I’d forgotten about this until today – on a message board I frequent, someone had asked me about Ethiopia and I remembered I had written this. It’s micro micro, not even a story, just an image. But I had to search and search to find where I’d written it down, so I’m going to write it down here too so the chance of me losing it again is slight.
Here is something I wrote while riding on the bus. It was a bumpy bumpy ride that took us two hours to go 40 km.
In the fields outside the city, the land is populated by men in green suits. Always green, faded from sunlight, dust, and the harshness of living here. But always green, same cut, same style, same shade. The hems have always fallen. The pants are always held up by a rope acting as a belt. I wonder why this level of conformity which I have seen only once before in the salarymen scurrying around the commuter trains in Tokyo. I think the Derg must somehow be involved, some command economy scheme to outfit Ethiopian men in misfit olive green suits as protection against the bourgeouis excess of Western capitalism. The green clashes with the dried yellow grass of the hills surrounding our town. You can spot the men from miles away, like fireflies in an inverted landscape. I wave but they never wave back. Only the children who chase behind me on the street yelling “Ferenj, ferenj!” (always twice) wave at me. To them, I am an oddity, an amusement, a novelty. To the aged old men in the dusty green suits, I no longer exist.
So, anyone want to publish a paragraph of what I thought on a day in October 2007?