Connected to his love of books and his insatiable curiosity of mind was his relationship to languages. He spoke seven living languages well—Tigrinya, Amharic, Italian, English, Arabic, German, and Spanish. He could say hello and thank you in literally dozens of other languages (“What could be more important to know in a language besides ‘thank you’?” he used to say) and was teaching himself Mandarin Chinese and French. His language acquisition was an emblem of the politics of colonialism and exile. Eritrea was for some time an Italian colony; he received a beautiful early education from Italian nuns and that was the language of extensive book study for him. Amharic, also, was a colonial tongue for a long, fraught period. Spanish came from long years of restaurant work, communicating intimately with the people he worked with in his kitchens. But his relationship to language also said everything about his respect for others, his sense of all of us as connected global citizens, and his constant curiosity to learn and then amalgamate different ways of thinking and being in the world. He was an Esperantist, someone who understood profoundly that languages are epistemologies as well as human bridges.
Ficre also connected language to visual expression. “Storytelling comes naturally in Eastern Africa, where the mainstay of culture is orally transmitted from generation to generation,” he wrote. “Many Eritreans are still illiterate, and the culture of visual communication is relegated to Coptic Orthodox church facades and interiors. Murals and mosaics of saints and angels abound. There is an equally strong presence of Islamic iconography on the exteriors and interiors of mosques. Concomitant to these two ancient presences in my growing up years in the capital city of Asmara were war-time, mural-sized portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and—depending if he was in favor—Chairman Mao, as well as the Ethiopian dictator Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.”
Ficre dreamed of one day opening an arts school in a peaceful Eritrea. “Of the few painters that currently live and work in postwar Eritrea, most are relegated to didactic renderings of social/realist views of the painterly praxis, and inasmuch they have not done much to instigate critical participation from viewers by speaking for themselves, instead they keep speaking about a pre-supposed community with pre-supposed needs and solutions. In the light of such a backdrop my dream school will be about self-exploration and expression. I believe in it will be found great seeds for healing and peace.”
Five
The next day is Friday. There is some bad news in the extended family, and Ficre and I have been talking about whether, when, and how to inform our children. Solo is soon to turn fourteen, and Simon is twelve. We speak with them after school at the kitchen table, where all important conversations happen. They cry to hear the sorrows of one of their beloveds, but we answer their questions together and then I drive them to basketball practice, and we have the kind of unguarded post-mortem talk we often have on substantial car drives. By the time we pull into the gym parking lot, the children’s eyes are dry and they seem to understand all they need to. On the way home after practice, we talk instead of what was upon us: the surprise fiftieth-birthday party they have planned for their father, which would occur the next day.
On Saturday, the boys and I are buzzy with barely managed anticipation as we try to go about our business as usual while surreptitious emails and calls come in with last-minute details and snafus. My brother stopped at the bakery in Bridgeport to pick up the cake and found the bakery closed. A friend from New York is waiting at a café downtown until the coast is clear. It is supposed to storm, and a friend from Boston is not sure that she can make it on the road. Finally Ficre and the boys leave the house and he takes them to see The Hunger Games.
I scurry around tidying up. In a few hours, friends begin to arrive, decked out and giddy. Solo and Simon and I had secured a New Haven party treat, The Big Green Truck: a truck with a brick oven for making pizzas with a cavalcade of toppings, plus salad, and gelato, and espresso. The pizza-makers are in on the secret and so park the truck out of sight by the side of the house.
Solo texts from the road, We are leaving downtown. We pulled out of the parking lot. We’re on Whitney Avenue. Everyone gathers in the library, rustling and giggling, until we hear Ficre’s key in the door. Surprise! His face wide open with joy as he goes to each one of us, You, and You, and You! We laugh, we talk, we eat, and we dance. In the living room, he and Amy, who he calls his Italian sister, exchange long hard shoulder rubs as they often do; his face is perfect contentment, eyes closed, as she rubs the tension out of his shoulders. I later ask Amy how Ficre felt to her that night and she said, “He surrendered to my hands. I never felt someone so relaxed.”
That night, he goes to sleep literally with a smile on his face. I gently poke him, thinking he is awake and playing sleep to entertain me, or still falling asleep, reviewing the evening in his mind. But he is deeply, profoundly in what the Senegalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor called, in his poem “To New York,” “a deep, negro sleep.”