Ethiopia Under my Skin, a narrative
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Book Overview
An account of Ethiopia through the eyes of a writer-journalist who sees her career flounder when she moves to Addis Ababa with her family. In response, she throws herself into the immense artistic and cultural wealth of the country. She meets artists, designers, gallerists, women entrepreneurs, architects, musicians and dancers who become protagonists of her book.
The author lived in Addis from 2011 to 2015, a time of massive transformation and a window of hope for the future of the country. She has since returned several times and recounts the changes through a double narration in the present and in the past. In over a decade, she saw the city being razed to the ground and built anew using Dubai as a model and without much care for the architectural heritage or the social fabric. She records the places of cultural and historical significance in Addis which have now disappeared, along with a way of life centred around the community, Through snippets of daily life, the book tells the story of a change of century and gives a voice to the people who are usually silenced.
In a rare account of life abroad without the credentials, she opens up to her marriage and explain how her loss of professional and social identity created unresolved conflict in her couple, with one unable to understand the position and struggle of the other, and her feeling that she got the raw end of the deal when moving. She gives a detailed account of her difficulties raising uprooted children in a country where she had no cultural references, friendship and family support to help her.
As an escape, she travelled extensively, dragging her family to the four corners of the country including to places out of reach now, which she recounts in the travelogue part of the book. Along the way, she learnt about Shashemene and the Rastafari community who moved to Ethiopia in the 1960s on emperor Haile Selassi 's invitation; Gondar, the first sedentary capital of Abyssinia and the birth of Azmari music; Lake Tana and the source of the Blue Nile claimed to be discovered by Scottish Traveller James Bruce; Harar and the poet Rimbaud who lived his last years there and befriended Haile Selassi 's father Ras Makonnen; Dire Dawa and the train line built by the French to link Addis to Djibouti; Tigray and the birth of Orthodox Christianity; Sidamo and the coffee growing area; Arba Minch and the last of the wild zebras; the Omo Valley with tribes who wear lip plates and practice scarification; and the famous town of Lalibela with its rock-hewn churches that was built by King Lalibela as the new Jerusalem to prevent an assault of the kind of Saladin on the Holy City. Through her journey, she explores themes of displacement, social identity, cultural heritage and motherhood in the global age, while witnessing the end of an old world.
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