Notes from the Hyena's Belly: Memories of My Ethiopian Boyhood

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

In the 1970s, Ethiopia battled with famine, guerrilla warfare, invasion
from Somalia, and the infamous Red Terror of the junta that came into
power after the killing of Haile Selassie. During this period, the
author was a teenager who joined student demonstrations, became a
guerrilla with a liberation movement, escaped death many times,
witnessed murder and gratuitous cruelty visited upon people and animals,
and somehow managed to get himself an education and finally leave his
homeland for Europe and then Canada.

The sad history of a child in a sad country is tempered with fables,
often heard from his mother, and with the dry humor of his own voice.
Venal idiocies of corrupt governments are revealed with a firm tongue in
cheek, but neither writer nor reader can avoid the culminating horror of
the Red Terror.

Occasionally, the writing bogs down in historical narrative, and the
sketchy map at the back might have been more helpful at the front. But
there are flashes of poetry as Mezlekia tells the history of a people
who “gathered about themselves, like rags, what life there was left”
and relates astonishing and often amusing stories of teachers and
priests, friends and family, and animals on the streets.

Mezlekia’s mother once told him, “No animal goes out of its way to
exterminate his neighbour”; some years later, she was killed when
Somali soldiers opened fire on the bus in which she was riding. In the
mid-1980s, sensing that his own luck could not last forever, Mezlekia
flew to Toronto and asked for help. An immigration officer treated him
kindly and told him the help the Canadian state was prepared to give. It
is a small but moving moment in the story of a man and a country and, as
he finally reminds us, of countries all over Africa.