I Built a World on Pluto
When I was around ten years old, I had built an entire imaginary world on Pluto.
I consumed science books voraciously and used what I learned as a framework for the stories I told my little sisters. Most of them revolved around a duo I’d made up-1 & 2-and all the quests they embarked on. I must have known that Pluto was a desolate wasteland. But in my stories, it had pastel-colored landscapes & was populated with empathetic creatures.
Every day, I couldn’t wait for the nightfall when we would switch off the lights, and I’d take us all there again. My sisters believed that the place I described was real.
In retrospect, those stories were not very far away from my reality in Saudi Arabia then. My family and I were like aliens who created our own little habitat together. Since we hadn’t stayed in one neighborhood long enough to form deep connections with anyone, we didn’t get into the urban sub-cultures that had sprung up in our city of residence, Jeddah.
Instead, my sisters and I made our own game rules, a song out of all the countries & capitals of the world-which was aptly named ‘the Afghanistan-Kabul song,’-and a ‘language’ which was really just a combination of three bastardized languages.
But I was still curious about the countries beyond our region. So, every night, I waited for the weather forecasts to see where on this strange planet people would be lucky enough to experience some rain or snow. I found it frustrating that people complained about glorious natural occurrences like rainfall. Given how rarely it rained in Jeddah, those other locations might as well have been on another planet.
Dad had let us know early on that Ethiopia-where he had been born-was one of those countries with regular rainfall. Both our parents had to flee their birthplace in the 1980s because of the Ethiopian Civil War. But he told us that his dream was to move us all there someday. Every annual celebration, he prayed that we celebrate that event in Ethiopia the following year, and this repetition felt like a recurring ritual throughout the first fourteen years of my life. For a while, I was optimistic: I had a world on Pluto and a home across the sea.
The Arab Spring was the beginning of the end of that childhood.
The Saudi king came on television and announced the beginning of a new era, one that meant companies would be forced to fire many immigrant employees to fulfill a minimum citizen-to-immigrant ratio. On paper, the transition was supposed to run smoothly. But the reality included hate crimes against foreigners and people dying of dehydration while waiting for document processions at their embassies’ doors.
Within a short time, some newspaper articles started using the word ‘alien’ to describe people like us: immigrants & their children. It’s not like I hadn’t felt like a foreign entity before I was called one. Still, it was annoying to hear it spelled out.
That kingdom’s operations were too big to be stopped. I had missed several school years because of paperwork complications that were beyond our control, and I saw no real future in the increasingly xenophobic workforce. Apart from my birthplace, I’d known no other place but the Pluto of my imagination & the nation my dad described to us over the years.
But I could only physically exist in the latter. So, eventually, my sisters and I decided to move there.
We got khurooj bala a’wda tickets-which roughly translates to ‘exit without return’-and frankly, I was ready to go. Saudi Arabia had been my introduction to reality, and some of my favorite people wandering this planet hail from there. But it was time to say goodbye to those people, that suffocatingly humid air, and the lazy Ramadan nights in half-lit malls.
I spent my first few months in Ethiopia floating through my days. My morning allergies were gone for a while, my menstrual cycles were no longer bothering me, and my head was clear. I wondered how simply moving to a different location could change so much about my internal processes.
But even though I had made a home out of Ethiopia in my mind, everyone treated me like I wasn’t one of them. They were right: it was my first time in Addis Ababa, and I didn’t even know the national language, Amharic. So, how could I claim to be from there?
My new classmates and friends aren’t the little sisters who ate up my made-up scenarios growing up.
So, I was an alien again. And I embraced it!
When the clouds got pregnant and burst out over me, I wasn’t ashamed to celebrate in public. In many ways, it felt like I went through another childhood phase: I was being publicly adored and corrected while learning a new language, figuring out what to do about my feelings towards the people I was attracted to, and basking in the allure of the diaspora ‘returnee.’
Soon after graduating high school, I conveniently got into a course where I learned how to channel my imagination into something more productive: architecture. I didn’t build worlds on other planets anymore; I downgraded to designing buildings.
The sites our professors required us to visit & the trips my sister and I went on helped me get more comfortable navigating the city. But as much as I tried to blend in with my university classmates, several events made me stick out.
One early morning, one of our professors walked into the lecture hall and asked us to raise our hands if we didn’t speak Amharic. My hand was the only one in the air. I looked around the hall, spotted people who stole glances at me and quickly pulled my hand down.
I’d never shared a learning space with that many people before, and I hoped that our professor would just ignore me. I thought: why should he teach in English-a language I knew many of my colleagues weren’t comfortable with-just because of one student? But after class, he offered to give me extra sessions whenever I needed clarification.
The language barrier and class size weren’t the only challenges for me, though. I never really got used to the chill of the nights when we stayed in our lecture halls to finish up our models.
Around 3 a.m. one night, I was so frustrated with my work and the Addis Ababan cold that I rushed out of my studio and into the dark swimming pool area. When I spotted one of my classmates outside the cafe nearby, I walked toward him and grabbed him by the shoulders. I think I’d asked him to yell along with me — and I screamed until my voice cracked.
I felt better after that. But I was mildly concerned that the security guards across the football field would run toward us to check what was wrong. The young man stood still, his face frozen. To my disappointment, he hadn’t joined me in yelling. He did scream later that night, though — in his sleep. When he told his dormmates what had happened, they were so concerned they contemplated taking him to the nearby church to get him washed in holy water. I hadn’t known what happened to him after he walked away from me that night until I heard my close friends laugh about it years later.
Fortunately, that was the most bizarre thing I’d done in university.
It’s fair to say that I gained so much more from those around me than I’d given in return. While I picked up the national language from my colleagues and professors, I also inherited some of their cautious optimism regarding the country’s future. They were grounded in this reality, but they also took the time to shut out the rest of the world and direct their energy into creating beautiful designs and artwork.
By the time we graduated, one of the long-simmering conflicts in Northern Ethiopia had turned into a full-blown civil war. That meant that my colleagues and I had to enter the workforce when the economy was especially volatile and public tensions ran high. But while it’s a terrifying time to visualize the future, the ongoing political problems seem to be running parallel to hopes for an Ethiopian Renaissance.
I hope that we lean towards the latter scenario.
These days, when my friends ask me whether I imagine leaving Ethiopia anytime soon, I say no. It’s not a matter of patriotism either; I just feel like I’m in no rush to move again. I want to pay attention to my surroundings for once. Perhaps, that way, I could understand the needs of my fellow Addis Ababans and make myself useful by creating solutions wherever I can. It certainly helps that this summer, I got a fund from Berkeley University to build something I named a ‘mobile library.’
I hope the prototypes I make will help the young men who sell books on the streets here transport and sell their books more effectively.
Lately, it’s like I finally managed to rebuild the little station of my childhood from where I could create things with my sisters. But this time, we’ll see those creations take a solid form in this place.
