Addis Ababa Noir

 Edited by Maaza Mengiste

Akashic     2020

256 pages    Noir

We have always rented our small basement apartment to graduate students, and it was our great good fortune to have Samson and his wife Nofkote as renters for two years. Samson had come to Western Michigan University from Addis Ababa to pursue a Master’s Degree. During the civil war, Nofkote had fled to the United States from Ethiopia with her family while Samson’s family had retreated to a rural area of Ethiopia.  Both were members of the same tribe—a tribe that had fallen out of favor during the civil war. Both fathers had been government officials. Samson’s father became a carpenter and Nofkote’s father drove a taxi in Washington DC.

 I learned so much from them. After graduation, they moved back to the DC area, where there is a very large Ethiopian community. Four years ago we were invited to Samson’s sister’s wedding in Detroit. We met Ethiopian doctors, lawyers, and professors, all of whom had come to the United States from Addis Ababa during the diaspora. It was an extraordinary experience to meet them and to hear their harrowing stories.

So, it was with this background, I absorbed the stories in Addis Ababa Noir. The stories are beautifully written and express the highs and lows of this incredible city—a city that has suffered greatly and a people that have suffered along with their city. Some of the authors have moved to other parts of the world and write about the Addis Ababa of their memory, either before or during the Red Terror. Some of the authors live there today. All have so much to tell us.

Like most of the Akashic Noir series, the fourteen stories in the collection run the gamut of the genre. Few can be called pure Noir, but all are haunting and describe a longing for better days and more peaceful times. I was particularly taken by the story of a young woman who returns to the city to bury a beloved aunt, only to find her previously unknown father and some startling details about her mother’s death. Another remarkable story concerns a small child who daily watches the ostriches as they wander the palace yard, but then one day she is sure she sees a dead body on the sidewalk in front of the palace, right by the bump in the road. In another, an old man tells a stranger a story about a woman he saw on the street. He was sure she was the girl he had known in school and fallen in love with. And then, tragedy strikes.  

Knowing what I already knew about the Ethiopian diaspora, the stories held a unique fascination for me. Maaza Mengiste, the editor, says in the introduction, “What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It's a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It can also be disorienting, and it is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside.”

These are the stories of a people, who have faced disaster head on and have arisen tough and  resilient. Adddis Ababa Noir is as remarkable a collection as the people who populate it.

Here is a sample from the introduction of the book.

Yes Chef: A Memoir

By Marcus Samuelsson

New York, Random House, 2012

319 pages     Memoir

Marcus Samuelsson has this to say about being a chef: “We definitely are in the memory business: we are creating a memory with ingredients.” What a noble goal for a career—to make memories with ingredients.

It seems that chefs are the new breed of celebrities. They are everywhere. And now that I have read Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir, Yes Chef,  I see him everywhere. When I got on the airplane last night, his picture was on the brochure of the on-board food for sale. A colleague mentioned that she lived in Harlem. I asked her if she had ever eaten at the Red Rooster, Samuelsson’s restaurant, and she exclaimed, “We live right down the street and we can’t get in—no matter when we arrive--5 pm or 9 pm.” 

Marcus Samuelsson has a remarkable story to tell in his memoir, Yes Chef. He is in his early 40’s, so there is much of his story yet to be told. But, he seems to know that his life story is unique and eventful, and full of resolve, hard work, and what would appear on the surface to be a lot of good luck. But it is a much deeper story than lucky breaks, and Samuelsson acknowledges that his history has informed and guided his career every step of the way. He tells his life story every time he plans a menu or picks a spice to add to a dish. The menu of his restaurant tells his story, from the Ethiopian spices he inserts to the Swedish meatballs that are daily staples to the soul food of the Harlem neighborhood where he currently lives and works.

Samuelsson was born into an Ethiopian tribal family in 1970. When he was a toddler, he, his mother, and his older sister all contracted tuberculosis. In an act of uncompromising heroism, his mother walked 75 miles to the hospital in Addis Ababa with her toddler on her back and her young daughter by the hand. There were thousands of patients awaiting care at the hospital, but somehow that mother found treatment for her children before she died. I am haunted by that mother’s resolve and the magnificent gift given to those children. 

Samuelsson’s childhood took another turn when he and his sister were adopted by a Swedish professional family. He was raised in an atmosphere of love, acceptance, and purpose. He expected to be successful as a Swedish soccer player, but when he was deemed to be too small, he turned all his energies into becoming a chef. He says that throughout his career he continues to honor his birth mother and the family that raised him.

Trained as a classical chef in Switzerland, Samuelsson honed his craft on cruise ships, and other restaurants, where he took every position he was given and attempted to perform that task with great tenacity, no matter how lowly the job, including gathering herbs for the dinner menu at a famous resort. Because he was talented and clever, he was promoted quickly in each job. Finally, he landed a job as a chef at a famous Swedish restaurant in New York called Aquavit. When the head chef died of a heart attack, Samuelsson was chosen to take over the kitchen. Within 5 months, the restaurant was awarded a 3 star rating by the New York Times; Samuelsson was the youngest chef to be so honored.

Since that time, his career has flourished. His new restaurant Red Rooster is a fusion of all the tastes he has cultivated through the years, with a huge helping of the Harlem neighborhood as well. He mentions that early on he realized that classic cooking included ethnic cooking as well; that there was as much integrity in the cooking of his Swedish grandmother or his Ethiopian mother as the finest French chef. He speaks frankly of the difficulties Black chefs have breaking through racial barriers. He says: ““A hundred years ago,” he says, “black men and women had to fight to get out of the kitchen. These days, we have to fight to get in.” In many ways he identifies with the African American experience, but he is also an outsider in that community. One reviewer says, “There’s a kind of alienation, finally, that can come from being an atypical black person. Like Barack Obama, whom he thanks in his acknowledgments, Mr. Samuelsson hasn’t had anything like what could be called a standard black American experience and has sometimes suffered for that reality. He’s too white for some, too black for others.”  Yes Chef tells of a man who knows that he is in the right place in his world, but there is part of him that we don’t know and probably are not supposed to know.

 Last week I edited a dissertation about multicultural education. The author asserted that immigrant students attempt to succeed in school as a way of honoring their parents, who sacrificed much to bring them to the United States. They feel duty-bound to succeed in school. The reader of Yes Chef has the same feeling about Samuelsson. By succeeding in his chosen career, he continues to honor those who sacrificed much to help him succeed. The book is as much about them as it is about him.

Two good reviews in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/yes-chef-a-memoir-by-marcus-samuelsson.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/books/yes-chef-by-marcus-samuelsson.html

An interview on the Tavis Smiley show: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/chef-marcus-samuelsson/