Tenderfoot

By Chris Beckett

A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781784109721

Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett is a former social worker and now university lecturer who lives in Cambridge. In 2009 he won the Edge Hill Short Story competition for his collection of stories, The Turing Test.

Book preview

CHRIS BECKETT

Tenderfoot

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Inglizawi negn!

here comes a donkey loaded with beans

Sweetheart

Good bread

Asfaw’s hunger

Ras Gugsa’s kindness

The table

Pleasures of the feast

Elegy for a thunderstorm

When the backyard was a boy

When I was ten, I started watching men

The fig wasp

Bananas

In Gheralta

Becoming big

Praise shout for a stomach

Malnourished

I shave my soft hair

Qulul

To a tin shack behind the Lion’s Den Hotel

Hungry, we

Small angry famine

here comes a donkey loaded with figs

Outside the gates    with Abebe

here comes a donkey loaded with troubles

Tagesse’s hunger poems

here comes a donkey loaded with hope

Lib

To the teeming bookshops of Addis Ababa

The red bicycle

Three bushti go to the Mercato

Uncle! take me to a better place

The shop on my chest

To a weyala/minibus conductor

For the serval cats

Never a bad word about hyenas!

The young men say

When berberé attacks

Three pickpockets

Truth dog

Abel migrating

The day they murdered Assefa Maru

In the Lion Gardens

Chicken is the safest thing

Prayer to a saint of two religions

A song: Yehageré sheta

About the cows at Lake Langano

Amharic Glossary

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Chris Beckett, from Carcanet

Copyright

for Isao

Tenderfoot: a newcomer or novice, especially a person

unaccustomed to hardship (OED)

For now I ask no more than the justice of eating!

Pablo Neruda, The Great Tablecloth

I have already enjoyed too much, give me something to desire.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

INGLIZAWI NEGN!

Sometimes he stands on the balcony in his blue pyjamas

and sees it through the eucalyptus trees

slips out when day is lapping at the dark

and stands there looking over garden gates and walls

over tin roofs clicking in their shadows

down a track that wanders into the evening

out towards the faintly green distance of hills

already stirring with bats and the idea of pumas

he can hear bells and bits of conversation   someone far away

banging a nail   knows himself to be small and foreign

standing on the balcony of a big quiet house

that holds him up   holding him like a hand under his feet

but never feels unwelcome in the semi-dark

if someone hails him from the track he will call back Selam!

if someone asks   where are you from, little boy?

he will answer proudly   Inglizawi negn!

he does not really know right now where English is or what

but is not troubled by the things he does not understand

while his eyes follow silhouettes of long-tailed birds

and he feels this moment stretch almost forever

አሀያ መጣች ፥ ተጭና ባቄላ

aheya met’ach, tech’na baq’ela

here comes a donkey

loaded with beans

SWEETHEART

Yemisrach puts an