My appreciation for the Russian classic novels and short stories has no limit. I am of the habit, now for a fairly long time, of reading and re-reading many of them, reflecting on the paradoxes imposed in them, on men and women, on account of their being human. I can’t say if it is because I am charmed and captivated by these stories, or if it is an intrinsic property of these great works of art that many characters of these stories are, for me, almost living a real life with me and outside the pages written by their authors.
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Many a time, I also came face to face with a characteristic or more of one of the characters  of these novels and stories, masked in faces of actual, living people that I meet. For instance, at one time or another, I have seen and come across men like Raskolnikov, the axial character of Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment: a man claiming and believing to posses the knowledge of who should live and who deserves to die; a man who explains his crimes away by claiming to have committed them for a higher good and sublime objective. Yes, I have seen and met Raskolnikov not only in Dostoyevsky’s novel, but in real life! Who of us all hasn’t seen, heard of and met this man, assuming different names, complexion and context? But the greatest museum of characters are the short stories and novellas of Anton Chekhov. This one is a world by itself; you can say a parallel universe, fascinating, realistic, and penetrating with characters strikingly familiar and long lingering, all at the same time.

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So it was not surprising that reading Nawud and Yosief, I was reminded once again of Russian novels. 

The affair with grief

When I was only a child, I used to, sometimes, see my mother and other mothers from the neighborhood sitting for a coffee session in a joyous atmosphere filled with the smoke of the relaxing Kerenite frankincense and Indian sandalwood they burned for ingratiating themselves with the saint dominating that day of the week. Tuesday, I remember, was for Sheikh Abdussalam; Wednesday for Sheikh Abdulkadir.  And so on for the rest of the days of the week.

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The party holds on its joyous air for a long time, while we, the children, charged with higher levels of motivity  and pitch caused by the excitement stirred by the occasion and the gathering, play.  Our distance: not very far away that they lose sight of us; but not too close that we disturb their moods.  Then, before we children notice it coming, the party sometimes turns into one of wailing and lamentation.

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In a magical moment, the quiet laughter and the-all-engulfing air of content and relaxation turns into a harmonious chorus of rhythmic wailing and lamentation; tears running down the cheeks; lips moving and trembling as if they were (or maybe they were), humming one and the same song. There was no one in particular who was being lamented in these sessions: it seemed that it was lamenting for the sake of lamenting and love of grief.

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That was what we, kids, and even the older males sometimes thought.  But as one advances in age and comes in a skin-to-skin contact with grief, away from the insulation of parents and family; as one travels and lives in lands practicing other cultures and customs, one starts to see the mothers and their coffee parties and what seemed at the time their affair with grief in a quite, different light, and sees the wisdom behind it all.

In Egypt it is customary that people hire professional wailers for funerals. The lady, a professional wailer, is briefed and advised by the relatives of the deceased on how they would like their beloved to be remembered. The costlier wailer is the one with the necessary experience and devices for drawing tears from the eyes of the majority using rhythmic wails of quasi poems. The same, or a variation of the same phenomenon, is observed in parts of Ethiopia and Sudan. Sharing grief is, as you can see, even bought.

“The Lament” or “Misery” as it is known sometimes, is a tale portraying the crushing grief of Iona, a lonely Russian sledge-cab driver, and his futile attempts to share with strangers the anguish he endures by the loss of his child. The story takes place almost a week after his son's death.  The story’s value lies not in the documentation-like of human suffering on the loss of a child only, but because it also brings out to light and exposes the vital need for sharing one’s grief as a way of coming to term with the self and the irrational.

Thus, one reaches, it seems, to the conclusion that there is, in many cultures and societies, a powerful urge in humans to express their grief and share it with others of their kind.  And in the absence of a listener of their kind, an animal or an inanimate object will do.  That was the case of Iona, the cabdriver who is, in the end, forced by circumstances and the futility of recruiting listeners to pour his grief on his horse’s ears and tell him all about it. 

Electronic Melqes

Such is then, and only along these lines of public expression of grief, that the now- famous series of essays written by Ato Yosief Gebrehiwot should be seen and be interpreted if good will on his part is to be maintained as the motive behind coming up with his sour essay.

I was not aware of the three-part essay under the title of “ Romanticizing Ghedli, by Ato Yosief Gebrehiwot up to the time when I read about it in awate.com. Reading the essays, I have to admit, left me with acute unsettlement, mixed feelings and  ambiguous suspension until, without any obvious external  inducement, I remembered the story, by Chekhov,  The Lament--a story  I read long time ago. I remembered the story and its main character, Iona. Suddenly the feeling of unsettlement I had from the article “Romanticizing Ghedli” was resolved and the light under which I had to see the article was finally at hand.

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If you have read Ato Yosief’s article, liked it and identified with it, then it must be because of its mainly lamentation-of-the-dead like setting and not of its reasoning power. Its effect on you must have been as the effect of the wailing of Iona on the ears of his horse. If you like that essay, you must have done that because of its air of grief exposition mimicking a session of melqes መልቀስ, not unlike those coffee gatherings of our mothers in my childhood, albeit electronic.

If you have read Ato Yosief’s article, liked it and identify yourself with it, I advise you to go and re-read it and try capturing its soul, and ask yourself what is there in it serving a message that looks not nihilistic. There is no advice offered, no insight, and no direction as where to go and how from this point forward. In fact, his whole 28-page ranting boils down to barely two premises and a conclusion:

Premise 1. Jebha was sectarian, anarchic, corrupt and dysfunctional.
Premise 2. Shabia was totalitarian, isolationist, paranoid and barbaric past (one wonders if he believes its present is less barbarous).
Conclusion : Eritreans are cowards.

So what are we supposed to do with this conclusion? I would have been thankful had he prescribed a cure, or did he? Commit suicide, hang ourselves and make us choke the cowardice that has brought us and our families this much misery and live happily ever after?

One of two realms

But this is me, one who assumes Ato Yosief’s goodwill.  But there are others who would not be generous enough, and they are excused, given what looked pantomimic sectarian signals and nods in his article, on top of its condescending style, echoing the all-too- familiar EPLF/PFDJ hollow arrogance and superciliousness.

Those who assume possible political and ideological affiliations of the writer as the motive for writing his essay will find, the munition, there in his own utterances, and point out at him and accuse him of attempting a creation of an imaginary nemesis (the late Jebha) for the PFDJ, and to slip it to the minds of readers to be, without their awareness, and place it in their minds, buttressing it with stirring imagery created by old and unsubstantiated EPLF claims of Amma Haradit class of adjectives, talking, that is, to the guts rather to the reason, and then sit back, and hope people confuse his creation for the movement against PFDJ tyranny.

Ask yourself and search, also, what is it that Ato Yosief has said which has not, already, been said by the PFDJ? Is it their tasteless, humiliating and name calling of the ordinary Eritrean? Is it that he told that EPLF/PFDJ are bad and authoritarian and were barbarians (in the past tense!)? But, every one knows that, and even the despot himself brags about it, shamelessly on the screens of satellite TV stations with global reach! 

Ato Yosief, seems to relish seeing himself the spectator of all time. Perhaps he has the talent and ability to see the Eritrean life in its abstractedness and universality all at a glance, but all this is because he has enough food to eat and nurture himself and it looks that he doesn’t consider or reckon that Eritreans and Eritrean youth are with empty stomachs, starved and hungry, for a long time, and for the majority, a whole life-time. In the Novel “Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, the teacher, Ishmael, a 500lb gorilla, tells his student:

"When you have more food than you need, then the gods have no power over you."

What if the reverse case is considered by Ato Yosief :

“When you have no food and the heavy club falling ceaselessly on your back then…………………” and I leave the blanks for Ato Yosief to fill.

I wish Ato Yosief could tell us why it is that the tyrannical regime expelled aid agencies that were feeding Eritreans, is it for Eritreans to learn earning their bread the hard way, the way Nikita sees it?

Those whom Zekere Lebona referred to when he said that “When it comes to the youth of Eritrea the traditional opposition does not have a high regard for the youth of Eritrea too.” Those, also, are in the same spot as Ato Yosief. What moral authority do they have to patronize and judge others whose reality may not comply to the image they formed for the perfect man? And now, a little before closing my article, I can’t resist bringing a little of the speculations of Professor Nikolai, a university professor, melancholic, sick and expected to live less than six months, when he was rolling on his life in his mind and speculating on his life-long relations with people around him: his wife, his daughter, his peers in the university, his son, his daughter, and every one until at a point in his speculation he says: 

“I also happen to remember my son the officer stationed at Warsaw. He is an intelligent, sober fellow, but that’s not good for me. If I had an old father, and I knew that he has moments when he felt ashamed of his poverty, I think I‘d give someone else my officer’s commission and take a job as an ordinary laborer. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What good are they? To harbor ill-will against ordinary mortals for not being heroes; only a narrow minded or embittered man can do that”.

The idea here is that Ato Yosief’s piece of sophistry can’t escape one of two realms: Either that of Iona in The Lament or that of Professor Nikolai in the above quotation from the novella Dreary Story.

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Nawud

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Either.  Or.