Callaloo

1

A friend of mine, having left his teaching position in the United States to return to his native Addis Ababa, found a commotion in his neighbourhood one evening. A semi-urbanized peasant family discovered that their donkey had given birth to a useless thing. Inquiring, what the teacher found was that the newborn donkey was a sight to behold. It had pretty eyes and adorable ears, but this was precisely because the baby donkey was an albino—useless as a beast of burden. Why keep such a thing alive? “Why would God spite us in this way?” the peasant family asked. My friend took the albino home, named it Sunshine, and kept her in his garage. Sunshine would only feed at the hour when day turned into night, and just before the night turned into day. The only colors she would know are indigo blue. My friend also kept the same feeding hours as the donkey, but always accompanied with a bottle of vodka. You see, love is a kind of impossibility. But that is no reason to not feed Sunshine!

In an agrarian country, beasts of burden resemble the way the souls of the people bend. “Beautiful is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.”¹

2

I was thinking what we take to be love I have taken to be loving conduct. My parents loved me and then said go into the world and do good. In any case it is true that through loving conduct, love becomes a practice, not an abstract entity that one constantly craves after. Instead, loving conduct is a practice directed at those towards whom one feels fraternity. Loving conduct produces love sometimes; in other times it may simply produce a community of love (socialism?), which does not mean I love everyone in that community, but that I love the community. Yes, the community is ground and end, and not a means. It cannot be external to me. How can it ever be? If it is external to me, this is the result of the mystification and operations of power. I must fight to have my love returned to me. In fraternity, the loving practice is constitutive of the relationship between the other and me. In this sense love does not manage one’s relationship to a thing, including other people (as is the case in classical political economy). Rather, in fraternity there is more than a common good, there is a common will: a morally defined bond between those who choose to be together through indivisible ends: the community as ground and end, (re)discovered through ordinary daily practice. [End Page 819]

But in truth, under alienated circumstances love as practice comes off in the private sphere as manipulation. The beloved wants to be adored as they ought to be. Silently.

My friend told me that the Greeks believed that friendship was only possible as a public virtue. He said that there were too many slaves in the domestic sphere for love to be possible at home. Can it be true that the domestic love I received from my parents made me into a Greek man?

3

Careful Phaedrus.

4

“Man is free, land is tributary.” Alternative translation: “A soldier is free, land is tributary” (sixteenth century Ge’ez proclamation). Raising the question as to what is a man, and what is the one who extracts surplus so that tribute can be passed to the soldier? [End Page 820]

5

Certainly religion, language, trade routes, and agriculture systems are never co-terminus. But it is interesting the way in which a notion of civilization (most probably an eighteenth century invention) has been assimilated by many people, only to serve a very nineteenth century (or British or German) purpose which is to erase the ample documentary evidence that does exist that would suggest the concrete ways in which people are co-terminus.

[End Page 821]

6

We would watch the sun rise, or the fog descend over the mountains—like a brother...