Searching for Ella / Crocodile Collage (Ellan Fillega/Ye'Azo Kollage)

Ellan Fillega/Ye’Azo Kollage

(Searching for Ella/Crocodile Collage)

By O’Tam Pulto (Sinkneh Eshetu), August 2012, OLand Books, Addis Ababa
Cover Sketch: Assafa G/Kidan
Cover Design: Mulugeta G/Kidan 

Searching for Ella/Crocodile Collage is a story about the conflict between nature, indigenous culture, and modernity, and of the individual and society told through the story of one man’s quest for Ella, the spirit of water in Konso Cosmology, symbolizing the threatened intangible heritages of the Konso and other indigenous communities. The main character, Kussie, took preserving his culture to be his life’s mission. While going through all odds to realize his dream, he gets into sever conflict with the same culture he arose to preserve. His dream shattered, and an outcast of his culture and people, he starts to live as an “illegal” fisherman at Abaya and Chamo lakes in Netchsar National Park, struggling, his entire life, to rebuild his shattered dream. It seems hard to tell whether what he builds or rebuilds would take him back to his old dreams or destroy him.

At the background of almost magical natural beauty of the Arbaminch Landscape, the lives of the fishermen as well as that of the Guji People who live in the national Park, and their struggle for survival in the face of increasing control by park management, comes into a sharp focus. The story progressively depicts how nature and the lives of individuals and communities fall prey to the blind forces of modernity and, in the process, reveals valuable insights into the mysteries of nature, man, and their interconnectedness, inspired by indigenous knowledge. 

The story happens in eight days, days Kussie thinks to be his last days on earth, with vivid flashbacks into his past life that lead him to the state of being he is in presently. He is counting his days down for a deadly mission he believes to be meritorious. No one seems to be aware of his plan and no one prepared to stop him.

The book is in the category of personal journey that one may place in line with works such as Herman Hess’s Siddhartha and Paulo Chloe’s The Alchemist, philosophically taking on the question of time and space, spirit and soul, life and death, obedience and freedom, human-nature and human-human interconnectedness. Comparable to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, it shows one man’s perseverance and endurance in the face of suffering to reinforce the truth that pain is only a means of awakening powers latent in the human spirit.