Sweetness in the Belly Read Online Free PDF

had no word for diaspora, or emigration. There was only the word for pilgrimage, a journey with an implicit return—to Mecca or the shrines of beloved Ethiopian saints—but the idea of leaving your country, except for a very educated few who sought higher degrees abroad, was incomprehensible. A betrayal, even.
    Amina is an anchor in this small but growing community. While the others moan their longing for injera, Amina sets about making the Ethiopian bread using millet instead of teff. The women are grateful for the instruction, even though the injera lacks the critical bitterness that distinguishes it. But taste ultimately comes to matter less than resourcefulness. Amina locates a Yemeni merchant in Brixton who smuggles in qat from Djibouti twice a week. The men are jubilant. Bread and stimulants. The stuff of life.
    Amina is not a specter in this landscape; she is unusual in putting down roots. She began by washing dishes in the kitchen of a Punjabi restaurant, which she did while taking advanced English for foreigners at Brixton College at night. She soon began taking secretarial courses as well. Now she works from Monday to Friday in the legal aid department of the Refugee Referral Service alongside well-meaning English women with solid names like Marion and Patricia.
    While other refugees dream of mountains and hyenas and rivers, Amina takes Sitta and Ahmed to the zoo in Regent’s Park and introduces them to lizards and giraffes. She fashions paper boats out of pages of tabloids for Ahmed to float on the Thames near the foot of Lambeth Bridge. Old England looms large on the other side. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament would cast shadows over his tiny paper boat if it were to cross the river, but a paper boat cannot span the distance, and we are both alienated by and grateful for the divide.
    We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return.

    W hen the coffee beans are nearly black, Amina tips them from the plate into a mortar. She brought that mortar with her. Showed up at Heathrow with nothing but Ahmed, a man’s wallet and that mortar, Sitta still in utero. She unwraps a ball of waxed paper pulled from the pocket of her skirt and shakes two cardamom pods into her hand. She rubs these briskly between her palms, adding their silken ashes and brown seeds to the mix, and then passes the mortar to me.
    Sitta places her hand over mine as if to help. A twist of the wrist brings a distant yet familiar sting. The suddenly charged senses and the near-primal urge to follow. Everything lifts. The dull hangover of nightmares about bodies ripped from houses and dragged through streets; bodies jailed in terror and left to sleep in their own excrement; bodies stripped of fingernails, expressions and will; bodies raped with rifles, sodomized with sticks, lacerated and mutilated and broken.
    Everything lifts with the twist of a wrist. Everything comes alive.

part two

    harar, ethiopia
    1970-1972

al-hijrah
    I t was a still night in November 1969, the air thick with the smell of overripe fruit and woodsmoke, when Hussein and I disembarked in Harar’s main square. We stepped out of the Mercedes in which we’d traveled from the capital and skulked away. The extravagance of having spent three days winding up and down the miles of scrub-covered mountains in the back of a chauffeured car, complete with an ashtray full of chocolates wrapped in gold foil, had somewhat sullied our arrival. Not only did it seem contradictory to the spirit of pilgrimage, it was hardly representative of the rest of our journey, an arduous overland odyssey of months spent blistered and parched and subsisting on little else than the