Merekat: Notes on a Blessing

      When Emnet Getahun turned eleven her family decided to go back to their birth country of Ethiopia after years of planning. She was the youngest daughter, and the only one born outside Africa.  At the terminal she sat facing a large window, watching planes arrive from across the globe as an orange sun set over a vast concrete runway. She was giddy and anxious to see the birthplace of her family.  Ethiopia was the setting of her parent’s stories she used to beg them to retell her every night. It was the backdrop of their political tragedies and their adolescent melodramas. She could not wait to associate the actual landscapes to her imagined visions. Waves of anticipation rushed though her arms and legs like electricity. When her plane gently lifted from the airstrip she felt a shiver, like trickling ice water, race down her spine.  Miles between her and the United States she watched her parent’s calm expressions framed by a window of white clouds. She daydreamed about the lush green mountains and thirteen months of sunshine in her ancestral homeland. 

            After a week of staying with her grandmother in the city, her family traveled to the countryside village of Welkete to visit more relatives. The first thing Emnet noticed when they arrived were numerous circular palm thatched huts. Dozens of villagers were standing outside their homes eager to see and greet her family. Three men stood in the center of the crowd, surrounding a sleek red coated cow. The tallest man with thick arms and a pointed blade stepped towards them and began to speak in lyrical Amharic. Because Emnet’s grasp on the language was limited, her mother explained that the village was slaughtering their best cow in honor of the family’s visit.

            Ten relatives made a circle around the cow and began to chant a ceremonial blessing. They thanked the cow for sacrificing her life and they said a family blessing, a Merekat, for Emnet, her sisters and her parents. As the man with the knife bent over to slit the red cow’s throat, it languidly turned its head and locked its wide marble eyes with Emnet’s. Her skin crawled. The large animal continued to stare at her as the fixed blade was buried deep in the flesh of its neck. At the first gush of blood Emnet began to feel nauseous. Her head was light and vacant, as if her brain were hovering a few feet above her shoulders.

            The heifer’s pupils rolled inside her skull to reveal the whites of her eyes. Blood spilled from her, staining the men’s faces and arms. The cow gave a low guttural moan, too closely resembling a human’s, and toppled limply to its side. Its long thin legs jumbled loosely like a marionette’s. Blood leaked from the creature’s cracked skull and opened neck, to form a halo in the dirt around its head. Dogs throughout the village smelt the fresh kill and swarmed around the carcass, licking up the warm blood.

            There was something beautifully horrific about watching the beast slowly bleed its life away. The scene was magnificently corrupt. Emnet wanted to turn her head but her eyes would not allow her. She stared, unblinking and transfixed until she felt she might explode. Every part of her body was straining in a different direction. Her stomach turned over and over to the rhythm of the blood pounding inside her veins. Her heart beat so forcefully against her chest she feared it might leap out through her slack mouth. Emnet felt fragile, weak and disconnected from the scene before her. Her remorse for the creature’s life began to crescendo until it reached a zenith of pressure inside her skull, and finally released through her eyes. Tears clouded her vision until she was free from the limp, twisted vision before her.

            The villagers began to strip the meat, as they always had, and as their ancestors had before them. More men gathered around the body and shared the work of skinning the hide. They laughed at the soft American girl whose emotional response they could not understand. She knew she was embarrassing herself and this realization exasperated her sobbing. She cried for the animal’s life and she cried for her own displacement.

            As her family laughed and joked with the villagers in Amharic. Her older sister Tehut tried to ease her sister’s sniffling, “Emnet, death is a process of life. How do you think we get meat? Animals don’t just waltz up to our plates and conveniently die of natural causes.”  No one could understand why Emnet had reacted so strongly to the death of the animal.

            For Emnet it wasn’t just the cow which had been slain, but her idealized vision of Africa. She was proud of her Ethiopian heritage but this ritual felt as foreign to her as the English language must have initially felt for her father. On the airplane back to the United States she thought about how romanticized her expectations of her parents’ homeland had been. In Ethiopia, she was as conspicuously American as a processed hamburger. A part of her naivety died alongside the red coated cow the day of the blessing. Although the recognition stung at first, she understood more clearly than ever how her identity was convoluted. She was in a cultural limbo. The awareness was as poignant as waking from a warm dream to discover her house on fire. The realization struck her as stridently as the blade into the flesh of a sacrifice.