The Light of the World

Two

When Ficre Ghebreyesus and I met in New Haven in the late spring of 1996, the first thing he wanted to do was show me his art. He was living at the time at 218 State Street, the New Haven Cash Register Company building, in an unfinished loft where he slept and painted when he was not cooking his Eritrean fantasia food in the kitchen of Caffé Adulis, the restaurant he owned and ran with his brothers Gideon and Sahle. The restaurant was named in homage to Adulis, an ancient port city on the Red Sea that is now an archaeological excavation site, one of Africa's great "lost cities." Pliny the Elder was the first writer to mention Adulis, which he called "city of free men."

In those days Ficre used to chef through the evening, close down the restaurant, then paint until dawn in that loft, with its salvaged Steinway piano, a clothing rack he'd rolled down the street from Macy's when it went out of business and used as a closet for his few hanging garments, and graffiti scrawled by a previous occupant on the heavy metal door that read, "Foster Kindness."

There were paintings everywhere, mostly large dark canvases lit with brilliant corners of insistent life. The paintings gave a sense of his beloved homeland in wartime—the Eritrean War of Independence began shortly before he was born—infused with the light of determined humanity that would not be deferred or extinguished. He showed me pastel drawings with the driving color concerns that echoed Eritrean textile work and basketry as well as Matisse's sky-lit hues. There were linocuts and mono-prints he'd made at the Printmaking Workshop with master teacher Bob Blackburn, and paintings he'd made while studying at the Art Students League with Joseph Stapleton, one of the last of the Abstract Expressionists then teaching. Ficre made that art during New York years in which he was mostly working as a young people's leader and activist on behalf of Eritrean issues. And then there were portfolios of photographs—some of which would be exhibited at an office building of the U.S. Congress that summer—which told stories of Eritrea and its uncannily resilient people in saturated, painterly colors.

As Ficre showed me work he talked about his family: his late father, Gebreysus Tessema, a judge so ethical he was exiled hundreds of miles away from home when he refused to tamper with his judicial decisions to suit the wishes of the dictator and his minions. He adhered to many formalities and customs, Ficre said, but also loved his children—seven in total, one, Kebede, lost to war, Ficre at the number-six position—to climb on him and laugh when all would come home from work and school for the midday meal.

His mother, Zememesh Berhe, also navigated the family ship through the vagaries of war. She came from a clan of many sisters and one brother, respected and tough Coptic Christian highlanders, who all raised their children near each other until war scattered them and took some of their lives. Mama Zememesh had Parkinson's disease, he told me that first day, and all of his siblings—Tadu, Mehret, Sara, Gideon, and Sahle, then in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and New Haven—doted on her as she moved from one family constellation to the next. Their language was Tigrinya, an Afro-Asiatic tongue derived from the ancient South Semitic Ge'ez and spoken in Eritrea and its diaspora. His full name, Ficremariam Ghebreyesus, means "lover of Mary" and "servant of Jesus." The abbreviated "Ficre," as he was called, means "love."

Our love began in an instant and progressed inevitably. When Solomon Kebede Ghebreyesus, our first son, was born in April of 1998, we moved to 45 Livingston Street in New Haven. Ficre continued to invent and cook at Adulis. The great food writer and old-school newspaperman R. W. Apple visited the restaurant and after tasting Ficre's creations asked, in his article in the New York Times, "A Culinary Journey Out of Africa and into New Haven":

"Is all this authentic?"…

"Tricky word, authentic," [Ficre] replied. "Tricky idea. Food ideas move around the world very quickly today, and if you went to Eritrea, you'd find American touches here and there. There are thousands of Eritreans living in the United States, and when they go home, they take new food ideas with them. For us, that's no more foreign than pasta once was."

Adulis was a gathering place where people ate food they'd never imagined and learned about the culture and history of a country that most of them had never heard of. Ficre created legendary dishes such as shrimp barka that existed nowhere in Eritrea but rather in his own inventive imagination. Women called for it from St. Raphael's and Yale-New Haven Hospitals after they'd delivered their babies; people said they literally dreamed of it, a fairy food that tasted like nothing else. Here is how you make it:

In the mornings before Ficre went to the restaurant, he painted in a garage studio behind our house. There his practice and colors changed. He moved more fully into his brilliantly abstracted space; figures, landscapes, and icons were discernible but not strictly representational. With this work, he applied and was admitted to the Yale School of Art.

Ficre's time in art school was a mixed bag. He was a "grown-up," extremely open to learning, as ever, but also not a malleable kid. He was a respected town professional and, by that time, a father of two after the arrival of Simon Alexander Ghebreyesus in 1999. His particular African diaspora aesthetics were sometimes mis-read by teachers—"Where are your African colors?" one asked (to our quiet amusement), perhaps noting the absent combination of red, black, and green. But he had a good experience as a teaching assistant for Richard Lytle—who had taught the class "Color" for decades in the manner of his friend and mentor, the painter and color theorist Josef Albers—and strong, honest encouragement from Sam Messer, a Brooklyn artist known for his collaborations with writers.

Ficre loved outdoor painting excursions in New Haven's mixed-metaphor landscape of New England trees and industrial detritus. He made some fascinating text-based pieces in class with conceptualist Mel Bochner. Most important, however, were some artist's visits to the school. He had an expansive studio visit from the painter Amy Sillman, whose use of color and commitment to abstraction spoke powerfully to Ficre. Having Adrian Piper and Martin Puryear in his studio was a highlight of his time in graduate school. He revered each artist as a true master and had worked with his classmates to arrange the visits. Though his work looked nothing like either one's, Piper and Puryear asked him the deep questions that took his practice to the next level. It especially pleased him that Piper practiced yogic headstands during her visit in his studio, for he was beginning his own devoted yoga practice around that time. He cared deeply that people come in peace, for he himself was a profoundly peaceful and peace-loving person, forged in the crucible of war.

Ficre was shy about his artwork. He wasn't a schmoozer. He loved to have certain visitors in his studio, but the marketplace was not for him. Dozens and dozens of friends in and out of the art world urged him to show and sell and literally begged to buy paintings and photographs. He was never quite ready, he mostly said, still finishing, still perfecting. It made me crazy, for I believed fervently in the beauty and power of what he made and wanted him to have an art career commensurate with his talent and output. "People will know this work after I'm gone, sweetie," he would say. He said it with a laugh, but he meant it. I don't suggest he thought he would leave this earth prematurely, but I do think he had faith in the long-run, and the lasting power of art, and that he also clearly knew what was his and his alone to accomplish. He understood that ars longa, vita brevis, no matter when you die.

Three

The story begins on a Thursday night. I bring an unexpected guest home to stay with us, an artist friend who'd spoken on campus that afternoon. When I take her to her hotel after dinner we find that it is in a deserted corner of town far off the beaten track, so I offer to bring her to sleep in our guest room. She accepts with relief, and I call Ficre: to let him know company is coming.

When Lorna and I arrive home ten minutes later the house is lit and glowing. The kettle is hot and tea is brewing in the black Japanese cast-iron pot. Ficre has put raw almonds in a small, celadon bowl. It is late; the boys are sleeping.

We are so pleased to live like this, organized and open and welcome when friends pass through and we can bring them to Hamden, the hamlet adjacent to New Haven where we recently moved to live in a tan stucco Arts and Crafts–style house surrounded by a magic garden. Hamden, my first suburb, albeit a very urban one. Hamden, where Ficre fell in love with property that reminded him of the African "compound" where he grew up amidst flowers, inside walls his mother painted apricot, spring sky blue, rose violet, and butter yellow.

The next morning, I organize the children for school and send them off and Ficre makes coffee when our friend rises shortly after. We three drink our cappuccinos under the gazebo, which he'd painted in the delicate colors of the remembered borders of his mother's gauzy dresses and shawls. Some might take the colors for straightforward pastels, or Monet water lilies, but they came from Africa, and from his mother. Hanging inside the gazebo is a mobile he fashioned from some slender, twisty branches that blew down in the yard after a storm. The mobile turns gently in the breeze. The morning is gray, and the yard smells of the fresh, damp earth of early spring.

As we walk toward the house, something makes us look back into the yard over our shoulders. There is a giant hawk sitting on the branch of our hundred-year-old oak tree, eviscerating and devouring a squirrel.

We freeze to watch. The raptor is utterly focused on its task. I watch Ficre and Lorna scrutinizing, their artist's eyes recording what they see. The hawk attends to its business undisturbed. It is rapacious; it takes what it wants. The bloody ribbons of the squirrel's entrails hang off the branch as the hawk eats the entire remains of the hapless rodent in about five minutes.

Ficre tells us he has seen the bird the day before, with the children, and shows us a short video he took on his phone of the creature on the same branch, eating another squirrel. I have seen a hawk a few times but never one so intent on its survival, never seen predation itself up close and in action. It is pure and elemental, necessarily violent, riveting, nature itself. We watch for as long as we can before we have to go off to the duties of our days.

Some weeks later, on his bureau, I find an acrostic Ficre made, which exhausted variations on the word hawk. He'd assigned numbers to the letters and then assigned those numbers to lottery tickets, which I later discover he bought by the dozens and secreted in the pages of the books he was reading.

Four

Ficre was born in East Africa in Asmara, Eritrea's capital, in the midst of a three-decade-long war with Ethiopia for independence. There the story begins. Almost every family lost a child during those long war years. Ficre's eldest brother, Kebede, was always described as "a freedom fighter who fell in battle." The dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam's "Red Terror" claimed legions of young people in Eritrea and Ethiopia—500,000, by Amnesty International's final count—and years later he was convicted of genocide in absentia while in protected exile provided by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

Ficre's parents' bravery was in constant evidence in those years. They faced down soldiers who broke into their home while the children hid in the bedroom, and when Ficre was a teenager his mother retrieved him from the front lines where he'd gone to enlist and promptly arranged for him to leave the country. So at sixteen, Ficre was a refugee, first in Sudan, then Italy, then Germany, and finally in the United States at the age of nineteen, in San Jose, New York City, and then, for almost thirty years, in the perhaps unlikely place of New Haven, Connecticut.

Before he came to this country, Ficre was exposed to U.S. black power rhetorics—an early visual icon for him was Angela Davis's luminous Afro—and thinkers such as Martinican Frantz Fanon. Black soul music from Sam Cooke to James Brown rocked in his head along with Fela Kuti's Afro-beat and Bob Marley's reggae. Thus culturally he was a global diasporist, a "conscious synchretist," in his own words. He was proudly and resolutely Eritrean, East African, and African. At the same time, he was unambiguous about being a black Eritrean American.

In a 2000 artist's statement, Ficre told his story and described himself and his creative influences: