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mind entropy of the ethiofrican

Blind Ears

18 March, 2008 | No comments | Category: love.of.words!, poetry

at the base under where certainty resides,
jaws release pulses. clenched tight. assured…
flippant eyes glazed, or averted.

heads foam-filled, fuzzy from ear to ear.
stuffed with pretentious filler.
puffing with insistence of rigid and sure…

as if foam is unbudgingly fixed metal.
as if phobic of metals scratching when flexing and flowing.

halt the flex. stop the motion. parch the dialog.
testify the non issue.
decelerate the rumbling, bubbling flow.
avert eyes. defocus ears

what of listening to fluidity?
watching for raw individualities.
stories. emotion…the drumming of the heart.
the rhythmic motion of life
patterns of contradictions and idyosyncracies.
colorful volume and noise.
the unscripted and uncrypted textures.

opaque. beaten.
by listening to fluff and argumentation.
seeing fluff testify…
weave its tangling spell. tangling.

silent eyes close
blind ears numb

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Why I write about Ethnicity…

13 March, 2008 | No comments | Category: ethnicity, I.dentity, i.mmigration, peace & conflict

i have worries and fissures in my heart – about my country

…i worry about my country plunging into perpetual conflict if the question of nationalism is not resolved… i worry about the fact that a majority of all conflicts of the world that happened since the nineties are ethnic conflicts (Angola, Burma, Sudan, Iraq, Russia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Rwanda…)

i see the way i was conditioned by society, mostly isolated from those different from me

i write…

… after seeing the way i was conditioned. not to ask critical questions, not to discuss ‘unconventional ideas’ with classmates who were from an ethnic group with deep grievances. i was conditioned to stop in my tracks from exploring and understanding the unknown, understanding a part of their identity. when these classmates of mine held strong beliefs, they easily earned a comfortable label: radical. this easily validated my silence. when i had known these classmates since childhood, it never occurred to me to ask and listen.

…after seeing the crippling influence of silence about differences. seeing a society without the virtuous exercises of energetic, spirited dialog (not rabid argumentation or debate)… observing a society that does not encourage the constructive clash of opposing opinions. instead, seeing a society which commends a culture of complacency and assimilation. at most, a society that commends passionately emotive arguments without compromise or dialog, without listening.

…i write

In ethnically diverse societies where different groups have varying holds on cultural trends, social norms, traditions and access to the media; the concept of ‘the other’, stereotypes and prejudices take prominence.

i have felt that deep pang of being ‘the other’.

i have experienced that itchy feeling of being a social outsider whose core identity did not fit the mainstream…i have felt that hunger for acceptance in various settings, that waiting for the validation of my identity in that system. my most extreme experience being culture shock in the US at discovering my blackness, and thus, my lack of privilege…

…most astoundingly, around the same time, i discovered my blindness to my ethnic privilege in Ethiopia. Because truly its about privilege! The privilege that comes with being part of the ‘mainstream’, the privilege to assume rather than to assimilate…the privilege of access… (more…)

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no more historybooks, ever?: Ethnic Genetics

12 March, 2008 | 6 comments | Category: ethnicity, I.dentity, peace & conflict

(…a tangential continuation of a piece on the rightful owners of ethiopia…)

Ethnic groups bicker about their entitlement to a state, their rightful ownership of land, their rightful access to opportunities, their ownership of history, intellectual property…At the root of these ethnic conflicts, individuals ascribing to ethnic group membership feel deep grievances at being denied what they feel entitlement toward.

Issues of ethnicity balance on these feelings of entitlement; to opportunities and resources, to a full unabashed and proud representation of who i am, who ‘we’ are.

The hutu felt entitled to the land and resources they had been denied for years. Kenyans are recently fighting over issues of land entitlement . Chechniyans claim to be the first inhabitants of Europe and thus rightful owners of the land. The Oromo claim to be the original inhabitants of the Ethiopian plains and furrows. The inhabitants of the Basque Country make the same claim about being the first Europeans…ever! :) Many of these groups are pulling out the secession card. Typically, a seemingly never-ending battle is waged between:

the settlers vs. the natives. ‘I got here first, I have the right to the resource.’

These type of arguments are waged across the world in many conflicts of identity. The claims and bickering seem infinitesimal because…history does not recount the past to exact precisions, and there have been migrations, intermarriages for thousands of years. Legends and stories of ancestors wade in the consciousness of current groups – written records, oral traditions, folktales, art, books, media…Claims… Different groups write different tales to gain validation – they selectively forget parts of history.

Here is the hole:

History is not the past. And bickerings would continue.

Here is the news:

New technologies would drastically change all of this by reading the past!

Nowadays the likes of genetic technology are allowing us to read the PAST. Can you believe it? The recent unveiling of the origin of human migration in the vicinities of Addis Ababa is a testament to the power of the scientific advances. Now, bio-historic books built from variation within genes (aka SNPS) are becoming open access. By tracking SNPs in different populations across the world we can track migration, make the bridge between history and biology solid!

I can’t begin to imagine the political connotations, the many proclamations of entitlement that are sure to ensue! This is going to be beyond regular levels of curiosity- It is going to be big! What could it mean? A typical reading of our past would come fresh out of the sequencing machine in this format:

“Genetically, in terms of Y-chromosomes and Mt-DNA, inhabitants of Britain and Ireland are closely related to the Basques, reflecting their common origin in this refugial area. Basques, along with Irish, show the highest frequency of the Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup R1b in Western Europe; some 95% of native Basque men have this haplogroup. The rest is mainly I and a minimal presense of E3b. The Y-chromosome and MtDNA relationship between Basques and people of Ireland and Wales is of equal ratios than to neighbouring areas of Spain, where similar ethnically “Spanish” people now live in close proximity to the Basques, although this genetic relationship is also very strong among Basques and other Spaniards. In fact, as Stephen Oppenheimer has stated in The Origins of the British (2006), although Basques have been more isolated than other Iberians, they are a population representative of south western Europe.

source“

How is this going to change the the fight between the settler and the native? And how will that shape ethnic conflicts which have comprised the large majority of all the conflicts that have taken place since the 90ies??

Your call is as good as mine…But I am beyond hooked, waiting for the next developments!

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Power…taking her son barack

6 March, 2008 | No comments | Category: book snip, I.dentity, i.mmigration

“”During the purge, all students studying abroad had to be summoned without explanation, their passports revoked…Students studying in Eastern Bloc countries did much worse. Many of them are still in jail. Or vanished. “You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin repeated. “Such times are best forgotten.”

My mother left the cousin’s house in a daze… She began to walk without direction. She found herself in a wealthy neighborhood where the diplomats and generals lived in sprawling houses and wrought-iron gates. She saw a woman in bare feet and a tattered shawl wandering through an open gate…One of the men shouted for the woman to leave. Another man dug in his pocket and threw out a handful of coins. The woman ran after the coins with terrible speed, checking the road suspiciously as she gathered them to her bosom.

Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were, you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power, learned the wisdom of forgetting. Just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company…

She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.”

He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet filled with a sudden panic.

Power was taking her son.

…She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.

___________________________________
In America, it…remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface…spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned…
___________________________________

“…We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge that your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony; should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors they would have name for that too, a name that would cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed to deflect…

Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

from Barack Obama’s book ‘Dreams of My Father‘.

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