ERIC WESTERVELT, HOST:
For kids, the world can be magical. It's a place of wonder, populated with superheroes and Barbie dolls, terraformed by video games and cartoons, and stocked with candy, especially this time of year. But how do the cultural objects we love as kids shape how we see the world as adults? A new NPR series explores this. It's called Throw it Back.
MAHLET ASSEFA: My object is habesha kemis. It's a traditional Ethiopian dress that my mom made for me for my first birthday.
WESTERVELT: Throw It Back begins with Mahlet Assefa and the story of her cotton dress.
ASSEFA: Girls across sort of all ages, women, have habesha kemises that they wear to weddings, to christenings, graduations. We also wear it to church on Sundays. And my dress - you can sort of see gold thread catching the light. It's something that brings me back home, and I think it's beautiful.
WESTERVELT: Mahlet Assefa lives in Seattle with her family. But for her, home is Bahir Dar in Northern Ethiopia. It's where she spent part of her childhood.
ASSEFA: I grew up in that small city, and my two aunts, my mom's sisters, lived with us, and they helped take care of us. So my parents went to work. But when I came back from school or in the mornings, there was so much joy. That house was always full of people. I remember seeing pictures of me in the dress when I was really young. In these pictures, I saw myself sort of running around at this party with the green dress among red balloons, and our front yard had these two huge mango trees. We'd sit on the verandah, and everybody would get their own mangoes, and every adult knew me. Our door was always wide open. You know, our neighbors and passersby would always jump in to come say hello. It was this world that just gave me so much attention and love.
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ASSEFA: I lived there until I was 9 years old, which is when I moved to the U.S. There's a lot of political turmoil in Ethiopia. And when we moved, and all of us were sort of together here, I thought, are we visiting? Are we staying? What's going on? Kind of thing. And my dad looked very firm, and he's like, this is our home. There's no leaving. There's no turning back.
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ASSEFA: I think the first year was really the hardest year. My dad was working two jobs, and we rarely saw him. My mom - you know, she's used to working outside of the house, and she was at home. She was so much of a sort of a shell of herself, of what she was like in, like, taking the time to make beautiful embroidered, you know, dresses.
ASSEFA: There's just so much less levity in the house. There weren't mangoes on the porch. Our apartment was right in front of the steps. And I can hear people coming up and down the steps. Part of me - I was like, OK, maybe somebody will stop by and say, hello, introduce themselves. Ask me who I am, you know, and no one ever stopped by.
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ASSEFA: I just felt sort of reduced and sort of on the sidelines of maybe someone else's world. I didn't have the tools languagewise, but even sort of culturally to understand what was going on here. One of the things that was difficult was race. When I was living in Ethiopia, all I knew was Ethiopians, and, of course, it was pretty familiar. So I never had a context of myself as being Black. The first time that I remember being in a store and being followed by the store owner and then being confused about why that might be, was a difficult thing to navigate.
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ASSEFA: I didn't really think about the dress for many years until I was an adult when my mom gave it to me. Right around the time that I was going into medical school. I remember her saying, you know, I have something for you. And she pulled it out. At first, I didn't know whose dress it was. And when she told me, at first I was confused. How did the dress make it here from Ethiopia to Seattle? She explained that she brought it with her across the water, across the country, and kept it with her for all of these years. It really made me quite teary because it was like, wow, this dress is sort of a physical embodiment of the ways in which I've been loved and I am loved. There are a lot of different ways in which the world has tried and continues to try to define me.
And I think what the dress sort of allows me to do is to say, actually, no, I get to sort of anchor myself in all the beautiful things that made me. I could really go anywhere, and I could really do anything and then still come home and be loved and be cared for.
WESTERVELT: That was Mahlet Assefa in Seattle, Washington, for our series Throw It Back. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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