Rebecca Fisseha, Writer.

More Notes from the Canadian honey jar…

Would such a character be too farfetched for fiction or just about plausible? I don’t want to accidentally end up writing a horror story!

May 24, 2017

Portrait of the female (habesha) psychopath:

…came out West to ferenj-ager with a very rigid set of deeply conservative values (indoctrination, rather), one of them, the worst sin, being to cause her family name to be dragged through the mud/bring shame. Never mind it is one of those terribly generic names. Both her ‘official’ one and her ‘real’ one.

…always gives this impression, these subtle hints, that she’d had some very bad experience with a man in Ethiopia, and that was basically her reason for leaving. She was escaping a bad relationship fallout. You know, how habesha men get scary obsessive and murderous, etc. (I remember hearing some such story when I was in Nazareth, about a guy so in love with a girl, and stalking her, and threatening to kill her unless she agreed to be his – this was quite a common narrative. Guy becomes smitten, he demands the girl’s attention, she refuses him at her peril. And yet we also used to make fun of this particular ferenj tendency to kill the one you claim to love.) Whoever that was, she never went into detail.

…is never capable of spontaneous emotional openness, vulnerability, every move was calculated to make sure she always maintained the upper hand. So calculated that it doesn’t even require much conscious effort on her part. It is simply as natural as breathing. If people in general are quite disposable, quite interchangeable to her, like so many business cards in a folder you keep just in case they become useful to you someday (her version of ‘friendship’) men are even more so. Men, by the way, whom she claims to prefer for company better than women. Of course she would, they are easy prey! A smart bitch, or even a bitch of average intelligence, would see her coming a mile away! Game recognize game and so on…

…never any hard proof of all the stories she tells about her relationships, either how they started or how they ended. But she is always so convincing in her telling that you just believe her. Only after the passage of time do the details reveal themselves to have been just a tad too convenient, a tad perfectly sequenced to present her in the best possible light.

…she wasn’t always this way, when she left Ethiopia there is a conscious decision she made – fuck everyone else, I’ll do what I have to do to make sure I always come out on top. Does it have something to do with ‘the bad thing’ that happened to her there? Who knows. (Everyone of a certain immigrant generation has a whole other past life they never talk about, that no one save a few, if any, know about. It’s like they leave a whole self behind.)

…a calculating, selfish, insanely clever, cut-throat person who manages to come across as your best friend in the world, even your sister. But she’s got plenty of brothers and sisters to give a shit about the pretend ones she makes and drops along the way

…convinced of her own importance. She is the most important person in the world, to herself, and other people’s needs, feelings, expectations, come second, if at all. I don’t think she ever loses a moment worrying about how her actions or words affect others. Weakness was what she lived on, especially men’s weakness. She loved to torture them. “use-and-throw” isn’t just for picnics

…this power-craving, especially when it comes to habesha men, is something she developed from knowing that her mother was a child bride, and from seeing what drove her to eventually divorce him. she takes out what she couldn’t do/say to him on those other, in her view weaker men she comes across later in life. daddy’s girl, in a twisted way. really expects him to waiting for her in the afterlife, to hear a report of how she lived, whether he would approve of it or send her back for a redo, as if he holds the keys to heaven itself.