Chewing the Tchat in Ethi

Sword, journal, and church windows in Lalibela, Ethiopia.

Nelly Rosario © 2010

The Chat

“If you want to chew, come early. Once the tchat hits, we’ll be talking for hours,” says Gabra.

She’s flopped on a couch at the New Flower Lounge in Addis Ababa. The place is half-empty in my eyes, half-full in my ears. The World Cup warbles from a wall-sized flat screen, broadcast from Planet Johannesburg. Our drinks wore off decades ago, when we’d paid too much for the booze-flavored OJ they call Screwdrivers.

For us, it’s been a marathon of panels at a conference titled “(Black) Movements: Poetics and Praxis,” hosted by Callaloo and The University of Addis Ababa. Gabra’s an Ethiopian scholar at a University in the UK; I’m a Dominican New Yorker teaching at a university in Texas.

Who cares.

Thinkers get tired of cogito ergo summing.

“So, how high does tchat fly you?” I ask because I have to catch a flight up north early tomorrow, and if I don’t make it to those rock-carved churches in Lalibela it’s going to be the crib death of my two-week journey to the cradle of humanity, so no chewed or burning bush is going to keep me from seeing the Eighth Wonder of the World…

“Relax, girl.” Gabra sighs and becomes a couch cushion.

Tchat—or khat, kat, chat, gat, qat, quatt, qaad, quaadka, miraa, sallaa, Catha edulis—is a stimulant plant native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The euphoric tobacco-looking herb, chewed all over the region, grows where coffee grows but attracts the higher price. Because it contains amphetamines or something like it, tchat is illegal in the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe, or it’s not or it was but now isn’t but should be if prescription Adderall, Vyvanse, Dexedrine, and Desoxyn are.

Whatever is naturally produced by photosynthesis is legal by nature, as far as I’m concerned.

I need a second opinion.

There are two Wikipedia entries for “qat.” The first refers to “the principal god in the oral mythology of the Banks Islands, a small archipelago of northern Vanuatu, Melanesia.” “Qat” is part of the Oceanic language of Mota—and “mota,” I should mention, is Mexican slang for “marijuana.” The second entry for “qat” displays the photo of a grinny Yemeni man with balled cheeks and a fistful of the good salad (“Khat”).

I need a third opinion.

“Do you chew?” I ask Bahrnegash Bellete, a non-Euclidean mathematician who translates Amharic poetry into English. He smiles, grunts, says, “I’m not a goat.”

In Ethiopian: The eye of the leopard is on the goat, and the eye of the goat is on the leaf.

Gabra laughs when I mention goats. “Look, tchat relaxes you. Some talk too much; others get quiet. You’ll want to drink coffee, tea, smoke a lot of cigarettes. It’s chill.” She has antique-doll eyes and a Ginzu-knife mind: “Look, tchat is to Christians what alcohol is to Muslims. You have to understand, this country’s predominately Orthodox Christian.”

Sunni Islam is Ethiopia’s other major religion. But these days, Christianity as commodity seems to serve the country best, if judging by tourists like me, who flock up north to Axum, where the original Ark of the Covenant is presumably housed. Journalist Nick Hunt observes that “Ethiopia is courted by the West as a key ally in the ‘war on terror,’ an outpost of strength and democracy in a chronically unstable region.” His article in New Internationalist opens in a tchat-house, a curtained and dimly-lit “safe place” where he’s able to pick the brains of two young Ethiopian tour guides about their views on Ethiopia’s politics.

“First, we will chew for half an hour,” the guides tell him, “then we will tell you everything.”

Gabra, she doesn’t tell me everything. It’s getting late. We’re exhausted. The New Flower Lounge is wilting. She calls us a cab. [End Page...