Water I am
It was on a weekend; I was 13 years old. I wasn't fully awake, but I could hear people chattering inside our house. I woke up and my sister told me our uncle, Kahsaye, had passed away. As I stepped out of my room, I saw relatives preparing for the funeral. I felt bad, but I didn't know him well enough to be truly sad. He wasn't talked about much in our family, partly because he was deported from Addis Ababa to Asmara when the Ethio-Eritrean war broke out in 1998. Though he was born in Eritrea, he spent most of his life in Addis Ababa. Security forces took him from his home and put him on a bus to Asmara, leaving him with nothing.
Years passed, and in 2019, I had the chance to go to Eritrea with my mom and another uncle after the peace deal was struck in 2018, 20 years after the conflict began. The feeling about it was eerie. As a kid, it was a family secret, and we couldn't mention anything about Eritrea; suddenly, it was all forgotten. All those years labeling Eritrea as the villain and the propaganda - it just didn't feel right. What happened to the family secret? What about the people who had to leave their homes and live different lives?
I didn't know Kahsaye well, as I was just a kid when he passed. I knew him only through his belongings that used to sit on our shelf and from a few stories I heard from family. In 2020, when I had to pick a title for a small weekly project with friends, I was assigned "My Uncle." The first thing that came to my mind was the briefcase. It used to sit on top of a shelf inside our unfinished bathroom, and we had kept it for a long time. Inside were project files, cassettes, and books. After he was deported, his belongings started to arrive at our house, sent to us by his girlfriend. We weren't allowed to touch them, but years later, my sister and I would sneak out the cassettes to listen to them and sometimes record our voices over them. The project files we found were used to pretend-play as doctors or receptionists, scribbling on the pages. I made a couple of images of the briefcase and the items found inside it, but I was more curious about him.
Who was Kahsaye? I wanted to know him.
