Good riddance: An Ethiopian’s take on ‘Gone with the Wind’

[Yeah I read it!]

[Really read it!]

[Read it two whole decades after romanticising the love story, its caricatures, and its language (its “የሰማያቱ ያለህ”, its Miss Pitty-Pat Hamilton, its Prissy) with Seblewongel Sime, who read the ነብይ መኮንን version, at the back of Commercial College of Addis Ababa where ignorance and a half-baked grasp of the English language were a bliss].

And, turned out, it is your typical american love story. There are rags. Riches. Fragile saints [Melanie], hard-knock sinners [Scarlet and Rhett Butler], one-legged Supermen [Will], one-eyed cowboys [Archie] and dark-skinned “Indians” [except these are servitue-loving, freedom-hating, fat, ape-ish and brainless-when-not-infantile “black apes” who deserve nothing but the basest treatment and amongst whom no hero ever sprung].

If there is one word to describe ‘Gone with the wind’, it is u̲n̲k̲i̲n̲d̲. Viviously and mercilessly so. And it has reserved all its hate and malice, its propaganda-of-degradation, its mission of justifying the birth of the KKK and its long reaching fingers [even unto this day] against its “darkies”. The African-slaves on whose back the South once stood proud, with its elegant women, its whips, its noose and white sheets hidden from sight. Because this is what the genteel south knows and without it, it is forever lost: Stealing young men and women from their native land, bringing them into a country and a place where they have no one to defend them, beat and break them into submission so they would till its land, pick its cotton, raise its children and make sure it has more of the same.

Alas.. It it is not all bad. The book is well written with interesting insights into gender roles, and a sense of humor that is as witty, sardonic, and relevant today as it was back then. And enjoyable too, if one over-looked the hate-campaign that the writer didn’t even bother to mask under the guise of a chracter’s point of view but boldly reported as fact. [A monomaniacal and persistent literary-blackening and name-calling only equal in its savagery to Dickens’ Anti-semitism.]

As a woman from a proud African country that has never been colonized by a European nation, I regret neither the money nor the 43 hours I spent listening to Ms. Mitchell’s first and last novel. Learning about the Old South and its ways, coming soon after the reading of “Midnight in the garden of good and evil”, has helped me put some old-perspectives on the birth of these here United States and the rise of Donald Trump. The only thing I wish? That the writer was still alive and kicking when those black medical students had that photo taken outside that Louisiana planatation’s slave quarter. It would have been a very satisfying and deserved giant middle finger.

Russell Ledet, a second-year medical student (top row, third from left) organized an outing for 14 of his fellow African American classmates to a former plantation that had slave quarters. Ledet says he would caption this photo “Our Moment of Resiliency.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/19/789453422/black-med-students-at-former-slave-quarters-say-this-is-about-resiliency