“You do understand this project?” Abubech asked. Not knowing precisely what Abubech meant by this, Lannie had replied, “I come from a farm in Saskatchewan.”
“That’s good,” Abubech said. “But don’t confuse the two. This is a different kind of agriculture, with very different problems, and, in certain ways, different goals as well.”
“I think I know that. I mean, these people have tiny plots of land and they do everything by hand, I’ve even seen them weeding their fields by hand.”
“The difference is more acute than that,” Abubech said severely, once again fixing those stern black eyes on Lannie so that she couldn’t look away. “They farm almost entirely to feed their families, with a very little bit left over, if they’re lucky, to trade or sell at the market. Your Great Plains agriculture has always been strictly for profit — for cash. My guess is that your family never ate one handful of its own seed.”
“It’s true,” Lannie admitted. “Not since pioneer days. My aunt bought our flour in the grocery store.” She sees Iris struggling through the kitchen door with bags of groceries, handing Lannie the milk, the butter, the cream, the vegetables to put in the fridge, the toilet paper and bath soap to run upstairs with: I don’t know what I’d do without you, Iris would say, smiling down at her. And she would swell with little-girl pride on hearing that, even though she knew Iris was just trying to make her feel necessary and at home, never the burden she could not forget she really was. She shook herself, found the thread again. “My uncle sold every kernel he raised, just kept back enough seed for next year’s crop. Some years he’d buy seed if he wanted to try a new variety, or if he’d been using hybrid seeds.”
“So I can assume, by your use of the word ‘hybrid’ that you know what landraces are?” Lannie knew because she’d made it her business to find out before she’d come for the interview.
“I think so: natural seeds, not bred in laboratories, native to an area. Indigenous.”
“Close. Some of them have been selected and improved by local farmers; some have improved themselves naturally over the centuries.”
“I know your project is trying to keep Ethiopian agriculture from being taken over entirely by the new hybrid seeds we use in North America. And you’re also trying to keep biodiversity alive by not letting the landraces vanish.”
“We are indeed. But we are also trying to keep the small farmers on their land. What is there for them in cities but to starve? The
women to become prostitutes.” When she’d said “prostitutes,” her shoulders jerked with the force with which she spat the word. “Biodiversity — Ethiopian landraces — are our most precious resource. Few realize how infinitely precious.”
Abubech stood then, and walked to the window where a hibiscus tree flowered just outside, filling the space between the office building and its compound wall. Lannie knew Abubech probably didn’t even see the flowers. But in her plain navy suit and with her dark hair pulled back in a bun and the coral blooms framing her, with her erect posture, her neatness, the air of quietly contained sorrow that she wore all the time, against the brilliance of the flowers, perfumeless as they were, made Lannie hold her breath at so much beauty. Moments like this she forgot Africa’s cruelty, and this country’s woes, thought of Africa as the lost Garden of Eden.
Abubech turned slowly to her. “For myself, I do this work because I am tired of seeing people dying of hunger. I am sick with it.” She walked back to her desk and stood looking over Lannie’s head across the room, glancing at her only occasionally as she spoke. “That is what this project will do: provide food security for the farmers. Improved landraces have high yields here in the country where over the centuries they’ve adapted, selecting themselves for optimum performance. Here they give a much better yield than the seeds you Europeans and North Americans use, and they give it without chemical fertilizers or herbicides or pesticides, none of which, for the most part, local farmers can afford. And which, in the end, do much damage to the soil, to water, and so on. And because of their genetic diversity, they are unlikely to all succumb to one disease or to certain adverse conditions. Unlike the hybrid seeds with their absolute genetic uniformity which are then completely destroyed by one scourge, landraces will not all die — something will be left to harvest. It is — it can be — a major contribution to food security in this famine-ridden country.” She paused, smiled briefly at Lannie. “Forgive me, I am making a speech. I am perhaps too serious.” Lannie murmured softly, “No, please. I want to hear.”
Abubech sat down then, raised her eyes to Lannie’s with a look so fixed, so clear-eyed, that in the face of it Lannie’s mouth went dry. She
wanted more desperately than she’d realized to be a part of this, if only because she wanted to be with this woman, to gain strength from her, or to float for a while in the steady wake of Abubech’s fortitude.
“I’m tired out,” she heard herself say. She would, bit by bit, when she knew Abubech better, tell her about her years as a relief worker doing whatever needed doing, checking out rumours, mixing batches of feed, weighing children; about watching people die of starvation, especially the children; about how angry the endless, hopeless poverty of the rural people made her, in a nation rich with mostly undeveloped resources; about her former disgust at the arrogance of the ruling class and their cruelty and their corruption and their negligence.
Knowing all the while that her deepest reason was that she needed to do something that, at the very least, would not add to her burden of shame, that would not waste what little strength she had left in worry over whether she was doing something to justify her very existence, her privileged, screwed-up, selfish existence. And Abubech and her agency had found something that seemed to Lannie to make clear, inarguable sense. Not that, in the beginning, there hadn’t been plenty of arguments with government officials until they began to turn from dubious toward it to supporters of the project. The results already were speaking for themselves. And always, at back of all this, she did not want to leave Africa. She was in love with Africa.
“Yours is the only project I’ve ever heard about that makes any kind of long-term sense to me. I want to help. Please let me help.” Abubech at first looked faintly surprised, then amused. She looked down at the papers in neat piles on her desk. After a moment, during which Lannie cursed herself for letting her own desperation leak into view, at the same time wondering if Abubech had a husband, children, a real life somewhere out in the ragged, tumultuous city around them, Abubech began speaking again as if Lannie hadn’t said what she’d said.
“You know that Global 2000 is also present in this country?”
“I’m not sure what that is,” Lannie said.
“It is an American initiative, with the backing of the World Bank. Introducing hybrid seeds and high technology, high input farming
techniques like the ones you use in North America, here in Africa, because they get such high yields, as an answer to the problem of food shortages and famine. Former president Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center is behind it. I do not know who else.”
“Like the Green Revolution?”
“It appears to be.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lannie said. “The Green Revolution got high yields at the expense of every single small farmer wherever it was introduced.” At this, she saw new interest appear in Abubech’s eyes.
Fatima has begun to roast the coffee beans and a rich, heavy scent, one that normally Lannie savours, is rising from them. Today it makes her sick. If she tells Abubech how she’s feeling these days, Abubech will make her take a holiday. A holiday! The word makes her think of a Canadian family heading out in their overloaded minivan for Banff or the Pacific, of the hordes of tourists she saw in Greece, Crete especially.
Crete — the warm blue Aegean, the welcome heat so strong it could melt muscle and bone, of Dimitri, his jealousy, his pride in her as if she were a racehorse he owned or a new sportscar. Sitting side by side in a taverna by the sea drinking the tawny Cretan wine, listening to musicians playing wild Greek music, the dancers snapping their fingers, their gleaming black boots — even dancing themselves sometimes. And Dimitri’s friends with them, rich men like himself, with their gorgeous, long-limbed European girlfriends, their cultivated, wilful vapidity.
She shudders, and then she’s lying, her palely freckled white limbs tangled with Dimitri’s golden ones, in his big, square bed, the moonlight pouring in through the open terrace doors, spilling across the dark tiled floor, bathing them in its cool light. It’s true that even as she hated him, she’d been in love with him; she’d stayed as long as she did for those endless nights in his moonlight-flushed bed.
And the long lazy days she spent on the terrace in the shade, lifting her head from her book now and then to stare out over the roofs of the whitewashed resort town clinging to the precipitous, rocky
slopes of the island, running down its sides to meet the sun-sparkled Sea of Crete. She thinks now perhaps she had been happy then, steeping herself in
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
and whatever other versions of the Greek myths she’d been able to find in translation.
Other times, while Dimitri slept or went off to do business in Athens, she took his car and drove to the ancient ruins which were everywhere on Crete, mixed in with bronze plaques telling of the horrors of the Second World War, whole villages of women, in preference to being raped and killed by the Germans, grasping hands and leaping off cliffs just as they had done three thousand years earlier. She could not imagine the women of Chinook joining hands and singing as they leaped off Chinook’s clay cliffs to their deaths. Lying there on her blue-and-white canvas deck chair, she thought that without a history fraught with war, murder, blood, sacrifices, with gods and goddesses replete with human desires and passions, it was impossible to imagine any of these things except as insanity. She wondered if the people of Chinook, placid and smug as she remembers them, were better off without them or not. They were wealthier, but they were not better off.
Day after sweltering, dry day she parked Dimitri’s car on the hard-packed dirt lots, paid her entrance fee and wandered through the palace at Knossos, the ruins of the ancient city of Gortyn, the wonders of the palace at Mali, the palace-city of Phaistos, the long-buried town of Gournia, and a dozen other sites whose names she’d forgotten. A whole universe of human desire and its fulfilment or failure existing before her own world had been dreamt of. It seemed to her then that if she could only sink into that city’s or palace’s life as it was three thousand years earlier, she would come to feel at home, because of all the things that counted, what could possibly be different?
She walked the ruins in the baking heat, her guidebook in one hand, her bottle of water in the crook of her arm, sliding slowly back into the Minoan world, then, hours later pulling herself out of it to get in Dimitri’s car and drive herself back to the whitewashed villa set on the rocky cliff overlooking Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” And she would ponder what it all meant — she from a country without a
past, at least not for her people, cut off irrevocably from her European ancestry. Not able to make a new world, try as they might, and the United States always with them, overshadowing their own possibilities even while sinking further and further into greed, violence, and corruption.
And yet the clean sweep of the prairie; it spoke to her sometimes in her dreams, whispering to her of its purity, of its power to sweep away history, to outlast all histories, to be stronger than the mightiest king, stronger even than any god — or perhaps, as the Native people said, it was itself a god. She thought that she had somehow fallen into the dreams of the pioneers, her own grandparents and great-grandparents who imagined the land as much as they saw it, and then set about creating that dream. Then her heart ached and she longed for the wind rushing through the grass, for its sweet and pungent fragrance in spring, for the liquid call of the meadowlark on a summer morning, for the lonesome melodics of a band of coyotes carolling from a windswept grassy hill to the star-ridden sky.
She thought — she thought a lot of things: that only land is more powerful than history, but only if it is not wholly transformed by the hands of human beings; that maybe some day she would be able to go home, followed, always, by the fear that the home she dreamt of was no longer there, the grass had been ploughed up, the buffalo were dead, there were fences everywhere, and the stink of diesel fuel and oil wells tainted the once-clean air.
Abubech is speaking to her. She comes to herself with a start, looks questioningly toward her, but Abubech has turned back to Fatima, they’re laughing together. Pulled into her fatigue, she knows some kind of respite is needed, but she isn’t sure what would help. With her money almost gone, she won’t squander what’s left on a holiday. When she has only enough left for a plane ticket home, will she buy one and go? Nausea grips her again.
“I have no past,” she’d said to Rob Sargent as they sat together on the terrace of the café all the workers frequented in the town near their camp. “I renounce my personal history.” And when he’d been angry
with her, had shouted at her, causing the local men sitting against the back wall to swivel their heads and stare, she’d said, “In a country like Ethiopia what is the use of a personal history? A personal history is meaningless in Ethiopia.” She had meant much more than merely that cut off from one’s own country it became meaningless, or there was no one to share it with, but that was the significance Rob decided to take.
“Share it with me,” he’d said. “I’ll tell you mine.” But she didn’t want to hear Rob’s history, it was too intimate, it would be more than she could bear. Nor did she want to know why he’d come to Ethiopia. If he told her, she was sure she would be able to read his weakness in what he said, and she didn’t want to know in what way he was weak. It took all her energy to deal with her own, she had none left for anybody else’s. It seemed to her that his red hair shot sparks in the light falling from the bulbs strung up against the back wall, his blue eyes darkened, boring into hers, searching, trying to fasten themselves to her.