Confronted with erasures and distortions of their past, Black diaspora communities seek to recuperate and retell collective histories in service of a shared present and legible future. However, as Stuart Hall posited in 1990, such recuperation is not a mere “unearthing,” but a recreation of history that produces and is produced by collective identity. Diasporic identity does not stand apart from the signs and stories that seek to represent it but is formed by those very evocations of the past. This process is less concerned with a singular position of truth (though it may be corrective of common distortions) or a location of origin (though it may hold a real or imagined site of reference). Instead, diaspora rearchives history by dynamically engaging both its emotional resonances and extant power structures.

An especially powerful genre of historical narrative employed to produce collective identity is biography. The story of a life can be made to represent a people or scaled down to the unit of the individual, in all its specificities and contexts. What then, must we do with the story of a life, in the words of poet Lemn Sissay, “that's not happened”? What power exists in the biography of a child, for example, who has been made famous for historical occurrences not of his own doing? In the Ethiopian diaspora, one such life has long animated the imagination of writers and storytellers: Prince Alemayehu, son of Emperor Tewodros II (1855–68). Current debates about inter-country adoption, repatriation, and the diaspora's terms for migration and displacement are negotiated across the worlds Alemayehu reached beyond his own volition.

In March 2019, the director of London's National Army Museum handed two locks of Emperor Tewodros's hair to Ethiopian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Hirut Kassaw. The hair was taken in the wake of the Battle of Maqdala (1868)—one of Britain's most expensive military expeditions in the nineteenth century—along with over three hundred and fifty manuscripts, dozens of royal treasures, and the emperor's son, Alemayehu.

Introduction

According to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published in 2018, more than 244 million people across the world live in countries other than their country of birth; indeed, by the end of 2016, over 22.5 million people were refugees (IOM 2018). The same IOM report indicates that 16 million Africans live in other African countries, with another 16 million living outside of the continent altogether. Nonetheless, in recent years migration from sub-Saharan Africa has attracted increasing attention from scholars and European and African policymakers alike, focusing on the flow of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

The international migration of Ethiopians is not a recent phenomenon at all. But Ethiopian mass migration has become more prevalent in recent decades. The complex political and security situation in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the protracted conflict that followed (domestically and internationally) serve as a critical juncture in Ethiopian migration (Semela and Cochrane 2019). At this time, political dissidents and the intelligentsia sought opportunities and took refuge elsewhere, while ordinary people who opposed the Derg military regime (1974–91) fled persecution and reprisal. In the later stages of the Derg regime, new insecurities emerged (both physical and political), resulting in waves of migration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including after that regime had been toppled (Estifanos n.d.). The past two decades have witnessed a growing stream of people moving from the countries in the Horn of Africa—especially Ethiopia—through Sudan and Libya or other alternative routes, and into Europe. Even though a huge number of lives are lost along the way, migrants are still determined “to try their chances” in the face of very real, existential threats.

The literature on migration largely focuses on discovering why migrants originating from developing countries want to travel to developed nations. Reasons include structural differences in labor, income, capital, and more between regions and rational decision-making, whereby individuals decide to move to regions with less intense labor and high wages (Arango 2000, 285; Jennissen 2007, 413). On the one hand, this individual decision-making can be seen on a household level, that is, as a means of diversifying risk (Massey et al. 1993, 439; while, on the other hand, the concept of migration networks might give us a more universal picture, whereby networks themselves spread and fuel further migration (ibid., 448).

Wilfried N’Sondè's The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits

Wilfried N’Sondè's The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits allow our investigation of the migratory imagination to explore two novels centered on the postmigratory condition in the suburbs and projects of Paris to showcase the expansive imaginary capacity of the African migration novel. The migratory route carved out by the protagonists from the Republic of Congo to Paris is often overlooked if only because of its underrepresentation. The Republic of Congo (colloquially known as Brazzaville) is often overshadowed in historical discourses and our collective imaginary by the Democratic Republic of Congo, no doubt because of the latter's tumultuous colonial and postcolonial history that has garnered significantly more scholarly attention. Historians have been busy producing massive and popular tomes such as King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism by Adam Hochschild, Congo: The Epic History of People by David Van Reybrouck, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns, to name just a few of the monumental historical studies that have recently emerged.

On the literary front, however, the creative works emerging from the Republic of Congo have been gaining increased attention due in no small part to Indiana University Press's commitment to translating and publishing Francophone African literature by authors from the Republic of Congo in its Global African Voices series. Wilfried N’Sondé is one author the series is committed to translating and publishing. N’Sondé is often classified as an “Afropean” author because he is firmly integrated in and, more importantly, contributes to European culture (Thomas “The Heart of the Leopard Children” xi). He hails from Brazzaville, was raised in Paris, and is a practicing musician living in Berlin. His literature carries the traits of an Afropean sensibility and aesthetic.

The soldiers as referenced in the above quotation are those who fought in the Nine Years’ War, 1596–1603, between what was termed the Gaelic order of lordships and the rule of the Tudors in Ireland. At the start of this war, Sir Henry Wallop, the English Treasurer at War, had petitioned Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, to request money to buy Hibernia (Irish) mantles to protect their soldiers against the weather and the Irish agues (strains of typhus) as evidenced in detail in the quotation. However, the marginal comment greeted the request with a warning that the wearing of this mantle would function as a mechanism to associate the civilised (England) too closely with the primitiveness of the Irish identity. In fact, by 1600, mantles in the Irish style were issued to the army, possibly in response to the war dispatches that reported more soldiers dying of ‘poor food, poor lodgings and the raw, wet Irish climate than through any military engagements’. Wallop was not alone in his observations of the underlying science of how the mantle was used to protect health in that ‘raw, wet climate’.

Introduction

Approximately 20 percent of Canada's population are immigrants. Along with Eritrea, Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria, Ethiopia has become one of the primary countries sending immigrants to Canada. As a result, a growing Ethiopian immigrant community is beginning to form a significant diaspora within the Canadian population. Immigrant economic integration has become a key government priority; however, the processes of immigration and settlement are inherently stressful, and therefore integration necessitates that the psychosocial well-being of immigrants be considered. As one of the largest groups of African immigrants to Canada, Ethiopians address well-being for the most part by opting to utilize and contribute to communal mechanisms in their diasporic community that support health and well-being. For Ethiopians, health is derived both from a state of equilibrium within the body and a balance between the individual and the external world. Communal mechanisms are integral in settlement and integration because, being aligned with Ethiopians’ traditional social roots, they attend to their mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being, which are disrupted as a result of migration.

This chapter will explore the ways in which a series of communal mechanisms— the forming of a diasporic community, the establishment of religious institutions within that community, Mehaber (a collection of individuals with a common interest or identity that meet regularly) and Iddir (informal insurance)—exist as systems of support that offset the mental health risk factors associated with migration and integration. This exploration focuses on how these practices are shaped by the ways in which their well-being is threaded between their homeland and the host country through their interactions with transnational social fields. This chapter will discuss how these multidimensional (social to economic) communal mechanisms organize well-being, and how well-being is symbiotically organized by community. This chapter has important implications for: (a) how well-being is conceptualized, understood, and practiced cross-culturally in settlement and integration work; (b) the way well-being, as lived through community practices, structures responses that support further well-being; and (c) how cultural mental health interventions can be advanced through community mental health approaches that conceptualize community as transnational. Last, readers should note that there is not a one-dimensional story of the Ethiopian immigration experience. This work acknowledges the complicated, nuanced, and diverse experiences that make up the Ethiopian immigrant story and, as such, this chapter presents one aspect of a vital part of diaspora life seldom researched.

Introduction

Zemzem is a young Ethiopian woman in her early twenties who had lived several years in the Middle East. When we met in a small cafe on Bole Road, she was dressed in a black abaya, her hair covered with a head scarf, and accompanied by her brother and his wife. Zemzem's young and timid appearance disguised her extensive life story, and when she began to talk, she hardly came to a halt. Born in a village in the south of Ethiopia, she grew up with an aunt in Addis Ababa because her parents were unable to provide for her. When she was sixteen years old, Zemzem migrated to Qatar to take up paid domestic work for an Indian family. When her employers went on pilgrimage to Mecca, she joined them but got lost at the Kaaba, between hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. She stayed in Saudi Arabia, had numerous jobs, and was deported during the large-scale deportation campaign of the Saudi government in 2013. When we interviewed her in August 2014, Zemzem was living with her brothers in Addis Ababa and desperately looking for a job. She would like to set up her own business, but if that did not work out, she was planning to migrate again.

Zemzem is one of the millions of Ethiopian women who have migrated as domestic workers to the Middle East in the past twenty years, and in doing so have become part of the Ethiopian diaspora. While labor migration was restricted under the socialist regime of Mengistu, freedom of movement has become a constitutional right under the government that came to power in 1991. Ethiopia has become one of the main “sending countries” of domestic workers to the oil-rich countries on the Arabian Peninsula and to Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt (see de Regt 2010; Fernandez 2010; 2020; Minaye 2012). In this chapter, I will use the experiences of young Ethiopian women who migrated to the Middle East to study issues of mobility and immobility. The public discourse in Ethiopia about women's migration to the Middle East emphasizes women's immobility; many spend their lives in the houses of their employers and face abuse and exploitation. Yet, a closer look at their life stories shows the many different instances of mobility and the moments in which they are able to exert some agency, albeit under restricted circumstances.

This important event in the life of the Norwegian King Harald Greycloak (b. c. 935, d. c. 970 CE), described in Old Norse by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson in his thirteenth- century history of the Norwegian kings, Heimskringla, appears to lie at the root of some conclusions that have been drawn about the origins of the shaggy pile weave textiles in Norway, known as röggvarfeldur or röggvarvefnaður in Iceland. Vararfeldir is another term used to describe woven mantles with a piled surface that had been in vogue around Northern Europe from the sixth century and survived to the late medieval period. Their true origins are to be found in Antiquity, with the earliest documented examples of this cloth type appearing in Bronze Age Sumeria, 5,000 years ago (see discussion on pp. 69–72, below).