 by: Shfé ii
It is after my recent introduction to SELEDA I realized that I am the ‘oldie’ and the ‘commie’ in some of Seledean literature. It reminded me of John LeCare’s ‘old men,’ those Russian émigrés of the cold war who were still hoping to go back to Mother Russia to claim back their lost fortune. They were LeCare's comic relief. The poor old buggers used to make me smile. Today, I found out that I am the old commie whose antics has become a besaq afaji anecdote to cool brathas and sistahs in their cool digs.
My first instinct was to go at their puny cell-phone-charred little heads and their TommyHellifigered-cracked-asses at full, insidious blast. Instead, I let the indignation and resentment pass. I realized that it is not only the little rascals who are calling me names, but also many yetemerameru sewoch. I donned their attire and tried to see how the other shoe felt. It felt clammy, not at all inviting. I thought it might be useful to show the person behind the ‘oldie’ and ‘commie’ anecdotes.
I came from an age where unveiling truth was as easy as A-B-C. You apply dialectical materialism to a question and - voila! - truth would shine in all her glory. If, for some reason, she refused, you'd go back, iterate your question through the great machine that was Marxism, and you were sure to get your truth. There were owners of instruments of production Telatoch, there were those who sell their labor, Yemedeb gwadoch, and in between there were shokaka n'uss kebertEwech. End of story. There were no buts and/or ifs. Truth was as easy as A-B-C.
Mind you, my friends and I were teenagers and young adults, where our intellectual development was at its most versatile and malleable. We were the young, and like the young of any age, we were questioning the old. Rebelling against it was our rite of passage. Unlike the generation before us whose rebellion was against the encroaching zemenawinet, or the new generation whose rebellion is for a full-fledged rap-attired ferenjinet, ours was a rebellion against oppression. Our righteous indignation was not aimed at the enemies of the Ethiopian people, but at the enemies of the people of the world, in whatever holes their fat behinds might have been hiding. Pretty heady stuff for a young mind. Not only ordinary truth, mind you, but that of the scientific type no less, was behind us. It was intoxicating. All the questions about the world we had begun to explore were answered without hesitation or equivocation. We had no existential head benders that most of you, that is, those of you who can think, are fraught with today. We knew who we were. We knew where we were going, and above all we knew how we would reach our destination. Everything was sharply distinct with no room for gray; if it was not this, then certainly it was that.
The world loved us and we were crazy about the world. Prison, torture and death did not bother us. We expected it and never ran away from it. It was in the script, nothing new. Eventually we would win. We had no doubts about that either; that was in the script, too. We would win and build a just and prosperous society. We had no need for God or the devil or merzam Imperalism or qelbash soshal imperalizm. We would do it our way, the true way, the Marxian way. Everything to the revolution!
Then one fine day, the thing hit the fan, as they say. Everything was thrown wrong side up. The whole freaking world went whoosh south. Just like that, we became aynachu lafer. The world don’t love us no mo’. We became pariahs, the untouchables. GashE Girma, ider lefafiw, gelibeTew ygerfun gebu. Selemon, ye kwass mEda gwadeNachn iyetenTerara beshiguT QiT gnbar gnbarachenen!
After our introduction to hell, we gathered up whatever was left of us and sidet geban. I am sure you have heard a lot about our adventures while on the run, in prison, in refugee camps, and while in transit in Europe. I will save you from the same old boring commie and oldie’s talk. That my friends, was a walk in the park compared to what was in store for us when we finally arrived in the land of milk and honey.
My friends and I, on account of being lesefiw hzb tagayoch, did not finish high school or university. Unlike the iNa nen bayoch of certain schools that you guys keep talking about, we had lost our studying days in prison and refugee camps. Therefore, like most abesha, when we reached the shores of the west, we were ill-prepared to adjust. We became parking lot and McDonald’s agafariwoch and big hotel’s mamitEwoch. Who had time for school? At first, like everybody else, there was the question of the sofa and then the new VCR and then the china cabinet we had to address. Then the kebertEwoch would open all those Ethiopian restaurants and the azmaris would come. One has to go there and contend with w'ski megabezing everyone within hearing distance. Meches sew bahelun aykid. Some of us, like many an Ethiopian, came from awraja without ever having seen Addis. While we were still admiring the coka inna bira beTasa, wochEgud! in Djibouti, boom! we were in Europe and America. Before we knew it, the 80s would be history, the 90s, come and gone - and our adjustment was not finished yet. We had gotten married and our children were born. The parking lot kebertEs had gotten wise to our touch. Now it is second job time just to buy the $200.00 Adidas for the kids. You know how it is, we can’t buy the $70.00 one. LijE keman lij anso?
Meanwhile, the rich countries would have gotten rid of their proletariat, middle-classing everything in sight. The world Marxist movement would go south without a single note of their intention to us. Years later, we would hear rumors that there was some ‘inherent, irreconcilable problem in the philosophy of Marxism itself’. We would once again find out we are pariahs, this time intellectually. Finally the stupid Russians would let the wall fall and the funny age of ‘everything goes,’ that we are in the middle of, would commence. These are rapid times, where the evening of the same day has no inkling as to the identity of its own morning. Words come and go as if on their own volition. Before I can correctly pronounce "paradigm" the word "empowerment" has come and gone only to come back as empawa’. For some reason people get a smile out of this new lesser word. What can an old commie like myself do except stand in the middle of an intersection, dazed and paralyzed? What else can I do but go back to what I know best and what is near to my heart, my country and it’s suffering? That, too, I would be told, is out of style. Times have changed.
As some learned people tried to explain it to me, this German seTan called Nietzsche had meborbored the basis of Western civilization and let loose all kinds of ye qetr ganelat to finish the job he started. For example, we knew for sure that the guy whose stupidity used to make us double up with laughter in our study circle, Bishop Berkley, was an idealist (besaq siafajen yameshew qeldeNaw BerklE,). It is common knowledge that idealists are a bunch of worthless kebertE intellectuals. Well, except maybe Hegel. It was also a well-known fact that metaphysicians were the worst of the lot. Yet Berkley was given a better spot on the spectrum of the mistakes of Western thought than Marx. What in God’s name is going on? How is this blasphemy possible?
Then there are swarms of these other ye qetr ganelat, I was told - Kirkegaard, Heidegger, Foucault, Kuhn, Feyrabend, Popper, Derrida, Deluze, Rorty - that were and are bringing a new brave wisdom to Western civilization. My objection that these people are confusing an already confused world would result in a condescending smile from the learned. There is positivism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logo centrism, phalli-logo-centrism, legitimacy, illegitimacy, transcended transcendentalism, scientism, anthropocentrism, ismism… . All the names and the -isms are saying that we are obsolete, that at the limit, philosophy is no more or no less than ye qalicha Selot. To be honest, these are the tidbits of tittle-tattle that I hear form learned people while they are waiting for their Big Macs with fries and extra large coke.
I find this kind of talk very disturbing. Who are all these people? Who has time to read all this garbage that these people are spewing? Who has time to get up to date with the goings-on of that world? You would think that I am joking, but I have heard very respectable learned people arguing about how the book is dead. Can you believe this? These were not zbazenkE sewoch. They were unibersiti temari doketoroch. A while ago I asked someone to help me understand this new language of a dying book and the end of civilization. He brought me two books. "First read Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, then start Disseminations by Jacques Derrida," he said. I spent three hours on the first page of the first book with dictionary in hand and a willingness to understand. I could not find a single word I looked up in the dictionary, all I got was a migraine. To this day, it is my firm belief that the book was not written in English, but some other language resembling English. I tried the next book a week later after my headache had subsided. That was an experience that I would not wish on my enemies. Let me put it this way, after struggling through one chapter for a month, I have sworn not to read any book voluntarily again, ‘till the day I die.
There is one thing that you commie-bashers should understand about my friends and I. We were made by dialectical materialism. We can’t help but analyze a problem using those methods. It is part of us. It is the way we think. Despite this new age witchcraft, barren as a Martian landscape, that is blunting the world, the dialectical method is still valid even in postmodern goggles. So save us the argument about its validity at the limits. Furthermore, Capital may have been written as a critique of nineteenth century capitalism and some of its predictions might be a little off the mark, but its critique of the essential character and tendencies of capital are valid today more than ever. Just stop for a minute and look around you. How are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Why is the gulf between the so-called first and third worlds reaching astronomical distances? Isn’t technology a deciding factor in this disparity? Have we attained freedom and equality that we don’t anymore have to think in terms of class interests? Why do you think that the liberals themselves have accepted the new age meaning of the word liberal as an insult? I better stop here I can feel hyperventilation and hypertension coming on.
Breath slowly. In…. out…in …out. I am one with the universe…in… out…one with this shit-hall of a world…in … out… Mother Nature and all that crap…in …out. Ok, now that feels better.
We do not mince words. We call a spade…you guessed right…a spade. We believe in standing and being counted. An enemy has no other name but enemy. (Speaking of being counted, the writer himself is actually a wussie who's stopped standing up a long time ago. He does not represent the valiant friends he is talking about. In fact, there are substantiated rumors that he is one of them people who are caught in an existential quagmire, whatever the hell that means.)
There is one other thing we have to add. Please don’t confuse us with the sima belew Marxist. There are a lot of people who had never read one original line from the vast literature but bemarx yemimelu. They still chant the same old story like a parrot. I believe those are the ones who shout the loudest. Though it is very tempting to go at them, one needs to understand them rather than denigrate them. First and foremost they are abesha with all the goodies that come with the noun, in this instance hulun awaqinet. Next, they have the burden of having to talk about things they know little about because that is all they know. In their defense, however, incoherent as they might seem to be to the oh-so-learned, they believe in what they are saying. In our book, that belief goes a long way. (There is also another rumor going around that the writer himself could be one of these yesima belew Marxists.)
Some of the louder commie bashers come from this same group of be sima belew yetemaru ex ‘abyotawian’. They blame everything on Marxism. They are the kind who are ready to take advantage of any opportunity that they believe does not require hard work. They are quick to attach themselves to anything that is ascending, as they are the first to abandon ship at the first sight of hard work. Indeed they are the loudest in condemning their host in the hope of attaching themselves to the new one. Of course they will fail again and start screaming foul all over again. Friends, there is no substitute for hard work and passion. Just some friendly advice, out of pity.
Finally, there are those who are critical about our staying the course despite the fact that the world has moved on. These are neither loud nor simplistic in their critiques. They seem to know both sides of the issue quite well and try to push us to choose our fights intelligently. They tell us that the multi-faceted predicament that is faced by Ethiopia and Africa in general will not be solved by the same old methods. Concepts and languages change over time, therefore, it is necessary to adjust our languages and concepts to reflect the age. They point out that Marxism is not really dead, but it is on hold. ‘Marx’s different voices’ will join in in the future. That is a promise because Marxism itself is a promise of the human spirit. I think I am making up this group as I go, but you never know - they could be somewhere out there and I am venting on their theoretical slights incase there is some evil hiding behind the nice looking words.
Next time you sit in on one of those commie-bashing sessions, please remember that we were made in a different way, and in a different time.
Herr Doktor.
-A.W
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Oct.25, 96
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