There is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene

Author:Melissa Fay Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2008-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

36

CHALTU, GIRL, EIGHT years orphan, a first-grader.

Biniam, age two years boy, mother and father died, kebele sent him.

Hana, girl, age eight years, first-grader.

Tariqua, girl, ten years. Kebele brought her.

Hailegabriel, 14, ninth-grader, mother and father died.

An angular, ebony-skinned boy of thirteen arrived. His small, shaved head and narrow shoulders rode high on his lanky torso and long legs. He'd disembarked from a donkey cart, after riding for an unknown number of days. He politely greeted everyone in words no one understood. He expected to sleep on the floor and was amazed to be offered the opportunity to share a cot with three other boys. He was quick and strong; he could whittle and he could tie good knots. While doing his chores, he chanted something under his breath, a muttered, endless soliloquy. He recited himself to sleep at night, and his lips began to move in recitation before he was folly awake in the morning. Perhaps he was from the Nuer people, near the Sudanese border? He didn't know Amharic, the language of the Amhara people and the official language of Ethiopia, but Ethiopia is a land of eighty-four living languages and five dead ones, including ancient ecclesiastical languages. The boy did not respond to visitors who questioned him in Oromo, Gurage, Somali, Tigrinya, Harari, or Arabic, other than to tilt his head with a polite smile.

Haregewoin took him to the Mercato, positioned him in the middle of a mass of vendors and shoppers, and gestured for him to raise his voice. A passerby caught the gist or the rhythm of it, then concluded, the child was singing the oral history of the generations of his ancestors.

Clearly he'd been tutored to repeat the myths, the legends, the genealogies endlessly, to engrave them on his memory until he himself could relay them to the next generation.

But now the boy was cut off from his parents, elders, tutors, and holy men; from his people. To whom would he pass on the oral traditions? It was the kind of loss not measured by any statistic.

The boy was delighted to be given a ratty maroon sweater and to start school with the other children. One night Haregewoin recognized what he was chanting to himself in bed: it was the fidele, the Amharic alphabet. The history and holy tales of his people, so carefully stored in the archive of a bright boy's memory, faded.

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