Go and find your own home

the stories we share

My great grandmother was born far from her parents’ homeland, in a small town called Muhur, a place that google maps can’t find. The closest you’ll get is Butajira, the capital city of the Gurage region in Central Ethiopia. It’s not on the map but it’s where one thing led to another and resulted in me being here today.

She was named Badaayse, which loosely translates to go and find your own home. True to her name, Badaayse lived her early years searching for a home, eventually ending up in Segenet, another town google maps doesn’t recognize. She was married off to a mean old man with a lot of land and two other wives. She had three sons, my grandfather was the youngest. Badaayse raised her kids alone and then watched them scatter across Ethiopia in search of their own stories. My grandfather left home at fourteen, with nothing but the clothes on his back and my mother’s prayers, which covered me better than any cloth or house ever could. He took a long, winding road and eventually found his fortunes in the restaurant and hotel industry in Harar, an ancient city in eastern Ethiopia. He married Bizunesh, whose name means you are plenty and they went on to have many children, including my mother.

There are many facets of my childhood that persist in memories, but the early morning walks with my grandpa while he told me stories about his mom and their lives in that small unmarked village remain my most cherished. Because of those stories, and the latter stories my grandmother told me when her life was coming to a close, I can envision my entire family tree, put names and places to the question of our story. There is a place, in a small country in the far corners of Africa where the very dirt on the ground would recognize my feet. This is clarity that I know a lot of people do not have. And it feels like a feather on the edge of a cliff. I hope nothing ever comes to blow it all away.

I spend a lot of time in museums, and I travel often to certain countries in Europe. I marvel at sculptures, buildings, paintings from hundreds of years ago in cities like Paris and Florence and I genuinely feel a kind of deep connection to those expressions of art. I find myself in a lot of the stories. I once traveled to the town where Shakespeare was born and it felt like a pilgrimage. At university, I based my thesis on 18^th century British Literature. And through it all, the thought persists: what about the towns and villages and homes that no longer stand? The artists and poets who die as refugees, nobody traveling to the towns where they were born? What has the luxury of being kept in tact, revered as a classic and what are just stories of suffering? Who deserves a home? Whose stories are universal, and who decides what is universal?

Those of us who come from corners of the world where our stories are often ignored (unless they’re an appeal for aid) are sitting now with a very specific knowledge. We recognize it because it grazes a wound we all share. We know about entire family lines that get wiped away, about children who will never again see the light of day. We know about border lines that get drawn by white men who don’t even know how to employ their mouths in the pronunciations of our words. We know about the steady diet of unbelonging and insecurity that is drip-fed to us until we learn to fear and alienate our very selves. Perhaps this is part of why it always feels so personal, so urgent, when we see it unfold again somewhere in the world. This story lives in our bones and it keeps repeating.

I’m not sure what the point is here, really. I’m just sitting with the weight of it all as it persists. It seems to always persist. And so must we.

—

Something to read

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

First, let’s start with the essay which inspired the title of the novel. James Baldwin wrote these words in his 1962 essay, A Letter to My Nephew. If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to do so now.

Abulhawa’s novel takes us through the life of one woman, born a refugee and living her whole life fighting for a place in a world that keeps disinheriting and exiling her. It is not an easy story to read, but it is worth the trouble.

Here you were to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you. It looked black that day too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived, and now you must survive because we love you.

James Baldwin, A Letter to My Nephew

Take care,

Lidiya