BERHANE AND MEBREK
COMMISSIONED AND EDITED BY MICHAËLA DANJÉ
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY NESSA KALFOU
Michaëla Danjé: Since the first contribution of my collective, Cases Rebelles, to The Funambulist in 2019, I have been an attentive and regular reader of the magazine. In 2025, I even started a reading group of The Funambulist’s texts. When Léopold asked me to be one of the editors for the anniversary issue, I immediately thought of asking Berhane and Mebrek to write on international adoption. Issue 26 had already featured an article on being Black and adopted, but the specific topic of international adoption has never been broached and the positionalities of people who experienced it is missing from our transnational activist analyses. In this powerful text, built on back-and-forth jumps between France and Ethiopia, they narrate their stories, while analyzing the systemic dynamics at play in displacements justified by a disastrous humanitarian grammar of assistance and their enduring effects. We would like to warn the readers that the text depicts some violent and traumatic aspects of adoption and can be thus triggering.
My brother was sitting on a white, bold-patterned couch. Out the window, one could make out the quiet pond stretching alongside the one-way street on which the guests’ cars were parked. The adults spoke loudly and were getting impatient for drinks. I was eight years old and just after the guests’ departure, as I was trying, on my tiptoes, to reach for some glasses put way away deep inside a dusty cabinet in the dining room, I had stumbled upon a piece of paper that read “Abandonment Certificate.” Under a few sentences in which a woman declared that she was leaving me to an orphanage, no signature could be found, only a fingerprint. That piece of paper would disappear later and I was told that I had made up all the information it contained, as well as the name written on it.
Throughout the following six years, I used to rub my thumb on the tip of a wooden pencil until it was completely soaked in lead, then put duct tape and pressed the fingerprint I had obtained on a blank piece of paper because it looked like the one on the Abandonment Certificate and because I didn’t want to forget. Despite the discourse that maintained that my mother was dead, the everyday nature of this gesture reminded me that it wasn’t so, and I made a promise to myself that I would at least look for a tomb where I could mourn. I would often repeat to myself the names I had read. Hers. Mine. To make sure I would keep a trace, I added the initial of my birth first name in the middle of my handwritten signature. Large enough to be meaningful to me, with a handwriting nondescript enough to go unnoticed by others. Ten years later, after relentless research on the margins of institutional pathways, with the help of people who had measured how absurd my predicament was, I find out that my mother still lives in the city I was born—alive. Better (or worse), she has been waiting for me, looking for me. Of course, after these findings, reality felt like it had come to a standstill. I felt evanescent, struck down by the category-based thinking of international agencies: Central Vital Records Office in Nantes, and in Addis, NCAPO (National Council for Access to Personal Origins), OAA (Organizations Authorized for Adoption), the International Intercountry Adoption Mission, hospitals, and children’s care homes.