by Camilla Gibb
Perhaps I am very fashinn qadim, but to become as orthodox as this imam demands, I would have to abandon the religion I know. He’s asking for nothing less than conversion. Why would I do such a thing? My religion is full of color and possibility and choice; it’s a moderate interpretation, one that Aziz showed me was possible, one that allows you to use whatever means allow you to feel closer to God, be it saints, prayer beads or qat, one that allows you to have the occasional drink, work alongside men, go without a veil when you choose, sit alone with an unrelated man in a room, even hold his hand or even, dare I say it, to feel love for a Hindu.
It’s an interpretation where jihad is as Hussein taught me, one’s personal struggle to be a good Muslim, not a fight against those who are not Muslim, as our imam has started preaching.
I’ve stopped going to the mosque, and I’m rather glad Amina is moving for this reason. She’s already given up her colorful veils for plain ones in navy. I don’t think she needs to hear anymore from this imam.
She is stirring the chicken stew with her back to me, but despite calling me old-fashioned, I can hear her saying the prayer along with me as I wave incense above her head.
We eat Ethiopian style, sitting on the floor, dorro wat at the center of a platter covered in injera, a bit of salad and a spoonful of white cheese at the side. We tear the injera with our right hands. I play mother and separate the meat from the bones and divide the hard-boiled eggs into pieces with my fingers. We dig in, and like all Indians who eat our food, Robin looks as though he has been eating this way his entire life.
“Do you have a daughter?” Sitta asks him between mouthfuls.
“No, I don’t, Sitta. Not yet.”
“Do you have a wife?” she persists, much to my embarrassment.
“No.” He laughs, looking at me, and I realize how much I like his slightly wonky eye, and I wonder if the world looks slightly different to him out of that eye or because of it.
“Not even in Ethiopia?” Sitta asks.
Everyone laughs, though it’s not surprising. Every adult she knows is missing someone. In her mind, Ethiopia must be the country where missing people live. And I suppose Robin’s coloring is not that unlike a Harari.
“Like Lilly’s husband,” she says.
The laughter stops and we look into our laps.
“He was never my husband, Sitta,” I say after a minute.
Sitta looks confused.
“Why are you not married yet, then, Dr. Robin?” asks Amina without a hint of subtlety.
He groans. “Oh, it’s my mother. I know it doesn’t sound very modern, but she wants me to marry a nice Bengali girl. She sends me pictures all the time. Last time she called me she couldn’t stop giggling and I asked her why she was so amused, and then she says in this high-pitched voice: ‘Mukulika? Now go ahead and introduce yourself.’
“She had this girl on the other end of the line! Can you believe it? It was terribly awkward. ‘And what kind of medicine do you specialize in, Dr. Gupta? My father was a doctor in Bombay. No, he has passed away I’m afraid.’ And my mother interjecting: ‘Tell Mukulika about the first-class honors; tell her about saving poor Mr. Parminder’s life.’ ”
Ahmed and Sitta find Robin’s imitation of his mother highly amusing. “Poor Mr. Parminder,” Sitta chirps in imitation.
I can’t believe how I’ve misjudged him. How I used to dismiss him because of his perfect English and his Cambridge education. Resent the ease with which he picked up the phone and called home. It’s amazing how similar many of our experiences have been.
“Do you know how to ski?” Ahmed asks Robin.
“Well, I once—”
“Because Ayo says we’re going skiing in the Rocky Mountains,” Ahmed interrupts.
“Are you really, Amina?” I laugh. “Masha’Allah!”
“Yes!” she exclaims. “You know”—she gestures, as if she is gripping ski poles—“and these special trousers and woolly hats with balls on top, it’s very fashinn gidir!”
The two of us shriek with laughter until we both realize that it’s not funny at all. This is just what the world looks like now: a veiled Ethiopian woman skiing down the side of a Canadian mountain. The picture of resilience. The new world.
For all the brutality that is inflicted upon us, we still possess the desire to be polite to strangers. We may have blackened eyes, but we still insist on brushing our hair. We may have had our toes shot off by a nine-year-old, but we still believe in the innocence of children. We may have been raped, repeatedly, by two men in a Kenyan refugee camp, but we still open ourselves to the ones we love. We may have lost everything, but we still insist on being generous and sharing the little that remains. We still have dreams.
I have a housewarming present for you,” Robin says once Amina and Yusuf and the children have left.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have. You’ve done so much for me already.”
He takes the towel from my soapy hands and replaces it with a pair of boots.
“Wellingtons!” I laugh. I bend over to put them on. “Oh,” I hesitate, just about to put my foot into the second one. “But they don’t match.”
“They will in your garden,” he says. “ ‘How very peculiar,’ your neighbors will say. ‘How very English.’ ”
And how very sweet that he remembers even the tiniest details of my faraway past, that he pulls them near, cherishes them, treats them as if they are precious objects, worthy of a home on the mantel above the fireplace, lined up to be admired, honored, shared.
a bit of background, a lot of thanks
This is a work of fiction inspired by research, relationships and, above all, imagination. As such, I have taken enormous liberties with the histories and geographies of the places and people depicted in this book—most boldly, perhaps, conferring saintly status onto Islam’s first muezzin, Bilal al Habash.1
That said, I have attempted to maintain some historical accuracy by roughly following the events that led up to the 1974 revolution and beyond, during the years of the Dergue. For this chronology I have relied upon and am indebted to Ryszard Kapuściński’s portrait of Haile Selassie, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat; Bahru Zewde’s A History of Modern Ethiopia; the Africa Watch report Evil Days: 30 Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia prepared by Alex de Waal; and Jonathan Dimbleby’s film Ethiopia: The Unknown Famine.
The following works have also been invaluable: Sir Richard Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa: A Journey to Harar; The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam compiled by H.A.R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers; and Yusuf Ali’s Arabic/ English version of the Qur’an.
I owe a decade and a half of thanks. For first introducing me to the “idea” of Ethiopia and Oromo issues fifteen years ago I owe thanks to my dear friend Agitu Ruda. For introducing the possibility of research in Ethiopia in 1992, when I was starting graduate studies in social anthropology at Oxford, I owe thanks to Dr. Bahru Zewde, former director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. Thanks to Dr. Adhana Haile Adhana for his friendship in England and Ethiopia, and to him, Federawit and their children—Haile, Hayget, Biruke and Salam—for opening their home in Addis to me and sharing everything they had. Thanks to Neil and Tigist Chadder for their friendship and generosity—taking me in so warmly and showing me a very different side of Addis.
Thanks to Ahmed Zekaria for his extraordinary generosity not only in sharing his ethnographic work on the city of Harar, but in introducing me to his relatives, with whom I lived in Harar during 1994 and 1995. Thanks to Haji Mohammed Adem and Abai Nafisa and their children—and Haji Mohammed Adem and Fatima Sitti and their children—for being family to me in Harar.
I am indebted to Mohammed Jami Guleid for assisting me with my research in Harar, to my closest friends in the city—Ekram, Hashim, Abdulaziz, Alemayehu, Biruke, Nouria and Sara—and the acquaintances far too numerous to mention who taught me everything from how to self-diagnose giardiasis to how to buy a decent goat.
For enc
ouragement and guidance during the academic work that inspired this book, I owe thanks most of all to Professor Wendy James, my doctoral supervisor. Thanks also to my postdoctoral supervisor, Professor Janice Boddy at the University of Toronto.
I am indebted to the following bodies who helped fund my research: the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute, Magdalen College and the Graduate Studies Office of Oxford University (for doctoral work), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto (for postdoctoral research).
I want to thank members of the Harari Community Association in Toronto who welcomed me at their events and into their homes. For some of my recent research on the Oromo I owe thanks to Professor Mohammed Hassen of Georgia State University, Dr. Trevor Trueman of the Oromo Support Group, Lydia Namarra and Taha Ali Abdi of the Oromo Relief Association in London, Tesfaye Deressa Kumsa in Toronto and Bonsa Waltajjii in London.
For answers to questions regarding hospitals in London I owe thanks to Patrick Fennessy and Deirdre Graham. Thanks to Richard Gibbs of the Croydon Council and Steve Roud of the Croydon Library for answering my queries about Ethiopian settlement in the area and to Lydia Namarra for reorienting me toward Lambeth. Thanks to my grandfather Sir Edward Fennessy for his concern. Thanks to Tammy Gibb and Fraser Tannock for help with London’s geography and to Ruth Petrie for giving me some sense of Brixton in the seventies and eighties. Thanks to Bedri Ahmed for answering my queries about Harari terms. And for reacquainting me with the Middle East in the last couple of years, thanks to Maureen Conway and Ken Campbell.
For support in the writing of this novel, I wish to acknowledge the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, the Banff Centre for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.
Thanks to Anne McDermid for representing me and my work. Thanks to my incredible editors Martha Kanya-Forstner and Maya Mavjee, who brought out in me the book that was meant to be written and to Shaun Oakey for the astute editorial advice that pushed it to completion. Thanks to Anne McDermid, Annie Sommers, Sheila Fennessy, Heather Conway and Christopher Kelly for comments on various drafts, and Kelly Dignan, Suzanne Brandreth and Ravi Mirchandani for their involvement at an early stage in the book’s development. Thanks to Louise Dennys for her generosity and ongoing support and to Scott Sellers, Scott Richardson and Lara Hinchberger at Random House of Canada, Jane Warren at Anne McDermid and Associates and Jane Fleming at Penguin Press for their involvement.
Finally, thanks to my immediate family—Sheila, Stan, and, above all, Heather.
1
For the record, Aw (Father) Abadir ’Umr al-Rida is the patron saint of Harar, but his importance is felt only locally. Perhaps the most influential saint in the Muslim world, one whose influence is felt throughout the Middle East and reaches across North Africa in a way similar to that which I imply for Bilal al Habash here, is Abdul Qadir Jailan.
