Ethiopian Review

By Liya Endale

I left Ethiopia at the tender age of one. Since then I’ve lived in The Netherlands and various cities in the U.S. For the longest time, I wanted to find ‘my people’. We lived in places like College Station, Texas and Bogart, Georgia. Needless to say, my family always comprised the Ethiopian population. In my mind, I always imagined a blithe reunion with sappy orchestra music playing in the background, running into the arms of a faceless countryman/ countrywoman who represented home.

The reality was quite a different occasion. With my closest relatives and friends, I can be myself; a patchwork of liquorish and mitmita, wooden shoes and abesha kemis, timberlands and netela. At the same time, I find I have to explain myself to the Ethiopian community as much as to the American community. My shoulders just can’t find the steady beat of the drum. They keep trying to shake to the off-beats like in Reggae music. We did not grow-up celebrating, but rather surviving. My Amarenya walks with a distinguishable limp marked by my thick tongued overemphasis of vowels and the seeming half-hearted roll of my ‘re’. My parents taught me my Amharic and Dutch was actually my first language. It takes me a while to read anything and I do not understand a lot of what I can pronounce. I taught myself how to read and write in Amharic during a six-week visit home when I was a sophomore in college.

I understand that to some who left home at a later age than I did, I may symbolize their worst fear; a loss of their culture and essentially their identity. But I commend those who push past this fear and take the time to not only know Ethiopian-Americans like me, but teach us through patience and love instead of judgment. The reality is that we grew up on foreign soil on which we took our first steps, spoke our first words, and experienced our first heart-breaks. Therefore, this foreign soil does, in fact, share this space we call ‘home’ with Ethiopia. Our unique Amarenya, then, represents not loss but the resilience of our culture because I refuse to stop speaking it. Frankly, I am proud of myself despite the “mts, mts, mts” I hear when I stumble over words or sit back at a party instead dancing in the middle of the circle. I worked hard to get here, this peaceful state of self-awareness, through persistent and active learning. Many times, life would have been much simpler if I would have just accepted this American identity as my whole identity. For me, and many like me, that is not enough. We fight to preserve our culture not despite the American culture with live in, but through it.

Pretense is not my forte. I can only be me. My sister once noted that most of us Ethiopian-Americans flourish not when we try to emulate that which came before us, but when we embrace our hybrid identities and forge our own path like Burntface, Dinaw Mengistu, and Wayna. Only then, I believe, do we truly pay homage to those who sacrificed so that we can live in a land where you never really fail until you stop trying.

A good friend of mine, Elias from the hip-hop group Burntface, once beautifully described his identity. I have yet to find a more eloquent and accurate term to describe myself. I am American African. In English, the adjective always precedes the noun. What kind of car is it? It is a blue car, a big house, and a small fish. African is my blood, my core, my noun. But what kind of African am I? I am an American African.

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