‘His son came back from the war with Eritrea. He was crazy — he blew his brains out right here,’ the sister explained as the brother made a gesture of holding a gun to his head. I looked at the old man, thinking he might be angry, but he smiled and lifted the bottle to his lips.
‘The young of today, we can’t get anything past them,’ he said and patted them on their heads. ‘But they also don’t know everything,’ he added.
Now that the children had broken our code, I felt reluctant to ask him about Kidane, but I risked it anyway, hoping he could launch both of us into deeper code.
‘The mysteries of the heart. To tell the truth is very difficult work; the truth is like hot lava going through the musician. Even if they try, it will still burn and leave them with scars. But it is also beautiful work,’ he said.
‘Sometimes my mother drinks too much and then fights with my father,’ the little girl once again injected her two cents into the translation. The old man laughed again. He must have understood English.
‘Perhaps we are saying too much?’ he asked rhetorically, but it was too late for him to stop. ‘Kidane sings for my son, to bring him back. Anytime I hear her sing, I can see my boy right in front of me, but each time, we are not the same after — and so I take a little medicine,’ he carried on.
This is what he is telling me, I think — Kidane and his son had been lovers, were probably going to get married, but he came back from the war traumatised. Her love could not save him from the ghosts of war that were calling him over. The landscape, this place, was not so full of happiness and peace after all.
‘The war between neighbours, between Eritrea and Ethiopia, what was it about?’ I asked him.
‘War between brothers never has a reason — the brothers of Pakistan and India, Bangladesh; the brothers of Britain and France; the brothers of Kenya and Somalia. We have been killing our brothers for too long,’ he explained, suddenly looking very close to breaking down.
I thanked him. He went back to his chanting, and we started our walk back.
‘You are the reporter writing about my mother, right?’ Selamawit asked.
‘Yes, he is. You know he is,’ Tsage answered for me.
‘You must be very special,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I asked in surprise.
‘We never meet any reporters,’ she answered.
‘It must be because your mother and father love you and want to protect you from being known to strangers. Imagine how difficult your life would be if everyone in Ethiopia and the whole world knew you…,’ I awkwardly tried to explain.
‘It would be very, very nice to be famous,’ the boy answered eagerly.
‘But how would you know if your friends loved you for who you are?’ I asked both of them. God! How many times had I asked myself that same question growing up?
‘I would not care at all. I would make them do what I want. Why would I care as long as they did what I wanted?’ Tsage reasoned.
He had a point there, I guess — it would be nice to be able to bend the world to your will.
‘OK, in that case, let me take a photo of the both of you, but I will ask your mother for permission to use it,’ I said, to close the subject.
I took the photo, knowing I would not use it, and they skipped and hopped ahead of me till we got back to the farm.
13
‘I have many answers, but here is one.’
Kidane was up and in the kitchen making tea. She was dressed in the kind of outfit that I have long associated with old African women — a dress decorated with flowers, and a loose waistband that made it formless. She could tell what I was thinking because she said, ‘It is, as a matter of fact, very comfortable.’
The kids went outside to play. She turned off the gas stove and got out a bottle of Red Label and two glasses from a cabinet and asked me to follow her outside, where we sat on the long veranda. Looking down the hill, I felt that if I were tall enough, I could dangle my feet in the air.
It was time.
‘Why don’t we start with your parents and then talk about your childhood?’ I asked her. She threw her hands in the air, walked back to the house and came back with a green photo album and sat next to me, so close that I could smell her worn-out perfume and bad breath fighting its way through the sharp smell of the scotch. She showed me old black-and-white photos of her parents. Her mother had been the headmistress of the school where her father taught English. We kept flipping through the photos; her parents got older as she grew from a toddler to a teenager to a young woman on her wedding day to a mother holding her first child. They aged with each flip, until they died of old age. There were no photos of a young Diva at a recital or playing the piano or pretending to sing and dance with a fake microphone, nothing to suggest an early interest in music.
‘When did you know you wanted to be a musician?’ I asked.
‘I did not know my parents could sing, I mean, really sing, but on my first day at school, they came to my class and taught us how to sing the national anthem. They did a beautiful duet — that was the first time I knew I wanted to be a singer. The national anthem…I did not know it then, but what I was responding to was the soul, the blues in the anthem. Know what I mean? There is a deep longing in our anthem, like a Black American spiritual,’ she said and started humming the anthem.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked above her hum.
‘The anthem is about love and light, love and truth; God’s children wailing from distant lands; humanity, not just Ethiopians, but all of us, pleading — that was the old anthem where we prayed to the Emperor to protect us. Fuck the politics of it all, it had soul, something about the way the words were strung together. A song, the way it sounds, can have a different meaning from the lyrics. I did not hear Emperor Haile Selassie. I did not hear politics at all — I heard a need to be with others. What I remember is my mother and father looking like young lovers. Singing made them beautiful — it was almost like they were singing a love song. It was a love song….’
I could see my story forming already — the first sentence in The National Inquisitor: On that beautiful morning when a wide-eyed, young Kidane (she was not yet The Diva) heard her teacher-parents sing the national anthem in front of the whole school, it was as if she was hearing her calling. But not a calling to God or to country, but to connect people through music.
‘Did your parents sing at home?’
‘No. Never. Not once. At home, they watched TV in the evenings, marked exams and prepared for school or worked out in the garden. I don’t know what home was to them, and by the time I knew to ask that question, they had passed on.’
‘Did they know you could sing?’
‘They neither supported nor discouraged me. They knew what I was doing; their plan was to let me grow with gentle guidance, my father once told me — and whether I became a flower or a weed was up to me. I was complaining to him as a child that they did not care about me,’ she said with a laugh.
‘It must have been extremely lonely,’ I said to her, trying to mask the pity in my voice with journalistic curiosity.
‘To the contrary. I could do anything and go anywhere. I was my only limit. Can you imagine that? They loved me, and so they let me grow into myself. I could do wrong, but there was no one to punish me, and it became easier to do the right thing. I try to do the same thing for Selamawit and Tsage.’
I could hear the pride in her voice.
‘Can you give me an example?’ I asked.
‘I started smoking cigarettes when I was 12. They knew but did not say anything. Instead, they started giving me more money for lunch, and so I quit smoking. Call it reverse psychology. Or sex — I started having sex when I was 14 with a 15-year-old boy. I wanted to. My own terms. No sexual hang-ups for me,’ she answered.
‘Did they know?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know if they knew about the sex, but they never stopped us from seeing each other. The old man — that was his son,’ she explained
, her voice dropping so low that I heard echoes of her performance at the ABC.
Yet another juicy bit that I knew would be good for my readers: The Diva, intellectually emancipated at birth, sexually liberated at 14, owned her life from the day she was born, thanks to her anarchist parents. She meets a boy. They fall in love. He goes to war, returns and shoots himself in the head.
‘You know what they used to call me?’ she asked, as she placed the album on her thighs and rested her hands on it.
I had no idea.
‘The boys from around here — even some record execs — called me Buck Horse ‘cos of my teeth — the front four,’ she said, with the pride of someone who had overcome her past and triumphed over her enemies. ‘The first thing I did….’
Somewhere deep down in her voice, I thought I sensed a tinge of regret.
‘Surgery?’ I asked her.
She shook her head to say no, her eyes falling on a photograph. I looked at the photograph closely. I looked again and looked at her — she wanted me to see it: she had not had surgery.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘You mean how, you should ask, how?’
‘How?’
‘I did nothing, just improved…completely redid the way I looked — hair, dressing, make-up. Disguise is the simplest of all things — in my case, I became the face of the voice they wanted to hear. The first thing I did when I made some money was to buy The Diva. Money is all it took,’ she explained.
‘No one noticed?’ I asked.
‘No one looked hard enough — they see glamour, the diamonds,’ she explained. Once she became The Diva, her long hair draped on her shoulders, all glitter and voice, she became what people wanted to see.
‘But why didn’t you get them fixed? It would have been easy enough,’ I pressed.
‘What if it changed the sound of my voice?’ she asked in turn. ‘Do you play anything?’
‘A little guitar,’ I answered, knowing what was coming next.
‘Then you must play me something,’ she said as she went in to get a guitar.
She came back with an expensive-looking acoustic electric Fender that, like the keyboard, seemed out of place out here on the farm. The kids, on seeing the guitar, joined us.
I had sung “Malaika” a countless number of times, drunk at BU student parties, in the perpetual hunt for a one-night stand that never materialised, but never for a musician I was interviewing, and in front of her two kids on a farm deep in Ethiopia. I found myself, as I explained the song to her, thinking about it in ways I had never before.
“Malaika” was, in a way, our version of the Tizita, a Kiswahili version. In the song, a man cannot marry the woman he loves — he doesn’t have the money, presumably for a dowry, but also to make a home. But it’s more than an absence of money; it’s an absence of a fortune. Can you have a lot of money but not a fortune? I wondered. He blames her for turning down his proposal even as he yearns for her. The young man in the song has faced adversity in his quest for a fortune and he has lost, resulting in a double tragedy — loss of two things yet to be acquired. He loses before he knows what it is he is not getting. I asked if she thought “Malaika” was the Kenyan Tizita.
‘I have many answers, but here is one,’ she said as I laughed. ‘Tizita is of a love lost a long time ago — before you are born. Let me put it this way, “Malaika” is the song the original Tizita singer sang when the wounds of losing love, country, parent, sibling — of losing life while still alive — were still fresh. All those losses over years become something you pass on from generation to generation — the moss of all those broken hearts and loss gathered in a song. “Malaika” is the fresh wound; the Tizita is the scar. “Malaika” has a face; the Tizita is faceless, or rather, it has so many faces that it is faceless.’
I could see that there was something very old that the Tizita invoked in me that I could not name yet. I started playing, but she declared the guitar out of tune, taking it from me to tune it herself. Kidane, of course, knew “Malaika” — the chorus at least — and so she joined me, her voice making mine sound even more out of key, but I could tell she was having fun, so I kept playing, repeating the chorus at every opportunity. She went in and came back with another guitar and started strumming along with me. She quickly mastered the three chords so that, in a little while, she was picking the strings with her fingers while I strummed.
We played for a while before I asked her to show me how to play the Tizita. A few complicated chords and I gave up, so she offered to teach me how to play a simple bass line, repetitive and soothing, like the hum of a nearby stream, while she played the rhythm. The kids went and brought small drums and the band started warming up. After trying to have me follow her, she gave up, took a hold of my fingers and guided them through the bass line as she hummed it. Finally, I got it, and we started playing and getting into it until her voice was soaring so high, or rather gliding up above her guitar, above my awkward bass line. I could almost see the sound waves separating, her voice going higher and higher while the guitars remained constant, like a beam of light coming out from where we sat going into the sky, getting wider and wider. She kept getting higher and higher until we lost the song, and we sat there laughing.
‘Now you see why the Tizita is not about the voice but containment,’ she said, slightly out of breath. ‘The explosion is in the containment.’
The concert continued as the kids crowded around her and demanded the guitar and plucked away at various Ethiopian lullabies. It was soon time for them to go to bed, and Kidane went in to feed them and tuck them in. I was left to my own devices, consisting of a half-drunk bottle of whisky and a guitar. I sat there plucking away at bits and pieces of songs, trying to string the Tizita to “Malaika.”
14
‘Well, sometimes beauty is not comfortable.’
Kidane in the kitchen was pure chaos, pots and pans all over the place — and in the end, dinner was spaghetti and tomato sauce. She had a concert the following day, she said, to explain the haste. Her kids ate away, as I did — spaghetti and tomato sauce was one of my favourite dishes as a kid.
I went up to my room intending to write, but after an hour or so, I gave up — I had not seen enough. There were some nascent questions, though: what kind of an African middle class doesn’t have kitchen help? Or a watchman to stand by a gate? What was it I was missing?
I undressed, hopped into bed and tried to fall asleep, but I was exhausted — the kind of exhaustion that makes sleeping impossible. I called Alison only for her to sleepily tell me to fuck off.
A stiff drink seemed like the next best thing. On my way to the kitchen, I noticed the light was on in the small room with the piano and decided to turn it off. But Kidane was in there, stark naked, headphones on, playing a song I could not hear.
‘In space and heaven there is no sound,’ she had said back at the ABC. This was as close as I was ever going to get to hearing, or rather witnessing, music without sound. I did not dare enter to disturb her, so I just stood there observing a naked woman, her hair down to her back, her statuesque figure shaking gently, and other times violently, as her hands moved across the keyboard, sometimes so forcefully that I could feel reverberations on the wooden floor and up my naked feet, and other times so softly that all I could hear was a light flutter. Sometimes, she would hum, but without the music, the melody sounded disjointed. It was like watching a painting come alive.
I could get why she was playing late into the night — but naked? To stand naked before the Tizita? To share vulnerabilities? To feel it on her skin in a way that she could not in front of an audience? Or was it just too hot, and she thought I would be sleeping? Or was it my dream?
I could have stood there and watched her for hours, but I heard the key turning. It was her husband returning, and, understanding there would be no easy way to explain why I was standing there watching his naked wife play soundless music, I took that as my cue to quickly but quietly go back to bed.
&nbs
p; I soon heard his footsteps pause by the music room. They were talking, and in spite of myself, the tabloid journalist in me was curious enough to decide to eavesdrop. What kind of a conversation would I have with, say, Alison if I found her stark naked writing on her laptop? What was I thinking? Of course, they would speak in Amharic. I lost interest and went back upstairs. I heard their laughter followed by lovemaking amplified by the increasingly urgent creaking floors.
It was funny: seeing her naked had not turned me on; it hadn’t even occurred to me — I would say it was sensual or, more accurately, sensuous without being sensual. But now, hearing them making love, there was nothing to do but to masturbate along, matching their intensity, so that we all came together.
What must have been an hour or so later, I heard giggles by my door. I thought the kids were up for some reason. I put on my boxers and opened my door, only to find both Mohamed and Kidane beside themselves with laughter. They were standing there doing rock, paper, scissors to see who would knock on my door. They were clearly tipsy, and I tried to show my annoyance by letting out a loud yawn, to which they laughed even more.
‘Come on, you know you want to join us! Put some clothes on, we are going to start a bonfire. You can help,’ Kidane said and dragged Mohamed down the stairs with her.
We piled up a mountain of wood and brush. One slight problem, it was all mostly damp. Mohamed had an idea; he had some petrol in the shed. He fetched it and liberally poured it on, struck a match and threw it onto the brush. Terrible, stupid idea! An explosion! I have never moved so fast, or seen other people move even faster. We sprinted off in different directions and congregated back when it was safe. They were drunk enough to find it funny — who ran faster, the Kenyan or the Ethiopians? Adrenalin still coursing through me, I took liberal swigs of whatever bottle they had thrust into my hands. Luckily, the tired kids (thanks to me) were completely wiped out and did not wake up.
Unbury Our Dead with Song Page 7
