My Story

Saluting a Ghost: The Hell of Near Madness in Academia
by: Atnafu

By the time I left my country, students were dying because they found themselves on the wrong side of the acronym war. They, we, were cannon fodder.... Twa-Twa-Twa...Too young to say no... too stupid to know we were staring down the barrel of a sebara shguT.... First time my friends and I went on a protest was at L'ilt Zenebe-werQ School - the woman was a grand dame and the school, grander. Big foQ... deep blue building. The Royal Blue shade, not the dastardly blue of the bright shiny sky of Addis. Tnish Teyem... tnish Qota yale blue. We were in the ninth grade. We were called Abiyotawi Tiyits by the Order Givers...who we never really knew. Like the QusQuam Mariam Tabot, they remained shrouded in myth. No face. Just orders. Only their orders/wishes were felt. "Tzaz meTwal," the Whisperers tell us. Well, the Tiyits would carry out the orders. But the only bullets at Zenebe-Werq were being hailed at us by the QulQuCHas and Menatis who just yesterday learnt how to Temenja aQebablo Twa-Twa-Twa ...

But those were the old days.… Soon, those of us who could walk the walk, walked all the way to Djibouti... Kenya... Sudan.... Zenebu foQ was no longer grand... grand.. grand... It was, instead, beautifully, wickedly ugly. Who knows how many skeletons of young proud Tiyit Ethiopians holds the foundation of the big foQ as a result of Tiyit from soldiers who did not adore Zenebe-werq. Zip forward to ages later on a campus in cold... cold upstate New York. One Ethiopian on campus meant two Ethiopians on campus. Bzu tebazu. And then there were plenty. Merawi, Mengesha, Alamziyaye, Ahmed, me... wezeterfe. Refugees from the hot desert now burnt by the snow and ice of America. Here also in upstate New York were foQoch. But here they were squeaky clean. There were no Whisperers who circulated the names of those who would soon die. Here there were no barrels to look down. Just classes and more classes and then the African parties at the student lounge where women pretended not to be delicate flowers - they took too many crazy classes and then when you held them a bit they were more fragile than is proper. So we stayed away from them.

Ethiopians stuck together on campus... me, Mengé, Munir, Almaz, Taday, Seble... down the list. Past? What past? You only talked about the future. Mengesha was the healthy one among us. He never spiraled down the spiral staircase of an academic challenge that whipped us into zombies from ..... Tn'nat...not the Ma-Lay of the Qebellé, but Tn'nat of the science kind…of the computer kind. We needed to make up for time so it was Tn'nat all the time. On Fridays sometimes - often – we would all meet at Mengé's bright, neat dorm room, decorated with tasteless Ethiopian Tourism Office posters, to get warm and fuzzy: "K'ager bet mn yesemal?... Dehna…dehna…hulu dehna.... Intna dena? Dena. Intnas? Dena..Yaa manew dena? Dena new.... Ante/anchi dehna? Yimesgenew - Therapy, Ethiopian style. Mengé was the kind that if he were back home he would be called tmhrt yasabedew. Tall, skinny Ethiopian dude who held conversations about arraba b'Qobo gebto with people like the Asian student body president. On the good Fridays we met in his dorm room - ye Mengé Mshg... our mshg from the bombs being dropped on us. He would make us jump to our feet and "N'or... n'or…begzyr" when the Ethiopian girls came in. No wonder they wouldn't sleep with any of us. I think they slept with him.

Mengé, who would feed us sometimes - "Rbohal? Rboshal?" - like all of us, had a past. So, in a way, he was like one of us. But he was different because he was the Einstein of the group, and in many ways, the campus'. AyTal... graduate school on his horizon... bliCH, bliCH. Doktrate keziya whala... we looked up to Mengé like children. "Inberta," he would say with his trademark mumble..." Ere EthioPiyawiyan nen. Inberta." So we followed his veteran steps. ... we became geniuses. We were like scuba divers in the ocean. Take deep breaths, go underneath the academic water, and stay there until the oxygen ran out. At the helm of our oxygen tank was Mengé.... pumping life into us - awon iniberta..awon, awon - with a few words, he quieted down the screaming demons in all of us. Twa Twa Twa. The strings that held us together and in one piece were made from silk spun by Mengé Mengesha.

You are judged by how well you can take irony because it was those strings that choked Mengé - the literal choking not the philosophical…or maybe both. The Asian student body president found Mengé hanging in the closet of the Good Friday room, and it wasn't even Friday. Because on Friday we were supposed to see Mengé, and he might have thought it would be rude for us to find him hanging. What would we say? "N'or… n'or..." ?? Student life in America, shegaw hager, was supposed to be different for all of us. By any means necessary, you would get on the genius path...and it would (naturally) wind, zig-zag-zag-zag, and drop you off at the gates of Genet. Slavery to the physics and science gods would pay off... Gosh! Gosh! But upstate New York was not Genet for us students who survived real bullets and got Twa-Twa-Twa by the Tyit they call Academics. When they found Mengé, his room was in its usual pristine state, so we could not call up the "temporary insanity" excuse that we used to call upon to temper own thoughts of suicide. He was not the kind to shoot himself with a shguT because he was a neat freak - he wouldn't let us clean the table we ate on, let alone his brains splattered all over the neat room...

Alem BeQaN is not only a gedam in Ethiopia. It was Mengé's room, and now, like the buildings at Zenebe-WerQ, his room was fortified by the bloody cement of blood.… The Whisperers in the dorms told us of the death of a crazy African. We smiled until we realized he was our African. The crazy Americans wanted to interview us for a story in the campus newsletter. His Ethiopian friends didn't know who to call to claim the body so the town coroner claimed it until the school located some distant relatives. How did he die? Why did he die? they kept asking. The answer was because we let him. Instead, we said, "Ere dehna neber... beTam dehna neber... Inante dehna nachihu? Dehna…dehna." They wanted to know what to tell his mother who was in Debre Zeyit. We didn't build a legacy for him so we couldn't say, "Trust us, being close to madness is a worse hell than thriving in madness." She would think we were being rude. So we dropped out and went to sunnier places that still can't melt the glacier in us.

Once in a while we remember him and we jump to our feet and say, "N'or…nor, Mengesha." "Ere begzyr." Ay Mengé.