A friend of mine who went to the United States a long time ago was here on a visit recently. Back in years he told me that the day he was sworn in as a US citizen was, in his words, one of the days of his personal humiliation and anger. Although I have never been to the US myself, I have encountered many people who said that most Africans including Ethiopians are usually happy to travel to the “land of opportunities” on a temporary basis or move there as permanent residents. I heard that there are even people who eagerly waited a long time to grab the famous Green Card as a ticket for success in America without which life might even be more difficult than here in Africa.
I asked my friend why he was sorry or angry about becoming an American citizen. He said that he felt humiliated by taking American citizenship because he felt like he betrayed his own country for not providing him with the opportunities America could give him, and that he felt like shifting his allegiances from the country that raised him to one he never knew before. For him it was like changing his mother with a stepmother.
The Diversity Visa Program (DV) is perceived by many as a kind of “voluntary slavery” while others consider it as a lifetime opportunity and a passport for success. The true fact is that in both cases, success is conditional on how hard you work and not by the very nature of the DV program. There are plenty of stories of people who did not make it in the US after they landed there with a DV passport in their pockets. There are also stories of people who made it in America by taking the hazardous journeys through third countries and even by jumping over border fences or by similar other means. In brief the DV does not entitle you to automatic success and there is no free lunch in the US as they usually say to emphasis the virtue of working or paying for anything you want to get.
I recently met my friend in this story after many years and his first feeling has completely evaporated and his is now proud of being an American citizen because he has now a Ph.D. in linguistics and has become a professor at a college himself. This is true success indeed because not only did he finish his studies but also landed a prestigious employment as an African intellectual who joined the American educated elite. This is no mean achievement.
There are of course two kinds of immigrants to America as he told me. There are the economic immigrants, that is to say those who go there to ran away from poverty and those who go there with dreams of professional achievements. Most of the immigrants are said to belong to the first category and the minority belong to the second one. In both cases however people’s choice is justified because poverty is a terrible ordeal that one is right to escape by any means available except criminal ones.
They often tell you that you can have a menial job in America and if you work hard you are entitled to financial success even educated peers may not sometimes achieve. That is, in my opinion, the magic of American economic and or social system where success is largely based on hard work as the single most important factor for upward mobility. America is of course a good example of the merit system at its best.
As I often hear from people who lived in America for many years, the system not only give you economic and educational opportunities no other system in the world can provide you with, but also transforms your personality from who you were when you left Africa or Ethiopia into what you have become after years of living there. There is an Ethiopian saying that goes like, “A man looks like the life he leads”. This is true. But the transformations that most people undergo after they live in America for a considerable time is not only physical or economic but also psychological, ethical, linguistic and even religious.
Psychologically speaking, most immigrant Africans of previous generations were said to encounter what they call “culture shock” which is defined as, “the feelings of confusion and uncertainty that are experienced when you come into contact with a culture that is vastly different from your own.” According to studies, “culture shock is typically divided into four stages, which are honeymoon, frustration, adaptation and acceptance stages.”
Generally speaking, culture shock may also be a challenge of adaptation or integration into a new environment or a new society. Depending on the personalities of the immigrants, some of them might experience a relatively short period of maladjustment before they fully integrate into their new environment. Others might take longer times to adjust and live a normal life. There may also be extreme cases when immigrants might adapt faster than expected or lag behind in the adaptation process.
They tell you that some lucky immigrants learn the English language in record time, adopt the cultures of the various American states where they are based with astonishing speed and assimilate in the community as if they lived there for the last two decades. A minority of them are said to be caught between being or behaving like Americans without completely shedding their Ethiopian mentality. They live between two worlds, hanging between a past mentality that is deeply engrained in them and a present that they face with hilarity and try to imitate the manners and practices of the full-fledged American. Ethiopian journalists of the 1960s and 1970s were calling these people, “hyphenated Ethiopians”.
The hyphenated Ethiopian is therefore someone who is not fully Ethiopian or fully American in their behaviors mannerisms and aspirations. They are caught between their old and their new personality traits and vacillate between their two personalities like the pendulum of a clock. To borrow a term from Franz Fanon, the hyphenated African or the hyphenated Ethiopian is a person who cannot shed their blackness and instead assume an imaginary whiteness and if successful, adds a second personality on his original one. This is apparently a remote echo of Fanon’s ‘black skin white mask’ syndrome.
The hyphenated Ethiopian tries to speak English with American accents and the result is utter ridicule. They think that speaking English with Ethiopian accent is backward or rural. Therefore, they speak English “with their nose” as they say, without forgetting that there are among them newly minted Americans who speak English with their rural Ethiopian or regional accents. The hyphenated African is placed in between these sheds of linguistic imitations.
There is however nothing with speaking English with American or Ethiopian accent because, “In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location or nation.” The struggles waged by the so-called hyphenated Ethiopians to speak English with an accent does not have any impact, positive or negative, on their being Americans because they have already acquired their citizen status by law.
The following observations are based on personal accounts of Diaspora Ethiopians and I beg your pardon if what I put down on paper does not correspond to their oral accounts. The hyphenated Ethiopia rather looks ridiculous when they try to adopt American culture in full or in part because there are so many things that do not necessarily click when you try to put two different things together. Let us take one example by looking into the ways holidays like Christmas or the Western New Year are celebrated by Ethiopians in America.
I heard that these people are torn between the two cultures and want either to drop one or adopt both at the same time and the result might be something you call “misto” in Italian or “mixed”. The old hyphenated Ethiopians wore Wrangler jeans trousers and sat on horseback carrying their gabbi, (or their heavy cotton garments) on their backs, as if they lived in two eras, feudalism and modernism, at the same time.
The newly hyphenated Ethiopians are almost indistinguishable from the ordinary Americans in their dressing codes and manners. They look non-Americans only during holidays when they go back to their dress culture and look like residents of one of the Ethiopian regions. Their food cultures are said to be more visible during those holidays because of the feeling of nostalgia that comes with them.
Recently, Westerners have been celebrating the Christmas and New Year holidays and Diaspora Ethiopians are said to have joined the shows by creating their own Ethiopian brand of American Christmas with Ethiopian and American drinks and foods. No doubt about it, the fully integrated Ethiopians must have celebrated these holidays the American way. The hyphenated Ethiopians must have staged a mixed kind of holiday with mixed rituals or half Ethiopian and half American. Rest assured that the unhyphenated and unassimilated Ethiopians must have celebrated the holidays in the Ethiopian way, with Ethiopian foods and drinks. This is one aspect of the diversities available in the Land of Opportunities, where individual freedoms or the rights to do whatever you like within the confines of the law are seriously adhered to.
Ethiopians here at home who cling to their good old motherland and its unyielding traditions often speak of “their holiday” and “our holiday” when speaking about the way their compatriots in the Diaspora observe those holidays. Western Christmas is called “Yeferenj Genna” or “their” Christmas and “Yehabesha Genna” or “our” Christmas. Many Ethiopians in the Diaspora are said to be celebrating “their” Christmas and “our Christmas” with equal fervor and passion because they find opportunities in both.
That is certainly a good thing to do as long as you have the means to entertain both. This can also be considered the bounties offered by the Land of Opportunities because it has virtually become near impossible to observe Ethiopian holidays without hitting the jackpots so to say. Otherwise you are left with shedding some tears of nostalgia “in remembrance of things past” to borrow from Proust. Unfortunately, it is not possible to get the holiday feelings by sitting alone in an empty house and remembering how you used to welcome those holidays during your youth or a few decades back.
Anyway, happy holidays to both the ‘hyphenated Ethiopians’, the traditional Ethiopians in the Diaspora, and the fully assimilated ones, in short to all Ethiopians near and far.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SATURDAY 6 JANUARY 2024
