Fekade Azeze
Addis Ababa
I walk your streets, but make no strides:
your shops and kiosks crowd my eyes
ENTs and dentistries
music stalls
drug shacks
photo booths
jumbled!
chaotic!
so many loud bars competing to make the most noise
how can so much thunder come
out of shops as small
and cluttered as gravestones?
this flow of people that never stops
pushing, storming, elbowing
measuring the chaos of your streets…
I walk your streets, but make no strides:
dinginess and squalor
poor rag-dirty men
all men, sleeping rough
in your abundant filth
on every corner
keep piercing my eyes,
I stop and glance, not long enough to see
if they are alive,
I march forward, like everyone else
we all march forward
.
I walk your streets, but make no strides:
your population is so dense
there is no space to walk!
your bodies look so pale and shrunken
discoloured!
slack!
I ask myself, do they have food?
do they have a roof over their heads?
is everyone sleeping rough on street corners
lying in make-shift tukuls?
piled on top of each other like planks?
I walk your streets, making no strides,
hands stretch out and hold me back, begging every step:
thousands of fathers and mothers!
hundreds of babies and young girls!
crowds of skinny old men and teenagers
with no one to care for them
all searching for scraps, a living out of scraps.
I walk your streets, making no strides:
a naked boy runs past me
another clutches a stone or stick
others a flower or a rag
or a paper
long black hair locked in dreads
skin burnt to charcoal
shouting in the squares where other people call them
insane!
but there is always some truth in what they say
they have nobody to care for them
but they are your decorations, Addis, your beautiful jewels!
I walk your streets, but make no strides:
how can I avoid playing football with your children?
your streets are a playground
a nursery where you bring up your young
your little shoe-shine boys
lottery-ticket hawkers and cigarette touts
q’olo corn sellers, gum sellers, paperboys
children doing nothing
children begging
look! it is World Childrens’ Day
they are performing a show for everyone to see
about survival
they have made your streets into a stage.
Yes, I have walked your streets, I have made no strides.
Your secrets are endless, Addis! I will give in now, I will rest.
~ Fekade Azeze, trans. from Amharic by the author and Chris Beckett
Fekade Azeze was born in 1950 and studied at Addis Ababa University and Sheffield. He is associate professor of Ethiopian literature and folklore at Addis Ababa University. He has published five collections of poems in Amharic, two books on folklore, a book about famine poetry and many articles on Ethiopian literature.
Chris Beckett grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s and his acclaimed collection of praise shouts and boasts, ‘Ethiopia Boy’, was published by Carcanet in 2013. The book of his collaborative project with artist Isao Miura, ‘Sketches from the Poem Road’, has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2015.
