geez. you dont know on how many levels i can relate to that. artist is a title you have to earn after having a body of work to be proud of.
im still at the birth pangs of my career but when asked what am i do, what else am i suppose to say???? there aren’t many synonyms for artists and when you do try to explain, you have puzzled expressions staring back you.

my childhood in ethiopia was rather a contradiction my single mother encouraged everything and anything artsy yet at school there was no outlet for me. none what so ever. it was very frustrating. you’re a star if you excel in math and science but anything else is not worth the consideration ena i did my very best to excel in those things for so many years for the sake of having somewhere to belong to but it did little to help my social life. At the end of the day I was still me and I did a very pathetic job at hiding my peculiarities and that left me with very few friends. The Ethiopian culture is about the group and conforming to that group, American culture is founded on rebellion and individuality and the place where it is most glaringly obvious is in the American schools. You gain more friends in American if you stand out, if you are a rebel if you do your own thing. But in a twisted turn about way that in of itself is a cliquish behavior. You’d think I would’ve found heaven in America but as they say, the more things change the more they stay the same. I couldn’t blend in with the individual culture, there was too much of the Ethiopian in me for that. I realized labeling is a knee jerk reaction, an attempt for folks to better understanding and control their surroundings. We all peg, just some less than others.

When juxtaposed with the political/social organization in Ethiopian history and culture… I think this issue you raise reveals itself to be a deep-set problem inextricably bonded to the very core of our identity.

It pervades almost all strata of perception and self-awareness for the vast majority of people born and raised in Ethiopia. And though we are quick to be swept off by hazy notions of things like HAGER, HIZB, HIBRETESEB…etc. at the end, success as a country will only come after enough people with the right skill-set and drive, reach a position of power after trudging through enough existential doubts and headaches to reach a practical philosophical approach good enough to reendow us with our lost natural gift of being able to identify a cause of a problem after adequate observation and then learning from mistakes. (when repeated for several centuries, as have most of our mistakes, they are elevated and hailed as “bahil”), and gives proper heed to the *natural* truth that >> There is this phenomenon we call time…It is best observed and marked by changes observable by the senses. Change is inevitable. The successful organization – the government, the party, the team – is the one that quickly learns to re-adjust, and correct its tragectory to keep running parallel to the waves of change. Same for societies…<<

There is an article about a variation of this issue on the recent edition of Addis Admass. A perspective of this challenge from a political stand point… It touches on how ethnic/regional groupings/mentality discourage independent critical thinking by individuals … the story of our nation.

At the end it makes one lose heart. This wouldn’t even occur unless one gets the delusion of great hope to begin with… but as is the story with most used-to-be rebels and free thinkers now with their flags firmly planted in conformist land, this deflation comes as a consequence of too many eager fingers burned too many times.

Hope is not a natural, inevitable urge. It is constructed very delicately on the ratio of past successes to failures. And as we can easily imagine… the less the hope the more orthodox the paths taken. The more readily (indeed happily) we lock our thoughts securely into the proverbial ‘box’ and joyfully huddle together among the herd. ‘Our’ herd. Not ‘theirs’! Or ‘theirs!’ :0)

So makes one wonder… after all flames of anguish and indignation start to cool off… Who are we to blame the nation, the culture, the people.. and lament the woes of ‘living in Ethiopia’ and point fingers and mabTelTel the end result of a great progression of events and decisions – centuries in the making?

I do not wish to succumb to defeatism… Any way to solve a problem is to articulate its effects and give it a name. So it’s good to discuss. But such handwringing on this nature of our society is nothing new… Our parents maturing in a cold war era of massive social changes across the world would have been accutely feeling such feelings of frustration on the calcified state of social climate in Ethiopia.

And I’m sure their problems of conformity vs. individuality went, arguably, much further than what some of us face. This in itself doesn’t mean anything…but it’s useful to keep it in mind.