“Are you late for work”? I asked.“No. It’s the music on my ipod” she says while pulling the plugs from both ears. “I do look like I am in a hurry, don’t I? Listen!” she smiles and gives me her earphones. Had it been my kind of sound, I would probably pace like a puma and disappear in the background.
Maybe I need a hearing aid. I thought.
An idea is not that different from a cloud. It drifts, changes shapes, hovers, drops, storms or evaporates depending on whatever is going on around. There are times when it can spark a bolt of lightning.
Eritrea, just like any other country, is an idea that has been framed on a territory for which thousands died and are still dying. Unfortunately, the map became the territory and land is increasingly becoming of no use. How is it possible to establish decent living conditions when young people are leaving the country in their thousands?
The idea that Eritrea is being diluted by friendly fires from here and there demands some real and hard talk from all corners. Some would say this is a no-war-no-peace condition and I think it’s more than that. This is a situation where Eritrea can’t see a way out.
Well, here comes one and if you are not at ease with it, feel free to slash and burn.
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Why do you think Eritrea appears to be not in chaos?
A friend replies, “You can ask that again… and again but ‘where do we go from there?’ would have been much more simple”
I had to ignore that because I was trying to walk backwards. However, that domain is not safe anymore. It has evolved to a smoke screen where everyone is enabled to claim invisibility.
Maybe it’s being in chaos for so long that it is taken as given or natural. The way it looks now (as it has been in the past), it [Eritrea] is probably incapable of being at peace with itself because every time it gets the opportunity to actually seize that possibility, it somehow manages to unhinge itself while trying to claim self-reliance.
How would that be possible when at least a quarter (or more) of the Eritrean population are living abroad and those inside are fleeing the country in their thousands? The way it is now, self-reliance can easily be translated to ‘use of violence’ – in other words, physical confrontations, verbal threats, spies and security police. Some Eritreans in diaspora operate or behave like one without even being aware of it and they do it for free. A few more do actually pay the government to do the job themselves.
It borders on the peripheries of a stupid mind. If stupidity can be framed on canvass, you better not leave a trace of ink and not even a pin. It’s got to be blank – in paint and sound.
All that is left is an endless echo or a black hole in the imagination. No wonder all this shout we hear about Eritrea is from within. It’s an echo from a long dead memory. The concept of communication which gives way to ‘settlement’ was thrown out of the window a long time ago – long before the struggle for the independence of Eritrea.
Why do you think Eritrea is on top of the list for exporting the highest number of refugees per capita? In 2007, the UK received more than 2500 Eritrean asylum seekers – again the highest from all countries.
Talk about self-reliance!
Lots of Eritreans assume that the latest African psyche has nothing to do with their kind of experience – as if they are not part of the continent. They find it hard to swallow that the African tragedy had something to do with ‘modern’ borders (in relation to nation states) and the age old warring factions based on food, land and adrenalin drive to ‘over’ exercise power on your next of kin… be it your brother, sister, neighbour, clan, tribe, etc.
It always boils down to some idea that reigns supreme over all petty squabbles to assume the all important cause around which armies of all kind of denominations raise their knives, swords, guns and flags and justify their sacrifices and chant glorious songs to this and that victory.
That was the cycle then and still is.
In Eritrea however, it is not a cycle. It’s a way of life. It’s a solid and permanent state of affairs. Some confuse it for security – another version of ‘better the devil we know than the angel we don’t’. Every time the imperative to guard the right of the individual is invoked, the State declares that it will have to wait until the nation is safe and secure enough to guarantee those protections. In the meantime, the individual can and will be sacrificed for that ultimate national purpose – the new god for which everything must be given without question or reflection.
There is this thing about Eritrea. The whole epic can be reduced to being married to a map while divorce is not part of the deal.
Another friend called me the other day and, somehow, that same subject was the agenda. She said that she had read a book on Eritrea a long time ago. It could be on the anthropology of… or just travel writing… it was in Italian.
“Are you sure”? I ask.
Dead sure, she says. By the way, she can read, write, speak and walk in Italian.
“The one word I remember now [in that book],” she said, “is ‘litigazione’”.
Litigation came to mind and suddenly, the clouds cleared.“What do you mean?” I asked. What I meant to say was: What was he trying to say? I just had to assume the writer was a man.
“It was one the things he observed then…” she replies, “and I don’t remember when the book was written… but I can say is that it was a very old book and was probably written long before the Second World War”.
We had to leave it at that and began talking about the veil behind ‘litigation’ instead. It does ring a bell in Eritrean cultures and the ever-evolving behaviour outside that environment as well.
I had to endure another sleepless night again trying to dig into some obscure memory. Litigation is actually another way saying, “I am not going to sleep on this… till death!” and if you do find the time to read, chew, digest and think about Eritrea’s history or the culture it is based on, you are more likely to notice more litigations than resolutions.
I go online to Encarta to finally settle the word ‘litigation’ and it is defined as:
lit·i·ga·tion [ lìtti gáysh'n ] (plural lit·i·ga·tions) noun: 1. existence of lawsuit: the act or process of bringing about or contesting a lawsuit or all lawsuits collectively The matter is in litigation.
No wonder the ‘passion for justice’ – for better or worse - is and has always been of paramount importance in Eritrea.
Ever since the 1940s, there were and still are so many opportunities to resolve and/or prevent conflicts. But the art has always being on how to delay settlement and, if it can all be achieved, it always comes attached with a sort of ‘cultural’ clause or amendment to re-ignite a dead old case.
Such elements have, obviously, long being embedded in the social fabric. Now, they are being transferred or upgraded to a national geographical map. All you have to do is point toward a target, mark a physical ‘entity’ or just dip your finger in deadly histories and accuse an ‘imaginary’ enemy, an outsider or anything that seems to stand against one’s short sighted vision. In Eritrea, litigation can be confused for a quest for justice while the practice behind it is lost in translation to revive a long forgotten grudge.
A few days later, an American asks me where I am from. It’s the kind of question I dread or cannot deal with anymore. So, all I do is device a trick.
“All you have to do is guess!” I suggest – because almost anyone who asks that kind of question manages to mention all parts of the world except Eritrea. Most don’t even get close – they either don’t know or a miss the ‘map’ by a continent or two.
The moment I lead the way, they say “Ah! I’ve heard about Eritrea. Where is it?”
I explain and I am really getting tired about all these but I can’t let go without a fight – the age old Eritrean bloody litigation kicks in.
“Now that you know where it is, what do you imagine”? I asked my American friend with a stern face.
You know what he said? Don’t get me wrong here. He is a good guy.
“Well, stuff like diving, mountaineering, meeting different kinds of people, exploring the landscape… that kind of thing. You know?”
As far as I am concerned, it suits me just fine.
“I am looking for some sort of long term settlement there,” I wanted to say but I couldn’t – simply because it would extend the conflict or, to be more precise, the litigation.
The next day and before I could recover from all that mental mayhem, my old friend Paul drops another time-bomb.
“Africans…” he begins, without pointing a finger, “suffer from what we call victim mentality!”
“Include me out!” I want to say but couldn’t.
“They think all the problems they are facing these days originate from colonial rule and all sorts of interferences from the West…,” Paul goes on, “…while there is some grain of truth in there, it just serves no purpose but perpetuates an attitude of resignation and encourages a mindset of waiting for things to change by external factors. They are losing the ability to think for themselves on a massive scale. Don’t you think?”
I nodded my head. I had to because I thought he said, ‘can’t you think’?
“So, what are you going to do about it?” he asks with a hint of urgency in his voice.
“I’ll think about that,” I say and my head is hurting while thinking ‘when?’
A few days later, two key words stand out to frame the Eritrean predicament – litigation and victimization. What a deadly cocktail of a mental state can be created by these two words that reinforce each other to establish a social disability in a nation state that claims to be or to have being self-reliant?
Yeah, Eritrea doesn’t need any external assistance. All it can do is conduct litigation on its borders and victimize its own people – without any foreign assistance. It has successfully evolved to a kind of entertainment or a national pass-time dug and rooted in quicksand and spread over the borders of a bloody map and deep in the psyche.
Beware! It’s infectious and maybe that’s why I can’t stop this rattle and can’t figure out how or where to end it.
The way it is now, it seems the idea of Eritrea is not that different from a bird that can’t possibly fly or put its feathers in the right order to at least look at its own state of affairs from a different perspective.
All I could do was imagine that Eritrea is a geographic idea. The fact that almost no one knows where it is while all these ugly stuff is happening down there should be used as Exhibit A. Maybe I should take the State of Eritrea to a court of law and start another series of litigations.
What do you think?
