Burnt Eucalyptus Wood: On Origins, Language and Identity

‘Burnt Eucalyptus Wood defies easy categorisation. It is at once a love story and a battle cry, an elegy and an anthem. It is compulsive reading, bursting with tenderness while remaining uncompromising in its assessments and realisations. Take note: this astonishing book announces the arrival of a rare voice, wise beyond her years. Perhaps beyond all of ours.’

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

‘In the midst of so much pessimism, especially among young people, this book is like a crack of light in the dark. […] Compulsory reading.’

Time Out

‘The author mixes the sentimental, intimate and evocative, which she knows first-hand, with statistics and reports on the African social and economic reality, which she has in turn handled in her occupations in various international organizations in Nairobi, Brussels and Maastrich. […] The narrator evokes the scenarios, routes, places, colours and smells of her childhood, without avoiding the harshest episodes but in such a way that the pleasant feelings from the country where she lived until she was seven years old carry more weight overall.’

La Vanguardia

‘The biography of Ennatu Domingo is impressive, and hearing her speak is no less so. In this small body there are more experiences than can be imagined for a twenty-five-year-old from Barcelona.’

Ara

‘Through the pages of Burnt Eucalyptus Wood, the author makes her debut exposing in the first person the complexities of a country at war and the experiences of a girl who distanced herself from her culture and her language, Amharic, and has built her identity in another country.’

Diari de Barcelona

THE INDIGO PRESS

50 Albemarle Street

London w1s 4bd

www.theindigopress.com

The Indigo Press Publishing Limited Reg. No. 10995574

Registered Office: Wellesley House, Duke of Wellington Avenue

Royal Arsenal, London

se18 6ss

COPYRIGHT © ENNATU DOMINGO SOLER 2023

Fusta d’eucaliptus cremada © Ennatu Domingo Soler 2022

by agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency.

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by The Indigo Press

First published in Catalan in 2022 as Fusta d’eucaliptus cremada by Navona Editorial

Ennatu Domingo Soler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-91164-858-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-91164-860-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Translation of ‘Divisa’ by Maria-Mercè Marçal (Cau de Llunes, 1977) © Sam Abrams

Front cover painting by Bekelech Tamayo

Cover design by Luke Bird

Art direction by House of Thought

Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

Contents

Beside the Window

A New War in the North

The Luxury of Silence

Under the Shade of the Warka

We Never Got Home

On Dual Identity

The Turquoise Door of Gondar

Deculturalisation

The Sounds of Memory

From Nairobi to Addis Ababa

The Scent of Burnt Eucalyptus Wood

Author’s Note

Glossary

Acknowledgement s

‌

Beside the Window

We left Dansha for Wereta in a hot, jam-packed bus filled with a sharp smell of sweat. The air was dense and it was difficult to breathe. The parched road was narrow, and every time we met another vehicle it seemed as though we might come off it altogether. There were many potholes and the driver had to brake constantly to avoid them if he didn’t want the bus to overturn. I was sitting beside the window with my little brother on my lap; I was seven and he was three, but he weighed hardly anything. Mikaele had a high fever and was so weak he no longer even cried. Even had he done so, out of thirst or hunger, I had nothing to give him. We’d already finished the dabo*

and there was no water left. We weren’t carrying any luggage, just a few birr. We wore everything we had.

Through the dirty window I could see the flat landscape we were leaving behind. It was still the dry season, but we were entering the greenest, wettest, most mountainous part of Ethiopia. From time to time we would overtake a horse-drawn carriage, a group of women carrying bundles of vegetables on their heads or umbrellas, to shield themselves from the sun, walking along the side of the road. The bumps made my forehead pound against the glass.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a teacher from the school in Dansha among the bus passengers. I’d only gone to school for one day, one day in my whole life, and he probably wouldn’t recognise me, but, just in case, I covered my face with my white cotton netela and hugged Mikaele tightly to my chest. I didn’t want him to ask how my mother was. Wasn’t it clear she was very unwell? Sitting beside me, Yamrot had vomited into the aisle of the bus minutes earlier, and the people around us looked at us in disgust. She was coughing a lot and her netela was bloodstained. No one offered to help us. By then their aid wouldn’t have been much use: Yamrot’s state seemed irreversible.

The bus was going to Gondar. I knew it took two days to go from Dansha to Wereta, and Gondar was the halfway point. Perhaps we would have to spend the night at the bus stop, as we had done before, and wait for the next bus.

What I didn’t know was that this dusty road would bring me to a horizon beyond anything I could imagine.

*

The definitions of words in Amharic can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.

‌

A New War in the North

On 4 November 2020 I woke up in the early hours of the morning in a small, welcoming flat in the centre of Brussels. Outside it was still night and the streets of the city were empty and silent. The windows were misted up. I reached out from under the duvet to grab my mobile from the bedside table. I opened Twitter almost without thinking.

‘The prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, has ordered a military intervention in Tigray,’ I read, in a tweet by a local journalist that was going viral. The whole world was focused on the US election, in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump were contesting the presidency for the next four years. And Tigray, one of the ten states of the Ethiopian federation, had gone offline. Blacked out, with no access to information. I wouldn’t get back to sleep now. I knew that within a few hours that tweet would blow up on international media. My muscles tensed; I was aware that, like most people, I would be able to do nothing more than watch the number of deaths climb. The information that came trickling through drop by drop would be manipulated by both sides of the conflict in an attempt to exert control over the official narrative, causing us to lose the thread of events. And in the end there would be silence, leaving space for anxious reflection, paving the way for the next wave of violence. It was as if a bucket of water was full of holes and we lacked hands to cover them. A pattern of behaviour which had become endemic in the country, difficult to break.

The central Ethiopian government was saying that the TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) had attacked the military base in Humera, one of the best-fortified with soldiers, artillery and equipment. The reason this military base was so important was its proximity to Eritrea, which until very recently had represented the greatest threat to Ethiopian security. Even though the war with Eritrea had ended in 2001, having started in 1998, the military base was equipped in case of attacks on the border and was therefore still active. An attack on the Ethiopian military base meant an attack on Ethiopia and its unity.

But had it actually been a preventive attack by the TPLF? It had been clear for months that the central Ethiopian government wanted to remove the government of Tigray, which is where the elite that had ruled Ethiopia for three decades came from and which was resisting changes resulting from the political shift that had brought Abiy Ahmed’s administration to power. What’s more, a few days before the attack on the military base, Ethiopian soldiers had been seen approaching the Tigray border. Soon after, the federal government took back military control of Dansha, Humera and Mekelle – the capital of Tigray – but, fighting alongside Eritrean soldiers, it continued a guerrilla war against TPLF members.

At twenty-four years old, I was more than five thousand kilometres away from Ethiopia. The towns of my childhood were being bombed and I’d never felt so confused about my roots. Nor so disappointed, and naive for believing that the road to Ethiopian political stability – the key to its development – would be easy. It seemed the federal government and the government of Tigray had come to the conclusion that, to construct the democratic and prosperous Ethiopia they wanted, and that the people demanded, they had to self-destruct in a battle for political hegemony.

It was the first time I’d seen Dansha and Humera become international news. My stomach churned – a feeling I’d learned to recognise, because it forced me to redefine my identity; it pulled me back to my roots. It forced me to recover those images of the streets of Dansha and Humera which my head had erased so long ago. I’ve heard it said that only pain can reconnect you to buried memories, and I’d rationalised my pain to such an extent that an image of a woman carrying a half-asleep little boy on her back failed to move me. But this image, which had been exploited by opportunistic Western photographers, was also an image etched inside me, an echo of my past. At that moment, I felt a lump in my throat and my eyes filled with tears. My vision became blurry. I couldn’t continue reading and I switched to another article.

ሀ

In July 2003, at seven years old, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, I explained to my new parents Anna and Ricard that I’d lived in Dansha and Humera. Their Ethiopian friends Kumbi and Teddy were interpreting for us. As the orphan children of soldiers