Wayna & Dinaw: Slums of Paradise
8 December, 2008 | 9 comments | Category: book snip, for.the.love.of.words!, I.dentity, i.mmigration, love.of.words!, musiqa, nostalgia.personal, peace & conflict, poetry, prose.tales
The African immigrant experience within the U.S.
…complex, diverse and ridiculously chaotic!
Which experience isn’t, eh?
A friend recently told me we are ‘transplants’…
Surely there is no way that can be less-than-a-chaotic experience!
A chaotic experience that’s gotta be told…
Why Stories?
Stories are powerful and profound…
They are ways to …share the most beautiful parts of ‘me’ and ‘us’:
stories of sincere, vulnerable, honest, contradictory and complex humanity…(great video on that)…a way to confirm my & our presences in this world, in our own voices…I love stories, always have for some reason.
My mum told me, when I was a little girl and wouldn’t eat food, she used to tell me stories so my mouth would unconsciously gape open and she’d slip the food in! We should tell each other our stories to share each other, and to build/reaffirm our commonality – or humanity.
Stories make & relay meaning, share, connect, inspire, uplift, persuade, shape thought, teach, transfer history, bring together, affirm culture, enable self-reflection…they confirm ‘you are not alone in your experience’ and describe common narratives of communities. From the political-historical angle…written stories hold weight as Virginia Woolf once said; “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”…and as long as the victors tell the prevalent stories, they would have the upper hand. Stories are paths to peacemaking, just as they are to the absence of peace. ‘Stories fill our lives in the way that water fills the lives of fish.’ Stories are as all-pervasive as culture.
Wayna’s Slums of Paradise
Below are sublime original sounds by Grammy nominee Wayna Wondwossen. ‘Slums of Paradise’ holds her description of experiences as an Ethiopian-born immigrant in the US with parents filled with expectations about her future. She is an incredible neo soul musician wonderfully deserving of her Grammy nomination. Listening to her live rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ last March, I literally had tears in my eyes and goosebumps! Her voice has a clarity and beauty that is just uplifting. No wonder the incredible Stevie Wonder himself said “She is Incredible!”
Slums of Paradise – Wayna
Desparate Days – Wayna ft. Tewoderos Taddesse
Dinaw’s “The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears“
Also been reading a very engaging novel by Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian Immigrant, winner of the 2007 Guardian First Book Award. The story is about a man, Sepha Stephanos, who flees a communist junta as a teenager to become a transplant immigrant in the US, making attempts to grasp the ‘beauty that heaven bears’- the American dream. The book captures the loneliness, and internal angst involved in the immigrant experience- it is so bare and honest… The best parts of the book, to me, circulate around the emotional narrative behind the illusion of opportunity and Sepha’s attempts to reconcile his ever-present nostalgia. His fleeting romance with a family of a single white mother and biracial daughter is a touching tale of a man fearful of love in his self-doubt. Here is an interview with Dinaw by Tadias Magazine. My favorite part of the interview:
“I don’t think most writers ever decide to write. For me, it was something that I did because I had to. It’s been my way of managing and making sense of the world I live in.”
It’s exciting that voices like his are starting to get heard.
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Below…excerpts organized in random order with titles added for reading-ease.
“Going Home
It would be so much easier to never return, wouldn’t it? To just keep walking down this road until I hit the city’s edge. And from there I could hop on a bus or train and make my way farther south, or north, and start all over again. How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return to Ethiopian again? It seems as if there should have been a particular moment when the knowledge settled in. For at least the first two years that I was there, I was so busy passing my mother, brother, father, and friends in the aisles of grocery stores, in parks and restaurants, that at times it hardly felt as if I had really left. I searched for familiarity wherever I went. I found it in the buildings and in the layout of the streets. I saw glimpses of home whenever I came across three or four roads that intersected at odd angles, in the squat glass office buildings caught in the sun’s glare. I found a small measure of it in the circles and in the beggars who slept under the office towers at night. I used to let my imagination get the best of me. My hallucinations of home became standard. I welcomed them into my day completely. I talked to my mother from across the bus; I walked home with my father across the spare, treeless campus of my northern Virginia community college. We talked for hours. I told him about my classes, about Berhane and our little apartment together and my job carrying suitcases at the Capitol Hotel. I explained to him the parts of American culture that I had never heard of before. “There’s no respect here,” I told him. The students in my class call our teacher John. They dress like they’re coming from bed and then sleep through class.
I couldn’t have asked for a better listener than my father. We talked and saw more of each other during my first two years here than in all of the years we spent living under the same roof. It was so easy to slip him into my day. All it took was a passing thought of him in his impeccable white shirt and pinstriped suit, and there he was. Does any of this make sense to you, abaye? I know you wouldn’t have had much patience for these conversations with the dead. That would have never been your style. You would have simply asked that I remember you fondly. But it’s nice having you here with me for just a little while as we near 13th Street. You would have loved this city on a day like today. You used to stretch open your hands and crane your neck back so you could feel the wind wrapping around you, a gesture that I can’t help but mime every time a warm breeze blows by. Perhaps you would have thought, as I always do, that the portrait of Frederick Douglass painted into the back of that red building on the corner bears, from the right angle, a striking resemblance to one of the pictures of Haile Selassie that used to adorn the walls of the capitol. I was saying earlier that I couldn’t remember at which point I understood that I had left home for good. I can’t seem to remember, either, when we stopped having these conversations. The two are connected, aren’t they? I never understood that until right now: that everything went with you.
The Elevator
Only one of the elevators is working today. A line builds up in front of it, forcing a round of general greetings with people whose faces, much less names, I can hardly recall. I know that there’s a curiosity surrounding me. There’s an upturned glance behind every salaam and tadias that I exchange. I’m being measured for everything. For my clothes, hair, shoes, for my readiness to offer a proper greeting and good-bye. Sometimes I think of my decision to leave this building as an escape, while at other times it seems more like an abandonment. I try not to take the thought too seriously, but when every eye you catch seems to hold an accusation or question behind it, a decision has to be made. Either I left to create a new life of your own, one free of the restraints and limits of culture, or I turned my back on everything I was and that had made me. Each familiar face waiting for the elevator seems to want to ask the same questions: What have you done with yourself, where you have gone, and who do you think you are? I know there would be a fair amount of pleasure behind the pity that would greet me if my life were ever laid bare before this crowd.
I’m pressed into the back of the elevator with at least fifteen other people. There’s a joke waiting to be had here. How many Ethiopians can you fit into an elevator? All of them. What do you call an elevator full of Ethiopians? An oxymoron. Once the elevator begins to move, the gossip begins. It’s disguised as innocent conversation between two women. Speaking much louder than necessary, one woman claims to have seen Dr. Negatu’s daughter getting out of a cab by herself at sunrise. To make matters worse, she was sitting in the front seat. The news is followed by the customary tsking of sound judgment being passed. It’s soon followed up with the other news of the day. Those who don’t join in on the conversation simply stand quietly like myself, complicit and greedy. In one protracted elevator ride there are rumors of infidelity, abuse, drugs, unemployment. Time, distance and nostalgia have convinced these women that back in Ethiopia, we were all moral and perfect, all of which is easier to believe when you consider that lives that most of us live now. With our menial jobs and cramped apartments, it’s impossible not to want to look back sometimes and pretend there was once a better world, one where husbands were faithful, children were obedient, and life was easy and wonderful.
With enough time, one woman says in Amharic, there won’t be any Ethiopians. They’ll all become American.
I can’t help but smile whenever I hear that line. By even the most liberal standards, I would easily stand convicted of the same crime. I can count the number of Ethiopian friends still in my life with two fingers. I go out of my way to avoid the restaurants and bars frequented by other Ethiopians of my generation. My phone calls home are infrequent. I eat injera only on social occasions. I consider the old emperor to have been a tyrant, not a god. When I try to pray, it’s only to ask God to forgive me for not believing in Him in the first place. And of course there had been Judith and Naomi, who alone could have set every gossiping tongue on fire for months.
The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears
His interest in the city’s politics lasted only as long as it took him to know the faces behind it. Once he accomplished that, there was no more mystery or surprise. Politicians came and went. They ate their lunches. They tipped generously. they demanded to be treated like royalty, and that was it. Perhaps Joseph had believed that his physical proximity to power meant great things were in store for him. That was what the Colonial Grill was supposed to have meant- a step up in the world, a sign of progress, advancement, promotion. When he first came to D.C., he had worked as a busboy, and then as a bellhop, and now as a waiter. We all have measures by which we gauge the progress of our lives. Joseph has been generous with his. It’s been nineteen years since he came to America, and he has tried to see each and every one of those years in the best possible light. Michigan and the PhD are now the idle dreams of a restless young immigrant.
“You don’t need a PhD anymore,” he said to me once. “Any thing you want to learn in this world, you can learn in this city for free.” We were walking back from the Library of congress where we had spent most of an afternoon looking for the poems of an obscure Congolese poet Joseph remembered reading as a teenager. In his rare and sober off-hours from work, he was working on his own cycle of poems, ones that would trace the history of the Congo from King Leopold to the death of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko.
“The poems,” he said are like the Commedia, except there is no heaven. They begin in hell, they come out of it for just a moment, and then they return.”
Once, in his under-furnished and oversize studio, he read to me the last few lines of the first section, the one that ended with the department of Belgium from the Congo and the rise of Lumumba as prime minister. The scene was his equivalent of Dante’s “Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears.”
|Through a round aperture I saw appear,
some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.|
We have come this fair, to find we have even further to go
The last traces of a permanent twilight have faded and given away.
To what we hope is nothing short of a permanent dawn.”
Possibly Related Posts:
- A Saturday at the Wharton Africa Business Forum
- The Graying of these here Pink Shades
- When I’m Back
- The Uncomfortable Truth: Nneka
- Flattery: Fast-tracking Success?
9 comments to “Wayna & Dinaw: Slums of Paradise”
nyalasmoke, December 10th, 2008 at 4:51 pm:
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great post homegurl! If u haven’t done so, also check out “Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia” by Rebecca Haile. It is off the hook. Even though one is sort of a memoir and the other one a novel, for some reason, I found myself identifying much more with Rebecca’s book than Dinaw’s. Anyway, our diverse community needs many more books from our varied perspectives. i hope one day you will write one and we will get to read it.
tpeace, December 10th, 2008 at 10:13 pm:
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thanks nyala that’s very kind of u to say! lol who knows right? i might just pop out one of those books hehehe…
Nani, January 20th, 2009 at 10:38 pm:
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I second the “you should write one!” seriously think about it … lol or that will be my next mission of what to nag u abt
I love this post! … as always:)
Fana, February 12th, 2009 at 11:16 pm:
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I love ur post… thanks T-ye!!!
Adey, May 12th, 2009 at 4:20 am:
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The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is made into a play in Seattle. Great reflection of the book, but unfortunately no abeshas in the play as well as audience. I agree with you Nyala. Sepha, Dinaw’s book main character looked like he was stuck, most people that came during Sepha’s time has moved on & up.
Mahlet, September 1st, 2009 at 2:52 pm:
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Hi there – this piece you write fits in well with a book project I am working on. Essentially – who are the young Ethio/Eritrean diaspora living in the U.S.
What is their life like? How do they traverse their two worlds (culture and fam with daily U.S. life.)
We are asking people to submit writing, photos, art, etc. that captures this group of people who are trying to make sense of this “less than chaotic” experience.
Hope you can write a piece for us. Also please share our website with other talented Habesha friends.
Thanks!!
Ghennet Girma, September 9th, 2009 at 10:09 am:
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Dear Mahlet,
For getting in touch with a photographer in exile write to : “dagnew ghere” , Ethio?Eritrean diaspora in the UK…people have links across continents too!!!I know you’ll make the most out of it!!!
GG
Mahlet, September 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pm:
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Thanks, GG!!
Mahlet, September 18th, 2009 at 5:00 pm:
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GG – i tried googling the name but came up with nothing. Any suggestions on more intentional searching?