A homeage to my dad

Once upon a time there was a mighty man. The only survivor out of 9 siblings, a FiTawRaRi’s son non-the-less, he lived his life the way he saw fit: saying what he wanted, doing what he wanted or beating up anybody standing in the way. That doesn’t mean he had an easy childhood, on the contrary! But he never took life seriously, until lost or too late.

• He was a genius, but never stayed in school long enough to finish it. He either had a fall out with a director for making the kids laugh while earnestly singing the King’s “Mezmur” with his hoarse voice, gets punished a year for starting a group fight in high school/college, or tells the American lady doing the interview that “you Americans” were segregators and losses his scholarship.

• He loved his mother to death, still spent most of his time in Addis, partying his youth away at “Wube BeReha” (while she sent one messenger after another begging him come see her before she died) until the fatal day she fainted in his prescence, and he run to the nearest doctor weeping “Enate Motechibign. Enate Motechibign”, and discovered she’d had the worst case of diabetes which she kept from him and refused to look after properly (saying, like everybody else did in those days, she wasn’t going to live forever) the same year he was taking his ESLCE exam. Resulting with her dying, him falling his exam and being left all alone in the world.

• He loved his wife, and children, but they never knew about it till she got tired of the beatings and left him or one of them got sick and he starts crying like a baby.

He didn’t have much of a role model, neither. His mother traveled across countries (with him next to her, on a mare that later broke his nose) on the trail of one judge after another until she won over her land from her [male] adversaries at H.I.M. Haileselassie I’s court. An experience that taught her son a valuable lesson he’d stick to even in his old age: that if you are alone in this world, you are vulnerable to all kinds of attacks you should be able to defend yourself from, by seeing them from afar if you can.

So he knew about and brooded over “conspiracies”, saw them coming even when they weren’t, sometimes in his own family and children who can barely pronounce their grandpa’s name, better than anybody. The only men in his life (his dad died young) were either the various tenants working in various capacities in his father’s estate who made fun of his mother’s impressive figure when her back was turned, grieving his young heart (they used to call her “GArA MuLeta” he told me once) or the men she married and divorced – for being mean to her son – when she wasn’t traveling. He remembers once waking up from sleep in the middle of the night, covered in ants; and screaming for help; and being beaten for it by a stepfather whose wife has run away that very evening.

Unfortunately, before they learned that parents weren’t really smarter, only older, and that they got weaknesses too kids should learn to understand and forgive; his children couldn’t tell the difference between the darkness that covered their door in the evening and the dark man that walked through it drank, angry and “sniffing blood”. A difficult man who found it hard to live with himself, he wasn’t exactly the type of father whose return in the evening his children looked forward to.

Nobody loved this man for who he is! His friends were his friends because he spent his mother’s money freely on them. The peasants on his father’s estate loved and hailed him as something of a Saint because he refused to take advantage of their labor and the fruit of their toil. His college buddies & fellow teachers made him their hero because he didn’t hesitate from beating up anybody giving them trouble and taking all the blame. His pretty cousins wanted him around only when they needed a male protection to and from school.

This man is an honest man! A hard working man! A man with principles! As a man of principles, he saw the world in only two colors, in black and white! A hard working, honest and principled person is loved by him like no other. He’d be there for him no matter what, to the gallows sometimes. A person who falls short of it made enemies with him. So he had as many people who hated his guts as he had who bear witness that he’ll never take bribe. And his kids, going to the same school he teaches in and sitting with the same kids he punches in the face with little notice, had to bear all the looks and nasty words from those not courageous enough to say it to their father’s face. They were more or less strangers too, strangers who needed defending themselves for somebody else’s fault (or right).

This man is a good father and a faithful husband! But as a man, he has a long way to go. So angry words are said and bad looks are exchanged. And every time that happens, their mother is told to leave the house taking her kids with her.

Problem is, the kids are all grown up now. They know the laws. They know how far a father can go. And that he isn’t the Alpha and Omega he once was, the loving lord & father with a whip of fire looking at them only to find faults. And they say as much. They tell him, too, that they aren’t kids anymore. That they aren’t scared of him anymore. That they won’t let him scare their younger siblings anymore. No way!!

They don’t mean to hurt him, perhaps only to teach him. But ofcourse nothing sounds the way it is meant to sound in the heat of arguments; when angry words are uttered, when hateful looks are exchanged and when resentments and grudges come out to light.

So now this man is a broken man! A broken old man! A broken and lonely old man whose children are “against him”. Or atleast don’t love and appreciate him the way he thought all fathers who labored for their family should be loved and appreciated. Sometimes I catch him looking at the floor llike a man who has suddenly woke up to find his world gone. A king reduced to a commoner. A mighty man with as much dignity & stubborness, save for the power, who can neither admit he was wrong, nor less than perfect, but whose eyes beg for love and understanding. Like a man … scared!

And I wonder, I sometimes wonder, if being right and having enough reasons are worth it. They never were for my father!!

“YeWondOch GudAy”

MSNBC’s Entertainment Writer Miki Turner and TMZ on TV are my favorite sources for latest entertainment news, celebrity gossip & Hollywood rum. The latter I got to watch on Arab Sat at my parents’ house every Sunday evening after “Everybody Hates Chris” (a show I simply ADORE).

It’s not the actual news of who is caught doing what I find interesting (although I felt fake prince Frederic von Asshole’s reference to Obama’s wife looking like “washer woman” very disturbing & insensitive on TMZ’s part; but there are also moments in which 18+ actresses like Hayden Panettiere are referred to as “the most annoying little girl”, instead of what the moment calls for, so I try take the good with the bad). What I love is the tone with which the pieces of news and the celebrities in them are treated, especially when it comes to beastly characters like Paris Hilton. I don’t know what the comic genre those two use in their reports is called, or if it is a genre at all! But the way they make fun of stupid people & situations with the kind of sharp and unexpected wit that makes you explode into your “Qechin” coffee, spilling most of it’s content on your lap, filling your low-self-esteemed blogger heart with a [“I wish I can write like that”] yearning, making breathing difficult for a sec.

What brought TMZ’s trade mark of reporting to mind is a post at habeshafriends on “Father’s Day”, which in turn reminded me of a program I caught on “Yechewata program” last Saturday. The program was a Father’s Day introduction to all those Ethiopians who have never came across the concept. The type that tries to make us aware of foreign holidays so we may adopt it at our convenience, with the kind of educating [“Silezih Lijochiye”] tone that makes you wanna tear a strand out of your hair (exactly the way you wanted do when they were having their “ErSwo behonu min yadergu neber” yeRadio Wuyiyit earlier and the interviews to various parties packed with the word “… mAlet…”). Still leLa amArAch yelemina, you suffer through it!

The funny part on this program, and the part which reminded me one of TMZ’s tv programs, was how the presenter seems to be grieved with how fathers haven’t been given enough attention in today’s gender politics sensitive world. He went on mentioning how women have rights groups, March 8s, and tv programs preaching their cause. Things fathers have been, unfairly, forced to do without (Mohammud Ahmed playing “Abaat des yilewal lij siweledelet” at the background).

Now, if this was America, and the TMZ people heard it, they’d have prepared a mock interview with the least “male” looking transsexual man/woman and ask what he/she felt about his/her minor role in Ethiopian media these days. That’s what they did to somebody’s comaplaints that the “White Male” wasn’t given enough place in USA’s presidential election. They stopped a Mexican/phillipino looking actor/singer?, infront of a hotel lobby and asked him, loudly referring to him as “WHITE MAN”, what he felt about not being given enough attention in the election. It was Hilarious!!.

Like I told whoever would be reading my comment at habeshafriends, the White Male of the American politics and the Ethiopian Father of domestic politics are “yannd santim hulet getsitawoch”. What one is known for, the other excels. And trying to bring attention to him as the “neglected part of society” & a victim would only make the bringer a source of mockery. Even for a Father’s Day special!