These Dreams of You

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Jasmine hears the song on returning to Ethiopia for the first time since the age that Sheba was on leaving it. This is during Assassination Summer, riots as much about grief as rage sweeping the Chicago park where, forty years later on Zan’s TV one November night, crowds greet the election of a new president whose only precedent is what forty years before was forsaken. Jasmine’s sojourn follows a brief reconnection with her father, a retired medical orderly — who never became a doctor — hobbling with arthritis, and her brother, an eternal thirty-one-year-old student wandering the landscape of aspirations looking for his.

While she’s angry at her father for abandoning her and her brother and mother, Jasmine senses this reconciliation is a fleeting final chance at something. The three take a trip to Addis together where at night she hears “Tezeta” wafting from the clubs and isn’t sure whether what she glimpses is a memory from when she was two or a dream posing as one; but hearing this song is the only time Jasmine feels like she’s home. In assassination’s wake she sometimes aches for the solace — a less secular word than comfort — of the mosque; on the flight to Ethiopia, she wonders if she’ll leave. Eight days later, with her brother she does, but her father does not, and she never sees him again.