How to Make a Life From Scratch

Critical thinking develops when you go outside of your comfort zone, when you eat a different bread from the one you grew up with. Challah, chapati, hot-water cornbread, pita, injera, baguette — how wonderful to eat a different bread, a differently spiced meal. How wonderful to sleep next to someone who might be dreaming in a language different from your own.

Ficre Ghebreyesus, my late husband, the refugee I married. He fled death squads, hid from soldiers when they broke into his home, saw classmates disappeared. This was the norm for every family he knew. At 16, he was sent away by his mother to save his life. He journeyed on foot to Sudan, then Italy, then Germany, and from there, to the United States, eventually landing in New Haven.

Here is what he did when he came to the United States: He worked, usually three not particularly enjoyable jobs at a time requiring multiple bus trips, long and lonely nights. And then he made friends. And then he became part of his community. And then he built and enriched that community.

Ficre considered himself African-American, African, Eritrean, East African, Asmarino, human. He lived in those identities. He had read more books than anyone I knew, spoke eight languages, started a restaurant that fed a community for years and made 882 paintings, some of which will be shown at a one-man show at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in September.

“I don’t want the children to be refugees,” my husband would say, and we’d share a dark, knowing laugh. “But I do want them to know what we refugees know: that you can make your life from scratch. I want the children to have the strength and wile of survivors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/opinion/sunday/how-to-make-a-life-from-scratch.html

Elizabeth Alexander (@ProfessorEA) was President Barack Obama’s inaugural poet in 2009. She is the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the author of, most recently, “The Light of the World.”