When Lorna and I arrive home ten minutes later the house is lit and glowing. The kettle is hot and tea is brewing in the black Japanese cast-iron pot. Ficre has put raw almonds in a small, celadon bowl. It is late; the boys are sleeping.
We are so pleased to live like this, organized and open and welcome when friends pass through and we can bring them to Hamden, the hamlet adjacent to New Haven where we recently moved to live in a tan stucco Arts and Crafts–style house surrounded by a magic garden. Hamden, my first suburb, albeit a very urban one. Hamden, where Ficre fell in love with property that reminded him of the African “compound” where he grew up amidst flowers, inside walls his mother painted apricot, spring sky blue, rose violet, and butter yellow.
The next morning, I organize the children for school and send them off and Ficre makes coffee when our friend rises shortly after. We three drink our cappuccinos under the gazebo, which he’d painted in the delicate colors of the remembered borders of his mother’s gauzy dresses and shawls. Some might take the colors for straightforward pastels, or Monet water lilies, but they came from Africa, and from his mother. Hanging inside the gazebo is a mobile he fashioned from some slender, twisty branches that blew down in the yard after a storm. The mobile turns gently in the breeze. The morning is gray, and the yard smells of the fresh, damp earth of early spring.
As we walk toward the house, something makes us look back into the yard over our shoulders. There is a giant hawk sitting on the branch of our hundred-year-old oak tree, eviscerating and devouring a squirrel.
We freeze to watch. The raptor is utterly focused on its task. I watch Ficre and Lorna scrutinizing, their artist’s eyes recording what they see. The hawk attends to its business undisturbed. It is rapacious; it takes what it wants. The bloody ribbons of the squirrel’s entrails hang off the branch as the hawk eats the entire remains of the hapless rodent in about five minutes.
Ficre tells us he has seen the bird the day before, with the children, and shows us a short video he took on his phone of the creature on the same branch, eating another squirrel. I have seen a hawk a few times but never one so intent on its survival, never seen predation itself up close and in action. It is pure and elemental, necessarily violent, riveting, nature itself. We watch for as long as we can before we have to go off to the duties of our days.
Some weeks later, on his bureau, I find an acrostic Ficre made, which exhausted variations on the word hawk. He’d assigned numbers to the letters and then assigned those numbers to lottery tickets, which I later discover he bought by the dozens and secreted in the pages of the books he was reading.
Four
Ficre was born in East Africa in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, in the midst of a three-decade-long war with Ethiopia for independence. There the story begins. Almost every family lost a child during those long war years. Ficre’s eldest brother, Kebede, was always described as “a freedom fighter who fell in battle.” The dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam’s “Red Terror” claimed legions of young people in Eritrea and Ethiopia—500,000, by Amnesty International’s final count—and years later he was convicted of genocide in absentia while in protected exile provided by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Ficre’s parents’ bravery was in constant evidence in those years. They faced down soldiers who broke into their home while the children hid in the bedroom, and when Ficre was a teenager his mother retrieved him from the front lines where he’d gone to enlist and promptly arranged for him to leave the country. So at sixteen, Ficre was a refugee, first in Sudan, then Italy, then Germany, and finally in the United States at the age of nineteen, in San Jose, New York City, and then, for almost thirty years, in the perhaps unlikely place of New Haven, Connecticut.
Before he came to this country, Ficre was exposed to U.S. black power rhetorics—an early visual icon for him was Angela Davis’s luminous Afro—and thinkers such as Martinican Frantz Fanon. Black soul music from Sam Cooke to James Brown rocked in his head along with Fela Kuti’s Afro-beat and Bob Marley’s reggae. Thus culturally he was a global diasporist, a “conscious synchretist,” in his own words. He was proudly and resolutely Eritrean, East African, and African. At the same time, he was unambiguous about being a black Eritrean American.
In a 2000 artist’s statement, Ficre told his story and described himself and his creative influences:
“I started painting ten years ago, but I suspect I have been metaphorically doing so all my life. When I started painting, I just did it. I had never felt a stronger urge. The pieces that flowed out of me were very painful and direct. They had to do with the suffering, persecution, and subsequent psychological dilemmas I endured before and after becoming a young refugee from the Independence War.… Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life.”