Click Here to Download the Text
Rania
Mamoun
Thirteen is not a superstitious or
unlucky number, it’s the number of months in a year in Ethiopia.
But that’s another story.
I was very frustrated by the time he
arrived. The computer in front of me had frozen and a customer needed help. It
was morning and I was still half-asleep.
I assumed he was Sudanese when I saw
him, or, more accurately, I didn’t assume anything. It wouldn’t have been
unusual to meet a Sudanese man in my country. Isn’t it normal for Sudanese
people to live in Sudan? I don’t know why I didn’t ask myself where he was from
when he spoke to me in English. Maybe my mind was elsewhere.
I fixed the problem with the computer
and was in a better mood. I overheard him grumbling about a floppy disk.
‘You’re not worth the trouble’, he
muttered to it.
‘You’re better off using a CD or a flash
drive,’ I told him. ‘They’re safer. You really shouldn’t trust floppy disks
nowadays.’
‘Yes, I won’t again.’
‘Do you have a copy of what was on the
disk?’ ‘Yes, but just a print version. I’d hoped to edit it.’ ‘Eritrean or
Ethiopian?’ I asked.
‘Ethiopian,’ he said with pride.
Before we met, I hadn’t really known the
difference between Ethiopia and Eritrea. I didn’t know why I preferred the idea
of Eritrea and its capital, Asmara, to Ethiopia and Addis Ababa. Even though
I’d never visited either country, I felt that Eritrean rhythms spoke to my soul
somehow and the same with Asmara. I liked both countries, generally speaking,
and had harboured a great love for Abyssinia ever since I was small. We lived
next door to an ‘Abyssinian’ bookshop, a word we used to refer to all Ethiopian
and Eritrean immigrants and visitors to Sudan.
The bookshop occupied the whole building
and hosted community events and gatherings when I was young. In front of it was
a vacant lot where teenagers played football. It was lined with houses that had
little gardens in front, each ringed with barbed wire, wooden posts, or mats.
They often held celebrations in that open area by erecting a stage, setting out
lots of chairs, and pitching a large tent over the top.
I loved how the Abysinnians danced, the
intense way they moved their shoulders and neck with the beat. I still do. I
often stared at the dancers on stage, gazing at the women’s beautiful clothes,
white with colourful embroidery, with my hands full of popcorn and mouth agape.
We didn’t understand anything they were
saying or singing because they spoke and sang in Amharic, but even so, we
delighted in the melodies, music, dancing, and joyous atmosphere.
The Abyssinians were a vital part of the
community with their gatherings, just like the other adults and children in the
neighbourhood. We shared their delight in the festivities. For us, the parties
were a chance to play and cause mischief; we’d stand on either side of the
tent, batting at each other through the fabric. Anyone who wanted a seat had to
fight for it, there was always chaos, commotion, and clamour. It was our chance
to escape the adults’ supervision and revel in childhood freedom.
‘I really love Abyssinia,’ I told him.
‘We look the same, so we feel an
affinity with each other. You’re wearing clothing similar to ours, by the way.’
I was wearing an abaya and matching
trousers made from handwoven fabric on the loom. It was white with brown
threads running through it, and three red stripes embroidered on the cuff… it
really did look like Abyssinian attire. In fact, I remember asking the tailor
who made it to use red because it made the outfit look more Abyssinian.
Perhaps the abaya I was wearing reminded
him of home, perhaps that’s what drew him to me. When you’re homesick, you
yearn for anything familiar: people, language, signs, anything. We feel
differently towards these things than we do when we’re nestled in our own
country’s embrace.
A beautiful friendship took seed in
those moments. He told me it pained him that he couldn’t easily communicate
with other people, not without constantly explaining and clarifying, but with
the two of us, conversation was easy. He found in me someone who understood
him, and I found in him a window into Ethiopia, and oh how I loved it.
He mispronounced my name for the first
few days, calling me ‘Raina’ instead of ‘Rania,’ half-swallowing the ‘R’, while
I called him ‘Kidane’.
Back home, Kidane is a woman’s name, he
told me, ‘Call me Kidana.’
‘For us, Kidana is a woman’s name,’ I
told him, ‘because it ends in an “a”.’
I would ask him about all sorts of
things, from zaghny (an Ethiopian
dish) and zaleekh (chilli), to
politics and Eritrea’s conflicts with Ethiopia, born from Italian colonialism.
He told me how, when Eritreans wanted their own currency in place of the
Ethiopian birr, their former Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, deceived them by
just changing the design.
He compared everything, great and small,
to what it was like in his country, and he often said that he never imagined
that he might sit, chat, laugh, and enjoy a beautiful friendship with a
Sudanese woman. We joked and drank tea, 7Up, and tamarind juice, which he said,
with its brown colour, looked like an alcoholic drink they have back home.
He asked me to accompany him to buy some
Sudanese music, so we went to Studio Adeel and Zein. I picked out a cassette
tape featuring some of the greatest Sudanese singers for him, as well as one of
the flautist Hafiz Abdelrahman called
Everlasting Days.
‘Think of me every time you listen to
those tapes,’ I told him.
‘I’ll fall in love with you if I do
that.’
‘No. You mustn’t fall in love with me.’
‘I love you now, in my own way.’
‘I love you, too, in my own way.’
Little Mohamed, who was twelve years old
and worked at the café on weekends, always stared curiously at us when we were
together, trying to get closer to us.
‘He’s Sudanese?’ he asked me one day.
‘Kind of,’ I replied.
‘Then why doesn't he speak Arabic… was
he in America or something?’
I laughed, and told Kidane what the boy
said. Kidane laughed too. ‘He’s Ethiopian,’ I said.
‘Y’mean Abyssinian.’
‘Yes, Abyssinian.’
‘So you’re Abyssinian, too,’ he said to
me.
I laughed again.
‘My mother is Abyssinian.’
‘Is that guy related to you?’
‘Yes, he’s my cousin.’
After that Mohamed began to show off his
knowledge of English, which didn’t seem to include more than ten words. Kidane
became far more relaxed around him, and from then on they were friends.
I wouldn’t claim I could speak English
like a ‘Johnny,’ as we called the English, but through it we were able to
understand each other.
Kidane was able to communicate with the
words he knew, as well as a generous human spirit. I didn’t need him to finish
every sentence he began, and if I got a word wrong he never corrected or
embarrassed me.
Kidane was here to collect data on water
for his Master’s thesis. He was researching the Nile basin and had been given a
choice: travel to Sudan or Egypt. He chose the former. He was here to study the
Gezira Scheme – the largest irrigation project on the continent of Africa – and
was doing fieldwork at the scheme’s headquarters in Barakat, with farmers in
the villages of Helwa and Bika, in the city of al-Hasaheisa, and at the
Agricultural Research Authority in Wad Madani.
‘We drink the same water,’ he said to me
once.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘It flows through both
of us.’
The Blue Nile, which passes through
Khartoum, originates at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. That’s what makes our bond so
strong, I thought: we were nursed from the same source. The White Nile
originates at Lake Victoria in Uganda and the two rivers – the unruly Blue
Nile, and the wide, calm White Nile – meet in Khartoum, where their beauty
glorifies the city. There they converge to form the great River Nile, which
crosses Egypt to where it then flows into the Mediterranean Sea.
It’s ‘tea’ in Amharic, and ‘teha’ in
Tigrinya, he told me every time I ordered a cup of tea. He knew both languages:
Amharic, which was spoken by the Amhara people, and Tigrinya, which was spoken
by the Tigrayans. His father was Tigrayan and his mother was Amhara. He told me
about the different tribes and ethnicities back home: Muslims from Harar,
beautiful men and women who still live in cities surrounded by huge walls like
ancient citadels; the Afar people, the Oromo, Somalis and those from the South,
and the Anuak people, who intersected with part of the Dinka tribe in South
Sudan.
When I was little, a friend told me that
she had a relative from Ethiopia, and he’d told her that their year had
thirteen months.
This tale stayed in the back of my mind,
and once, when we were browsing an Ethiopian website, I asked him, what’s the
story?
‘Each of our months has just thirty
days, and all the extra days from months which have thirty-one days are
combined to make the thirteenth month of the year,’ he told me. ‘Pagumen is the name of the thirteenth
month, which has five or six days depending on whether it’s a leap year.’ How
could Pagumen be a month when it had fewer days than a week? Ethiopia was a
wonderous country!
It’s the only nation in the world with a
year unlike all the others – a year with an extra month, a composition all its
own – and whenever I recalled this I would ask the person next to me: did you
know that Ethiopia has thirteen months?
‘Is this place good for you?’ He asked
as we were deciding where to sit.
‘It’s not the place that’s important,
but the person you share it with.
They can make it heaven or hell.’
‘In that case it’s definitely good for
you!’
We laughed a lot that day, and when he
said ‘I feel at home in this country,’ I was filled with joy that I’d managed
to ease his sharp loneliness. When he walked away, on that last day together, I
felt as if a strong hand had clasped my heart and squeezed it tight, and I
couldn’t look away until he’d disappeared from sight.
It was evening, and in front of us was a
wide, green field ringed by young trees. ‘Open spaces nourish the imagination,’
said my Ethiopian friend. Did I imagine something different about him that last
evening? He was different, yes. Or at least that’s how I felt, because my
feelings for him were different, feelings preceding the word goodbye. Maybe for
forever. In my mind, I told him: take care of yourself… keep in touch… please,
don’t forget what we shared.
I felt the moment of farewell sweep over
me, and the consequences that usually accompany those moments.
‘Will I see him again someday,
somewhere?’ I asked someone nearby. Kidane Kiros was his name.
~x~
No comments:
Post a Comment