Returning to Addis Ababa

The first time I saw Ethiopia since I was two years old was while looking out the window of a British Airways flight as it headed into the capital's new airport at 3am. Twenty-five years had passed since I had left Addis Ababa, and in that time I had attached an almost mythical significance to what it would be like to see the city again. In my imagination I pictured myself looking out onto a vast vista of low-lying mountains, with a ramshackle city built in the middle. My father, who had worked for Ethiopian Airlines before fleeing the country in 1978, four years into the Communist Revolution, had once shown me a postcard of an Ethiopian Airlines plane sitting on a tarmac with an enormous lion crouched next to it. From that moment on that was the image I had when I thought of returning back home: a bright sunny day with a single airplane sitting on the tarmac, lion and all.

I was surprised to see the streetlights from the plane. They sprawled into the distance, and from a thousand feet, made Addis resemble any one of a dozen small cities that I could have been flying into that night. Even then I was on the lookout for any sign of familiarity, for things that I could hold onto to make the country familiar and therefore manageable. Despite the late hour I knew someone would be there to meet me at the airport. With the exception of my uncle Berhane though, I did not know what any of them would look like. I had never met my aunt Aster or her daughter. The same was true of my aunt Rosa and her three children, along with a long list of other relatives, all of whom were strangers to me. I had seen only a few pictures here and there, none at all in at least a decade. I had never once heard any of their voices. I would realize later, after two months of never being without a relative near me, just how much had been lost during all those years away from one another, how much could never be regained, and at the same time, just how easy it was for a family to claim you as one of their own. At the time though, there was only an implacable fear of not knowing who or what to expect. We were strangers, and yet we carried all of the expectations and customs that came with close family, which in this case translated to a half dozen faces, only one of whom I had met, standing shoulder to shoulder behind a black rope at a few hours before dawn, waiting for me to get out of customs. In the other imagined scenarios-over the years I had built up dozens-I was supposed to walk directly out of the plane, onto the ground, hesitating at the last step because in two seconds I was going to touch Ethiopia's soil, and like the prodigal son, drop to my knees and weep.

My aunt Aster's face was essentially my mother's. They both had the same high cheekbones, petite noses, and flawless skin. I knew it immediately, as I did my uncle Berhane, who fifteen years earlier had spent a week with my family in Chicago, and apparently had not aged since. I had taken him on the EL into the city, to the top of the Sears Tower, and on a ferry ride around Lake Michigan, all of which to my thirteen-year old eyes seemed like the greatest things to do in the world. We all walked out of the airport together, completely silent after a brief round of customary kisses and hugs, into a misty early morning. This was late July and the middle of winter in Ethiopia, which meant chill damp nights that with time eased into the very fiber of one's skin, leaving no real hope for warmth. My uncle, who as a teenager had spent five years in jail during the Revolution, had been rewarded later in life...