W O R K > Flights
FLIGHTS (BEIRUT IS A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY)
text by Eric Gottesman; video stills by “Metasibya”
(published by ArteEast "The Art of Engagement," edited by Diana Allan)
I.
Before I arrived, before I read Darwish, before I knew where it was on a map and some time after my mother tried to describe what her father’s father told her about it, Beirut was a part of me. The story I remember most is about my mother’s father’s mother’s sister, great aunt Lathifi, at that time a young girl. Her parents packed their bags for the United States, gave her a few coins and asked her to go to the store to buy some bread for the journey. When she returned, they were gone to America. They rode her favorite donkey to get to the boat.
II.
“I asked her how she felt at the place. She told me that it is not good and that she missed her family. And I was counseling her every weekend. We met at the church; all the Ethiopians came. If the people they work for are fair, they bring them to the church so we can meet and talk about our family and talk about how we can help each other.”
– “Metasibya”, Beirut, speaking in 2006 about another Ethiopian girl she met in Beirut
In 2006, I departed Addis Ababa on a plane packed with 15 year-old girls. The girls giggled until the plane took off; I showed my row-neighbors how to use a seatbelt. The only other white people on the flight were a Lebanese family in first class. The last time I saw these girls was in a nervous bubbly group at passport control, herded by a stern, cloaked older woman and a man in a leather jacket. This story is not about me returning to Beirut long after my family fled; it is about a girl I knew in Addis Ababa, who fled for Beirut.
III.
Metasibya was a girl to whom I had been teaching filmmaking and photography in Ethiopia. She excelled and won a scholarship to attend a workshop in South Africa. There, she won praise for her acting and her clear sense of the kinds of stories she wanted to tell, informed by the intensity of her own story: her mother contracted HIV when Metasibya was young and begged for money to keep her daughter in a one-room home and in school. Metasibya sometimes walked past with her friends on her way home from school, her mother begging on the side of the road without acknowledging her; both knew that Meti’s friends would not look kindly on the daughter of a beggar.
When Meti returned from South Africa, she embarked on a new film with other children in the neighborhood that came together in a group we called "Sudden Flowers." The film which eventually won second prize at a film festival in Addis Ababa and was screened as part of a film festival in Rotterdam. The director of the film, Daniel, who also went with Meti to South Africa, ended up making the film without her. She had called him one day early in the shooting to say that she would leave for Beirut the next morning. He hastily organized a goodbye party for her with the twenty or so other members of Sudden Flowers. I was in Beirut at the time, so I could not attend. The photographs of the party show that everyone is crying and dancing. One of the boys told me later he did not know what to do, so he cranked up the music and they danced until the taxi took her to the airport.
IV.
Eighteen months later I was sipping coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut when I received a call from Daniel in Addis Ababa. He told me over the phone that Metasibya was coming to Beirut to work as a domestic servant and did I know anyone she could contact. I gave him a few phone numbers and before I got off the phone with Daniel, I asked him to give her his video camera.
I wanted her to have a camera so she could reflect on her experiences as she was going through them, so she could retain a distance that might provide comfort as she endured whatever she was about to endure. More than making a movie, I wanted Meti to continue making things, to be a viewer rather than an object. I just wanted her to have the camera; Daniel and I never discussed what would be done with the videotapes she shot.
The next day, I sent an email to a friend recounting our conversation:
…Meti decided last minute to work as a house-maid in beirut. she said she couldnt bear to watch her mother beg on the streets any longer. i got an email from danny yesterday. i can’t believe it. it happened so quickly: she decided on sunday and left on monday. can you imagine the system that is set up so that girls can decide, on the spur of the moment, that they want to leave? the other kids are so depressed about it. i don’t know what to feel. it is hard for me to conceive of coerced flight. i have to respect her decision. i worry for her. Plus, I didn’t think it through last night but i should have gone to the airport to meet her. i don’t know what it will be like to get in touch with her now. apparently, there are menus of girls, telling what training they have, what language, etc. but i’ve also heard from Lebanese men stories of pimping maids to other men. i really hope meti got that video camera and i really hope i can find her.
I seemed to have thought the video camera could protect her.
V.
On my flight back to Addis, only two of the other passengers were young Ethiopian women. I dreamt of the return voyage of a slave ship.
I left Beirut without hearing from Metasibya.
Nine months pass. Daniel receives infrequent phone calls from Beirut. Meti’s mother receives monthly payments of $100. I return to Addis Ababa to continue making films with Sudden Flowers. One day, my friend calls me to say that Meti is back, at home with her mother. When I arrive at her house, her mother makes me coffee.
VI.
At first it was okay. Madame liked me fine. Mister also liked me but he was busy. I did not see him much. The little kiddies loved me and I loooooove them. Especially the boy. He is such a beautiful boy and so funny. He looks like you.
I learned French and my English got better, didn’t it Eric? Eric, I will tell you, the first time, everything was fine. I met other Ethiopian girls. I had parties with them. Madame asked me to go with them to the country. They had a car and two houses. They let me take pictures with my video camera.
(What kind of work did you do?)
Anything. A-ny-thing. I cleaned. I cooked. I played games with the children. I feed them. I made a cake on the boy’s birthday and Madame she took pictures with my camera. C’est joli. We went to different places. Beirut is a beautiful country. I saved my money and sent it home to Mami. I sent her one hundred dollars every month. She told me that I was doing a good thing.
(Did she miss you?)
Ndi? Yes, of course she missed me, Eric. But she wanted me to stay, even when things went bad, she wishes I would go back.
(What do you mean “when things went bad?”)
Eric, I will tell you. Mister get very sick. He has cancer. He cannot stay at work and so he is home all the day. I am also home. The kiddies go to school. Madame take them to school and I stay with Mister. It is okay. I bring him a towel. I feed him. I help him take off his shirt. I think Madame gets jealous.
One day, Madame is there. Mister calls for me to help him. Madame goes to him and he tells, “I want Metasibya help me.” I run to help him. I try to help. I do my best. I help him and he feels better. But I look at Madame and she is hating me. Another day passes.
She take my video camera and she break it.
It is Saturday. I wake up. The door is locked. I am locked in the room. It is dark. There is no window. I knock and nobody comes. I wait. Nobody comes. I have no food, no water. I do everything in that room. I wait. For three days. I am locked in the room. I have nothing. I use toilette in that room.
After three days, she comes in with a man. I am scary. She takes my money. He take me and he drag me to the car. They leave all my things. They bring me to airport and I get on the plane direct to Addis Ababa. Now my head and stomach hurt and my lips blood. It was three days.
That woman treat me very bad. She take my things. She almost kill me. And now I am back here. I do not even have money to give to my mother. I told her what happened to me. She is happy to see me but she no understand. She wants me to go back. She not want me to stay. My sister is here, so she do not need me here. She think that it is better for me to have money.
Anyway, I will go back.
(Why will you go back? Aren’t you afraid it will happen again?)
Maybe it will happen again. I don’t know. Nobody knows. But I am okay. I will be okay. And I have nothing here. There I can work. I can send my mother money. It’s okay. I am strong. Do not worry about me. Ayzo!
VII.
Later, I received an air mail package in Boston. Daniel shipped me two tapes that Meti shot before Madame took away her camera. There is Daniel teaching Meti to use the camera, her suitcases, the boutiques and cafes and well-dressed children skipping out of Landcruisers on Bole Road on the way to the airport in Addis Ababa. Meti tried to record on the plane but the other girls were nervous so she stopped. Classical Ethiopian tezeta (bluesy Amharic song of longing) plays as the flight attendants ready the cabin.
The first images she recorded in Lebanon were at an Orthodox church on a mountain overlooking the sea. There are over a hundred young women there. She looks around at the big plates of food they had. She has her friend hold the camera and point it at her as she eats melodramatically, as if there is great abundance. It reminds me of the scene in one of fictional films in which she had acted; a homeless girl is brought into a rich household and given food. She crosses herself before eating and thanks God between bites.
Cut to a brief pan of her room. It is no larger than 1.5 meters by 2 meters. The bed touches three walls, adorned with images of Jesus, Mary, Bob Marley. There are fake flowers and two shirts pinned over the head of her bed: one says “I Ethiopia” in hand-sewn English, the other: “Africa Unite.” She slow zooms on the Bible. Amharic praise music is playing softly in the background.
Cut to a birthday party with twenty young Ethiopian girls, all servants, and one Lebanese man. On his shoulders is a young boy who looks to be a mix of Ethiopian and Lebanese blood. The women clap and sing and dance and smile at the young boy. It must be his birthday.
The room is filled with loud music. The man comes in and out of the frame. (Does he want to avoid being seen?) I imagine a story about him. That he secretly had an affair with his beautiful maid, she with her coy Ethiopian eyes and he with his Mediterranean search for eternal youth, a modern-day Beirut remix of Jefferson and Hemmings. The man takes his boy to these small parties in tight rooms packed with spicy food and women whose skin is darker than his….
She is behind the camera, moving constantly, panning, dancing, floating along with the women. At funerals back home, some of Meti’s friends are hired to wail and at weddings, to dance. She hands the camera to a friend and begins a choreographed routine in her powder blue winter parka. She is a phenomenal dancer but holds back here; does not want to stand out yet.
It is her first time shooting on her own, without Daniel or me. She is so far from home in this place, so alone in Beirut, like my great aunt Lathifi was, and yet she tends toward the typically Ethiopian capture of a familiar spectacle or ritual. In Ethiopian photo albums, in homes rich or poor, there is a series of photographs that catalogs the extravagant birthdays of a child family member’s life. The elements in these photographs, fake flowers, the positioning of the child behind the cake, tall candles, people having fun, glass bottles of soda, are replicated here. The women dance circles around the boy, who stands in the middle.
The tape cuts to a still shot of the white shirt above Meti’s bed. The audio track is Meti composing verbal letters to her friends and family, a video diary:
“Dear Woinshet, You are a good person. I will never forget you. Thank you for helping me and all the other children…”
Later scenes repeat this refrain. She lies on her bed, staring up at the shirt, narrating her prayers to this makeshift shrine to her country. The cloth is a trace of this other place. The light is from a bare bulb.
Almost half of the recorded footage depicts a television screen playing a French-subtitled English movie about Mother Theresa.
Back to the shirt hanging in the room. I realize now that this was the room in which she would later be locked for three days: no windows, no water, no toilet, no camera.
“I am in Beirut. It was good to be with you all. I missed you, especially the Sudden Flowers kids. It is cold here. I miss the games that we used to play…”
I try to imagine what “Madame” did for those three days.
Meti’s tezeta is the sound of her voice in this video, echoing off the walls of a room that would witness the pain that she would later choose to make temporary. It is the unrecorded cries that Madame did not hear and, after the infection in her mouth healed, and the doctor gave her medicine for her stomach, and she returned to her mother’s injera, her song was one that she decided to forget so she could fly again to another place.
There is one other birthday party on the videotapes. It is Meti’s birthday. It opens with Meti holding the camera and the man of the house lighting an explosive candle on top of a medium-sized cake. He tells his wife in French to take the camera so Meti can be in view, “Viens ma femme.” He directs Meti to come to the cake. He leads his sons in a ringing chorus of “Joyeuse Anniversaire.” He waves his arms in the air as though he is conducting an orchestra. He is joyous. There is no hint of the cancer inside of him, no hint of animosity. Sa femme holds the camera and immediately zooms in on Meti who is holding the youngest child.
VII.
As I am writing, I realize I must decide what to do with these tapes.
I met someone in Amman, a man with decades of experience in politics in the region. I told him about Meti. He said her story is relevant to a larger narrative in the Middle East. He told me, “The way we absorb difference will determine what will happen here.” He suggested some organizations who could use the videotapes that she made to raise awareness of other girls like here. I thanked him for the suggestion. He finished his cigarette and left.
I have watched her videos three times consecutively. I still do not know what they say and am aware of what someone (I?) could use them to say. As I look at the cassettes on my desk, labeled in Meti’s handwriting, I think about which organization to send them to and what they might use them to say. But I do not put the tapes in an envelope. I take one out of its case, slip it into the recorder and press play again.
IX.
The last video on the tapes is a series of clips shot through a car window. On the ring road in Beirut, the car passes political signs and advertisements in fading light. Meti turns the video camera on every time she sees a billboard with a fashionable woman on it.
On a different day, the car curves its way upwards, upwards, past small houses stacked on top of each other and rooted in the mountainside, past lines of trees covered in snow. As they rise into the mountains, the snow accumulates on the bottom of the windshield, the first snow Metisibya ever saw. We are in the mountains now. ABBA is on the radio. The windshield wipers beat a steady rhythm. At one overlook, the camera points back down toward Beirut into a thick cloud.
(Seeing this makes me think of my great aunt. I wonder if it snowed when Lathifi’s parents rode her donkey down these mountains onto boats that took them far across the sea.)
X.
In all the footage, Metasibya points the camera at herself exactly once and says, “My hair has grown long, and I have a lot of stories I want to tell you when we meet.” But when I arrive back in Ethiopia, she has flown again, this time to be a domestic servant in Bahrain, where, she told her mother, she would find a better life than what she had in Beirut.