"Older than the Flow of Human Blood in Human Veins": The Editor's Notes

So long,So far awayIs Africa'sDark face.

-Langston Hughes, "Afro-American Fragment"

Early in 2008, Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet, who teaches English at Cornell University, invited me to visit with him in his native Ethiopia and to make a public presentation on Callaloo and its allied projects. I accepted. Why would I not accept such a seductive invitation to visit that sempiternal country, whose last emperor, Haile Salassie, has been, like Haiti's Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of my most important heroes during and since my childhood? Yes, I immediately told Dagmawi I would visit with him, his family, friends, and colleagues in Ethiopia, and in August 2008, near the end of the two-week long CALLALOO CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS, which we mounted that year at Washington University in St. Louis, I was on my way to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia-to that ancient country where Christianity was accepted as the state religion as early as the fourth century and where the twentieth-century Jamaican derived movement called Rastafarianism found its raison d'etre. Mythic Ethiopia! The one African nation, which-although occupied by the Italians for five years-successfully resisted European colonization! Abyssinia! The Ethiopian Empire from c.980 BC to 1974 AD, when a military coup d'état ended the reign of Haile Salassie I, which had begun in 1930. The Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Jah! Mythic Emperor of a mythic land! Yes, I accepted Dagmawi's cordial gesture, which was later seconded by an official invitation from Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. And on the afternoon of Sunday, August 10, 2008, I found myself in flight from Houston, Texas, bound for Addis Ababa.

Saturday, August 9, the day before I boarded my Houston flight to Ethiopia, I was transported back in time to view the earliest known remains of human ancestors-the bones of whom the Ethiopians refer to as Dinknesh (or Lucy, as the Western world insists on calling her). Dr. Alvia Wardlaw, Director of the John Biggers Museum of Texas Southern University in Houston, had invited me to lunch at Houston's Blue Nile Restaurant as a farewell gesture for my trip to Addis Ababa the next day. Instead of taking me directly to lunch, she escorted me to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to see the controversial world premiere exhibition of Dinknesh. "Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia," as the exhibition was called, not only positions Ethiopia at the center of human evolution and history, but it also introduces to the United States an ancient African civilization as represented in over one hundred artifacts that illuminated for me-and, no doubt, for the more than a quarter of a million people who went to see Dinknesh-"Ethiopia's rich heritage." In other words, the exhibition also included, as the museum notes read,

stone tools found in Ethiopia; a wide selection of objects from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church such as illuminated manuscripts and processional crosses; a selection of Korans from the holy city of Harar, the fourth most important site in Islam; and the first coins minted by an indigenous African civilization. Paintings, musical instruments, implements of daily use, a scale model of the famous Church of St. George in Lalibela. . . .

I, like many of the other visitors to the exhibition, had read about and seen similar images of Ethiopian treasures in books, but Alvia's escorting me to the Museum of Natural Science in Houston, Texas, was more than a museum visit or a farewell gift; it was also an invaluable prelude to my impending travel and the first installment toward my preparation for evaluating the guest editors' excellent job in mounting the present issue of Callaloo.

Around dusk Monday, August 11, 2008, the second and final leg of my flight to Ethiopia put down at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, where Dagmawi patiently waited to welcome me and drive me to my lodgings. But first came the drive to a restaurant in...