“With her plane unexpectedly grounded in Addis Ababa, Dessie, burdened with secrets and mourning the death of her mother, is forced to confront a history that is different from what she'd been raised to believe. Featuring gorgeous prose and a most compellingly prickly narrator, Fisseha's debut novel is a puzzle, a page-turner, and a triumph.”
— Kerry Clare, author of Mitzi Bytes
“Fisseha's assured debut straddles two worlds and is vividly, insightfully, embedded in both. She takes on some of the trickiest of family and cultural dilemmas with affection and beady-eyed aplomb.”
— Aida Edemariam, author of The Wife’s Tale
“A story of trauma and reckoning, of flight and return, told honestly, written boldly.”
— Tessa McWatt, author of Higher Ed
“Fisseha’s remarkable debut tells the story of a family fractured by secrets and grief and a young woman’s journey to find healing and survival. Dessie is a character I will not forget, and her voice—confident, vulnerable, and sharp—stayed with me. Riveting, bold, and beautifully written, this book will break your heart and then precariously mend it back together.”
— Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving
“Rebecca Fisseha maps a young woman's journey into adulthood with care, sensitivity, and sly humour.”
— Djamila Ibrahim, author of Things Are Good Now
Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Fisseha.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Excerpt from “Käthe Kollwitz” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.
Cover design by Julie Scriver with images from Light Field Studios, iStock.com (figure); dmitr1ch, Adobestock.com (wall texture); and valeriya_sh, Shutterstock.com (pattern).
Page design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Daughters of silence : a novel / Rebecca Fisseha.
Names: Fisseha, Rebecca, 1980- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190090928 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190090944 | ISBN 9781773101026 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773101033 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773101040 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8611.I8525 D38 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Goose Lane acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
For Zeni,
Mimi,
and all who survive.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open
— Muriel Rukeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz”
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Acknowledgements
ONE
The announcement comes during down time, after duty free, and before the last meal service. I am preparing a tray of plastic cups for my turn to walk the cabin with the hourly offering of water. Our in-flight manager hangs up the interphone, looking none too pleased.
“We’re diverting to Addis Ababa. Vienna airport is closed,” she says. She explains to us, the crew in the galley, that ash from the eruption of a volcanic mountain with some unpronounceable name in Iceland has blocked the whole jet stream.
“Why wasn’t this mentioned during pre-flight briefing in Johannesburg?” I say. An act of God was not what I had in mind when I wished for an extended absence from Toronto, relief from Le’ul’s relentless brotherly love.
“I’m sure we’ll be in and out in no time. Hey, you’re originally from there, right Dessie?” she says, reading my name tag and pronouncing it “DC,” instead of calling me what I go by at work, D.
I smile, picking at the label of the water bottle. “Well Barb, you know the expression. You can take the girl out of . . .”
“Ethiopia?” she says, helpfully, and waits for me to deliver the punchline, if that’s what it is. When I don’t, she supplies it. “But you can’t take Ethiopia out of the girl, eh?”
The flight attendants laugh. I join. That’s what we do: smile, laugh. The cabin is our living room, the air suffused with cheer, the passengers our personal guests. For days after a trip, I can’t wipe that smile off my face. Even after I do, the lines remain.
The captain broadcasts the news via the PA system. As soon as she signs off, Barb dispatches us into the twin aisles of the widebody, armed with smiles as bright as the midday sun, to soothe passengers’ anxious concerns.
So many planes are on approach to make unscheduled landings at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport that we have to stay in a holding pattern over the city for what seems a long time, but is not long enough for me. Eventually we land. While we wait for further instructions, I look out the window. Seeing the word የኢትዮጲያ on the bodies of the green-yellow-red-tailed planes suckling at the gates on home soil, I feel stirred, as if I’d come across a favourite childhood toy.
We are going to either resume our journey or disembark and wait it out in the terminal. The scenario no one wants — least of all me — is an overnight stay. I console myself that if it’s the latter, at least I will be with my crew, probably at the Hilton. There won’t be time to do anything other than sleep, eat, wash, and fly right back out.
The captain informs Barb that we will disembark. In the commotion of gathering in the terminal, no one else notices the tourism posters advertising Dessie: Heart of Ethiopia. I wonder why a city, which seems to offer nothing but a lake and wildlife, has been elevated to the rank of Axum, Gonder, Lalibela, the standard tourist attractions. If anyone asked me about my namesake, I would share the only two facts I know about it: my mother spent time there when she was young, and she never forgot the bone-shattering cold there during kiremt.
“Well, at least for you, you can see your people now,” Barb says. Then, she remembers, and turns sombre. “Especially at this time of mourning for your mother.”
What a lucky coincidence, the crew all agree, patting my shoulder. I nod and smile. Yes, it will be such a wonderful surprise. They mean well. Though we might not get scheduled to fly together again for months, even years, when we’re out on a trip, crew are family. But I know that my mother’s death, a little over a month ago, is the least of their concerns. With each development in the diversion of the flight, their mood has fallen. Who the fuck wants to be stuck in Addis Ababa? Not me either, I want to shout at them.
“Just keep your phone near you. I’ll call you the minute we get the all clear,” Barb says. I watch the Hilton shuttle drive away with the crew in it while I
stand between my suitcase and tote. I want the van to reverse up the ramp from the terminal, come back for me. But the van descends into the parking lot and disappears around a corner.
I am in Ethiopia again, all of a sudden, as an adult, on my own. I feel panicky, as if there’s a bowl of liquid trembling inside me, threatening to spill over. Am I now to just show up at my grandfather’s house nineteen years after I told him that I would be gone only for four? Worse, let him believe that I am here intentionally, to grieve Ema with him, as would a good granddaughter?
I look up. Kiremt is not for a couple more months, so the mid-April sky is cloudless. Even if we were in the middle of the rainy season, the skies ominous with clouds, who would believe that hail could happen here unless they saw it? Ice pellets the size of marbles really do drop from this equatorial sky. How I used to wish they would smash through our rooftop and force a stop to what was happening inside my house.
I amble down the ramp like an exotic red bird, rolling my suitcase and tote amidst disoriented, frustrated passengers clutching hotel coupons. I follow the first man who says he has a taxi for me. This should be a dream, because I am not supposed to be here. But I’m not asleep against the window seat in the back row of an airplane cabin. I am wide awake, in the back of a yellow-and-green taxi sedan. Kidist Mariam, the bestower of kisses, is watching me from her sticker on the top right corner of the windshield.
The taxi driver wants to know where to. I open my mouth to tell him to go to the post office, the main landmark of my grandfather’s neighbourhood. I trust that I will remember the rest of the route to Babbaye’s house once we’re in that area, which is one of the few parts of Addis Ababa I know by heart. My only grandparent is eighty-seven now. Last time Ema came here to see him, almost two years ago, I had wondered if she ever feared that one day soon she would be going to Ethiopia to bury, not visit, her father. So much for that.
But I’m not ready for Babbaye. I need to gather myself first, before I go to his house where I’ll be met with tears, where I will face his double sorrow over Ema’s death and the place of her burial. Whether for hours or a day, spending time with Babbaye — also the person who had refused me the one time I did want to come back to Ethiopia — is going to be hard work.
Taking my pause to mean I didn’t understand him, the driver asks me again, in English, where to. In Amharic, I instruct him to take me to the Ghion Hotel, where Ema used to stay when she came for work. Maybe I will be lucky enough to get room 521. The room Ema always booked. In Toronto, I’ve continued my new routine of tracing her footsteps, going where she would have gone, seeking out places where I might still feel her presence.
Even if I’m not able to get 521, I’ll stand outside her door, as if I were again a little girl whose mother, wanting some peace and quiet, has banished her child from the room. I will wait for her outside her door. When I imagine she’s come out, I will follow her downstairs. We’ll have a glass of red wine at the bar, a sunset stroll in the garden. We’ll sit on the edge of the pool, swirling the water with our feet while she has a cigarette, careful to keep the smoke away from children, rubbing the ash into the stone.
I sigh, sink further into the back seat, and lift my heels out of my shoes. From my purse, I pull out Ema’s pack of Djarums to sniff them, like an ex-smoker managing her cravings. The driver glances at me in the rear-view. I suspect he’s thinking, She’s habesha, yes, but in that blood-red uniform, not an Ethiopian Airlines girl. No, I’m not one of those girls who wears forest green, as if they had sprouted out of this lush land.
Babbaye had interrogated me about this land at the farewell party for my family, the day before we left Ethiopia. I was eight years old. The party had to be at his house because our own house was empty, ready for tenants. He called me over to where he sat, pinned my arms at my sides so that I stood as rigid as a proper Little Patriot, and asked me the second impossible question of my life.
“My child, tinishwa arbegna, how do you feel about leaving this land?”
Land, I knew, meant the whole of Ethiopia, which I’d only ever seen on a paper map, but which Babbaye had walked across. Or so it seemed to me. My head was full of the stories my father had told me about Babbaye’s valour as an arbegna during the five years of resistance to the Talyan — as my grandfather says “Italian” — occupation in the thirties. During those years, Aba said the Patriots became known for possessing a spirit of bloodthirsty, come-what-may defiance toward foreign interference. They let their hair grow into unkempt Afros because they had vowed to cut it only when Ethiopia was deloused. They had developed a lion’s palate for raw meat because to make fire was to betray their location in the bush and mountain hideouts from which they launched attacks on the Talyans, making them regret the day they dared to pursue empire.
Babbaye had called me his little arbegna since I was five years old, but my Ethiopia was much smaller than his. My Ethiopia was made up of the patches of land on which stood his house, our house, my school, my parents’ workplaces, the Bole airport park and observation deck, the Ghion pool, and Sodere Resort. To these places, I had none of the deep attachment I knew Babbaye had to his Ethiopia. I was attached to him. He was my land. About leaving him, I felt heavy with the weight of emptiness, like the rooms in our house.
But that was no kind of answer. Because in those days the adults, Babbaye more than anyone, cared deeply about the actual land. Just four months before the party, on the twentieth of Ginbot, Babbaye’s enemy’s enemy had at last conquered Addis Ababa and sent the dictator — the face of the Terror — running. It was a new time, a fresh start that began with the decision to sift the land for what was left of the dead. Diggers clawed splintered bones and tattered cloth out of the disturbed soil. Babbaye was melancholy. The hopes, whispered by his friends and relations, that the remains of his six sons would be among the exhumed had so far remained just that: whispered hopes. Now his youngest, my mother, his only child not disappeared by the Terror, was leaving with her family.
So, in answer to Babbaye’s question of how I felt about leaving this land, I repeated the promise Ema and Aba had been saying to everyone since our departure was announced.
“We will be back after four years, Babbaye.”
He asked the question again.
“I’ll come back.”
He shook his head slowly, like a long-suffering but infinitely patient teacher. I opened my mouth to say, I want to stay, but started crying instead. The festivities continued. Crying was expected. Someone sitting next to Babbaye said even a bride should weep on her wedding day.
I wished Babbaye and I were really how we must have looked: an old man and a little girl, the last of his bloodline, struggling to say goodbye. Rather than a girl forced to keep giving her favourite adult the wrong answer because he didn’t know how to ask her the right question. All the talk in those days of new freedom was about the dead, known and unknown. I wished Babbaye would recognize me as one of his unknown dead. But the three years of my terror were never on the news and my breathing body was there for all to see.
When I started bawling, Babbaye seemed satisfied. My crumpled face and wet cheeks gave him the answer he wanted. He pulled me close and rested my head on his shoulder, wiping away my tears.
The taxi driver warns me that we’re almost at Ghion Hotel, probably remembering my earlier indecision. He’s read me well. If I were to go to Ghion now, at some point between walking to the front desk, getting a room, and making my way to the elevator, I feel sure that someone in that perfumed, glittering lobby would recognize me. Instantly they would know that I am doing the unthinkable: I have arrived in my birth country, my mother laid to rest in outside-country, and I have not gone to my grandfather’s house. Someone will know whose grandchild I am, and will call Babbaye’s house to tell on me. They won’t say anything to me directly, of course. That’s not how it works.
I lean forward and redirect the driver to the old post office, near Babbaye’s area. I must sound unsure of that desti
nation too, because the man asks me to call my people. I refuse. He insists. “Use my phone. That way, you’ll have my number.”
I try to sound certain. “Once we are by the post office, I’ll remember the way.” I sit back, my heart pounding. I am going to Babbaye’s.
“And can you slow down when you pass Foreign Affairs?” I say. I want to catch a glimpse of Ema’s office, at least. Former office.
“I can’t slow there. Only stop to drop off or pick up.”
When we drive past, I understand why. Flimsy gates that used to be wide open have been replaced by solid black iron ones stencilled with the yellow star of the Ethiopian flag. In front of them are concrete guardrails reinforced with barbed wire. In front of all that, cold-eyed soldiers in blue fatigues stand, hands gripping their rifles. Only the vine, flowing thickly down the high walls and gate pillars, is free. Of the four floors of the honeycomb-shaped ministry building, the topmost windows are visible, but not Ema’s, where I had stuck that torn scrap of my letter to my second grade pen pal.
Ema wasn’t supposed to have ended up at Foreign Affairs. She was all set for a career in academia alongside my father at Addis Ababa University. But Babbaye’s enemy informed her that she was welcome to serve in the ministry as a junior legal advisor. She grew to love the work, but in those days, when the tension and paranoia of the Terror was still a reality, receiving the message of “welcome” was really an order to report for duty, which she had to obey.
Once I see the post office, I guide the driver to Babbaye’s easily, warming up my Amharic by saying the directions in my head first. He parks beside a turnoff onto a rocky unpaved road, and searches his pockets.
“Not a bad ride. Some Adisaba roads make you do the eskista,” he says, doing a little dance like a Harlem shake.
“And not a sheep in sight,” I say, remembering Isak’s tirades about what ferenjoch chose to write about on returning to the West after they’d visited here. You’d think they were on a mission to locate farm animals.
Daughters of Silence Page 1
