In Between Nations: Ethiopian-Born Eritreans, Liminality, and War

[From Asmarino Staff: This is an excellent article, and we would like our readers to read it in its entirety. Here, we have posted the introductory part only. For the full article, please click here: In Between Nations: EthiopianBorn Eritreans, Liminality, and War]

In Between Nations: Ethiopian-Born Eritreans, Liminality, and War

Jennifer Riggan

Abstract

In 1998, seven years after Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia, renewed war between the two countries created rigid borders where fluid boundaries previously existed. This border making was not only an attempt to physically delineate the border between the two countries but was also a symbolic process that attempted to definitively differentiate Ethiopian from Eritrean. However, alternative nationalisms were formed in the spaces that lay in between the two nations by people who inhabited those spaces. The national identities of Eritreans born in Ethiopia, known as Amiches, ran counter to state-produced forms of nationalism in both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Amiches defined their understanding of belonging by imagining attachments to two different national spaces. In this article, I use the concept of liminality to explore the dangers that Amiches experienced when confronted with this border-making process and the sense of community that emerged from their liminal state.

Rupture, Ritual, and the Reshaping of Nationalism

In the fall of 1999, I watched as buses and trucks laden with people came pouring into the town of Assab, Eritrea, honking their horns. A police car, siren blaring, preceded them, calling people to come out of their homes, businesses, and schools to welcome the newcomers. The onlookers cheered, clapped, and waved palm fronds and branches from trees. Some of the people inside the buses smiled faintly and waved back, but most looked exhausted. The tops of the buses and the line of trucks that followed were laden with suitcases, furniture, rolls of bedding, and anything else that people had been able to gather together when they were forced out of Ethiopia. These deportees of Eritrean descent had made the grueling journey through the desert from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, across the front lines between Ethiopia and Eritrea, to Assab, the port town at the southern tip of Eritrea. The political event had the celebratory air of a parade or a festival, yet there was a marked disconnect between the dejected looks on the faces of the passengers and the elation of the onlookers.

Whenever a new batch of deportees arrived in Assab, their names were publicly posted outside the locations where they were to be housed. Assab's largest hotels, as well as some unused housing on the outskirts of town, served this need. Assab's Eritrean residents, the majority of whom had relatives in Ethiopia, made the rounds of these makeshift urban “camps” for displaced people, meticulously checking each name, looking for relatives, former neighbors, or friends.

The evening following the parade described above, I accompanied two friends, Iyasu and Hailu,1 teachers in Assab, as they searched for relatives and friends who might have arrived. Like many of Assab's residents, they were Amiches, which meant that they had grown up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and had moved to Eritrea after its independence in 1991. The mood was marked by excitement mixed with anxiety, as Iyasu, Hailu, and others crowded around a typed list of names taped to the cement wall outside the hotel.

As successive waves of deportees arrived from Ethiopia, these actions became routine. Those who found a familiar name would seek out that person and invite that person home, provide coffee, a meal, and perhaps a place to stay. This extended a politicized welcome to the newly deported. The process was repeated with each batch of deportees. Everyone knew it was likely that eventually parents, siblings, and best friends would show up. Although at one level these reunions were joyous, they also marked the severing of long-standing linkages to Ethiopia.

The two very different kinds of rituals just described—political and politicized—provide examples of the uneasy coexistence between the state's attempt to define national identities and informal processes that blurred state-produced identity categories. In many ways the parade was similar to other spectacles of Eritrean nationalism in that it attempted to incorporate everyone into an experience of total nationalism that celebrated the ability of citizens to transcend suffering (Woldemikael 2009). The official welcome parade was a state-produced political ritual of nationalism that marked deportees, a population whose relationship to the Eritrean state was tenuous, as Eritrean. However, this particular ritual also moved deportees across a threshold from Ethiopia, where their citizenship status had been ambiguous, to Eritrea, where they were expected to behave as full Eritrean citizens. In contrast, the checking of the lists of deportees was a ritual of a very different sort. This more intimate and communal ritual was an effort on the part of a population, which had always occupied the space between the two nations, to continue to maintain a hybridized sense of identity and community that was constructed out of blurred boundaries and an attachment to the two nations. This informal ritual of welcome also moved deportees across a threshold, but it did so in a manner than celebrated the hybridity of a community that had straddled the border for decades.

Amiche identities are, in many ways, a counterpoint to official state attempts to define Eritrea and Ethiopia as distinct and separate. These Eritreans, who were born and raised in Ethiopia, were liminal in the sense that they did not fit into prescribed national categories. They were both Ethiopian and Eritrean in some ways. They connected to both nations on their own terms, but by virtue of being both, they were also neither. This sense of attachment to two national spaces began before Eritrea's independence in 1991, and continued after, thus these identities reflected both the historical blurriness between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the ongoing reworking of the relationship between the two nations.

Amiches’ ability to cultivate identities that blurred the boundaries between nationalisms became increasingly difficult starting in 1998, when Eritrea and Ethiopia found themselves at war over their physical border. War created rigid borders where fluid boundaries between the nations previously existed, and solidified what had been loose systems of classification on which national belonging to each country was based. In the midst of this process, states and majority populations recalibrated how they classified and characterized Eritreans who had lived in Ethiopia.

Deportations of Eritreans from Ethiopia were one such mechanism of differentiation. Between 1998, when the border war began, and 2000, when both countries signed a cessation of hostilities agreement, approximately seventy-five thousand Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin were deported from Ethiopia (Human Rights Watch 2003).2 The war and deportations also ruptured the lives of Amiches who had resettled in Eritrea, but who maintained deep linkages to both nations. At the same time, totalizing forms of state-produced nationalism in Eritrea made it clear that the attributes of Amiche identities that many Eritreans identified as Ethiopian were unwelcome. This meant that there was pressure to change styles, tastes, language, and beliefs in order to act Eritrean, not Ethiopian.

In this article I explore the uneasy relationship between official processes that produced boundaries around identities and informal processes that blurred these boundaries. Groups who carve out identities in the in-between spaces between nations face a particular crisis when both states to which they claim belonging suddenly redefine them or particular components of their identity as a dangerous and “other.” These in-between groups produce anxieties for the legitimacy of the nation itself. Processes of fixing the categories around identities and cleansing the national body of impure elements are a response to such anxieties (Appadurai 2006). I argue that state practices of classification and cleansing fundamentally alter, but do not destroy, the ways in which in-between groups blend and blur categories of national belonging.

The focal point of this article is a group of Amiches whom I initially met in 1995 while living in the port town of Assab. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on state formation in Assab during several periods between 2000 and 2005. This article draws on that fieldwork, as well as observations made between 1995 and 1999 during visits to Assab preceding the onset of formal fieldwork. The ethnographic discussion of this group of Amiches is contextualized within discussions of broader political changes in Eritrea and Ethiopia.

I examine anxieties about national identities that resulted in state-sponsored processes of cleansing in Ethiopia and Eritrea and explore the ways in which Amiches resiliently produced alternative forms of national identification in the face of these anxieties. The article moves back and forth between ethnographic discussions of Amiches’ lives and a discussion of the political circumstances that altered the structures of belonging, against which their national identities were constituted. In the next section, I theoretically frame these ideas by applying the concepts of liminality and communitas to the complex identity politics that mark contemporary nation-states. I then explore how anxieties over defining the nation and claiming loyalties of national citizens played out in Eritrea and Ethiopia in the years leading up to the 1998 border war. Despite tensions between these two nations, Amiches developed hybrid forms of national identity based on the ways that they imagined that they were spatially linked to places located in both nations. I diagram this process in the fourth section and look in greater detail at the state policies and practices in Ethiopia and Eritrea that reclassified Amiches in order to fix their identities as Eritrean following the border war. The final section concludes by suggesting that, despite this alteration of the conditions in which Amiche identities were structured, the sense of connection and community among Amiches was resilient and allowed them to form identities that presented a covert counter-narrative of national belonging.

For the full article, please click here: In Between Nations: EthiopianBorn Eritreans, Liminality, and War]

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