GIFT OF INCENSE: A Story Of Love and revolution In Ethiopia
By: Ashakih, Judith
ISBN: 9781569021811
$24.95
Gift of Incense chronicles a unique twentieth century story, the emigration to Ethiopia in the early 1960s of Judy Linder and of her marriage to African musician Abubaker Ashakih. What emerges from the pages of this book is not simply a personal memoir but also a living picture of a unique time and place in East Africa before it was forever changed by revolution and famine. The reader, and especially the Western reader, shares through the life story of Abubaker Ashakih the lives of a remarkable group of Ethiopian and Eritrean people in a country that had found a way to balance Muslim and Christian traditions and to create a beautiful and elegant culture that may well have been unique in the modern world. If only for this, Gift of Incense would be a compelling and timely story that cries out to be heard in a world increasingly swept by the winds of intolerance and religious violence. But what also emerges is a picture of an East Africa that has been forever changed and not likely to return. And finally, through the story of her husband and her children, she opens a window onto the loss of a culture as it has been experienced by the expatriate community of East Africans living in the United States.”