Book #18: Held at a Distance

Title: Held at a Distance: A Rediscovery of Ethiopia
Author: Rebecca G. Haile

Another day, another book about Ethiopia. This time it's not an adoption memoir, but the story of a woman who was born in Ethiopia in the 1960s and escaped with her family in the mid-70s after her father, a university professor, became a political target and was nearly killed in an attempt on his life. Haile returned to Ethiopia in 2001 and writes about her experiences as a young child in Ethiopia, growing up as an immigrant adolescent in Minnesota, and finally returning to Ethiopia as an adult.

More than anything, Held at a Distance is a story of family. Haile spends most of her time in Ethiopia visiting relatives and ruminating on how these visits reflect how she sees herself as an adults straddling two cultures. As a child, she'd been a part of the upper class, attending an American school and living in a compound near the university. After her family fled to America, they were poor. But when Haile returned to Ethiopia, it was to a family that still had power, wealth and influence. Drivers, cooks, and other servants just seemed a matter of course in her discussions of place, and quite frankly, it shocked me that in a book about Ethiopia written in 2001 there was not a single mention of AIDS.

Overall, I enjoyed reading about Haile's experiences, and she did a good job making the tourist attractions she visited sound interesting, but the most powerful part of the story had not as much to do with a place, Ethiopia, as it did with love and family. Haile was drawn back to the land of her birth because she had family there to embrace her. For those children who are adopted from Ethiopia as babies and have no connections to the families they left behind, I wonder how strong the draw to their culture of origin may be.