickly kohl lined and wide, a hissing sound coming from between their clenched teeth.
“Amharas,” Dr. Aziz said.
“As if they are the only ones who dance,” Munir mumbled.
The music was abrasive, and the room had grown quiet. Qat leads one through animation into mirqana, a mood of quiet reflection. All I was conscious of then was Dr. Aziz. I could hear him inhale and exhale as he sat cross-legged beside me in the blue glow of an otherwise entirely dark room. It was his breathing I heard at night; now I knew this for certain.
introducing custard
Zemzem not only returned to class but brought with her a piece of paper folded into a small square. Inside, I found a silver necklace and a note from Dr. Aziz.
It seems it is Zemzem’s father’s pride that is the real issue. He does not wish to be seen taking charity—especially charity from a farenji—but he does want the girl to learn. It is my fault, I hope you can forgive me. I neglected to tell him you were a farenji, because it did not seem relevant. So when he came to find Zemzem that day he was shocked to find you. He offers you this necklace that belonged to his late wife as payment for her lessons.
He wishes you peace, as do I.
Later, I waved the necklace before Nouria’s eyes.
“Perhaps we could have meat for lunch after the mosque on Friday,” she said, glowing.
“With rice,” I added.
“And fried onions.”
Nouria’s affection toward me increased exponentially. She sold the silver necklace to Abai Taoduda, the midwife, and with that money safely stored between her breasts we walked to the market on Thursday morning, arm in arm, passing the beggars pleading “baksheesh” and “have mercy,” the goats bleating like bruised infants, the men bartering with the qat sellers—“If your skin is as tough as this qat, God has no mercy for your husband”—the merchants elbowing and outbidding each other—“Lady, lady, look here, this is real Indian silk,” “This mango is much much sweeter”—and the shouts of “Farenji! Farenji!” at which Nouria hissed in my defense.
We bought not only beef, rice and onions but also cucumbers, tomatoes, chilies, eggs, sugar and all the spices we would need to make berbere. We shared our extravagant lunch with Gishta and several women from the neighborhood. Rahile poured water over the hands of each woman in turn before we said our bismillahs and tucked in.
“So delicious, Nouria.”
“Yes, but how could you afford this meat?”
“And not goat, but cow!”
“Is it a special occasion?”
“You can thank Lilly,” said Nouria.
“Ah, so the farenji has more money after all,” said the neighborhood cynic.
“She earned it,” Nouria clarified.
I had even improvised a dessert my mother used to make when I was a child. Here we never ate dessert, apart from dates and sweet potatoes, which in season were so abundant that mercha
nts had to give them away.
I offered the women spoons borrowed from Gishta and placed the bowl in the middle of the circle. “Eat!” I encouraged, as they stared at the bowl.
“What is it?” one woman whispered.
“Farenji food,” her neighbor replied.
“It’s good!” I exclaimed. “It’s called custard.”
“Cus-tard,” Gishta said, trying the word out. “Okay.” She inhaled before tentatively prodding the skin with her spoon.
“Here,” I said, taking the spoon from her hand and scooping up a generous amount.
She opened her mouth and we all looked on with expectation. She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.
One of the women leaned forward. “What does it taste like?”
Gishta grimaced. “You try it,” she said.
The woman took a small spoonful, looked heavenward and pulled a piece of skin from her mouth, holding it between her fingers for inspection. “What is this?” she said, sticking out her tongue.
“The skin. Like the skin you get on milk.”
“This is some kind of farenji milk?”
“It’s made with milk, eggs and sugar.”
“What a ridiculous thing to do to eggs,” she muttered to her friends.
Later that afternoon, after Bortucan and I had licked the bowl clean, I helped Nouria and Gishta lay out chili peppers to dry in the sun, transforming the entire courtyard into a bright red carpet. It would be three days before the peppers were properly baked. “Any moisture, you get rot and your berbere is finished in two weeks,” Gishta explained, smacking her palms together.
Nouria would sell batches of this fiery cocktail in the Amhara market beyond the city wall. We did not eat it ourselves, but Amharas could not taste anything without it. It was a compromise to sell to them, but given Nouria’s poverty, one that she was accustomed to making. We’d spent money in order to make more money.
While we waited for the peppers to dry, we prepared the rest of the spices, bouncing cardamom, fenugreek and coriander seeds with a hiss and pop, the buds of cloves and black pepper, the allspice berries, the cinnamon bark, the nutmeg and the shaved ginger root in sequence over the fire. It was hot, repetitive and tedious work, and while Nouria and Gishta sang to relieve the boredom, I thought about Dr. Aziz. “Your friend Aziz,” he’d signed the note Zemzem had carried. My friend Aziz, I thought, pressing my pocket to check if his words were still there.
“Lilly!” Nouria snapped.
“Mmm?” I turned to her.
“I thought you wanted to help!”
“I do.”
“Well, grind then, you lazy girl,” Gishta shouted, pushing the mortar and pestle toward me. “The spices are not going to disintegrate on their own!”
big fashion
Gishta’s acceptance of me was gradual: hard won but mighty. Though she was Sheikh Jami’s favorite wife, as an Oromo she had once been on the outside herself. And it was for that very reason that her resistance to me had been far greater than that of many of the other women. When you’ve fought long and hard for it, belonging can come to mean despising those who don’t.
Gishta began life as a servant in a Harari household like most Oromo girls in the vicinity of the city. Her employer was unusually kindly disposed to her. As a lonely widow whose only son had made the pilgrimage to Mecca some years before, where he’d married a Saudi woman and set up shop, the woman loved her little Oromo servant like a daughter. She gave her gifts of boxed dates and gold thread sent from Mecca by the son she resented. And she sent Gishta to school for half a day until she was sixteen. She even gave her a Harari name—Gishta, meaning custard apple.
Gishta grew up with dreams of belonging in the city, but unlike most Oromo, she was given access, not only through education but also by virtue of being left a small inheritance by her employer. Gishta adopted the language, the manner, the dress and the customs of the Harari and took up the age-old Harari profession of selling qat in the market.
Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.
In keeping me at a distance, Gishta had continued to refuse to believe Bortucan’s progress. “It’s just not possible!” she would say to Nouria quite deliberately when I was within earshot. Bortucan, who could still barely mumble the word for mother, was now able to recite Al Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur’an. These were actually Bortucan’s first words, as if she had the confidence to speak God’s words but not her own.
“It’s Lilly,” said Nouria. “I keep telling you; she just knows, somehow, how to teach her. And the other children as well.”
“Tell me,” Gishta would say, “how is it that a farenji can know Qur’an this well?”
Every time she asked, I told her the same story of being raised at the Moroccan shrine. “It was actually one of your husband’s distant relatives who taught me,” I said. “The Great Abdal. He was Hussein’s teacher as well.”
“Yes, yes, you and your famous story,” she would say dismissively. But then one day, the day after the second hidden bercha, she really listened. It seemed Gishta only began to believe me once I started keeping secrets.
I had spent every day of the week after the first bercha with Aziz hoping that I might be invited to join him and his friends again. I fought off the disappointment when Saturday arrived without a sign. After lunch, the neighborhood women were gathering to carve meat in the compound next to ours. All the families had contributed toward the purchase of a cow that had been ritually slaughtered that morning. Large pieces now sat on burlap sacks in Ikhista Aini’s courtyard. Nouria was demonstrating proper technique to me, gripping a large knife between her feet. She rolled up her sleeves and moved a large piece of meat up and down against the blade.
I was just getting ready to help her when Sadia arrived, greeting the women with questions about their health, their well-being, their happiness.
“Stay,” the women insisted, “at least until we have carved up these ribs—you must take some home to your mother.”
Sadia protested but the women were insistent. The women insisted but Sadia protested. Then the women insisted a third time, which meant Sadia was now obliged to wait while Ikhista Aini carved up part of the rib cage and wrapped it in burlap.
“You are too kind.” Sadia bowed. “Jazakallahu khayran.” May Allah reward you for the good.
Sadia had nothing to say to me. She made no effort to conceal her dislike of me. We walked in silence around the wall, she several feet ahead, nose turned up, proud, me vaguely nauseous with anticipation.
When we arrived at Aziz’s uncle’s house, the room was bristling with conversation. Aziz and Munir were questioning the legitimacy of a Palestinian organization under a man named Arafat, not convinced by his justification for recent attacks on Israel. Tawfiq was in complete disagreement.
“Welcome,” said Aziz, patting the pillow beside him. He passed qat into my hand, and Tawfiq resumed, punching the air with his finger to make his point, which was lost on me. I sucked on the bitter leaves while the conversation digressed into an exchange of opinions about whether Abebe Bikila, who had been the first African to ever win a gold medal at the Olympics, was too old to compete in the upcoming games in Munich.
I might not have had much knowledge of secular affairs, but where was their concern for religion? I wondered. That was the source of this Palestinian situation they’d been discussing, was it not?
“It is an issue of imperialism and economics,” said Munir, answering a question it had taken me so long to formulate that they were already well on to another topic. His answer only left me feeling confused and uncertai
n. My questions not only came at the wrong time; they seemed to be the wrong questions, at least as far as the men were concerned. I was good at learning languages—why did theirs seem so foreign?
When the relief of mirqana descended over the room, Aziz leaned back and joined me in silence. I felt his presence beside me like one feels the day’s heat radiating from stones.
“See you next Saturday,” he said at the end of that afternoon, and suddenly the week ahead looked very long.
So that story is true?” Gishta asked the next day, raising one eyebrow.
I bit my tongue hard. “What other story is there, Gishta?” I asked with calculated calm.
I knew she wouldn’t repeat the rumors—that I was a spy, an anti-Muslim agent, a sharmuta here to lead their sons astray. In the year that I’d been here, I’d still not provided any evidence in support of these allegations. The women in the neighborhood had gradually come to accept my presence: those who knew me in the day-to-day, those whose children now uttered holy words. They even referred to me differently as a teacher—as Bint Abdal, daughter of Abdal.
“Call me Gish,” Nouria’s cousin said a few days after that second bercha.
“I made you these,” she said the following week, holding out an expensive-looking pair of trousers, the ones the wealthy Harari women wore under their long skirts, striped silk with colorful embroidered cuffs.
I told her it would take an eternity before I earned enough to pay her back. She scoffed and insisted I try them on right away. The cuffs were tight by design, so tight that I had to oil my feet before I could begin.
