Ferihan

Je Mets Les Pieds Dans Le Plat

C’est la saison des pluies à Addis, et il pleut des cordes presque tous les jours! Yea, rainy season in Addis, and it rained cats and dogs nearly every day. Lycée students, in their bilingual brilliance, called it il pleut des cordes—“it rains ropes.” Not quite cats and dogs, but you get the picture. That morning, the rain hammered down, and through the window one could see cedar trees wrapped in thick brouillard.

The radio, as always, added drama: orage et éclairs—storms and lightning—enough to scare college students into staying home with their blankets.

But to me, it was beautiful. The rain triggered an old memory. As a child, my father once bought me a Russian novel translated into Amharic by a man named “BaKafa.” My brother and I laughed endlessly, because Bakafa sounded like “spade” in our childish brains. Emotions, I realized later, don’t sit in neat text files in our minds. They are more like pictures, little films. That morning, looking out through the fog, the pictures from the Russian book flickered alive again: a narrow alley among cedar trees, mist so thick it brought tears; houses with smoking chimneys; a horse cart approaching. I imagined the woman cooking, the children warming their hands, the father arriving with gifts. Déjà vu wrapped me like the fog itself.

“It’s been raining for two weeks, and I’m sick of it! Il pleut depuis deux semaines, et j’en ai ras le bol!” cried Ferihan, a plump Somali classmate of mine with a derrière that deserved its own postal code. Women often detest rain, but her phrasing made me pause. J’en ai ras le bol—I’ve had a full bowl of it.

The phrase catapulted me back years, when the Emperor himself visited my hometown and handed out margarine with bread. We had never seen margarine before; the smell was suspicious, the taste worse. Most of us smeared it on the school walls instead of our bread. That, truly, was a full bowl of it. My mother later explained it was Ye-Enchet Qibe, butter from wood. Ferihan’s complaint, therefore, hit me right in my margarine memory.

While I was still smiling at the thought, she caught me off guard. “You have a very balanced face—oh, you are beautiful,” she blurted, then quickly added: Je mettre les pieds dans le plat… excusez-moi.

I nearly choked. Balanced face? Me? If anyone in the room deserved the word “beautiful,” it was her. But she had already pulled me into another stream of memory. My mother used to say: “The Guraghes have four eyes—two in the front, two at the back.” When I pressed her to prove it, she gave me the slyest look: “How do you expect to see four with only two?” True wisdom. Perhaps Ferihan had glimpsed something in me with her mythical four eyes.

Bless you, mum, I whispered inwardly.

Still, Ferihan’s French had me giggling inside. Je mets les pieds dans le plat—literally, “I put my feet in the dish.” I wanted to reply, “Don’t put your foot in your mouth,” but softened it with a polite mumble.

“I speak very frankly—je mets souvent les pieds dans le plat,” she insisted.

“Wey TaTa,” I muttered to myself. How was I supposed to reply to this frank philosopher with only minutes of acquaintance? I considered three options:

1. Thank her for complimenting my “beauty” (though age had already turned my eagle into a tortoise).

2. Broaden the statement: “Yes, Somalis, Guraghes, Amharas—everyone is beautiful.”

3. Or bravely reciprocate with “Vous êtes beau aussi,” or the bolder “Tu es magnifique.”

The sensible old man in me won. I dodged both flattery and flirtation, though a younger me might have seized the moment with a lion’s heart.

Instead, I gave her a big silly grin, hoping it conveyed enough. But she wasn’t finished.

“Vous ne donnez pas votre langue au chat?” she teased with a Medusa smile.

Don’t give your tongue to the cat? I froze. Who was the “cat” here, and what on earth was it planning to do with my tongue?

“Je n’escompte pas embrasser moi!” she clarified—“I don’t expect you to kiss me!”

“Good for me,” I muttered, eyes scanning the room for escape routes.

Later I learned Ferihan was a post-doc in philosophy, dabbling in ontology, existentialism, and African thought. That explained a lot.

A few weeks later, I asked again about the “tongue and cat” idiom. She laughed so hard her body shook like a tree in a storm. For a dangerous moment I thought her gros derrière was wobbling too, but I blamed my imagination.

Her parting words that day were oddly political: Daniel félicité pour le dégager de votre dirigeants—congratulations on the release of the opposition leaders. I hadn’t even heard the news. Then, like a true philosopher, she skewered the logic: why refuse to defend themselves in court, only to admit guilt years later? Why rot in prison before surrendering? She left me standing there with questions buzzing like mosquitoes.

By Friday, the story took a different turn. The university was hosting what they called the panty-free party. From debutantes to professors, the entire female population seemed to show up… panty-free. Yes, even one of the older professors, who should have known better, appeared with sagging anatomy on full display. My nausea nearly drowned me.

And Ferihan? She danced among them, twisting her formidable derrière as though physics itself bowed to her. Watching her, I realized: she was not only a philosopher of words, but of balance. Her secret was in perfect counterweights—top and bottom in delicate harmony, like a camel carrying the desert on her back.

The rash of students and teachers flashing their derrières was quite the spectacle. Some emerged from other rooms wearing outfits that could only be described as a combination of a few scraps of fabric, ropes, and pulleys, barely holding together. Others had miniskirts hiked so high that their pantyless private parts peeked out like mischievous secrets. Half the guests wore loose stretch fabrics, breasts and bellies swaying in a display that would make any voyeur blush. I had never seen such blatant exhibitionism in my life. It looked like an ancient sex ritual. If Steven Spielberg had been there, he might have gotten the plot for his next blockbuster: “The Rites of Debutantes at AAU.”

The next day, it was my turn to raise the moral issue of the event. Surrounded by students still recovering from yesterday’s pantyless parade, the ever-zealous Christian soldier in me raised his hand. I recounted the professor’s words with horror:

“Hell, yes! I think all girls over 15 should go pantyless at least three weeks a month, except during their period. They need underwear after that, but otherwise, let it all hang. My girls did it, my wife does it… I love seeing a well-displayed female form. If you weigh over 190 lbs without panties, that can be alarming, but for the rest, it’s a daily treat. Clean-shaven is even better—smooth and pristine.”

I met Ferihan Saturday afternoon, the day after the party. I had looked for her in the morning but she was nowhere to be found on campus. When I finally saw her, I expected some trace of the previous night’s antics in her expression. With a tentative smile, I greeted her:

Daniel: “Hi, Ferihan! Qu’est-ce que t’as fait hier?”
Ferihan: “Que dalle!” (Not a thing!)

Indeed, her face betrayed nothing. The party had left everyone else unscathed—except me. I took a deep breath and mentioned that I had raised the moral issue in class. She chuckled in her husky voice and warned me: “Ne cherche pas midi à quatorze heures.” Don’t look for noon at 8 p.m. My moral alarm bells quieted. In fluent French, she explained my concern was outdated, something that belonged in a “moral exhibition center.”

Later that evening, I found her in the library, chair scraping loudly as she sat—her signature irritation-inducing habit. She was reading Jean-Paul Sartre in French. I complimented her on her French and added that this was a benefit of attending the lycée. Her eyes sparkled as she said:

“J’étudie le français depuis trois ans, mais je le parle toujours comme une vache espagnole!”
(I’ve studied French for three years, but I still speak like a Spanish cow!)

I couldn’t resist: “Je parle le Somai comme une vache Amhara.” She laughed until tears ran down her cheeks.

Tesgaye, a Ph.D. criminology student with an ego the size of a Tigre, joined us. He had the habit of resting his hand on his cheek while pondering—a human statue of overthinking. When Ferihan asked about the Tigre, he began an overcomplicated lecture about Greek traders and the Axumite civilization. She laughed uproariously. “Tsegay, you stupid Tiger. Dummy, don’t you understand ‘tiger’ is English, not Greek?” The hurricane of his ego threatened to explode, but he left quietly, mumbling about her impressive gluteus maximus. She turned to me with her usual mischief:

“He’s a good egg, isn’t he?”

The morning sky was clear, sunlight lavishly spilling across the plains. A few stray clouds threatened nothing. Ferihan noted the dome-like shape of the Addis sky, later claiming rural houses were modeled after it. I thought of igloo-shaped huts and the Afar dome-type DaSa, and marveled at how the land and sky shaped human imagination.

By afternoon, dark clouds gathered, and rain poured accompanied by thunder and lightning. Car headlights lined the streets like tiny fireflies. From my vantage point, the storm’s rhythm echoed a deeper thought of hers:

“Connecting dots should be our task in life. Life leaves a network footprint. If we cannot read ourselves or our closest friends, we cannot predict behavior.”

Tesgaye, ever the innocent, asked: “But how would one know a person?”
Ferihan shot back: “Who said anything about knowing a person? I said connecting dots and dashes.”

“And what if the dashes outnumber the dots?” I ventured.
“Then you’d better stay quiet. Every time you open your mouth, you attempt to connect the episodes,” she replied gleefully. (TBC)