The War on Tigray: Reflections From An Ethiopian Adoptee

Crossing the dry Tekeze river on foot, near the border of Gondar and Wollo in 2016.

As the 72-hour deadline to attack Mekelle looms, I am febrile and my heart is heavy.

As the story goes, my mother was a pregnant, internally displaced person in Northern Ethiopia. She was escaping famine when she arrived at a food camp near Gondar and gave birth to me. At the time, food shipments were being blocked from reaching the camp.

And here we are in 2020, history is repeating itself. Food and humanitarian assistance is once again being blocked.

Thousands and thousands of Tigrayans are fleeing their homes and their land, on foot, with no food, no water and few possessions, if any. Many of them are reported to be unaccompanied children.

Seeing photos of the landscape and their journey reminds me of my story. Their terror, trauma, desperation and loss haunts me deeply. It feels familiar to me, reminding me of my own story, of my mother, my family members and their communities. I wonder if they survived or not and what they had to endure. I wonder about their courage and their strength to push through.

Over 80% of Tigrayans are subsistence farmers, trying to survive. If they voted, they voted for whoever promised them the most, the same way Americans voted for Trump and Canadians for Trudeau.

While wars are waged by political elites, it’s always the most vulnerable who pay the full price. War not only kills and harms people in unimaginable ways; it permanently scars their psyches, affecting their descendants, even when they’ve been separated. The War and Famine of 1984-85 permanently separated me from my family; I lost my mother and my mother lost a child. I have no verifiable information about my mother or father. I only have my DNA.

As Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste eloquently said recently, “History is something that never leaves us, we drag it forward with us…nothing is past.”

As an outsider to the many cultures and languages of Ethiopia but Ethiopian nonetheless, I believe the war on Tigray urges us to reckon with ourselves, our past, our family histories of dominance and oppression, our grievances and especially, with what it means to be Ethiopian with a critical lens.

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