I asked my son this morning what topic I should pick for my daily post. He first suggested China. But when I told him I had nothing to say about that country, and that I should write only about what I know, he switched to Russia (where my father had been an Ethiopian diplomat in the 70’s), and then added Ethiopia. That made more sense. Still, what about Ethiopa (or Russia) would I write about? As I explore the nature of the/my writing process, questions about the relationship between formulated and unformulated thoughts, questions about the nature of thinking itself, and questions about writing as thinking and/or acting come up. I will stick closely to the principle of writing only about what I know (these questions are very familiar to me). But other than that, how far should my mind be ahead of my fingertips in spinning the yarn that forms the fabric on the page? It’s anybody’s guess, I suppose, but I may be veering too much towards the abstract (as my wife would readily agree) at the expense of the concrete (Ethiopia).
So, I will train my inner eye to memories I still retain about childhood in that country. More times than not, my mind zeroes in on the small compound that surrounded our second house in Addis Abeba. The house was a solid brick structure my father built using some money my mother got after the sale of some land she had inherited from her father. I don’t remember how the decision was made, but the second house was build on land that was part of the first house whose sprawling rooms were built with mud wattle. The new house was smaller and more efficient. There were two bedrooms in the main house for my parents and for me and my younger sisters. There was also a separate structure in the back with several rooms one of which was for my two older sisters. We were more cramped than we had been in the first house, liked it because it was new and made of brick and mortar. The other house was rented out and the money supplemented my father’s meager salary.
In the small compound of the second house, I had much less space for play. There was no room for bike that I road around in what was previously a spacious yard. But I had outgrown it anyway. Instead, I created new games for myself such as training my dog to jump over obstacles, or devising traps to catch birds, or shooting at targets with my slingshot. The confinement forced me to be creative. And sometimes the creativity got out of hand.
