Haben Read online

  I slip into a chair, fold my arms on the table, and rest my head. The visit with Mr. Smith wiped me out. Apparently, assuming teachers will always give me the information I need leads to failure. If I want to succeed, I’ll have to work to gain access to every visual detail and every spoken word. Every single time.

  Three hours later I’m back in Mr. Smith’s history class. Sitting at my desk, my fingers fly across the braille book in front of me. Every line, every word, every letter touches my fingertips and instantly enters my mind. No strain. No pain. The physicality makes reading a whole-body experience.

  Part of me knows I’m missing a student reading, and the sound of thirty kids fidgeting in their seats. Thirty faces peering into identical books. Perhaps a few even sneak glances at one another. I know millions of sights and sounds are playing out on the streets of Oakland at this very moment. The sensoryscape continues around the world—the reddish brown of Redwood bark. The radiant glow of Big Ben at night. The majestic roar of Victoria Falls. The swell of voices in Singapore’s streets. Tastes and smells and textures, too. The world’s a steaming sensory stew.

  I like my Deafblind world. It’s comfortable, familiar. It doesn’t feel small or limited. It’s all I’ve known; it’s my normal.

  Ring! The school bells mark the end of the class. The room bursts into a cacophony of kids scraping chairs, shoving papers into bags, and shouting plans across the room.

  Putting my book in my backpack, I get ready to leave. Wait, is there homework? I didn’t hear any homework, so there’s no homework tonight, right? If I didn’t hear it, then it didn’t happen. If I didn’t see it, then it didn’t matter. Right?

  My back tenses. When I told Ms. Scott I would ask another student for the homework, I failed to consider how that feels. I don’t have friends here. I don’t feel wanted; I just feel tolerated. Asking someone to tell me the homework will just confirm their low expectations.

  Pushing past my dread, I plan to do it anyway. A student sits right behind me, so I turn around in my seat. She’s standing up and preparing to leave. The noise makes it impossible for me to hear her, so I keep it short. “Bye.”

  The students leave. The room quiets. I slide out of my seat. Part of me knows I should walk over to the teacher and ask if he assigned any homework. Another part of me wants to escape before he assigns me homework. I don’t want homework, but I don’t want to fall further behind on assignments.

  As I approach his desk, I scan the room for a tall figure. Nothing. I stop by his desk. Nothing. Every cell in my body tells me to run. I force myself to use my voice, “Hello?” Nothing.

  My knees feel weak. I consider putting my backpack down since I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait. When I told Ms. Scott I would ask for the homework, I failed to consider the emotional drain of trying to find someone when you can’t see or hear them.

  A tall figure strides over from the other side of the room. “Are you here for the homework?”

  “Yes. Is there an assignment today?”

  “Read chapter eighteen and answer questions one through four.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” I exit with my shoulders slumped, weighed down by my heavy backpack.

  It’s a sighted, hearing classroom, in a sighted, hearing school, in a sighted, hearing society. They designed this environment for people who can see and hear. In this environment, I’m disabled. They place the burden on me to step out of my world and reach into theirs.

  Chapter Three

  War

  Asmara, Eritrea. Summer 2001.

  The smell of home-brewed coffee fills the living room of my grandmother’s house in Asmara, Eritrea. The smoke of the roasting coffee beans swirls through the living room and slips out the open windows. After roasting the beans in a pan, Grandma Awiye boils the brew in a jebena, a traditional Eritrean coffeepot. The ceramic vessel has a spherical base, long neck, and a short handle to grasp while pouring the potent liquid.

  The room buzzes with the happy chatter of coffee time. I’m twelve years old, sitting on the sofa with my parents. My father’s name is Girma. It’s also my surname. Eritreans and Ethiopians traditionally use the father’s first name for the child’s last name. Girma means “charisma” and is pronounced Ghir-mī (“my”) in Tigrinya, the language of Eritrea, and Ghir-ma in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia. We pronounce it both ways. My mother’s name is Saba. She’s named after the queen of Sheba, the revered ruler who journeyed to ancient Jerusalem on a quest for knowledge. Legend has it that all Eritreans and Ethiopians descend from King Solomon and the queen of Sheba. People tell me Saba looks like a queen.

  The room bursts into uproarious laughter. The sofa cushions shake from my parents’ amusement. The conversation continues, animated voices bouncing from person to person around me.

  Seven other family members sit around the room. TT, my nine-year-old sister, assists Grandma Awiye with the coffee. My aunts Roma, Selam, Senait, Hiwet, and Elsa keep the conversations going. Grandma Awiye, Aunt Hiwet, and Uncle Teme live in this house year-round. Elsa now lives in the Netherlands, and the rest of us live in the United States. We try to have family reunions in Asmara every three years.

  An aunt laughs, the sound rising and falling like a bird song. It piques my curiosity, leaving me longing to join the conversation. I can’t identify the words in the babble of noise. The speech sounds tangle together like hair strands caught in gum. Try to pull a strand free and another strand gets caught. The mix of languages compounds the problem. Seventy percent is Tigrinya, fifteen percent is Amharic, and the rest is English.

  I feel bored. A confusing, I’m-lonely-even-though-I’m-surrounded-by-people bored. I tug on Saba’s arm. “Can I go?”

  “No, I want you to stay with me. Why don’t you talk with us?”

  “I don’t understand what people are saying.”

  “Well then, you should ask. We can explain it to you.”

  Frustration bubbles up inside me and threatens to boil over. Memories of the agonizing isolation in middle school flash through my mind. Shifting in my seat, I try to stay calm. “It’s not that simple. I’m missing too much. I don’t even know the topic. Can’t I just get a book?”

  On my left, Girma nudges my arm. “Saba just told us she used to call herself an Ethiopian.”

  My eyes widen with shock.

  “Don’t listen to him,” she says. “I am Eritrean.”

  My curiosity craves an explanation. “I know you are Eritrean, but have you ever called yourself an Ethiopian?”

  “At school, yes. Because of the war.” Ethiopia claimed control of its small neighbor to the north. Eritrea did not want to be part of Ethiopia, and for thirty years Eritreans fought for independence. The war ended in 1991—two years later, the world recognized Eritrea as an independent country.

  Saba continues, “Ethiopians controlled the schools. We had to speak Amharic in school. But at home, we spoke Tigrinya and called ourselves Eritreans.

  “When I was a teenager we lived in Mendefera, another city in Eritrea. My father worked as a police officer and they transferred him from Asmara to Mendefera. At the high school there, I was part of a group that traveled around singing songs making fun of the Eritrean freedom fighters.”

  My face scrunches up in confusion. “You made fun of Eritreans fighting for freedom?”

  “We had no choice,” she says. “The soldiers came to the school and they forced us. They picked about twenty students from our school and told us to join the group. They gave us lyrics and forced us to learn them. We used to sing all over Eritrea, visiting different villages. One day we went to my father’s village, and the people there didn’t like us. They felt insulted. We were Eritreans, too. It wasn’t right. But the soldiers said, ‘Sing or you’ll go to jail.’ That’s why we sang.”

  My voice rises with trepidation. “What happened?”

  “We got fed up and told the soldiers, ‘No.’ We refused to sing.”

  One word, one thought, one daring declaration of f
reedom. No, she would not sing songs that offended her father’s village. No, she would not serve an organization that hurt her people. No, she would not continue to hide her identity.

  “The soldiers sent all of us to jail. The first two days, they wouldn’t give us food. The soldiers would ask, ‘Are you going to sing? If you don’t sing, we won’t give you food. You’re going to stay here. You’re not going to get out.’ And we were hungry—so hungry! After two days we broke down and told them we would sing. They finally let us out after a week.”

  The injustice of throwing girls in jail for refusing to sing infuriates me. “How did you manage to go back to singing after that?”

  “We sang, but in our minds, we were all making plans to become soldiers for the resistance or go to Sudan.”

  “Weren’t you in school? Couldn’t you study to become a doctor or something? Why only those two choices?”

  “Because there was a war. A lot of the time we were hiding. The Ethiopians would be in the air by five a.m., flying over Mendefera dropping bombs. They did it for months—everyone would get up early and leave the city to hide in the jungles, and then come back later in the day when the bombing stopped. Sometimes we pretended we were just going out for a long picnic. Awiye cooked food for us and we would play in the trees. At the end of the day we would head home, wondering if our house was still standing.

  “Even when we did make it to school, we were always thinking about the war. We weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll study and become a doctor. I’ll study and become a lawyer. I’ll study and become somebody.’ Our mind was only focused on the war. We had two choices: as soon as we finished high school, we could either become soldiers or go to Sudan.”

  “Did you consider becoming a soldier?” My voice quakes just asking the question.

  “I thought about it. Almost half of my classmates joined the fighting—girls, too. But one of my friends warned me about joining. Something horrible happened to her. She wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened. She kept saying, ‘It’s really bad, don’t go.’ So, me, my friend, and a cousin all decided to go to Sudan.”

  “Haben, eat.” Grandma Awiye holds a tray of pastries out to me. She wears ankle-length floral dresses, with a long white netsela, a traditional headscarf. Mostly older women wear the netselas. No one else in our household wears one, so the headscarf is one of my clues for identifying Awiye.

  “Yekenyeley.” Thank you. I reach out and feel for a pastry on the tray, the one like a sandwich with cream in the middle. Taking a bite, I savor the tantalizing cinnamon flavor. Many American treats have distinct shapes and textures that lend themselves to easy tactile identification. Eating here tends to involve a series of discoveries. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll know all the foods here by touch.

  I turn back to Saba. “What was it like to go to Sudan?”

  Saba sips from a tiny cup of coffee, then sets it down on the table. “We weren’t allowed to just leave Asmara. The Ethiopian soldiers controlled the city. If anyone wanted to leave, they needed to get permission from the Ethiopian soldiers. I was with about twenty refugees, all of us trying to escape the war. We told the soldiers we were just going to visit family in a village about twenty miles outside Asmara, so they gave us papers. We took a bus to the village, Halhale. Then at night we met up with this guy, a smuggler, who helped us get to Sudan.

  “It took us three weeks. We only walked at night to hide from Ethiopian and Eritrean fighters. One night, we were walking between two hills—on one side were the Ethiopians, and on the other side were the Eritreans. They were shooting at one another. We had to duck and run for cover.”

  “Was the smuggler nice?”

  “No!” Saba laughs. “He was incredibly mean. If anyone got tired he’d say, ‘I’m going to leave you here and let the hyenas get you.’ We were so tired! After the first week, my shoes fell apart and I had to walk the rest of the way barefoot. He didn’t care. He still said he would leave us if we didn’t keep up.

  “The smuggler told us he would get a camel to carry our bags if we paid him. We’d left home carrying everything we owned on our backs, so we really wanted that camel. We gave him some money, and every night he said he would buy a camel.” Saba sighs, remembering. “We never saw a camel.”

  “But Saba—”

  “Don’t say Saba, say Mommy.”

  My cheeks flush. “Actually, I’m too old for that.”

  Girma chimes in, “You should say ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad.’”

  “No, that makes me sound old!” Saba loops an arm through mine and pulls me against her. “I’m not gonna let you become a teenager.”

  Saba’s arm tries to pin me to her side, for now and forever, while my heart pulls me toward my own trek for freedom. “Then what do you want me to call you?” I ask.

  “Eh…I’m fine with Saba.” Her whole body vibrates with her warm, melodic laugh. I laugh with her. Girma can’t help chuckling, too.

  When the laughter subsides, I urge her to continue the story. “Do you think the smuggler was telling the truth about the hyenas?”

  “Oh! You know what happened?” She loosens her grip on my arm, relaxing into the sofa. “On the third night, we were walking, and all of the sudden two hyenas started circling our group. The smuggler said, ‘Don’t run! Stay together!’ But my friend and I ran for a nearby tree. The hyenas left the group and came straight to us! Oh my god, their eyes! We flew up that tree, and the hyenas glared at us from the ground.”

  Her words send adrenaline racing through my veins.

  “The rest of our group screamed at the hyenas and chased them away,” she continues. “Another time, we crossed a river where the water rose up to my chest.”

  “But how did you cross the river?” I shoot Girma a questioning look, wondering if he’ll crack a joke. He tries to teach her to swim when we go to the Red Sea.

  “The smuggler brought ropes and we tied ourselves to them. The water scared me, but I forced myself to keep going.

  “Because it was the rainy season, the region swarmed with mosquitos. Half of us caught malaria. Actually, all of us got malaria, but some of us didn’t feel the symptoms until we got to Sudan. One girl didn’t make it. The guys carried her, trying to help her reach the border. Then one of the Eritrean resistance groups captured us. They wanted us to join the fighting. We told them, ‘Look, we’re tired, starving, and suffering from malaria. We’re not in any position to fight.’ They kept us for a week, then they let us go. The next night we made it to Kassala, Sudan.

  “All of the Eritreans living in Kassala helped one another. One of my friends had family there, so they let me stay with them. Every Eritrean home had several refugees sleeping on the floors and in the backyards. The Sudanese people helped me get a job. I worked at a store selling clothes. After ten months, the Catholic Church brought me to the U.S. They sent me to Dallas. I hated the weather there, so I moved to the Bay Area.”

  In the Bay Area, Saba and Girma met through the Eritrean-Ethiopian community, a small and close-knit group. Two years later, I was born on July 29, 1988.

  “I’m wondering…” My mind struggles to phrase the question just right. “How do you feel about the fact that Girma is Ethiopian?”

  “He’s not. He’s Eritrean.” She sounds annoyed.

  I give Girma a quizzical look. His silence seems to invite me to press on. “No, he’s not—he was born in Ethiopia.”

  “He’s Eritrean,” she insists. “His father was born in Eritrea.”

  “Can I speak?” Girma asks.

  “Yes, you can speak,” I tell him.

  “I was born and raised in Ethiopia—”

  “Your father is Eritrean,” Saba interjects. “Therefore, you are Eritrean.” She sighs. “Haben, I know what you’re trying to say. I have lots of friends who are Ethiopians. The people are not the ones who caused the war. It was the government.”

  “Can I speak?” Girma tries again.

  “Yes.”

  “I was born and raised in Ad
dis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia,” he says. “I grew up there. I have feelings for that place. I still have a home there, and my sister and brother are there. At the same time, I am also Eritrean. My father was born and raised in Keren, in northern Eritrea. Every year he would take the whole family there for summer vacation. My siblings and I would hike in the mountains, swim in the lake, and chase baboons. Do I speak the language? Yes, I do. Do I have friends in Eritrea? Yes, I do. Do I empathize with the Liberation? Yes, I do. But, as I told you, I love Ethiopia, too. You can’t hide this. Wherever you are born, it is a part of your life.

  “How would you identify yourself, Haben? What’s your nationality?”

  “American.” I give him a smug look, congratulating myself for the straightforward and indisputable answer.

  “You are Eritrean, too,” Saba corrects me. “Your parents are from Eritrea, so you are Eritrean-American.”

  “In that case, I’m Ethiopian, too.” I’m pressing her buttons. I can’t help it. Saba’s relationship to Ethiopia fascinates me. She moves through the spectrum of fear to forgiveness, and I want to understand it all.

  “Yes,” Girma responds. “You are American, and you are Eritrean, and you are Ethiopian.”

  I stare at Saba, willing her to say something. I can’t see her facial expressions, but I know she has an opinion.

  “Your name is Haben!” She shouts my name like a declaration. “That’s an Eritrean name!”

  “It’s a Tigrinyan name,” Girma points out. “Tigrinya is also spoken in Ethiopia.”

  Saba waves a hand in the air. “Only in the Tigray region of Ethiopia do people speak Tigrinya. But that’s not the point. Haben means, ‘Pride!’ Haben means, ‘We stand up for our freedom.’ Ethiopia had forty-eight million people. Eritrea had only three million. Ethiopia tried to crush Eritrea, but we refused to back down. And we won!” Her voice rises in jubilation. “We got our independence!”