A Christmas Gift to Professor
Al Mariam
Adal Isaw
December 25, 2009
Dear professor Al Mariam:
An invitation to a debate is your Christmas gift and I am hopeful that you will kindly accept it.
It’s not my intention to make this something more than a debate in good faith, to correct either of us from excessively indulging on false consciousness. Correct me or allow me to correct you, so that our beloved country goes to do its business not blind-sided by our diffusive manuscripts.
Your articles utterly misrepresent Ethiopia, and juxtaposing from what you have written so far, I am sure you have the same degree of claim against mine. Masked with hyperboles, misrepresentations and academic dishonesty, your articles, I think, are also famously replete with equivocations, to delegitimize EPRDF by purposely demeaning and devaluing Ethiopia. If you disagree, would you like to defend your articles? If you do, I beg you for a debate and I will give you two choices—till I hear from you on other choices that you may come up with as alternatives.
It is one of my choices for us to debate your articles and mine— in front of our Ethiopian sisters and brothers residing in America, either at CSULA (California State University, Los Angeles) or CSUSB (California State University, San Bernardino)—with both Department of Political Science staffs in the audience.
I am sure your colleagues from CSUSB would love to take part. I am also sure that those who taught me political science at CSULA would love to take part as well. Let’s do our best to make the debate happen. No worries; it will be a professor against a student. And no egos should hinder us; since the good that will come out of our debate stands grand compared to our personal concerns. That’s what I think, and we may also come out of the debate sharing smiles too.
Better yet, it will be more productive, I think, if we arrange to debate our acutely contrasting views in Ethiopia—in front of our people—the subject of our contentious convictions. You see; we can even arrange for our people to take part in the debate—to answer their questions without a note. I think, there is nothing more satisfying than answering the questions that our people pose. Don’t you think?
I presume you have nothing to fear and nothing to lose. The only loser will be the bugaboos that have plagued one of our worldviews—the exaggerated fear and anxiety that one of us harbors not to let the seemingly persistent problems of our country continue unabated. I say we’re on the right track to rid our beloved country from many years of deprivation; you say we’re not. Let’s resolve this issue of national interest, knowing that we cannot write any longer without a live debate. Otherwise, our articles will grow trite by the day, lacking the power to evoke fresh interest because of redundancies. Dear Al Mariam, can you please trade the English alphabet for our national mother tongue? I hope you will.
Professor Al Mariam: allow me to mimic EPRDF, to beg you for a debate without limit to the issues we can cover and without fear to uncover to cover our shortcomings. It will help peel the epidermis of hate, embellished for years by molesting words in your articles.
I am sure that you will replay in kind about my articles, and I hope to hear it from your own tongue in a debate. As I have stated earlier, if you kindly accept my Christmas gift, you have nothing to fear and nothing to loose. You will have the chance to defend your articles and your peers will have the chance to review your work, and my teachers will review theirs’ in retrospect as a result.