(literally “Sauce/Broth,” 2014), injera becomes a utensil for both identifying and determining destiny. Retta, who says that “even if eating injera may seem easy, it requires talent and healthy fingers to twist as needed” (2009, 232), makes eating injera a custom‐based artistic activity. In Yiwesdal Menged (2011), gursha (the activity of feeding injera to one another to show love and respect by tearing pieces of it using one’s hand and rolling the stew inside) will be transformed into a sculpture. The “sculptor” tries to create a gursha statue using different shaping techniques – carving, welding, assembling, etc. – governed by aesthetic principles such as proportion, scale, and balance. Injera is eaten with bare hands without the need for using silverware; the interaction between one’s fingers and injera becomes a musical expression (175–176). Finally, Retta, after studying the nature of injera, invented his own style called “hitsinawinet.” Hitsinawinet defies conventional disciplinary boundaries, established narrative principles, and traditional genre distinctions. It breaks centrality, binary thoughts, and hierarchy.6 Retta’s epic 940‐page monumental novel YeSinibit Qelemat (The Colors of Adios, 2016) was the fruit of all his previous works. It introduced him to the public and made an impact. This novel is highly innovative and experimental and at the same time recognizably “Ethiopian.”
YeSinibit, basing its narrative in Nefas Silk – one of the oldest places in Addis Ababa – manifests the multitudinous relationships between the surviving 1960s and 1970s revolutionary generation and the one that followed. I believe the novel is primarily a “national project” that envisions the resurgence of pan‐Ethiopianism. The three reciprocated plot lines in the novel tend to suggest that its main purpose is the revelation of this vision. The strongest signal for the resurgence is the Menkobia–Mittk–Makuta line. Menkobia, the son of kings, is a semi‐superhuman being who has lived for more than 5,500 years in Ethiopia. Though Menkobia spent his years looking at prominent women like Makeda (Queen of Sheba) in their beautiful palace gardens, he has fallen for Mittk, a young, destitute street vendor. Menkobia sleeps with the virgin Mittk in her dreams at her house, describing it as “slaves in the old days used to have a better shelter” (2016, 615). Their son, Makuta, is the unique creation of this mysterious intercourse. Retta’s attempt, therefore, is to present the resurrection of the nation through the new “national” myth that was built on the old and new values. The resurrection is completed by replacing the grand narrative of Solomon–Sheba–Menelik, which has long been challenged for its sectarian nature, with the Menkobia–Mittk–Makuta story.
In this context, I would like to introduce Ethiopia’s poet laureate, Tsegaye Gebre‐Medhin (1936–2006), to further elaborate Retta’s discussion. Although Gebre‐Medhin and Retta have differences in age, choice of genre, and ideology, their closeness in the self‐conscious invention of national myth makes it potentially easy to make a comparison. Their literary depiction of nationalism is profoundly oriented to mythic consciousness – a consciousness which is, in Ricoeur’s terms, “not just nostalgia for some forgotten world” but rather “a disclosure of new and unprecedented worlds, an opening on to other possible worlds” (Ricoeur and Kearney 1978, 117–118). Both authors recreated the old fabrics with a new design and essence to realize their vision of reinvigorating a new nation. They executed this in two ways: by creating a “modern” mythic framework and by domesticating the “foreign” myths using folk concepts and indigenous poetics. As a result, they produced two ontological benefits for their arts – creating time‐depth and producing coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). The coincidence of opposites is the unity of contradictory entities, for example, the infinite and finite, conscious and unconscious, divinity and humanity, eternity and temporality, virginity and maternity. This coincidence, however, is not unexpected or arbitrary; it is intentionally designed.
Gebre‐Medhin’s mythopoeia works with magnificently established national symbols such as majestic rivers like Abbay (the Blue Nile’s home name), charismatic emperors similar to Tewodros and Menelik, and the historical battlefields of Adwa and Mekdela. In addition, he is known for using these battlefields and heroes to inbreed other themes. The existence of a common enemy is one of the major themes formed through this process. For instance, in his collection of historical plays, Tarikawi Tewinetoch, published in 2011, this was a strong motif that tied all the five plays together. A common enemy, like the rivers that cross the country, is a nation‐building mechanism and powerful bonding factor that transcends sectarianism in the heterogeneous Ethiopia. Retta transforms Gebre‐Medhin’s elitism into “history from below.” Unlike Gebre‐Medhin, Retta’s national imaginary encompasses common entities – a beggar who is named the unborn messiah, a bartender who had a vision about him, and an impoverished tomboy who gave birth to him. Retta transforms ordinary entities that are neglected and ridiculed into national characters after enriching and enlightening them. For instance, in YeSinibit, Retta elevated Sinzro – the central trickster in Amharic folktales – to a primordial archetype entity by cleaning his wily persona and giving him another substitute name, “Menkobia.” Sinzr in Amharic, the modern Ethiopian lingua franca, indicates the span of a hand while menkob in Geʿez, the ancient Ethiopian language, means “thumb.” Both terms denote dwarfism. Thus, the transition from “Sinzro” to “Menkobia” is not a matter of code switching; it is a meaningful transformation of entities. In YeSinibit, Mittk is also an outcome of similar augmentation. If we start from the Amharic word mittk, it means “substitute.” The question is, whose substitute is she? Mittk is the substitute for her brother Tesfaye (meaning “my hope”), one of the teenagers who were brutally massacred during the Red Terror. Mittk wears a scarf with a green, yellow, and red frame; she is the woman who feeds a stray dog from her own poorly packed lunch. The virgin who gives birth, appears in dreams and visions with milk and flames, the moon and the sun, is the replica of the Holy Virgin. Mittk’s gynaecologist, Dr. Yoseph, has a helper role like his archetype, Saint Joseph. Moreover, she is the substitute for the Queen of Sheba. In the novel, Mittk is represented as a woman of contradictions – her childhood friends call her “Kebe,” a man’s name, and she possesses both femininity and masculinity with harmony. She also serves as an embodiment of motherhood with virginity, and dream with reality. Considering Mittk’s indeterminate, ambiguous, heterodox state of being, her relationship with Menkobia, who claims to “come from the start of time and the first country” (501), seems to be a unification of primordiality with postmodernity.
The nationality and religion of the new romance with a foundation on the Menkobia–Mittk–Makuta tradition is “Pan‐Ethiopianism.” In YeSinibit the old Ethiopian national characters will enjoy new identity through rebirth. For example, the Ethiopian composer and choreographer Saint Yared (505–571 CE) has become Menkobia’s student with a new secular identity. All these efforts have come along to build a new national identity and nation formation. Makuta’s mysterious birth substantiates this conclusion. Makuta was born and raised in “Beza Clinic” – a place that serves as both house and clinic. Beza in Geʿez is a theological term that has a similar meaning to “redemption” and “salvation.” The first redemption is the interconnectedness of man with place and nature; the reinstitution of genius loci. Because this chapter of the novel is written in Geʿez and old Amharic, it deepens with time, taking us on a journey to the country’s ancient culture and history. Thus, the second redemption is the reunion of the people with their history and culture. Makuta in Geʿez means “hope, anchor, promise,” making the son of Menkobia and Mittk a symbol of the national imaginary.
This kind of image, a vision of spatio‐temporal wholeness, will serve as a fertile ground to rebuild national identity and a platform to imagine the nation as a political ideology and, indeed, a socio‐cultural expression. In order to achieve this, as Benedict Anderson superbly noted, there is a need to have “deep time.” “If nation‐states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny” (1983, 12).
