Status Updates From De zieners

Incredible

Repeatedly quotes a Tigrinya proverb as "ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል—kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif—everything passes, love remains," except I'm looking at the Tigrinya trying to figure out how the alphabet works and realized that last word is not yiterif. Wordplay? Proverb's yiterif, ይተርፍ, "remains," has been changed to ትቕጽል, per google pronounced tǝq̲ǝṣǝl and translated as "continues." This story is one continuous paragraph.

They handed me to a refugee organisation as if I were a crumpled, dog-eared book that everyone had attempted to read before stopping midway through, having stumbled across difficult sentences, disturbing images, and then quitting and passing me on.

I remember those evenings when our garden was packed with adults and children who had come to read my father's books whenever there was a lull in the bombardment, when women who couldn't read or write would arrive with their bun sets and make coffee and popcorn in exchange for stories, when poets would read their unfinished work to gauge their audience's reaction, when, having read some of my father's books,...