Travels to and from Ethiopia

Tell me, therefore, and tell me truly, Are you a prince, son, brother, or nephew of a king? Are you banished from your own country; and, what is it that you seek in our’s, exposing yourself to so many difficulties and dangers?

—James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile

1

On the last day in Bahir Dar we drove thirty kilometers to the Blue Nile Falls, the “smoking water.” Here, sometimes, the force of the heavy rain can hit the windshield such that the water really does transmute to smoke. There is mud everywhere. Every day, at three o’clock—you could set your clock to it—the rain would burst suddenly from the sky as if a storm to remember. By the next morning, the sun would rise as usual and there would be no evidence of the deluge or memory of it.

Just as Harryette Mullen writes about the experience of “reading the words of authors who never imagined that someone like me might be included in the potential audience for their work, as when I read in Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols that a ‘Negro’ symbolizes the beast in the human,” I imagine that James Bruce would never have predicted my presence here, standing and staring across at the falls (199). I imagine him traveling around Gondar with his hair “cut round, curled, and perfumed, in the Amharic fashion,” and, “in all outward appearance, a perfect Abyssinian” (Bruce 210). He spoke Amharic and would not need an English-speaking guide. But I am an imperfect Abyssinian. Our guide asks for his tip in American dollars. He accepts the five I give him but is surly; most Americans, he says—especially African Americans—give him at least twenty.

It is hard to imagine how Bruce could be “stunned” and “made . . . dizzy” by the “force and noise that was truly terrible” (Shaw 247). We hear nothing. After twenty minutes of climbing through mud, crossing the Portuguese bridge, we are still separated from the falls by a huge chasm. At this distance, our view of the falls is reduced to that of a postcard. The falls are not majestic. Our guide assures us that, even with the new hydroelectric dams holding them back, the falls could be rather forceful in October or November, after the rainy season. Today, though, the Nile drops in thin streams of mud.

2

When conversation is a cipher, some words rise to the surface and others sink like stones. By the time one managed to crack parts of the code of one message, in a moment of glorious clarity, the code speakers had already moved on to another. In our household, those of us outside of the language would sit in silence. Not an uncomfortable silence—a familiar silence, the drifting silence of a daydream. Once in a while, the code speakers would shift to English for our benefit, but the shift wouldn’t take and lasted only a few minutes. There was a natural resistance to the shift. Like holding down the rewind button on a tape recorder, the English would give way to Amharic unless you were vigilant.

At home, I was never recognized by others. I expected this to be the case, or even more so, as I would become even more foreign, an American. I was born here and am an easy cryptogram. I had been thinking of what my first trip to Ethiopia would be like for more years than I can count. And it is difficult to know how precisely my experiences on this trip overlap with my inherited memories of it, and which is being superimposed on the other. I was born there and would have grown up there if not for a sudden turn and trauma. So I look at her from across this chasm.

3

Upstairs from our conference venue, I notice a photograph that captures an encounter between Haile Selassie and a young Marlon Brando. They shake hands but Selassie stares past Brando dispassionately, clearly not thrilled to be making his acquaintance. There may even be a touch of disgust...