Today’s guest post is by Caroline Kurtz. Caroline Kurtz is the author of three memoirs: A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing Up in Ethiopia and America; Today is Tomorrow; and Walking the Tideline: Loss and Renewal on the Oregon Coast Trail. From the age of five, Caroline grew up in Ethiopia, the child of Presbyterian Church missionaries. The family lived in the church’s most remote mission station in the mountainous regions of southwestern Ethiopia near the town of Maji. She and her sister, the American children’s author Jane Kurtz, recently launched Ready Set Go Books for early Ethiopian readers. Ready Steady Go has now printed and distributed 70,000 books in Ethiopia. When her husband died in 2013, Caroline bought, gutted and remodeled a house in Portland, Oregon. From there she returns regularly to Ethiopia, bringing solar power and economic development options to women in Maji. Learn more about Caroline and her work at https://developmaji.org/

Aida Edemariam was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, educated in London and Toronto, and currently works for the Guardian. Her book, The Wife’s Tale, is a fantastic weave of biography, culture, and history. She so intensely imagines her grandmother’s internal life, her book reads like a memoir. 

The story begins with a wedding in 1924. The bride is eight-year-old Yetemegnu. She is being married to a man almost thirty. A disease has swept through her town. No one plays the wedding drum. A woman trills the joy cry, Ililili! But she is shushed. Joy will only draw the attention of the evil eye. “(Yetemegnu) would always remember no one danced at her wedding.” During the days of feasting, she refuses all but tiny bites, sips of mead—she is afraid she will wet her bed.

For years she lives as though she is the daughter of this man, who feeds her tender bits of meat and calls her Lijay, my child. At fourteen, she is told that the birth of her first child will feel much like when she squats to relieve herself.

With her every contraction, the attending women chant, “Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, direshilin. O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.”

 Behind a curtain, deacons of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church read from the homilies of Ruphael. “Listen, the women said. Listen, because Ruphael opens our wombs.”

She is not yet twenty, with three children, when one day she sees, “six specks in the sky, specks moving faster and straighter than any bird, growing bigger and bigger, until she could hear them roar. ‘Oh mother of God, what is this?’ . . . Closer and closer the specks came. They looked like crosses now, stubby dark crosses, trailing smoke.”

Aida Edemariam renders vividly Yetemegnu’s fear and struggle during the Italian years: the planes dropping bombs and “rain that burns”—mustard gas, sprayed like insecticide on fields and villages; patriots who hold the countryside until Addis Ababa is just a garrison town; rumors that the streets of Addis Ababa run with blood after the failed assassination of the Italian Viceroy of Ethiopia.

This is the story of 20^th century Ethiopia—invasion, monarchy, Communism. This is the story of an eight-year-old bride who goes on to bear nine children.  She learns to grow, dry, pound and use her own spices in the feasts she serves to friends and family. She is possessed by a zar, a demon spirit which makes her dance until she collapses. She has premonition dreams. When her husband’s enemies strip her of her inheritance after his death, she takes her case clear up to Haile Selassie. She loses all again to the Communist government. She learns to read as an old woman. She makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  She outlives the Communist government and five of her children, dying at age 99.

Aida Edemariam, daughter of Yetemegnu’s oldest son, heard these stories at her grandmother’s knee. She has recounted the story of her grandmother’s life—a hero’s journey—in its particular time and place and culture. The smells and sights, the fears and pain, the celebrations and sorrows of an Ethiopian woman are granted to the reader as a feast as richly flavored as the national dish Yetemegnu cooked and served a thousand times.

*In Ethiopian custom, Aida is her given name, Edemariam is her father’s given name. It is honorable and appropriate to refer to her by her own given name.