Sunday. Post-lunch. The atmosphere was pure,\u00a0low-grade tension. Write or stroll. That was the whole setup. The writing urge was bugging me; the whole day an illusion of worry-free labor.\u00a0Mid.\u00a0They said some Englishman split a human hair thirteen times\u2014a world record\u2014but\u00a0splitting hairs\u00a0was already the ultimate metaphor for\u00a0caviling distinctions. Machiavelli got that rap first.<\/p>\n
Back then, they\u00a0verbed<\/em>\u00a0everything. Now, we just\u00a0vibe. I pushed down my beard, the mood barometer, then instantly pushed it up, the Derg-era official\u2019s signal.\u00a0Pure tension.\u00a0My mind was tense. Immediately,\u00a0Ayele Mammo and his mando\u00a0came to mind. That little trouble. How tense must its strings be for those terrible majors and minors? It brought back Bizunesh and Mahmud. That little monster shoved their voices. A digging, taking-far vibe. We bought a mando once, tried to fiddle; it was\u00a0in vain. Selling it was also\u00a0in vain. The shop owner was\u00a0sus. A painter bought it as an\u00a0objet d’art<\/em>. I\u2019d been all for the saxophone as a kid. The answer\u2019s here. That little trouble brought back a decade-old note.<\/p>\n Every Thursday, after school, we awaited the majestic, whirling percussion of the ground forces\u2019 marsh band drawing closer to\u00a0Mexico Square. Water from the fountain sprinkled us. Nothing else was so lively engaging. The unannounced live band stage performances, mainly from the municipality, complemented by the police and ground forces, in the very early years of the revolution\u2014a kind of out-of-town vibe at Meskel then Abyot square\u2014at least once a month. Spinning around the marching column, joining the vortex of ululating company, mostly kids, we\u2019d be falling, rolling, standing up like nothing happened. Angry men like cats chasing us away. We hysterically tried to identify the scintillating gizmos\u2014silver or gold? A kind of\u00a0cloud nine. Clarinet, flute, trumpets, alto and tenor Saxes, French Horn, Tuba, the sliding majorettes of the trombones, the mightiness of the sousaphones, the drum majors’ batons. Our fanfare wrapped up at the Ministry of Defense, national flag lowering, ear-splitting anthem, Great Spirit of togetherness. That childhood public function is unthinkable now.\u00a0It hits different now.<\/p>\n Negadras Tessema Eshete\u2019s disk\u00a0was the only one in town for decades. The first massive problem of music performance on stage in Ethiopia was convincing the audience it was a show. It ended up almost the standard.\u00a0Hager Fikir\u00a0and\u00a0Eyoel Yohannes\u00a0set the standard for local instrument orchestration. Beshah W\/Mariam is worth mentioning. Aselefech Ashine’s tear-jerking lamentation why they never understood Eyoel’s essence, the what ifs. The echo of\u00a0Narcis’ immortal pieces\u00a0at the National Theatre brings tears. Mind you, the\u00a0Police Symphony Orchestra was chased from the stage\u00a0by the audience those days.\u00a0Telela. I can’t non-think of my childhood without her. It must be the violin for her\u2014Minilik and Melkamu included\u2014as my fear for\u00a0Muluken\u00a0is Drums, noted from his irreplaceable early music, even the under- or utilized recent voice marvel\u00a0Haileyesus Girma\u00a0failed to copy. Minilik left the National Theatre\u2014a landslide felt.<\/p>\n In an interview before his death, he never regretted leaving the National Orchestra, but the news of overseas vocalists and their lifestyle interfered in what he called his unwise decision. It\u00a0boils him with rage\u00a0(yangebegibegnal<\/em>).\u00a0Tilahun’s sax-shoved voice\u00a0behind the Imperial Guard orchestration, a bit out of beat or their utter sightlessness for improvisation; a strong opinion on the same from Muluken caused a massive dust.\u00a0Kuku Sebsebe\u00a0told me about\u00a0Ashenafi Kebede’s\u00a0reading of her voice\u2014how it makes or breaks vocalists. Just like Major\u00a0Girma Hadgu’s vibing out the great hit Endet Yiresal\u00a0after checking the\u00a0do re mi fa so<\/em>\u00a0illiterate Mahmud.\u00a0Abubeker Asheke’s\u00a0unique flavor. The appearance of the new always hits every preceding band.\u00a0Mulatu Astatke\u2019s\u00a0marvel. Their response yesterday determined their future.<\/p>\n It\u2019s about\u00a0going to the instrument, making it enviously possessive, not the keyboard bringing its imitation to you. I talked to Johnny, guitarist of National Theatre Orchestra B. Girma Chibssa and Ali Birra couldn’t believe my wailing lamentation for\u00a0Ibex: Fekade’s and Johnny Mitiku\u2019s smokey sax, Jovani\u2019s Base, Tesfaye\u2019s Drum, Selam’s lead, Dereje’s keys. No wonder Selam, a college contemporary, never excused the man he thought was the cause of the disbandment of that color, that said adieu with reminiscence what was going on with Mahmud\u2019s \u201cMela Mela<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0Hailu Mergia’s raw organ fiddle, Yohannes’s Trumpet, Temare’s drum from Walias, with awkward “Huket” on a guitar\u2014era-defining pieces despite arguments over music making. I had a chance to sit and talk with\u00a0Bahiru Kegne, taught a sea of impromptu in situ creations with a voice shoved by the single-string\u00a0Mesenko. The receipt for the money I paid to study Mesenko, which never happened, is kept as a relic. No wonder the inability of\u00a0Roha Band to tame Tewdros Tadesse’s fame, or the fusion leading to fission, band members seeing eye to eye in the comfort of working at the Hilton, giving in to the\u00a0Ketefa ghost bands\u00a0that brought music making to ghost studios. Stage performance became a distant memory, making studio concoctions stars with names.\u00a0Who doubts the star is AI from now on?<\/p>\n As I was to wrap up, two girls came to my mind.\u00a0Asnakech Werku\u00a0and\u2026 An insignia out of the ordinary, distant in catapulting one with recollection with riveting depth, a once-in-years-to-appear treasure, spot-on expansive illustration of the land\u2019s beauty quintessence all the way through stunning melody.\u00a0Merry Armede. Asked in a monthly\u00a0Menen<\/em>\u00a0interview whether she loved someone with the same fiery breath her songs stir up sensual passion. She said firmly: of course, once, with a boy from the same neighborhood.\u00a0True love never runs smooth. He changed his inkling. She did all she could, but in vain, turning the towering go-in-off-the-deep-end passion to\u00a0rage. Inky dinky Merry sent a threatening message: if she couldn’t bring him back, she would beat the living daylights out of him with a knife. He changed his mind not, yet his address. Was it only hugging, snuggling, kissing, petting? What turned her to\u00a0pornocracy alias pornography or X-rated blues\u00a0in her songs?\u00a0Ambrose Philips\u00a0authored the illustrious palindrome “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.” Mae West claimed: “I do all my best work in bed.”<\/p>\n Then, a twist to football. Ethiopian football saw few talents like\u00a0Bitew Abre\u00a0from Dire Dawa and\u00a0Mathias Hailemariam. What could have turned out if their talent was supplemented with\u00a0Nigussie Gebre’s\u00a0dedication. Just a whiff of\u00a0politics. Emperor\u00a0Haileselassie\u00a0never tolerated the scent of “party politics” as it was to grow from differences in opinions on issues among Mekonen Endalkachew, Mekonen Habtewold and Tsehafe Tiezaz Woldeghiorgis. The tension in a word\u00a0school\u00a0came to me, the first day they took me. The older sense of the d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu kicks in: exactly as I knew where I was heading, I was chased. Like the\u00a0Habesha chicken\u00a0for a slaughter.\u00a0Vis a vis<\/em>\u00a0the tension at\u00a0Kes Timhirt Bet<\/em>, mind you, I was an unimpeachable prince in my Cartier, a heart of interest with a\u00a0gratis pass<\/em>. Why was my splendor coming to its ending?\u00a0Napoleon\u2019s instantaneous from the sublime to the ridiculous.\u00a0A day might have started and finished with breakfast, or playing with a ball. Or else a hand-in-a-shorts-pocket,\u00a0toffee-nosed\u00a0turnout at a band’s dummy run at\u00a0Sombrero.\u00a0Que buena!<\/em>\u00a0Just\u00a0candela<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0loco<\/em>. Possibly\u00a0Birhan Tea Room. Solomon Burke\u2019s\u00a0Cry me<\/em>\u00a0kind of blues. Or trumping for the spirit via jazz time by\u00a0Getachew Mekuria\u2019s\u00a0house, our neighbor, witnessing an insignia of out of the ordinary. Or a bit of\u00a0tra-comedy\u00a0theatrics at the\u00a0Bono Wuha\u00a0water kiosk with its snake-like queues. The\u00a0insera-carrying girls\u2019 hullabaloos laced up with bitter fights. Tugs of the day\u2019s belligerent life\u2019s initiation bravado. As identifying English alphabets grew to \u201cshow me this or that\u201d without textbooks. Grade three brought the first English textbook. A fight broke out between me and\u00a0Awolken. After being chased for days, we were allowed to return, but ordered to sit right on the front row classroom floor. Awolken reported the instruction to his family; they changed his school. I sat there for a while.<\/p>\n Whenever I think of days,\u00a0Teacher Gebre\u00a0comes to mind. Grade one. He used to struggle writing days from the Gregorian calendar. Weeks don’t bring the brazen literary output of\u00a0Didymus of Alexandria, nicknamed\u00a0Chalkenteros\u00a0(Brazen Guts). He wrote 3,500 to 4,000 books\u2014about three a week. Yet only fragments survive.\u00a0Lope de Vega\u00a0with his 1,500 plays doesn’t come close. Yet, on our English text book an image of an emaciated boy was denoted as \u201cWeek\u201d and thanks the hustle followed from my fight in the class room, right to grade six\u00a0Weak was Week. How our reading started with “Cholewa wuro<\/em>” to “yemiakatil Fikir<\/em>.” The running on the stairs me and Tibebe a friend, to get our hand on the most sought after books at Womezeker.\u00a0Abe Gubegna\u2019s provocatively titled books, his exiles stories. 3A. It was the year songs involving surly but slowly carried\u00a0HIM\u2019s names\u00a0started to be frowned upon. “Tetamaj Arbegna,” “HIM Hawarya,” “Haile Mariam Mammo.” This is how singing left from school.<\/p>\n I hadn’t gone fifty meters before that old, awful feeling, the d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu as a bad spell, started to nag me. Reversing direction back home, I was crossing a\u00a0carrefour\u00a0(love that French, non-negotiable term for “crossroads”) when I spotted a distant neighbor. My non-committal wave to stop the first vehicle fumed him. He reacted angrily, mistaking my finger-point. Changing direction, I returned, crossed the street, and headed for the big avenue. A kid in an over-decorated\u00a0yebole bajaj<\/em>\u00a0miraculously failed to hit me. A total\u00a0casus belli. A public bus approached the manicured transport pocket, an eyesore, the swimming of the double-deckers individual medley looking a vulgar prank. Why is it so hard to extend the state-of-the-art camera system to central control to stop the over-speeding, over-honking, and a broadlight prank on old folks like me? As I was looking for the right word, the phrase\u00a0hither, thither, and yon\u00a0emerged. No way I can escape it now: the third\u00a0L\u00a0of my college L that spilled over to my working life.<\/p>\n This whole m\u00e9lange of reminiscence coincided with the newly revised\u00a0skedule\u00a0(shoutout to that non-American English origin). I had to doodle something for this page on the\u00a0Ethiopian Reporter<\/em>. I was thinking about returning to my\u00a0Romances, this time last year, sifting one from the other. It was like\u00a0goading cats. A return to my Romances\u2014four different ones, started with one almost four decades ago. One dominates at a time. I added a German entanglement a decade and a half ago, as the temptation to a Russian return was also firm, though warned by a friend of its intricacy. Then a Chinese one was added, a defining moment. It started with a completely non-threatening question: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” But the moment you move past, you hit the wall: “Impossible n’est pas Fran\u00e7ais.” This phrase is the linguistic promise that everything is possible, which makes the struggle feel impossibly hard.\u00a0Maximum stress unlocked, but make it chic.\u00a0Just a “petite madeleine tremp\u00e9e dans du th\u00e9<\/em>” could become the entire foundation for\u00a0Proust’s\u00a0\u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>.\u00a0\u00c9dith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien”\u00a0is the final, non-negotiable proof that French is the ultimate psychological tool. It\u2019s the perfect, non-contradictory\u00a0Alibi Ake\u00a0for a whole life of poor choices. The duel in\u00a0Corneille’s\u00a0Le Cid<\/em>\u00a0is cleanly brutal: Rodrigue must defend his father\u2019s honor. The whole French affair is not not a love story; it\u2019s a structural engineer\u2019s blueprint for the rest of my linguistic chaos.<\/p>\n The Italian affair started with an entirely non-academic, orexic obsession: the non-simple mechanics of pronouncing “Maceroni.” This wasn’t non-a casual fling; this was a deep, verisimilar dive into a culture where the non-flaws are considered features.\u00a0Dante\u00a0literally helped build up a nation by standardizing the language. My struggle is reconciling that nation-building purpose with the simple, low-stakes joy of getting tenor with Pavarotti and Bocelli. That non-stop\u00a0wow\u00a0of the music is the background track. I am trying to figure out if my life, structurally, is worthy of being set to an Italian tenor. And the moment I can conjugate perfectly, the music stops. The Espa\u00f1ol entanglement truly embodies the whole “life is a dynamic skill-set” vibe. My entry point wasn’t not grammar; it was like having a direct, non-linear conversation with\u00a0Cervantes and Don Quixote. The music is the anxiolytic.\u00a0Celia Cruz’s “La vida es un carnaval”\u00a0is the ultimate\u00a0Alibi Ake\u00a0for all the cognitive dissonance. “Es de Lope<\/em>” (It is Lope’s) was the expression for playwright F\u00e9lix Lope de Vega y Carpio’s perfect, elegant, earthy style. The one Spanish word I will never non-master is “ma\u00f1ana.” This final linguistic love affair is the most riddle-wrapped part. It hit me with a deep, pervasive feeling that only has one word:\u00a0saudade. A sad, deep longing for something that is absent. It’s singing\u00a0Fado with Am\u00e1lia. The intellectual\u00a0peripeteia of Pessoa\u00a0is the ultimate Latin word attached to dissonance made literary. He created multiple literary personalities\u2014heteronyms. I am trying to acquire the perfect grammatical structure to contain my own internal Pessoa, lest I, too, non-fail to multiply and fall silent. It is like hitting the non-negotiable pressure point: trying to fit Pessoa\u2019s thirty-seven heteronyms into a single LinkedIn profile\u2014it\u2019s not not going to work.<\/p>\n No wonder it reminded me of the day an advocate told me a court issue that involves me, that reminded me of\u00a0Meera Kaushik\u00a0and her course on Communication, her mention of\u00a0dissonance\u00a0attached to a certain Latin word with the example of a person who bought a baby FIAT. A cool defense mechanism, an\u00a0alibi\u00a0for some of my own Ls. The issue being presented to court: “huuket yiwegedeligne<\/em>“\u2014as I hunted through the dictionary, the closest word I found was “dissonance.” I dug deep even changing dictionaries, it brought nothing other than my stupidity never ever to refer a dictionary for the word\u2019s meaning, ages ago. This whole chaotic Sunday reminded me of my college friend,\u00a0Girma. We were close, but he never agreed to my being willy-nilly to synthetic-sounding courses,\u00a0Emmanuel Kant\u00a0and all that. I used to lament why neither of us, good singers, hadn’t gone to Theatre Arts. His affection for\u00a0Behailu Eshete’s\u00a0songs was immense; we used to jam them. Girma was the epitome of Behailu\u2019s themes: friendly, straight, a team captain\u2014no backbites. The funny thing is, I established my name in the enterprises I’ve been in after being immersed in the\u00a0synthetics\u00a0and coming out through the mill of detailed numbers. I paid him a visit in his office early in the Internet era. That encounter completely transformed me. Then I started to complain about my non-synthetic courses in my sophomore year, wishing they had been extended. Mind you, I’m complaining about a topic taught by the woman I cannot imagine my college stay without, Meera Kaushik. I wished she had talked about\u00a0cognitive consonance\u00a0to make things clearer. Another subject I was completely unready for was Psychology, a lecture hall course that felt like high school talks about\u00a0Lobsang Rampa. This journey, from Rampa to the\u00a0Wiki Leaks leak\u00a0made through the American Embassy here in Addis, on Meles Zenawi, is the key. It’s the journey through the\u00a0Briggs nonsense. That mother-daughter team, Briggs and Myers, their\u00a0MBTI\u00a0was supposed to be Jung for the masses, yet experts struggle to validate its success; it’s the ultimate\u00a0curate’s egg\u00a0of testing. I feel the MBTI is synonymous with a haughty CEO at my former company, a self-proclaimed in public to be on\u00a0Abraham Maslow\u2019s top echelon. That labeling of live human beings annihilates individuality. Flattening human behavior into a static, predetermined set of traits needs to be a thing of the past.\u00a0It\u2019s not giving corporate flop it is the at most pornographic thing one can imagine.\u00a0The non-properly envisaged and led discussion circles we had in the early years of the revolution that required us, mind you, non-synthetic topics on our own… it was a kind of addiction. As to Kant, from all what I took in college, no mention from the second year onwards.<\/p>\n The ultimate dissonance\u2014the noise that stops the\u00a0rataplan\u2014is the realization that the pursuit of the\u00a0Alibi Ake\u00a0is the flaw. I\u2019m standing here, obsessing over whether the angry neighbor who looked exactly like a much older Girma, and whose pacing was non-different from the endless, non-stop motion of the world’s most powerful man, was mad at me or the synthetic nature of the road. I am trying to cut the\u00a0Gordian knot\u00a0of my self-doubt with the sword of academic jargon. But the moment the dissonance becomes clear, it\u2019s too late. The chaos of the day\u2014the\u00a0Bole Bajaj<\/em>, the bus, the\u00a0contretemps<\/em>\u2014was all leading to the fact that my own self, the man who hated the synthetics, the epitome of the straight-talking team captain, appeared only after I decided my entire career was defined by detailed numbers and synthetics. The ghost of my friend, the synthetic team captain, didn’t just appear; he confirmed my core fear: My life’s achievement is built on the\u00a0cognitive dissonance\u00a0of succeeding in the exact thing I was warned against. And the angry look? That wasn’t my old friend’s judgment. That was the face of the self I\u00a0gaslighted\u00a0twenty years ago, reflected back at the moment I tried to justify the whole flop with a simple walk.\u00a0The door stays closed because I am the door. That’s the tea.<\/p>\n Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sunday. Post-lunch. The atmosphere was pure,\u00a0low-grade tension. Write or stroll. That was the whole setup. The writing urge was bugging me; the whole day an illusion of worry-free labor.\u00a0Mid.\u00a0They said some Englishman split a human hair thirteen times\u2014a world record\u2014but\u00a0splitting hairs\u00a0was already the ultimate metaphor for\u00a0caviling distinctions. Machiavelli got that rap first. Back then, they\u00a0verbed\u00a0everything. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"editor_plus_copied_stylings":"{}","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1928],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47723","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-bits-pieces"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}