LITMIR.BIZ

      1 1 Rahmato was one of the leaders who spearheaded the student movement and his encounter with reality is a good example of such experience: “There were times when I – and by extension my country – felt small.” “Hailu and I were chatting while walking on a road in a small town called Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. An old white man was sitting by the road. Spotting us, he began shouting abuses, ‘Hey, niggers! What are you doing here?’ I remember our protest, ‘No, no. We are not niggers; we are from Ethiopia.’ It took me about 3 or 6 months to come to terms with myself. I still harbour a feeling of shame.” Dessalegn Rahmato, in Zewde (2010, 35, 37).

      2 2 “Aksum,” UNESCO, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/15.

      3 3 Among researches conducted around teff, most believe, referring to Vavilov, that teff originated and was domesticated in Ethiopia between 4000 and 1000 BCE (Nicolai Vavilov, The Origin, Variation, Immunity, and Breeding of Cultivated Plants, trans. K. S. Chester [New York: The Ronald Press, 1951]). There are also those who think that it may even be older and date back to ancient times. For instance, J. A. Ponti points out that teff was introduced before the Semitic invasion of 1000 to 4000 BCE (“The Systematics of Eragrostis tef (Graminae) and Related Species” [PhD diss., University of London, London, 1978]).

      4 4 There is no historical record that indicates when Ethiopians started eating injera. However, there are oral narratives that indicate the origins of injera in 100 BCE (Robert B. Stewart and Asnake Getachew, “Investigations of the Nature of Injera,” Economic Botany 16, no. 2 [1962]: 127–130). In these narratives, injera is considered as a gift from a supernatural being when Ethiopians were in need. Eating injera is a real ritual – it is like accepting Holy Communion.

      5 5 Until recently, Ethiopia was the only country that used teff as a food item. Because of the restaurants that use injera as their main cuisine which are owned by the diaspora in the US and Europe, teff has become popular and has crossed Ethiopia’s border. Today, this tasty, protein‐rich, and gluten‐free grain has captured the attention of the research community as well. It has also been dubbed the next “supergrain” by the western mass media (e.g., BBC, VoA, the Washington Post, the Guardian, The New York Times).

      6 6 The basic principles of hitsinawinet, which include reterritorialization, interconnectivity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity, are the main stylistic and thematic features throughout these texts. As Retta recently discovered, these conceptual principles developed from the nature of injera are similar to “rhizome,” which is one of the major ideas developed by Deleuze and Guattari. Hence, hitsinawinet may be partly studied in relation to rhizome (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]).

      7 7 Deressa and Gebre‐Medhin, for instance, published a few poems in Poems of Black Africa, which Wole Soyinka edited and introduced (London: Heinemann, 1975).