When I was a young boy and people talked about Tripoli and Trenta Cinque (1935), my eyes glazed over. I am sure you have interesting stories to tell, old man, but it can’t possibly be more interesting than my game, ashekakat Alem*, so buzz off! So now, when GG reminded me about Kagnew Station, I can see those who are young glazing over. But I must tell a story, it is the cycle of life.
[*I am speculating and wondering and thinking about converting Ashekakat Alem to a video game. But it turns out the patent people need more than speculating and wondering and thinking. Your turn, young guns, you do it. I insist: do not pay me more than 50% of the profits. Really, I must insist, not a point more.]Before they put that imperfect oval grass in Eritrea, that odd grass which is now considered iconic Asmara, and is, along with Mai Jah Jah and the Shidda, sold in postcards, you know the oval grass on the way to Camboni, there didn’t use to be an oval grass: it was just four way traffic, with a suspended traffic light. One dawn, a GI who was driving a…, well I don’t know what he was driving, but he surely was DWA (Driving While American), and he trashed it. Shattered glasses everywhere.
He paid off the imperial authorities for that is what Americans do and case was closed.
Went to class, a geography class. An American helicopter buzzed by and we looked out the window. A geography class meant drawing all the continents of the world—there was no CAD then, it was all pencil drafting. The helicopter hovered by—maybe it flew too low and that’s why we looked out. My rebellious teacher, Father Menegatti, perhaps he was a Jesuit priest, said: “look at them! Just look! They are raiding your wealth! Who knows what they are taking? Your gold, your tomatoes—which they will sell back to you as tomato paste.”
How does it feel, to make me feel like you do….That was OMD, many years later. I had no idea, not one clue, that the all powerful, almost god Haile Selasse was weeks away from being overthrown. How the mighty fall!
Back to my drawing. I drew the zig zag of Alaska, went down to the continental United States, lingered on the California coast. How would I know that would be home 30 years later?
Father Joseph came and told a tall tale. It was about a two-timing love-stuck sailor. Then the letter of Lucy went to the envelope of Anna… Jokes should come with expiration dates; after a 3rd retelling, the teller should go through a mild spontaneous combustion. Bless the padre, the joke had nothing to do with his subject, math. He thought his jokes were funnier than we thought they were. Naturally, he assumed that this was due to our English illiteracy. We thought, padre, they just ain’t funny but we drink it down without a glass of water.
Then my super-rebellious English teacher (later, I learned that all the rebelling Fathers were sent to Africa) Father Lauro, was in class now, totally frustrated with our English.
“It is not, ‘if I was’” he corrected, “it is ‘if I were.’” Then, he gave a naughty example: a dig at our troubled child, Mussa: “For example: ‘If I were Mussa,’” he said mocking the tallest student sitting, bored, in the back of the class, “If I were Mussa, I would be paying attention in the classroom!”
No dark sarcasm in the classroom…teacher! leave those kids alone…
English grammar makes absolutely no sense. We had spent months learning the conjugation, “I was, he/she/it was, we were, they were” and now the teacher was teaching us that if the sentence is preceded by “if”, then all bets are off and you are supposed to say, “if I were…”
Mussa is not fazed. He says, “I understand.” Then use it in a sentence, challenges Father Lauro. Mussa, the bad boy, says, “If I were Father Ladro, I would not be smoking while I graded the students tests!”
Double taboo! But I understand only one of them. One, we were all supposed to pretend that Father Lauro did not smoke. Priests do NOT smoke and those smelly test results we got had nothing to do with his smoking. Two, and worse, as the coolest kids understood, Mussa was deliberately mis-pronouncing Father Lauro’s name. For Ladro in Italian meant thief.
Father Lauro scribbled something on his notebook dramatically, gesturing wildly, to indicate that Mussa was in big, big trouble.
I wonder where Mussa is now. Statistical probability, and something I heard a few years later: he joined one of the fronts, our ungrateful fronts, in Kebid Bret and was martyred somewhere?
That afternoon, Father Lauro gave me a ride on his motorcycle. A Harley Davidson, no less: I told you he was a rebel! “You probably will join the rebels and die young,” he warned me, “Who knows?” I said. He shrugged and asked me where I wanted him to drop me off. I said anywhere because anywhere in Asmara is home and he dropped me anywhere. In his diaries, he wrote: another promising African going anywhere, nowhere.
Next day was Friday. At the end of the day, we were all lined up and taken to a quarter. Our own crossroad. Two directions to go. I can’t say North, South, East, West, it was a long time ago and I had no sense of direction. So, pardon me, I will use the illiterate “this way” and “that way.” This way was the library and that way was the Camboni Theatre. This way was boredom and that way was Spaghetti Westerns, where Lee Van Cliff spoke Italian (with English and Arabic subtitles, I think, just like the Indian movies.) But we still understood the movie’s plot: this was easy to do because Lee never spoke in the movies; he just aimed and shot his rifle, always hidden under his trench coat, always taller than him. In spaghetti westerns, the solution to any problem is that somebody was itching to be shot and it was the duty of the hero to reluctantly, grudgingly, stoically, scratch that itch.
They stopped us at the crossroads to pause dramatically and we had no idea whether we were going to the library or the theatre.
Then the headmaster, Father Charles, arrived: grim, serious and unsmiling. His grave expression was probably due to our insistence on calling him by his first name (Charles) and insisting on butchering it (Char-less) the same way we insisted on calling Comboni Camboni. I don’t know any Camboni alumni who has ever seen that man’s teeth. It was not a good day: today we had to go to the library. We groaned and he stared back, unsmiling. We opened our serious geography (again!) books, but inside, the cool kids had their comic books. I opened a big geography book but, inside, hidden, thanks to a friend, I had my Spiderman. Pow! Kaboom! I don’t know what pow and kaboom meant because even the grunts and non-verbal sounds Americans make were different from ours. I mean, Americans say “ouch” when they hurt. Ouch??? And their women don’t even know how to produce that special short hand our mothers used in lieu of saying “yes.” h’kkkk.
But the comics were drawn beautifully. Wearing his Harambe shirt, and bell-bottom jeans, my friend, Stephanos drew comics inspired by Shaft in Africa and certified himself, one more time, that he was the coolest kid at school. I knew where he was, in 1978 (left our ungrateful fronts). I wish I knew where he is now.
Went home and Kagnew was on. Long before I knew John Denver was not cool, I thought he was, because he was on Kagnew, for God’s sake, an American radio station which played nothing but country, Motown, folk and rock music. We liked country music, because we could understand the lyrics: this is way back in the old days when America’s smart bombs were sweet music.
country roads take me home to the place I belong, West Virgina, mountain momma, take me home. I never understood how a mountain could be a momma but I didn’t understand Americans, anyway, I just thought they were larger than life. Damn! They could destroy traffic lights and get away with it! Then came Johnny Cash, then some bubblegum rock, I think the Archies (Oh! sugar!) and then some guy I didn’t know who was singing a song that sounded like something I had heard my neighborhood homeys sing:
Shezeley AytHazeley
shizeley aytHazeley
shizeley!
gezana,
geza Kh’ray,
swana swa X’ray,
shizelay!
Years later, I learned that it was Tom Jones and the song was “she’s a lady.” And he wasn’t even AMERICAN! What a let down. Many, many years later still, I saw Tom Jones at a concert gyrating and doing Prince’s Kiss to middle aged ladies. It was not the same thing.
That Friday, just another Friday, at night, I switched to short-wave radio, scanning for news. Came my grandmother and asked me:
“Do they mention Jebha at all?” Jebha was short for the Eritrean revolution.
I said, “no, grandma, they didn’t. They never do!”
She said, “belash!” And Jebha wasn’t mentioned that night. Again. And we went to sleep, with rumors that the next morning the Tor Serawit were going to raid homes searching for weapons, trashing furniture, and asking where the men, whose pictures were in our family albums, were. I listened to Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye and I called it a day.
It was just another Friday. Or maybe it is a medley of Fridays, in no particular order.
This article first appeared as Unbound: Just Another Friday (1974) at awate.com on August 31, 2007. The “GG” reference below is Gabriel Guangul.
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