{"id":771,"date":"2009-06-21T02:09:59","date_gmt":"2009-06-21T09:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=771"},"modified":"2011-10-05T01:36:41","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T08:36:41","slug":"reading-hama-tuma-in-hebrew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=771","title":{"rendered":"Reading Hama Tuma in Hebrew"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLanguages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.\u201d
\nWalter Benjamin in \u201cThe Task of the Translator\u201d<\/p>\n

Western culture has a penchant for worshipping the exotic from a safe myopic distance, overlooking the human reality rubbing up against its elbows and knees, unintentionally creating cross-cultural connections comical, frustrating, and inspirational all at once. Israel, literally and figuratively, finds itself somewhere between Europe and Africa. The \u201cpeople of the Book\u201d, are currently celebrating \u201cBook Week\u201d with hundreds of new titles on display in all the major cities. Despite Israel\u2019s considerable Ethiopian population, the only work of fiction (to the best of this writer\u2019s knowledge) published by an Ethiopian writer this year is Hama Tuma\u2019s The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories, translated by Dori Parnes (Ahuzat Bayit 2009). Activist writer-in-exile Hama Tuma\u2019s book is out of print and essentially unavailable in English, and has never been officially published in Ethiopia in either Amharic or English, so if you want to read this brilliantly funny, sensitive, intelligent portrayal of life under Mengistu\u2019s reign of terror, start learning Hebrew.<\/p>\n

The book is written in two parts, each consisting of eleven stories. The stories in the first part are all written as court cases, described by a narrator, able to observe and comment, yet not personally involved in the proceedings. This distance allows an ironic humor to permeate the text, as translator Dori Parnes recounts, \u201cThe first thing that grabbed me was his humor\u2026then you suddenly reach the second half \u2013 it grabs you by the throat. These are the same stories but he tells them with pain.\u201d Hama Tuma, who has been a political activist for freedom and human rights since his student days in the 1960s, \u201cstumbled\u201d into fiction writing when he responded to a BBC call for short stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cVendetta\u201d, the opening story of the book\u2019s second part, was his first work of fiction, growing out of the painful experiences of life under Mengistu\u2019s regime, and the moral dilemmas with which people had to contend on a daily basis. Translator Parnes says of \u201cVendetta\u201d: \u201cI was stunned when I finished translating it. It wipes the smile off your face and you say to yourself \u2013 what was it that I smiled at before?\u201d \u201cMost of it has not been written,\u201d says Hama Tuma of this period in Ethiopian history, \u201cWhat really happened, happened in a worse way.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Hama
Hama Tuma\/Photo: Ghennet Girma<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Hebrew edition is prefaced by Professor Hagai Erlich\u2019s eloquent introduction, providing an historical perspective on the revolution in Ethiopia which began in hope and culminated in oppression. Comparing Mengistu\u2019s reign to that of Stalin, Hitler and Sadam Hussein, Erlich notes that a key to the success of these regimes lay in their ability to release the potential \u201clittle Stalin\u201d and \u201clittle Adolf\u201d lurking within any of us, and let them take over the hearts and minds of the people. As it happens, while he was translating the book, Parnes read Orlando Figes\u2019 The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin\u2019s Russia based on personal archives and interviews. Parnes says, \u201cWhat 50 years of that government did to a people is more terrible than what Hitler did in 12 years. People were born into it. The books complement one another, I didn\u2019t have much comfort between the two\u2026When you read one and translate the other, your dreams at night are not very pleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people collaborated out of fear,\u201d says Hama Tuma, \u201cThey denounced others or didn\u2019t help. It is a sad part of our history, we should live it as such, or else nothing is learned. I offer my stories as a suggestion: we should look for another way of solving the problems.\u201d Hama Tuma\u2019s stories penetrate the heart, mind and dreams. His humor is grounded in unflinching honesty, nurtured by a wellspring of hope, a sense of fun and mischief: \u201cto prick their serious balloons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parnes originally translated two of Hama Tuma\u2019s stories at the request of Doron Tavory, artistic director of Hazira Performing Arts Center, for a stage adaptation to be performed by the Netela Theatre Company. \u201cIt suddenly aroused my curiosity,\u201d says Parnes, who went to great lengths to acquire a copy of the book, feeling, \u201cthere is something here that seems to me important.\u201d In his essay \u201cThe Task of the Translator\u201d, Walter Benjamin discusses the way that a translation reveals the hidden connections between languages, saying that a good translation will bring some of the \u201cforeign,\u201d of the other language and culture into the text of the target language. Reading his translation inspired my own quest to locate the author, as described in \u201cFinding Hama<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The relationship between Israel and Ethiopia is ancient and current, certainly complex. The Ethiopian monarchy considered themselves descendents of King Solomon and the Jewish community there, known as Beta Israel, has ancient roots. Israelis are also mentioned in the book as having trained the Ethiopian military in interrogation techniques. As Parnes notes, \u201cOur excellent young men went to give them all sorts of tips\u2026Why must Israel be involved in the ugliest things?\u201d This journey from Addis Abbaba, through Paris, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv brings forth a work of fiction in Hebrew that makes Ethiopia a more vivid part of our lives, to reflect on Israel\u2019s relationship to Ethiopia and by extension, the situation of Ethiopian Israelis. Says Parnes, \u201cI am curious to know if the book will reach the members of the Ethiopian community in Israel and what feelings it will arouse in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our lives and histories are interconnected in mysterious ways, on a cultural and personal level. The difficulties of translation may sometimes bring us closer to the text, as in the story \u201cMadman, Killer, Saint, You\u2026\u201d in which a seriously injured political activist is hospitalized, his accusers await his recovery so that they can force him to reveal information, and he asks the attending physician to help him escape this fate by assisting his death. In contemplating this dilemma the doctor reflects on his younger brother, also a political activist, and the male nurse also plays a central role. In translating the story Parnes was confronted with a problem \u201cbecause Hebrew has this thing you are stuck with \u2013 the same word means \u201cbrother\u201d and \u201cnurse\u201d. I was afraid it would be confusing, so I wrote \u201chead nurse\u201d and as the story continued I slowly removed the word \u201chead\u201d. Having established the identity of the character as a nurse in the hospital, Parnes gave himself the freedom to let the word and its dual associations work in the reader\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

I feel that it is this kind of relationship to the text that Benjamin had in mind when he referred to a translation as revealing the relationships between languages, one that can extend to cultures and the individuals within them. To paraphrase Benjamin, Parnes\u2019 translation of Hama Tuma reminds us that \u201cpeople\u201d are \u201cnot strangers to one another\u2026but are interrelated in what they want to express.\u201d<\/p>\n

Book Launching: \u201cThe Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories\u201d
\nBy Hama Tuma, Translated by Dori Parnes, Ahuzat Bayit 2009\u201306\u201321<\/p>\n

Sunday, June 28th at 20:00 at the Ma\u2019abada, 28 Derech Hebron, Jerusalem
\nDoron Tavory presents:
\nReadings from the Hazira staging of the stories
\nPersonal accounts of the Red Terror in Ethiopia
\nA short documentary on Ethiopia under military rule
\nInformation and tickets: 02-6292000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLanguages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.\u201d Walter Benjamin in \u201cThe Task of the Translator\u201d Western culture has a penchant for worshipping the exotic from a safe myopic distance, overlooking the human reality rubbing up against its elbows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}