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.
During the first phone calls, the “I” precedes a request made to the interlocutor on the line. In the end, landlines have gone out of fashion and then one is not quite sure to what subject the initial “I” referred. Yet, something held up and I would be surprised to find myself almost standing after years of getting out of bed only to rummage through files, listen to answering machines, to be given the runaround by one agency after another. Often, the pretexts that my interlocutors would give me left me puzzled: a file stored too high in the cabinet to reach it, a fire in the room where it was stored, the passing of the Mother Superior who could have answered my questions, the impending departure of the missionaries to Algeria…
Meeting someone you were always told had died feels like a bittersweet joy. As I step onto the plane that would take me there, my heart is light from the feeling of redressed injustices. This is supposed to mark the end of years of yawning gaps, of flashbacks called into question. The timespan it took to carry out research required a bit of support—so even strangers expect, as symbolic compensation, a picture of our two faces side-by-side, at peace. As I step out of the plane, after landing where my family and I had been separated two decades before, I feel the ground crumbling under my feet. I see all these familiar lips moving and I, standing motionless, not understanding a word. Suddenly, a ringing in my ears so loud that it overpowers the screams and shouts of happiness. So many thoughts rush through me but I can no longer speak. It wasn’t only sentences that were out of reach: what was lost at this airport is the speakable itself.
A few weeks passed with my family, during which strangers puzzled over the fact of coming across me in these streets, where they would have rather seen me grow up than arriving now. I slowly understand that there is no happy ending. That this moment is simply the consequence of our splintered existence. In order to justify the displacement of thousands of Ethiopians, reality had to be falsified. In its wake, our lives remain twisted, our stories fragmented. As I’m about to fly back to Paris, the policewoman searching me is astonished to find out I’m travelling unchaperoned at such a young age: “But your suitcase is huge and you are really too young to be travelling over there on your own.” Our presences-absences color the atmosphere because many kind of teeter, wavering between impossible grievings and hoping to be one day reunited with their next of kin. “Transnational adoption” manufactures a sort of non-habitability of the world, a complete shrinking of bearable spaces, an annihilation of horizons. Our lifespan will certainly be too short for us to experience reparation in any shape or form and we wander in a polyphony of attempts at being and non-spaces.
Since I can’t fight what has been irreparably undone, I would simply like to have time in Ethiopia, time spent at doing ordinary things, playing soccer, washing cups, to have the luxury to get angry at measly things, without thinking about the ticking of the imperial clock that sounds the knell of all potentialities. Time to share something other than a heap of absences. For, even though we could get our breath back, out of the crevices, and find the respite after much fumbling to be present, the persistence of mandatory itineraries is always at work. Here, I am getting ready to move for the twentieth time, and over there, following a government order for the forcible eviction of migrant peoples, my family has thirty days to pack up and leave the country where they were trying to stay.
Berhane, Ethiopian, born a stateless person in the 1990s.
When I was a child, I was convinced that if we didn’t take the same route to return home as the one we had taken to leave, I would never get back home. I was convinced that I was living several lives simultaneously, hoping that one day I will be entering the right house. Every time I would leave—even briefly or for daily errands—I would say my goodbyes, anxiously hoping to be able to find my way back. Ethiopia was akin to another of those routes taken, another country in another galaxy with other versions of myself. I only had truncated and traumatic memories—badly-told stories that contradict themselves as they kept being reinvented over and over—and a vaccination record to moor the certainty that this country existed in the same space-time continuum as I did. And after all, how can a four-year-old child imagine being projected into a world that is not theirs at the speed of an airplane? In my mind, it was never about going “back.” Instead, I would say that I wanted to meet this child who had been forced to live somewhere else, convinced that this child had died stepping out of or onto the plane or during that flight. For my first trip as an adult, the issue of the route took over my whole being: how could I be sure I wasn’t taking part in the tradition of multiplying my selves? I had to take the same route as the one I had taken to leave, in order to make sure I would become one. People talk about “reparenting,” but I would rather talk about re-placing.
I remember the pain of seeing the harshness of the lives of those I had left twenty-four years before. But most importantly, I remember how hard it was to simply tell it. This forced displacement also created purviews inside which to speak and feel legitimate to act is a constant struggle. How can I tell the horror of seeing children, “alone,” wandering, being abused and being forced to leave their home without reinforcing discourses that justify international adoption? How can I tell the pain of my family without partaking in dynamics of competition and comparison on made-up, so-called “interethnic” conflicts? I know that’s what I used to do. I wanted to pin Ethiopia on the map of deadly zones: I spoke about the number of fatalities in the Tigray region as the highest in the 21st century. Then I wanted to pin the Amhara region on the same map. I tried to force people to look at the dead who are too dark-skinned and too poor to be of any interest. I quickly realized that it was to no avail. The conflict between the federal government and the Tigray, the violence in the Amhara region, the persisting tension in Oromia—all of this goes beyond “ethnic” rivalries bandied around like a ragbag of analyses. This discourse conceals the neocolonial and imperialist dynamics of external powers which fight to expand their influence in the region by relying on local elites—head of political parties, of the military, of communities—and to control resources, the territory, the historical narrative. Civilians are the ones who pay the high price. One only has to look at where the weapons, drones, planes come from in order to understand who are the first beneficiaries of this crisis orchestrated from all sides—the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, among others. And it is a most pressing task to question how structural anti-Blackness and the colonial continuities of colonialism shape our indifference in the face of thousands of deaths. If international adoption was still allowed in Ethiopia, there would have been a heap of new made-up families since the last months, of that I am sure.
When I returned, I had to admit to myself that I was standing in a terrifying, intimate and political place. Why seeking information on these situations foster in me an uncontrollable urge to contextualize, to doubt, to make things more complex? Despite what I have read, heard, and seen? First, I had to admit to myself that the memories I thought were fake are not. Then I had to come to terms with the fact that developing a political and radical discourse on our displacements constantly feels like being conspiracy theorists, and it is hard for us not to yield to the temptation to craft sensationalistic individual narratives. Yet, I know I’m not getting worked up over nothing when I say that our wrecked family bonds are collateral damage of geopolitics which has been made spuriously complex. The trafficking of children into adoption is another weapon of war, of ethnic or genocidal cleansing. I often call it a crime against humanity. The proof of that is the alarming number of at least 45,000 children who came from Ethiopia only since the 1970s, to which one has to add the children of Ethiopian women exiled in Djibouti and the accumulation of violence that they endured. The condition itself of international adoptees allows for this characterization, since forced displacement of a population is one of the eleven constitutive elements of a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, on top of that, our living conditions within the colonial centers that displace us too often attest to other elements: murder, domestic slavery, torture, sexual violence, and racial persecution.
The systemic and intimate violence linked to adoption causes an ontological anguish, a radical doubt on your right to exist as you are, a tear in yourself inscribed in logics of domination. But they also create a condition under which the threat of complete extinction is a daily and omnipresent possibility. Here, I’m not talking about finding out whether the adoption was successful or not, if it went well, if the parents were kind or not. I am pointing out to the condition intrinsically linked to forced displacement, which puts us in situations where the destruction of our being might always happen within a narrow window of space-time and in an even narrower geographical space.
Few studies deal with our living conditions in our adoptive family. For that to happen, the initial intentions and motivations should have been honest from the outset. And, to put it more crudely: what could be worse than orphans in Ethiopia? This status quo endows the largely white adopters with a type of superpower and impunity. At the behest of Ethiopia, our adopters, acting as the only “supervizing” authority, had to fill out questionnaires on our school careers, our psychomotor development, our behavior and so on—but never on our emotional and family surroundings. And cynically, it is almost impossible for us to get these invaluable documents back. A variety of studies enable us to think about adoption through what remains unaddressed, for example the Cinderella effect proving that children who are not brought up by their biological parents are at a higher risk of being abused, neglected, killed brutally. Studies on intrafamilial racism or studies that show that children under ASE’s care (Children’s Welfare Agency) face more ill-treatment. One can add the long list of news items about adoptees killed by their adopters: behind the humanitarian facade of international adoption lurks a ruthless machine of childhood theft, of human commodification—and in the darkest cases, a breeding ground for networks of child sex offenders. In our birth country and in the country we arrived.
Mebrek A.S. Temesk, born in South Wollo (Amhara region, Ethiopia) in 1997 and adopted by French people at the beginning of the 2000s.
Yet, we would like to stop talking about personal joys and tragedies, for our stories are obviously rooted in colonial continuities to which the entirety of the Black diaspora is subjected, echoing the carceral systems that repeat themselves to forbid as much as force our movements. Berhane’s displacement had been organized by a religious congregation running the orphanage. Since the 1970s, this congregation had been playing a key role in transferring Ethiopian children whose mothers were exiled. Coming to France as a baby, her childhood unfolded in a village of 500 inhabitants. On the other hand, Mebrek spent a few years in her birthplace before finding herself in a village of 1,300 inhabitants. We eventually came across each other for the first time, in the deepest French countryside, far from the villages we had each grown up in. At the time, we would catch a glimpse of each other everywhere we went. As we got closer, we realized that our paths were despairingly contiguous and what was left were the same fits of anger and desires. We do not believe in the empowerment of people, in the optimization of their agency, in the euphemistic terminology of the ministries, nor in the relevance of genetic testing to know the origins of our ancestors. Not even in a type of resilience and reconnecting that we should acquire through coaches and most importantly, we are impervious to the calls to move forward. We only hope that the world will be habitable for us. That our exiles will be named in all their entanglements with the eugenist dimension of institutionalized anti-Blackness, and also as stemming from the joint effort of States and colonial missionaries, with their unstoppable hunger to provide us “assistance.”
Those solitary and forced migrations have deleterious consequences—plus, the ban of “international adoption” by the Ethiopian state in 2018 does not diminish the displacements which have already happened. Beyond the defense of our rights, we hope that in the future there will be a context livable enough for the supposedly charitable discourse to lose all its credibility. Furthermore, our aspiration to find the immaterial part stolen from us is imperative. Because we wanted to refrain from analyses centered on individuals and to foresee collective possibilities, the issue was for us a financial one. That is why we founded a mutual benefit society—a system of solidarity covering expenses for trips to our birth countries, language lessons and medical care for the after effects of exile. The mutual benefit society wishes to support, in a concrete way, Black people who are victims of forced displacement. Beyond the practical dimension, the mutual benefit society opens up a space for meeting and reflecting on the freedom to move. Indeed, for instance, what we wish for is an acknowledgement of the nature of our displacements as well as material reparations through financial compensation (what the mutual society currently covers). For people who want “reunions,” it would also seem fair to us that reliable reception facilities, fit to welcome those pivotal moments, should be set up. After flicking through personal archives, after reading on “transnational adoption,” we grew uneasy. We were stunned to see our stories presented as an identity, an invitation to celebrate their “diversity.” We were confused to see them transformed into some kind of thought experiment to understand other positionalities, described as life experiences, ultimately aiming at promoting reformist or alternative visions of the family while the latter obviously constitutes a site where social structures of domination are reproduced. Clearly, adoption only amplifies a context of potential violence but we nonetheless do not believe that perpetuating the myth of family love is relevant in any other circumstances. ■