by Y. Medhin

To be born Ethiopian and with an acute sensitivity to all things hot and spicy is akin to being born with a clubfoot in a family of marathoners.

Allow me to expound...

As a young child, I found my grandmother's excellent spaghetti with her phenomenal sigo much more to my liking than the TrE sga my sister would pinch from the mektefia, dip in a bowl of lava-red awazE before she popped it in her mouth and closed her eyes with sublime pleasure.

My father used to recount with unbecoming (to me) relish one of his favorite "got one over on the ferenj stories, usually after his second or third melekia of brandy, surrounded by other Ethiopians who snickered with an obvious sense of superiority over the poor nameless ferenj. It's a brief but painful story: overwhelmed (misled?) by a prankish sense of humor, my father fed the curious ferenj a qaria which may well have been a live electric wire by the way the ferenj's face glowed an alarming shade of purple-red, before he was galvanized into trying to drown himself with glass after glass of water. To melewes my feline metaphors, curiosity got his tongue. In a roomful of merciless revelers, I kept my empathy for the punishment-by-qaria guy to myself and pretended to find the story just as amusing as my awazE-licking family.

Whenever people asked, "What's your favorite food?" for the longest time, I really couldn't say - out loud. My adolescent peers (nearly exclusively ferenj) rattled off a long list of junk-food: pizza, McDonald's, and hotdogs usually topped their list. Driven by a sense of die-hard nationalism, I wanted to say doro weT! but apart from the blank stares (this was the mid 80s) I imagined my selection would elicit, I was really torn by the fact that my pallet honestly, truly, embarrassingly preferred a well prepared selaTa over any doro weT.

Then, in my 20s, I discovered the wonderful world of gomen. While my ferenj friends lamented the appalling amount of vegetables one was required to consume in order to ward off cancerous cells, I secretly reveled in the exquisite flavor of y'abesha gomen cooked within an inch of its life, wrapped inside a light piece of Tef injera and dropped inside my salivating mouth with a lover's care...mmm-mmm-mmm!! Is there anything more tasty? Well, I'm glad you asked, because the fasolia-Tiqil gomen-carrot mix with a smattering of siga dropped in there for flavoring is just this side of heaven, sautéed in nothing but oil and turmeric.

Faced with gebeta after gebeta of Ethiopian cuisine laden with be'miTmiTa-na-qibE yetelewese kitfo, the shimmering (to me frightening) red of doro weT and siga weT and y'beg Tibs surrounded by yetesenege qaria, I would invariably fill my plate with all the other dishes, mostly yellow and green in nature, and leave the "red" stuff to those with tongues of steel. It's not that I don't like all the red stuff. Frankly, I love it. Unfortunately, though, I think it hates me.

For the longest time, I thought that I must have been born with the tongue of a ferenj. Why else would my eyes begin to water at the mere sight of miTmiTa? But even this little fantasy of mine was unceremoniously done away with by an Irish (Irish!! for sobbing out loud!) friend who put away injera after injera wrapped around doro weT then dipped his siga Tibs in some awazE and downed it without batting an eyelash. I was floored, astounded...jealous, really, but I told him I was truly impressed by his ability to eat the spicy stuff with such (damn him!) ease. He said (and I'm grinding my teeth as I write this, even after all this time), "It's really not that spicy." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was being metaphorically slapped around by the Karma of the ferenj my father's qaria trick had nearly sent into cardiac arrest. Laughingly, I told him that there was something even better (will we never learn?) called miTmiTa. But, I told him with expert certitude, that that stuff would singe off all his taste buds and leave him gastronomically handicapped for the rest of his natural life. Bring it on, he said. Let me give it a try.

Our waitress looked from him to me, and assuming that I was either the Ethiopian descendant of the Marquis de Sade de gastronome or severely retarded, offered her soft opinion: "irgiTeNa new? isu'ko beTam yaqaTilal." Dutifully, I translated for him, echoed by our waitress's, "Yessss, verrrry hot!" Then, determined, I'm sure, to prove to me that he was indeed a man of steel, he shrugged carelessly and insisted on trying it - and ended up liking it...and eating it...right before my offended eyes! Oh, ye gods! How is it possible that this white man, probably raised on a strict diet of meat and potatoes, is able to maTaTam, without even shedding a bead of sweat, miTmiTa, the powdered fire of my ancestors, while I sat there and gaped at him with equal measures of ire and (dammit all!!) admiration? Was there no justice in this world? Trying to salvage what little pride I had left, I told him with sniffing indignation, "Yeah, I'm like...um...allergic to that stuff." Okay!?

So now, when we go out to one of the veritable smorgasbord of Ethiopian restaurants in the area, I no longer hide my disli...er...allergy for all things spicy. While the rest of my family peruses the qey part of the menu, I go straight (unapologetically and unashamedly) for the green and yellow selection. One day, I even gave in to the impulse to order ye shrimp aliCHa and only laughed when my brother insisted that it come on a separate tray while my grandmother's lips turned up in disgust as she asked, none too subtly, "min? min? Ya ye til neger? Ayeeeee, mebelashet!!"

ishi! Okay!! beqa!! min TaTa new!? If I were allergic to say....pasta, would you all be rolling your eyes at me like that? I didn't think so! So what if the three-year-old ferenj baby sitting with her awazE-loving family at the table next to us was licking qey weT off her chubby fingers!? I don't care. I'll bet you anything she won't eat her gomen, though....