Eleni Gabre-Madhin

Pre-Assignments 2 to 7

SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them.

To quote William Kenower in Writer’s Digest (July/August 2019), “there are no villains in memoir.”

There are many characters in my memoir whose villainous acts I vividly describe, the husband who took me to a beautiful restaurant on a hilltop overlooking Addis Ababa and told me “you will be this country’s prime minister one day. I don’t think you need me for a husband.”  The second husband who one day disappeared without a trace. The father who repeatedly cheated on my mother and scarred me for life. Malicious, jealous, ignorant people who stood in the way of my dreams.  But none of these are antagonists to my story.  

So who is the villain in my story?  Every good story has one, and my story is no exception. Kenower’s memoirist is a detective, going beyond relating the story to uncovering what lies behind it.  As the protagonist of my story, I am motivated by being happy, fulfilled, doing the right thing.  I blame others, random circumstances, and the world for my problems.

But I, the memoirist, will have to unpack the lies that I, the protagonist, tell myself over and over.  And re-tell my story, uncovering where I have misjudged, feared, failed, misunderstood, covered up, or deluded myself, and gotten in my own way.  Thus, I am both protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain.

 

THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed).

1) The Market Maker

 2) Exchanging Love

 3) Belonging

 [Each would need need a more descriptive sub-title ?]

 

FOURTH ASSIGNMENT:  Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why?

I think there are several categories, or sub-genres, of comparables to the memoir I am writing.

First, I am writing my story as an Ethiopian-American woman who longs to go back and do something great for her native country.  This is an immigrant, multi-locational story of connection to roots.

In this genre, I think that Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie’s Americanah might be an interesting comparable as she describes her journey from Princeton back to Lagos and back and forth in the perennial struggle for identity.

Second, I am a highly-educated professional black female economist in a male and white dominated profession who achieved something extraordinary, to build a multi-billion dollar enterprise that impacted tens of millions of lives.  This is a professional and personal achievement story.

In this sub-genre, I think that Michelle Obama’s Becoming, the story of her rise from humble origins in South Side Chicago to achieve a stellar education and all that came beyond.  She and I are exactly the same age, and without sounding totally insane, I feel there are many parallels in our lives.  

Another memoir that also seems a good comparable is Finding Me by Viola Davis, also the story of overcoming her early childhood abject poverty in Rhode Island to coming into her own.

Third, I am a person who has felt like a social misfit on the inside, never feeling like I belong despite my best efforts.  And despite achieving great success in building an identity, it all comes crashing down in 2021 and I am left to pick up the pieces.  This is a universally human story of identity, longing, love, and loss. 

In this sub-genre, an interesting comparable would be More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say) by Elaine Welteroth, also an African-American woman who achieved success.

Another comparable would be the highly acclaimed memoir The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, a first generation Chinese immigrant, and published in 1976, about her experience related to moving from Communist China to the US. 

 

 

FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication.

 

The Market Maker

Uprooted for most of her life and longing to belong somewhere, the author finds her way back from the US to her native Ethiopia to build a national commodity exchange that transforms the lives of millions of small farmers.

Primary conflict:  Desperation to do something that matters for Ethiopia

 

SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. 

Inner conflict:  sense of not belonging, struggling to define my identity

Scenario:   When I was four, my family moved from Addis Abab to New York City, specifically Flushing, Queens.  We lived in a red brick two-story house with white and a front yard with a little fence around the yard, just like all the other houses on our middle-class suburban street.  There were no other black people, let alone Ethiopians.  In her desperate attempt to ensure that my sister and I would be liked by the neighborhood kids, my mother would bake cookies and cake every afternoon, and all the kids would come to our house every day, making wild noises, shrieks and laughter as they turned our house upside down, every afternoon, as my poor mother would look on, too afraid of the white American children to say anything.  And I don’t recall a single time we ever went to their houses in all the time we lived there. 

 

FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it.

My setting is all the places where my story unfolds: childhood between Ethiopia, New York City, Rwanda, and an American missionary boarding school in Kenya on an escarpment above the great African Rift Valley, overlooking wild buffalo and giraffes.  Then to upstate New York where for my undergraduate years at Cornell where I saw my first snow, and later in Geneva for a year exchange program where met my first husband.  Later, Mali in West Africa where I lived for a year traveling around the arid, super-hot countryside, doing research, escaping near death in the Sahel desert with marauders from Mauritania.  Later my husband and I move to Palo Alto, California, where I attend Stanford for my PhD, and we settle down, followed by Washington DC.  Then my move to Ethiopia, and traveling all over the country to convince people about the commodity exchange, and town hall sessions with hundreds of farmers and traders at a time, as well as interactions with government ministers, visiting delegations, including Melinda Gates, Bob Geldof, Bono, and heads of states and others.   Bringing up my kids in Ethiopia, baking cupcakes and attending school functions. Trips, conferences and speaking engagements all over the world, from Chicago to Tokyo to Buenos Aires to Abu Dhabi.   Then the decision to join the UN and move to New York city, where I presently live.

 

Reply to Pre-Assignment 1:   What is the story statement of my memoir?

The goal of the protagonist, me, is to belong.  I have craved belonging for as long as I can remember.  To matter, to be valued, cherished, possibly even loved, to be part of something bigger, a community, a society, a country, essentially, to find home.  I grew up in six different countries, moving between countless cities, schools, and houses as a kid.  I never felt I belonged anywhere, a global citizen at best, but really a citizen of none, ever the outsider looking in. Growing up, I had no special memories of spaces in the places I lived, no shared stories with people I had known all of my life, no one to remember me from decades ago.

My need for an identity, a place and a people to belong to, felt to me as basic as needing oxygen, water, food, and shelter, and so much more monumental.  This need has driven almost all of my important adult decisions, including the most important one of all.  That is, which identity?  Despite speaking four languages, living on three continents, having multiple passports and residencies, and a comfortable, even affluent, life in America, I decided to return home to my native Ethiopia after thirty years abroad.  It wasn’t really a return since I had last lived in Ethiopia as a fifth grader, even then attending an American school and not speaking the local language, and it definitely did not feel like home, since I hardly knew anyone in Ethiopia, nor really understood the culture.  But how desperately I had fought to be there over three decades of plotting, obsessing, and conjuring the belonging I so longed for.  Longing to belong.  

I moved to Ethiopia the same month that I turned forty, leaving my husband and comfortable life behind, with my two young sons and a container of our belongings shipped by sea.  I got to Ethiopia with a big idea. A really big idea that would touch millions of lives. I wanted to build a modern commodity exchange, like the Chicago Board of Trade, to help Ethiopia’s very poor small-scale farmers and transform the way trading had happened for thousands of years.  Three and a half later, and it took everything I had and then some, I became the first CEO of the new and shiny Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, a first not only for Ethiopia, but for all of Africa.  In a few years, annual trading reached over a billion dollars, and the exchange transformed the livelihoods of fifteen million coffee, sesame seed, and bean farmers.

My life changed dramatically too.  An intense media frenzy started around me, as my story caught the attention of people far and wide.  A woman, a returnee, a mother, an Ivy League educated economist, it seemed to be a powerful mix.  I  appeared continuously on media, becoming something of a household name, known equally by the most powerful leaders at helm of government to the simplest coffee and sesame seed farmers in remote corners of the country.  I was invited to speak all over the country and around the world, representing a unique success story, in a country known mostly for famine and war. I was invited by the White House to Camp David to share my story with G8 world leaders, among many other opportunities.  At last, it seemed I belonged. I mattered.

As the years passed, I settled into this identity and even took it for granted.  Until, one day a year ago, just like that, it all came crashing down.  I got caught in the political crossfire of a country at war with itself, with the social fabric of the country unraveled beyond recognition by late 2021.   Through an unfortunate set of circumstances,  I found myself the subject of an incensed public media attack, incredibly and wrongly accused of treason and betrayal of country.  It was sudden, dramatic, vicious, and spread like a raging wildfire.  Once seen as a national hero, now a terrible image of me was displayed continuously on national TV and print media with statements of my terrible deeds.  My treachery became the subject of talk shows and public denouncements on every platform available to Ethiopians, within and outside the country, for weeks and weeks.  People I considered friends, former colleagues, government contacts, and even religious leaders,  came forward, wave after wave, to denounce me publicly.  I received numerous death threats, as well as my sons, anonymous private messages describing horrific acts, while publicly an honorary doctorate awarded to me was taken back, I was dismissed from the council of economic advisors, my office was boarded up, my bank accounts were frozen.  In all of its dimensions, it became clear that the society I thought I finally belonged to had decided to viciously spit me back out.  

My close friends and family looked on with horror on the unfolding of this tsunami wave of hatred and retribution.  I stopped feeling, unable to speak out or defend myself, increasingly numbed and alone as my world collapsed around me.  Had I been living in Ethiopia, I would have certainly been arrested, tortured, attacked, or worse.  Someone called it the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism, and cancel culture rolled into one.  It was devastating and horrific in all of its ugliness, a rejection of every aspect of my being that became more painfully real than I can begin to describe.   It felt like a death, if I could imagine what death would be, and certainly was the death of the identity I had longed for and that had driven almost all of my life.

My protagonist story is not just the journey to belonging but also to the unbelonging, the gut-wrenching painful end of an identity, and what happens after that.  My story is not over. I find myself haunted by these questions, Did I ever belong?  What is it to belong?  Who am I?  What is to become of me now?  What is the worth of my life?  

Now I realize that these are the wrong questions, and have been all along, as, fourteen months after the incident that felt like death, I boarded a plane in New York city, headed home.