Sunday. Post-lunch. The atmosphere was pure, low-grade tension. Write or stroll. That was the whole setup. The writing urge was bugging me; the whole day an illusion of worry-free labor. Mid. They said some Englishman split a human hair thirteen times—a world record—but splitting hairs was already the ultimate metaphor for caviling distinctions. Machiavelli got that rap first.

Back then, they verbed everything. Now, we just vibe. I pushed down my beard, the mood barometer, then instantly pushed it up, the Derg-era official’s signal. Pure tension. My mind was tense. Immediately, Ayele Mammo and his mando came to mind. That little trouble. How tense must its strings be for those terrible majors and minors? It brought back Bizunesh and Mahmud. That little monster shoved their voices. A digging, taking-far vibe. We bought a mando once, tried to fiddle; it was in vain. Selling it was also in vain. The shop owner was sus. A painter bought it as an objet d’art. I’d been all for the saxophone as a kid. The answer’s here. That little trouble brought back a decade-old note.

Every Thursday, after school, we awaited the majestic, whirling percussion of the ground forces’ marsh band drawing closer to Mexico Square. Water from the fountain sprinkled us. Nothing else was so lively engaging. The unannounced live band stage performances, mainly from the municipality, complemented by the police and ground forces, in the very early years of the revolution—a kind of out-of-town vibe at Meskel then Abyot square—at least once a month. Spinning around the marching column, joining the vortex of ululating company, mostly kids, we’d be falling, rolling, standing up like nothing happened. Angry men like cats chasing us away. We hysterically tried to identify the scintillating gizmos—silver or gold? A kind of cloud nine. Clarinet, flute, trumpets, alto and tenor Saxes, French Horn, Tuba, the sliding majorettes of the trombones, the mightiness of the sousaphones, the drum majors’ batons. Our fanfare wrapped up at the Ministry of Defense, national flag lowering, ear-splitting anthem, Great Spirit of togetherness. That childhood public function is unthinkable now. It hits different now.

Negadras Tessema Eshete’s disk was the only one in town for decades. The first massive problem of music performance on stage in Ethiopia was convincing the audience it was a show. It ended up almost the standard. Hager Fikir and Eyoel Yohannes set the standard for local instrument orchestration. Beshah W/Mariam is worth mentioning. Aselefech Ashine’s tear-jerking lamentation why they never understood Eyoel’s essence, the what ifs. The echo of Narcis’ immortal pieces at the National Theatre brings tears. Mind you, the Police Symphony Orchestra was chased from the stage by the audience those days. Telela. I can’t non-think of my childhood without her. It must be the violin for her—Minilik and Melkamu included—as my fear for Muluken is Drums, noted from his irreplaceable early music, even the under- or utilized recent voice marvel Haileyesus Girma failed to copy. Minilik left the National Theatre—a landslide felt.

In an interview before his death, he never regretted leaving the National Orchestra, but the news of overseas vocalists and their lifestyle interfered in what he called his unwise decision. It boils him with rage (yangebegibegnal). Tilahun’s sax-shoved voice behind the Imperial Guard orchestration, a bit out of beat or their utter sightlessness for improvisation; a strong opinion on the same from Muluken caused a massive dust. Kuku Sebsebe told me about Ashenafi Kebede’s reading of her voice—how it makes or breaks vocalists. Just like Major Girma Hadgu’s vibing out the great hit Endet Yiresal after checking the do re mi fa so illiterate Mahmud. Abubeker Asheke’s unique flavor. The appearance of the new always hits every preceding band. Mulatu Astatke’s marvel. Their response yesterday determined their future.

It’s about going to the instrument, making it enviously possessive, not the keyboard bringing its imitation to you. I talked to Johnny, guitarist of National Theatre Orchestra B. Girma Chibssa and Ali Birra couldn’t believe my wailing lamentation for Ibex: Fekade’s and Johnny Mitiku’s smokey sax, Jovani’s Base, Tesfaye’s Drum, Selam’s lead, Dereje’s keys. No wonder Selam, a college contemporary, never excused the man he thought was the cause of the disbandment of that color, that said adieu with reminiscence what was going on with Mahmud’s “Mela Mela.” Hailu Mergia’s raw organ fiddle, Yohannes’s Trumpet, Temare’s drum from Walias, with awkward “Huket” on a guitar—era-defining pieces despite arguments over music making. I had a chance to sit and talk with Bahiru Kegne, taught a sea of impromptu in situ creations with a voice shoved by the single-string Mesenko. The receipt for the money I paid to study Mesenko, which never happened, is kept as a relic. No wonder the inability of Roha Band to tame Tewdros Tadesse’s fame, or the fusion leading to fission, band members seeing eye to eye in the comfort of working at the Hilton, giving in to the Ketefa ghost bands that brought music making to ghost studios. Stage performance became a distant memory, making studio concoctions stars with names. Who doubts the star is AI from now on?

As I was to wrap up, two girls came to my mind. Asnakech Werku and… An insignia out of the ordinary, distant in catapulting one with recollection with riveting depth, a once-in-years-to-appear treasure, spot-on expansive illustration of the land’s beauty quintessence all the way through stunning melody. Merry Armede. Asked in a monthly Menen interview whether she loved someone with the same fiery breath her songs stir up sensual passion. She said firmly: of course, once, with a boy from the same neighborhood. True love never runs smooth. He changed his inkling. She did all she could, but in vain, turning the towering go-in-off-the-deep-end passion to rage. Inky dinky Merry sent a threatening message: if she couldn’t bring him back, she would beat the living daylights out of him with a knife. He changed his mind not, yet his address. Was it only hugging, snuggling, kissing, petting? What turned her to pornocracy alias pornography or X-rated blues in her songs? Ambrose Philips authored the illustrious palindrome “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.” Mae West claimed: “I do all my best work in bed.”

Then, a twist to football. Ethiopian football saw few talents like Bitew Abre from Dire Dawa and Mathias Hailemariam. What could have turned out if their talent was supplemented with Nigussie Gebre’s dedication. Just a whiff of politics. Emperor Haileselassie never tolerated the scent of “party politics” as it was to grow from differences in opinions on issues among Mekonen Endalkachew, Mekonen Habtewold and Tsehafe Tiezaz Woldeghiorgis. The tension in a word school came to me, the first day they took me. The older sense of the déjà vu kicks in: exactly as I knew where I was heading, I was chased. Like the Habesha chicken for a slaughter. Vis a vis the tension at Kes Timhirt Bet, mind you, I was an unimpeachable prince in my Cartier, a heart of interest with a gratis pass. Why was my splendor coming to its ending? Napoleon’s instantaneous from the sublime to the ridiculous. A day might have started and finished with breakfast, or playing with a ball. Or else a hand-in-a-shorts-pocket, toffee-nosed turnout at a band’s dummy run at Sombrero. Que buena! Just candela or loco. Possibly Birhan Tea Room. Solomon Burke’s Cry me kind of blues. Or trumping for the spirit via jazz time by Getachew Mekuria’s house, our neighbor, witnessing an insignia of out of the ordinary. Or a bit of tra-comedy theatrics at the Bono Wuha water kiosk with its snake-like queues. The insera-carrying girls’ hullabaloos laced up with bitter fights. Tugs of the day’s belligerent life’s initiation bravado. As identifying English alphabets grew to “show me this or that” without textbooks. Grade three brought the first English textbook. A fight broke out between me and Awolken. After being chased for days, we were allowed to return, but ordered to sit right on the front row classroom floor. Awolken reported the instruction to his family; they changed his school. I sat there for a while.

Whenever I think of days, Teacher Gebre comes to mind. Grade one. He used to struggle writing days from the Gregorian calendar. Weeks don’t bring the brazen literary output of Didymus of Alexandria, nicknamed Chalkenteros (Brazen Guts). He wrote 3,500 to 4,000 books—about three a week. Yet only fragments survive. Lope de Vega with his 1,500 plays doesn’t come close. Yet, on our English text book an image of an emaciated boy was denoted as “Week” and thanks the hustle followed from my fight in the class room, right to grade six Weak was Week. How our reading started with “Cholewa wuro” to “yemiakatil Fikir.” The running on the stairs me and Tibebe a friend, to get our hand on the most sought after books at Womezeker. Abe Gubegna’s provocatively titled books, his exiles stories. 3A. It was the year songs involving surly but slowly carried HIM’s names started to be frowned upon. “Tetamaj Arbegna,” “HIM Hawarya,” “Haile Mariam Mammo.” This is how singing left from school.

I hadn’t gone fifty meters before that old, awful feeling, the déjà vu as a bad spell, started to nag me. Reversing direction back home, I was crossing a carrefour (love that French, non-negotiable term for “crossroads”) when I spotted a distant neighbor. My non-committal wave to stop the first vehicle fumed him. He reacted angrily, mistaking my finger-point. Changing direction, I returned, crossed the street, and headed for the big avenue. A kid in an over-decorated yebole bajaj miraculously failed to hit me. A total casus belli. A public bus approached the manicured transport pocket, an eyesore, the swimming of the double-deckers individual medley looking a vulgar prank. Why is it so hard to extend the state-of-the-art camera system to central control to stop the over-speeding, over-honking, and a broadlight prank on old folks like me? As I was looking for the right word, the phrase hither, thither, and yon emerged. No way I can escape it now: the third L of my college L that spilled over to my working life.

This whole mélange of reminiscence coincided with the newly revised skedule (shoutout to that non-American English origin). I had to doodle something for this page on the Ethiopian Reporter. I was thinking about returning to my Romances, this time last year, sifting one from the other. It was like goading cats. A return to my Romances—four different ones, started with one almost four decades ago. One dominates at a time. I added a German entanglement a decade and a half ago, as the temptation to a Russian return was also firm, though warned by a friend of its intricacy. Then a Chinese one was added, a defining moment. It started with a completely non-threatening question: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” But the moment you move past, you hit the wall: “Impossible n’est pas Français.” This phrase is the linguistic promise that everything is possible, which makes the struggle feel impossibly hard. Maximum stress unlocked, but make it chic. Just a “petite madeleine trempée dans du thé” could become the entire foundation for Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Édith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien” is the final, non-negotiable proof that French is the ultimate psychological tool. It’s the perfect, non-contradictory Alibi Ake for a whole life of poor choices. The duel in Corneille’s Le Cid is cleanly brutal: Rodrigue must defend his father’s honor. The whole French affair is not not a love story; it’s a structural engineer’s blueprint for the rest of my linguistic chaos.

The Italian affair started with an entirely non-academic, orexic obsession: the non-simple mechanics of pronouncing “Maceroni.” This wasn’t non-a casual fling; this was a deep, verisimilar dive into a culture where the non-flaws are considered features. Dante literally helped build up a nation by standardizing the language. My struggle is reconciling that nation-building purpose with the simple, low-stakes joy of getting tenor with Pavarotti and Bocelli. That non-stop wow of the music is the background track. I am trying to figure out if my life, structurally, is worthy of being set to an Italian tenor. And the moment I can conjugate perfectly, the music stops. The Español entanglement truly embodies the whole “life is a dynamic skill-set” vibe. My entry point wasn’t not grammar; it was like having a direct, non-linear conversation with Cervantes and Don Quixote. The music is the anxiolytic. Celia Cruz’s “La vida es un carnaval” is the ultimate Alibi Ake for all the cognitive dissonance. “Es de Lope” (It is Lope’s) was the expression for playwright Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio’s perfect, elegant, earthy style. The one Spanish word I will never non-master is “mañana.” This final linguistic love affair is the most riddle-wrapped part. It hit me with a deep, pervasive feeling that only has one word: saudade. A sad, deep longing for something that is absent. It’s singing Fado with Amália. The intellectual peripeteia of Pessoa is the ultimate Latin word attached to dissonance made literary. He created multiple literary personalities—heteronyms. I am trying to acquire the perfect grammatical structure to contain my own internal Pessoa, lest I, too, non-fail to multiply and fall silent. It is like hitting the non-negotiable pressure point: trying to fit Pessoa’s thirty-seven heteronyms into a single LinkedIn profile—it’s not not going to work.

No wonder it reminded me of the day an advocate told me a court issue that involves me, that reminded me of Meera Kaushik and her course on Communication, her mention of dissonance attached to a certain Latin word with the example of a person who bought a baby FIAT. A cool defense mechanism, an alibi for some of my own Ls. The issue being presented to court: “huuket yiwegedeligne“—as I hunted through the dictionary, the closest word I found was “dissonance.” I dug deep even changing dictionaries, it brought nothing other than my stupidity never ever to refer a dictionary for the word’s meaning, ages ago. This whole chaotic Sunday reminded me of my college friend, Girma. We were close, but he never agreed to my being willy-nilly to synthetic-sounding courses, Emmanuel Kant and all that. I used to lament why neither of us, good singers, hadn’t gone to Theatre Arts. His affection for Behailu Eshete’s songs was immense; we used to jam them. Girma was the epitome of Behailu’s themes: friendly, straight, a team captain—no backbites. The funny thing is, I established my name in the enterprises I’ve been in after being immersed in the synthetics and coming out through the mill of detailed numbers. I paid him a visit in his office early in the Internet era. That encounter completely transformed me. Then I started to complain about my non-synthetic courses in my sophomore year, wishing they had been extended. Mind you, I’m complaining about a topic taught by the woman I cannot imagine my college stay without, Meera Kaushik. I wished she had talked about cognitive consonance to make things clearer. Another subject I was completely unready for was Psychology, a lecture hall course that felt like high school talks about Lobsang Rampa. This journey, from Rampa to the Wiki Leaks leak made through the American Embassy here in Addis, on Meles Zenawi, is the key. It’s the journey through the Briggs nonsense. That mother-daughter team, Briggs and Myers, their MBTI was supposed to be Jung for the masses, yet experts struggle to validate its success; it’s the ultimate curate’s egg of testing. I feel the MBTI is synonymous with a haughty CEO at my former company, a self-proclaimed in public to be on Abraham Maslow’s top echelon. That labeling of live human beings annihilates individuality. Flattening human behavior into a static, predetermined set of traits needs to be a thing of the past. It’s not giving corporate flop it is the at most pornographic thing one can imagine. The non-properly envisaged and led discussion circles we had in the early years of the revolution that required us, mind you, non-synthetic topics on our own… it was a kind of addiction. As to Kant, from all what I took in college, no mention from the second year onwards.

The ultimate dissonance—the noise that stops the rataplan—is the realization that the pursuit of the Alibi Ake is the flaw. I’m standing here, obsessing over whether the angry neighbor who looked exactly like a much older Girma, and whose pacing was non-different from the endless, non-stop motion of the world’s most powerful man, was mad at me or the synthetic nature of the road. I am trying to cut the Gordian knot of my self-doubt with the sword of academic jargon. But the moment the dissonance becomes clear, it’s too late. The chaos of the day—the Bole Bajaj, the bus, the contretemps—was all leading to the fact that my own self, the man who hated the synthetics, the epitome of the straight-talking team captain, appeared only after I decided my entire career was defined by detailed numbers and synthetics. The ghost of my friend, the synthetic team captain, didn’t just appear; he confirmed my core fear: My life’s achievement is built on the cognitive dissonance of succeeding in the exact thing I was warned against. And the angry look? That wasn’t my old friend’s judgment. That was the face of the self I gaslighted twenty years ago, reflected back at the moment I tried to justify the whole flop with a simple walk. The door stays closed because I am the door. That’s the tea.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye