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San Diego Union Tribune
2006-09-10
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The opening of Melissa Fay Greene's fourth book evokes Edith Wharton's 19th-century New York. A society matron, "ebullient and round," has filled her parlor with a dozen friends on a rainy day. They include a sardonic retired professor, an august dowager and a shy young woman pouring coffee into demitasse cups. Everyone brings the hostess a small gift of gossip, and "as each caller took a seat, [she] hurried back to her chair and pitched forward brightly to hear the news."
But the year is 2004. The city is Addis Ababa. Roughly half the guests, including the professor and the young woman, are dying of AIDS. The hostess, Haregewoin Teferra, is called away from her party to rescue a street waif who has lost his mother and is about to lose his father to AIDS. Against the urging of her friends, she brings the boy home to join the dozens of other AIDS orphans who overflow her small house and a backyard annex made from "a rusted, bright blue boxcar with a door carved out of it." As is customary for new arrivals at the makeshift orphanage, Mintesinot will eat his first meal in days and sob himself to sleep.
Like the very best literature, There Is No Me Without You charts the human condition in all its extremes — passion and cruelty, greed and courage — through the narrative arc of an ordinary person thrust into a vortex. In this tale, the vortex is a viral plague, wrongly blamed on sex, inadvertently spread by a tool invented to eradicate disease and prolonged by an industry that chose to let people suffer and die because it would not risk its profit margins.
Greene's first book, the National Book Award finalist Praying for Sheetrock, told the true story of an African-American hero in a novelistic guise. Greene was part of the legal team that tried to shield a black county commissioner from racist retribution in segregated Georgia. Armed with compelling facts and riveting personal experiences, she produced a stellar work of literary journalism. There Is No Me Without You delivers a similar story with the same framework: Greene, a white Atlantan, met Haregewoin on a trip to Ethiopia to consider adopting an AIDS orphan. But it surpasses the earlier book because it harnesses the most potent of all human forces: the bond between parent and child.
Haregewoin's middle-class Ethiopian life began to unravel when her husband, a high school principal, died of a heart attack. Within months, her elder daughter, Attetegeb, fell in love with a thuggish security guard, and when Haregewoin tried to intervene, the couple quickly wed. Attetegeb became pregnant shortly after she fell sick with acute fatigue and a hacking cough. By the time her son was born, she was feverish, gaunt and racked with diarrhea. In less than a year she was dead, and Haregewoin plunged into an emotional abyss.
While Attetegeb's diagnosis is never made clear, her symptoms resemble AIDS, and her illness emerges as the proliferation of AIDS is choking Africa. Conspiracy theories that AIDS is a genocidal campaign to rid the world of blacks do not sound so loony to locals when you consider that, historically, Africa was the premier continent, advanced in civilization and, until modern times, victorious against foreign invaders. Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, was once ruled by King Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Even when mired in poverty and despotism, Ethiopians bear the dignity that comes with pride of heritage.
Ethiopia's 20th-century descent began with the execrable Haile Selassie, a petite tyrant who let his people starve because he thought famine aid would diminish his stature. Writes Greene, "Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has observed that there has never been a famine in a country with a free press." The descent steepened when a subsequent tyrant, Meles Zenawi, began a financially ruinous war on Eritrea: "The escalation into war in 1998 cost the government $2 million a day; in 2000, the defense budget exceeded $800 million." Meanwhile, 81 percent of Ethiopians were living on less than $2 a day.
Money followed the soldiers into war, and disease came home with them. By now, the horrific statistics of the AIDS pandemic in Africa are too familiar — 6,600 Africans die of AIDS each day, as many as 50 million AIDS orphans are projected by 2010 — but Greene deploys the data with a cold rage that sharpens their impact. She seethes at the cruel irony that, just as Africa threw off colonial rule and headed toward economic and political progress, "HIV/AIDS [became] the greatest single engine of social collapse." And she informs (or reminds) us that Big Pharma, aided by cronies like then-Vice President Al Gore, blocked the manufacture of generic antiviral drugs, ensuring billions in American revenues and millions of African deaths.
While millions of deaths fueled statistics, closer to the ground, the single tragedy of Haregewoin's loss led her to church, where a charity worker made a desperate plea: since she lived alone in an empty house, could she take in a starving AIDS orphan? One foster child led to two, two led to four, and soon dozens of orphans were showing up at Haregewoin's door. At first, this renewal of motherhood, of cuddling lost children and making them whole again, revived Haregewoin: "It was a transaction as old as humankind. ... She had been broken, and now she would put the knowledge of that to good use, to repair others, to bring them back to life."
But as needy youngsters piled up, Haregewoin wore out. Greene's portrayals of how orphans ache for a parent, any parent, are soul-wrenching. Among the children who could not fit into Haregewoin's orphanage, one little girl accepted her lot but held out for a consolation prize. "The child nuzzled her face deeply into Haregewoin's cheek and lingered there. ... She wasn't asking to be taken into the compound — she seemed to understand that she couldn't have Haregewoin as her own mother — she was only asking to be allowed this opportunity to kiss the mother."
There Is No Me Without You is based on Greene's October 2004 Good Housekeeping article, "Hope Lives Here," about Haregewoin and her orphans. The magazine story brought Haregewoin international renown, a flood of donations to expand her compound and waves of Europeans and Americans eager to adopt her orphans. It also exposed her to the viral contagions of envy and resentment, and she was temporarily incapacitated by them. But her ultimate humanitarian legacy is beautifully captured in the book's final descriptions of several AIDS orphans who were saved by her love and are now thriving with their new families in Vermont, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.
This book is an extraordinary portrait of this exemplary woman.
— B.T. SHAW
