The Wisdom of the Stomach

The Wisdom of the Stomach

Yosief Ghebrehiwet

[Today, I am taking a break from my circular journey to join the party down below.]

Here is an ingenious way Eritreans and Ethiopians can eat their cake and have it too – literally:

There were these heavenly testing cakes served on silver platter in a “regional party”. Both Eritreans and Ethiopians were invited to this "All the cakes you can eat" party. But there was one serious problem: the “cookie cutters” that cut the cakes into “serving portions” did it in various shapes that look like the maps of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Amhara, Tigray, Somali, Afar, etc. Of course, it was all done in the spirit of regional brotherhood … But given such a visual and tactile pressure on the guests to ignore the non-patriotic callings of their stomach, you can easily imagine how wrong the party went, with many guests stoically refusing to eat some cakes or taking malicious bites of particular shaped cakes for various “nationalistic” reasons.

A proud Amhara nationalist shouted “Ashaferegn!” and ferociously put his teeth only into the Ethiopian and Amhara shaped cakes. Occasionally, he was also seen to take sizable portions from what he believed was an Amhara portion of Tigray, leaving the rest half eaten cakes discarded on the tray … which of course annoyed the hostess, who admonished him, “Who is going to eat your leftover?” With the relish he kept gobbling the Humera part, you could bet your life he is from Gondar!

A patriotic Eritrean from Kebessa could hardly contain herself when she saw her favorite shape, which she already possessed in various forms, hanging from her necklace, on her wall, in her car … She kept devouring so many of those cakes before the host took a firm stand and stopped her, despite the “All you can eat!” sign posted on the wall. Wait a moment ….I am not so sure …I am getting mixed up here … it could have been the Afar sitting next to her, who had been wincing every time the Kebessa girl kept crunching the tail end of Eritrea with so much gusto, and could finally take it no more and stopped her with a punch on the nose.

But the shape that attracted the most attention was the one that looked like a strange fat animal – with some imagination put to it, a fat duckling – with a head, two ears, a beak wide open … a trimmed tail or is it tails … and marching with one leg up, another down …Well, you guessed it:Yedebub Hizbotch! An Oromo who had been looking at it with hostility was believed to have mischievously said, “Look at how unnatural it looks for a nationality!” and kept eating its head off as if to halt it from further marching northward, before it succeeded in its evil intention of dissecting the Oromo Nation into two – God forbid!.



But the Tigrean beside him was looking at the Yedebub Hizbotch cake with quite another emotion: envy. As a man who was always concerned about the small size of Tigray, he was saying to himself, “Come to think of it, why can’t we have Yesemien Hizbotch with the Agew, Afar and Tigray together”, as he absent-mindedly kept juxtaposing these three cakes on the table. Only after the hostess admonished him, “Do not play with the cakes! Eat them or put them back. You are no more a child”, did he wake up from his daydreaming.

As in every party of this magnitude, there was also this odd character that no one could figure out. Even though he seemed to have just woken up from a Rip Van Winkle kind of stupor, he managed to eat 13 cakes out of every kind as he kept circling the table. And what frightened the onlookers was that he kept stomping his foot every time he ate a cake, as if he was ASSERTING something mysterious. Now and then, he was also heard uttering "Viva ... !" which gave him away his Eritrean identity. An Ethiopian from the old school, who was still counting in “provinces” than “kilil”, interpreted the odd man’s assertions this way, ‘He is devouring the 13 provinces of Ethiopia, leaving his Eritrea intact!” Nobody else though attributed this to our fellow Eritrean. But no matter how they interpreted his actions, all seemed to have taken the same necessary precaution: given the spooky connotation that Americans associate with the number 13 (Did I mention that the party was in America?), they all kept a safe distance from him.

Oh, there were many others: there was the Mahel Ager man who wanted to eat his way to the Red Sea … there was the one who kept eating all the non-habesha part, as he kept murmuring to himself, “This is how they should be isolated, these troublemakers; I will eat the 80 percent of it only!” … and then there was this guy from Mogadisho who kept putting Greater Somalia together and asking anybody who would listen “how natural it looks” … and so many others …

And what added complexity to an already complex problem is that these cakes come in various colors.  Given the eye’s natural disposition to a multi-colored world, you would expect no problem arising from the guests given the tricolored nature of both flags. If you do, you must be a fool: you must have no inkling at all what colors do to nationalists! Even testosterone-crazed teenagers would not act that way if they see the opposite sex stark naked. But there was one who didn’t share the euphoria that the tricolored cakes elicited among the guests. He happened to be a die-hard Jebha complaining bitterly that unless the Eritrean-shaped cake came in blue, and only in blue, he would never eat it. The poor hostess had to quickly improvise and spill some blue ink on it. Ink or no ink, our guy happily devoured all the blue colored cakes.

Nobody should blame the host and hostess if they were totally put off by what went on in their party; they never expected all that childish behavior from grownups. But don’t worry, they are not the kind of people that easily give up. They had already come up with an ingenious plan for their next party. If you have ever heard of a blinded-folded party, it was actually them who invented it. In this party, the guests were blindfolded before they were served their portions. And as part of that ingenious plan, forks were handed to them, so that there was no way for the mischievous ones to know the shapes of the cakes by touching them. Having spared their guests from the tyranny of sight and touch, patriotism and nationalism found no way of making their way to their plates – and, of course, they were banned all the way to their stomachs. Harmony and peace reigned in the party room, and everyone was calling every one else “brother” and “sister”.

The Habesha have a peculiar way of locating “wisdom” in the human anatomy: in “Libi/Lib” (the heart) and not in the head, as the Western world does. I think they were moving in the right direction, but prematurely stopped at the heart. My suggestion is for them to move one step lower to locate it at “kebdi/hod” (the stomach). The wisdom of the stomach is that it gives a hoot to what the eye, with all its nasty map-reading habit, or the hand, with its slimy groping habit, can do to discriminate one portion from the other, so far as the cake tastes good. Let's say no to the "cookie cutter" mentality that defies the all-encompassing logic of the stomach!

The Europeans have reached the wisdom of the stomach long ago when they created EU. Ever since, the eye and the hand have found better things to do than locating and shooting at their enemy: counting money! I hope there will soon be a day our region will be cured of its nasty map-reading habit, and it too embraces the wisdom of the stomach.

Well, to hell with the cake that demands a sole eater. After all, isn’t it we the Habesha that have perfected the art of eating together? If so, it should come easier to us than the individualistic Europeans to sit in one meadi, not to forget the famous gurisha/kulaso that comes with it? I can hardly wait to see that day! Of course, a blue tsebhi/we't has yet to be invented, but then again with all the technology out there ….



And now, let me end my article with a 14th assertion, and am warning my readers that this is the Mother of all Assertions: I assert (foot-stomping) that it is highly laudable that the Awate Team have finally asserted (foot-stomping) that they are joining guys like me in the asserting (foot-stomping) that the Earth should be saved: in their newly discovered environmental consciousness (belated, but nevertheless welcome), they have asserted (foot-stomping) that they have decided to recycle old material (something that I have been doing for a long time – hey, give me credit, I was an environmentalist long before them)! I know that some nationalists will be up in arms, shouting, “Shouldn’t we first save Eritrea before we try to save the Earth?” But on this controversy, I will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Awatistas!

Yosief Ghebrehiwet
12/08/2012

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