12. When Woman-at-Risk Meets Youth-at-Risk

In this chapter, I share autoethnographic stories of my deepest struggles with social construction and weave them into a case illustration from my community practice. I especially highlight the inseparable interwovenness of the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, the ethnic and the national, the local and the global, the past and the future, the conscious and the unconscious. . . . I invite you to follow me through the surprising twists and turns as I peel away the notion of social construction layer by layer. Beware—I don’t define concepts! I simply tell you the stories of how I know what I know and invite you to make your own meanings. I also invite you to think reflexively as you read and figure out how the little pieces all fit together and where you yourself fit in these stories.

I was running away from my homeland, going into the depth of the uncertain. I had taken my three children out of their boarding school for the weekend, but I knew I was not going to take them back. We were fleeing the country of our people. I could not leave them in danger and run for my own life, but my secret schemes were not working. The weekend was coming to an end. I would soon be forced to take them back to school. Time was running out so we had to run—and run as fast and as far as we could. I did not utter a word to them, did not tell them why or where we were going. What if they wanted to say goodbye to their friends and what if the word got out? Nor did I tell my family and friends. What if . . . It was April 1991. Globally the Soviet Union was coming apart; locally the communist military regime in Ethiopia was in its final death throes. Its militias were running around like mad dogs, biting anybody they ran into. They were so threatened they would kill anybody discovered doing anything subversive. And running away was subversive! Telling anyone would risk our lives—mine, my kids’, and others’.

When we started out, my kids knew that something was not quite right and that they were not on their way back to school. We were going in another direction. They asked and grumbled a bit, but then they trusted me blindly and followed me without a word. Quiet indignation, perhaps? So we left, running in the dark by night and hiding in the bush by daylight. A sudden gush of breeze, a rustle of leaves . . . Oh my God! We’re busted! The militia! They’re gonna kill us all! Oh God, why did I take all my kids with me?! Why did I not leave them behind?! They would be alive, if not safe! Oh God I know I didn’t believe in You! But these are desperate moments . . . please take care of my kids. They are innocent.

Tears welled in my eyes. The kids looked at me inquisitively. I looked away. They probably knew I was scared stiff, but I shouldn’t show them I was capable of fear. What about their trust in me? For them, I was the pillar of strength! Hussshhh. . . . Don’t talk! Don’t cough! Don’t breathe! Hussshhh, my pets, hussshhh. How many days was it? Days were harder to count because they brought paralysis and terror. Nights brought little sleep, but they were better since they brought the hope of escape, of running as far as our little feet could take us. How many nights, then? Fifteen nights of hopeful terror! Until, in the end, terror receded and hope came to the foreground of our landscape. We were in safe hands in two weeks!

Crossing the border into Kenya meant safety. I knew all along that people from Amnesty and PEN¹ International were working with other people on my behalf on the other side of the border—if only we could get there alive! For ten years, they had been fighting for my release from the Ethiopian dungeon, where I was kept and tortured. They believed that I was a prisoner of conscience, imprisoned and tortured because I was an Oromo journalist and because the communist military regime did not like my political views and my Oromoness. When I was finally released, I did not have a place to come home to. My children were scattered, as were many children of other counterrevolutionaries at that time. The irony was that I did not consider myself a counterrevolutionary at all. Indeed, I saw myself as a revolutionary of the finest kind! The regime was against popular revolution!

In my absence, international human rights activists had worked out a way by which someone secretly collected my kids and put them in a boarding school where they could be cared for. When I was released, I wanted to start where I left off and raise my children, but journalism slammed its door in my face. I went back to the university but that too was closed down, and students were conscripted into the military to fight for their revolutionary motherland. The crumbling regime was scrambling to take down with it everyone in its path. My life was in peril once again. If I went to the training camps, I would be killed as a counterrevolutionary. If I refused, I would be hunted down and killed as a fugitive. There was no escape. If I had to die, I told myself, I would die running for dear life. That was when I pulled my kids out of the boarding school and hit the road.

As soon as I came to safety in Kenya, I became a refugee. A refugee? Was that what was happening to me? I was simply running for my life! Looking at the thousands languishing in refugee camps for years, it was hard to accept the fate. Worse still, have my children become refugees, too? Oh no! They did not choose to come! I made that decision for them! Oh God, that would burn me for the rest of my life. Although I felt terribly guilt-ridden for the thousands who were left in the camps, for us, the process of resettlement was swift because I was deemed a woman-at-risk. Friends told me that the woman-at-risk program was created by the United Nations to protect women facing danger. Soon Amnesty and PEN brought me to Canada under the government’s Woman-at-Risk program.

So I was a woman-at-risk? I was so busy living the experience, I had no time to name it. But I loved woman-at-risk and embraced it dearly when others named it for me. I told everyone that I was a woman-at-risk! It was a protective cocoon, and I wore it comfortably because it brought me to Canada, my sanctuary. It meant an acknowledgement that I was in imminent danger and needed protection. That was the meaning I took to my studies in social work. My woman-at-risk identity inspired my passion to help others at risk. I did my doctoral study and continued my community work with refugee youths who I believed were youth-at-risk—until one day my cherished “at risk” came into a sharp conflict with their disdain for the label. The tension prompted me to critically examine my unexplored assumptions about my coveted woman-at-risk identity. And what I found was shocking to me.

I know woman-at-risk as a social construction. It is a social category created by the United Nations, after all! And I am no stranger to the notion of social construction; it has been with me in one form or another since my teenage years. However, my relationship with social construction is a relationship full of surprises. This is because the contours of social construction have been a shifting ground where theories are formulated and reformulated as the contextual ground shifts. It is also because social construction is so textured and layered that the depth of its meanings is revealed to me piecemeal—encounter by encounter and milieu by milieu. I assume everyone’s trajectory in making sense of this is as unique as their personal stories. Let me share my unique relations with social construction, focusing on the discursive practices of nation-states. Being a woman-at-risk did not just drop from the sky for me. I was constructed as one—not just as an individual, not even in one generation of collectives. It took global and local, delicate and blatant, historical and contemporary processes.² It is deeply tied up with how Ethiopia was constructed as a nation-state through the Othering of Oromos, a people put at-risk.

I am an Oromo born and raised in Ethiopia. Being Oromo in Ethiopia positions me on a specific historical trajectory. Until 1974, Ethiopian historiography wrote Oromos into the world by a derogatory name, Galla, although the people called themselves Oromo. Ethiopianness and Oromoness were national identities competing on a playing field steeply skewed against Oromos. Even my naming was imbued with these struggles. My grandmother gave me her cherished Oromo name, Kuwee. But I was christened Martha, and that became my official name to protect me from the oppression many Oromos faced in Ethiopia. Martha Maxwell was the name of the American missionary nurse who delivered me when I was born. My parents loved her so much that they named me after her. They loved her because she dared to go against the grain and treat Oromos like equal human beings. She went to their homes and welcomed them to hers. She valued their teaching and taught them what she valued. Above all, she learned their culture and language and spoke with them in Oromo, even when most other missionaries followed the rules and spoke down to Oromos through interpreters.

At the time, nation building was at its peak in Ethiopia. Although it was the language of a minority ethnic group, Amharic was being instated as the official language of Ethiopia. My birth in 1955 coincided with the year the emperor proclaimed a new constitution, consolidating earlier decrees and ordering all forms of public speech and instruction, including local sermons, to be in Amharic. That was a huge blow to my parents’ generation who worshiped God and taught schools in their own Oromo language. Although Oromos constituted a numeric majority and the Oromo language was the language that the majority of peoples in Ethiopia spoke, it was banned from all public use. Abyssinian³ colonization was inching towards consolidation. Most American missionaries had to respect the law of the land and ban the Oromo language from their activities. The brave Martha Maxwell and a few earlier missionaries were exceptions to the rule.

My father documents (Kumsa, 2009) that the first American missionaries came to his Sayyo area in 1919 as doctors and nurses to help victims of the Spanish Flu that was ravaging the world at the end of WWI. The first Abyssinian gun-carrying settlers arrived in Sayyo just a year ahead in 1918 to subdue and incorporate Sayyo Oromos into the new country being forged as Ethiopia. Before that time, Oromos were an independent people who had their own indigenous religion woven into their egalitarian self-governance structures known as the gadaa system. Although Ethiopia was created by default as an entity left over from the European Scramble for Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century, its direct rule had not reached Sayyo until the end of WWI (Kumsa, 2009; Holcomb and Ibsa, 1990). Notwithstanding, today Ethiopia sits in the atlases and maps of the world with distinct borders—seeming timeless, a historical, and reified as if it has always been there. The new country has also stolen the ancient Greek naming of biblical Ethiopia to secure the reification. Now biblical Ethiopia coincides and doubles up with Ethiopia of the colonial carving of the twentieth century.⁴

Most missionaries reinforced this colonial process by taking on the civilizing mission to incorporate the heathen Galla into the Christian kingdom. Ironically, many Sayyo Oromos resisted the mortifying disruptions of colonial aggression and attempted a new dignified way of life by taking refuge in the American mission itself. When the Ethiopian theocratic state used fire and sword to convert Oromos to Orthodox Christianity, Sayyo Oromos refused and converted to the Protestant religion in mass, just as the Oromos in other areas converted to Islam in mass. That was a profound act of protest against the aggressive repression of the colonial state. My father was one of the first few Oromos ordained as Protestant pastors. He documents stories of their intense persecution, the burning down of their churches, and the imprisonment and torture of believers (Kumsa, 2009). While being Oromo in Amhara-dominated Ethiopia marked one for persecution, being Oromo and Protestant in Orthodox Ethiopia was a double jeopardy. As an Oromo elder and Protestant pastor, my father took the brunt of his community’s persecution and torture and spent half of his life in and out of prison.

Although they introduced the Protestant religion, American missionaries refused to intervene on behalf of the suffering communities of Oromo Protestants. Church elders assumed that the missionaries were caught in a dilemma between their loyalty to the Oromo church and their loyalty to the Christian state. But they expected the missionaries to seek help from the U.S. government. Since the U.S. loved the emperor, a little diplomatic help would go a long way in soothing the suffering of the community. However, the missionaries refused to do even that. They simply stood aside and watched the intensifying persecution. Baffled and feeling used and abandoned, the communities banded together to resist state repression. To add insult to injury, the suffering community realized that indeed the United States and other Western countries supported the emperor even in the brutal repression of his subjects. They learned the hard way that the Ethiopian nation-state was being created and maintained by much bigger global powers. However, this did not dampen the spirit of the suffering community. With tears and broken hearts, they prayed to the Almighty God and continued their struggle against injustice.

I was raised in this spirit of community resistance, inheriting their struggle against injustice but choosing a different gospel. I took on the social gospel and looked to the east of the Cold War divide with so much hope. I turned away from the West that I believed wreaked havoc and resentment among my people. My break with my parents’ God was not as clean, however. It happened in ebbs and flows, and the Christian values I internalized so deeply continue to surprise me even now, after four decades. At the time, however, I was blissfully revolutionary. I rejected everything that had to do with any kind of God! So many atrocities and injustices were committed in the name of God. Ethiopian emperors said they were elects of God and used God to denigrate and oppress my people. My parents continued to pray to God for deliverance even after living the atrocities committed in his name. I agreed with Karl Marx; religion was definitely the opiate of the oppressed. I saw it with my own eyes! When we talked about the Oromo national liberation struggle, my parents said there was no liberation outside the will of God. They truly believed in their people’s liberation from the Ethiopian colonial yoke, and they sacrificed a lot in the struggle to achieve it, but they tied it all to the will of God.

The Ethiopian theocratic state came tumbling down when over a century of oppression and injustice exploded into popular revolution in 1974. For me, that was a radical break from the bondage of God and religion, a blissful encounter with social construction. What happened was a radical social transformation. Regimes are not put there by God! It is not the will of God that the oppressed masses suffer injustice. Kings and kingdoms and nation-states are creations of the human imagination. No social reality is given; reality is what we make it. It is a social construction. We can create it, and we can change it through social action. Indeed, for the first time in the history of Ethiopia, the derogatory name Galla was officially banned and changed to Oromo. Oromo echoed throughout the country from state and private media. Galla was a social construction. There was no denigration in the nature or culture of the people. Denigration came through social encounters and Galla was changed into Oromo, the name the people liked to call themselves, through social construction. I agree with Karl Marx again. We become who we are through work, through history and action, through what we do and not by some God-given quality—virtue or vice.

That was the surface layer of my social construction. I lived it as a social gospel liberating from the cruel grips of kings and gods and religion. Indeed, free at last, I became a journalist, reclaiming my personal stories and my people’s history. I wrote newspaper columns and produced and broadcast radio programs in the Oromo language and in my Oromo name, Kuwee. Who cares about Martha? Let it sit in the official files and rot there! I am Kuwee, and my people are Oromo. Gone were the injustices of the Galla days! We were rejecting dehumanization and reclaiming our authentic humanity as individuals and as collectives, our true human potential repressed and stunted by inhuman practices of injustice.

To the utter dismay of my parents, I translated and published the first Communist Manifesto in the Oromo language—when I was only 19! Workers of all countries unite! That was so energizing. All these boundaries created among peoples of different countries were created by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the proletariat. All nationalism was bourgeois nationalism designed to isolate workers and protect bourgeois interests. All national boundaries will be dismantled and the workers of all countries will unite. Long live proletarian internationalism! We have nothing to lose but our chains! That also resolved my cognitive dissonance between the mythical Ethiopia and the real Ethiopia in which I grew up. I rejected the grand narrative of mythical Ethiopia: Ethiopia with 3,000 years of freedom and continuity; Ethiopia, the land of harmony and homogeneity; Ethiopia, the Christian Island. I replaced it with Ethiopia, the colonial carving of the twentieth century; Ethiopia, the prison house of nations; Ethiopia, built by the West on the ruins of over eighty nations and nationalities; and Ethiopia, the land of heterogeneity, conflicts, and struggles. We fight against all forms of oppression!

“Ssshhhh . . . Don’t talk about Oromo oppression,” said my comrades in my Marxist student study circles. Why not? Isn’t it a form of oppression? Being Oromo in Ethiopia hurts! National oppression hurts! “Ssshhh! Don’t say that; not while the imperialist monster is out there! This is divisive; it creates conflict within the revolutionary camp. We will come back to that after we defeat the capitalist monsters out there.” But Ethiopia is a colonial carving! It is oppressive to so many! What about the national colonial question? The response was a shock: “Even the Organization of African Unity (OAU) accepts colonial boundaries! The national colonial question is a Pandora’s Box; we cannot open it now. Leave that for later. In the meantime, the motto is Ethiopia First!” What? The very Ethiopia I just spat out of my mouth? Am I to lick that off the ground? No way! Somebody’s gotta be kidding me! Amharas are not real revolutionaries. They want to continue the same story when it comes to their interests. Are we really in this together?

I drifted to the Oromo national liberation struggle. Sister socialist countries were behind the anti-colonial national liberation movements in the entire world. What an inspiration! Local and global leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Baro Tumsa, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong became my heroes. But wait a minute! They are all men! Here I could shout about Oromo oppression to the top of my lungs. And I did. Here the brutal hushing up came down on issues of gender. It did not take me long to realize that my male Oromo comrades were not as hot about real gender oppression within the struggle as they were about the national oppression out there, despite the motto: There is no liberation without the emancipation of women. “Ssshhh,” they said, “don’t raise that; not while the Abyssinian monster is out there! It is divisive; it weakens the Oromo struggle now. We will come back to it after liberation.” But gender hurts now! Being a woman in the Oromo struggle hurts! Gender is an issue of liberation! I screamed on deaf ears and drifted away again, this time to journalism. I claimed journalism as my personal space to fight against all forms of oppression, class, national, gender, etc. Alas! The dismal consequence was a decade of prison and torture (Kumsa, 2005).

In Canada where injustice continues in other forms, I chose social work as the frontline of my struggle against all forms of oppression. I sought out welcoming spaces that would nurture my anti-colonial approach and found less radicalized, mild, and watered-down forms of anti struggles against injustice. I assumed, as a caring/helping institution of the liberal nation-state, that’s how radical social work could get. I did find a somewhat comfortable home in the anti-discriminatory, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist practices. However, as an anti-colonial revolutionary who lived through two revolutions and got disillusioned by both, I realized that these anti forms of reactive politics and oppositional struggles were becoming burdensome fetters on my continuously evolving sense of Self. I felt increasing unease and discomfort with oppositional binaries that I believed contributed more to hardening positions than creating transformative spaces.

Attention! Innocence is about to be lost! Social construction is about to reveal a deeper reflexive layer. This time it struck right at the very core of my being. This was an affront on my long held belief about my sense of Self, a simultaneous assault on my personhood and peoplehood. I was doing my doctoral research. Social construction was coming at me from all sides, or was I going at it? Perhaps we were seeking each other out but this time construction was pointing to me, not to something out there. I am a social construction!? I know Martha is a social construction. Global powers introduced it to my people, after all. But Kuwee feels like my authentic Oromo name! It reflects my authentic Oromoness. Now even my authentic Self is called to question! I know Ethiopia is a fiction created by global powers and local despots. But Oromo is an authentic nation colonized along with 80 other nations and nationalities and herded into a prison house of an empire called Ethiopia. Now they say Oromo is fiction!? I am not real!? No way! This is annoying! Nonsense! I’m reading too much of Western nonsense! Come on, Kuwee! You’re authentic! Your people are authentic! They are real! Their colonization is real! You paid a hefty price for it! Just remember why your kids suffered, why you lost your loved ones, why you were jailed and tortured! Trust your own experience! Don’t let Western nonsense take away your truth!

The earth was shaking from under me. The solid ground on which I stood was quickly dissolving away. I found myself in quicksand with nothing left to hold on to. I was coming apart and falling apart! Somebody wants my absolute death! No way would I allow them to do this to me! Or to my people! I will fight them tooth and nail! It’s an issue of survival! I have survived so much and I can survive much more! As a way of survival, I joined the debate. Did nationalisms create nations or did nations create nationalisms (see, for example, Anderson, 1983; Armstrong, 1982; Bhabha, 1990; Connor, 1994; Gellner, 1983; Hall, 1996a, 1996b; Hall and DuGay, 1996; Held, 1996)? Are nations and states coterminous or are there nations without states? I embraced the notion of nations without states (see, for example, Guibernau, 1999; Kristeva, 1993) as it fit the situation of my people. We are a nation though we don’t have a state. I viciously attacked those who argued on the constructionist side or even hinted at the notion that my Oromoness was a fiction (Kumsa, 2002; Sorenson, 1996; Gow, 2002). Fiction meant not real. I know I am real and my people are real! Come on! From the time I learned how to speak, I grew up reckoning my ancestors and counting back my genealogy up to fifteen or sixteen generations. I know who I descended from! I belong to the Oromo nation by blood and ancestry, not only by history and culture! And that’s authentic!

I defended my last stronghold with all the might I could muster. Oromos are a nation, just like Abyssinians, Germans, English, and French. Although many call us a tribe. A people over forty million strong, a tribe?! Something’s wrong with the world. Ethiopia is built on the blood and tears of many nations, just like Australia, Canada, and the United States. These are all settler colonial states, not nations. English are English, whether in Europe, America, or Australia. So are Oromos; we remain Oromo wherever the cruel world throws us. We remain one authentic nation from across the geographies of time and space and culture. But the assault continued, not just from outside of me; this time something was melting from deep within me as well. My last two defenses, the notions of the nation and of blood and ancestry, were being shaken. I learned that the term nation itself was a European invention. In earlier days, Europeans used to call themselves tribes and used nations to refer to Others they considered barbarians. With bourgeois revolution, they claimed nations for themselves and gave tribes to their Others (see Anderson, 1983). I identified so deeply with Frantz Fanon’s agonizing cry (Fanon, 1967). So I have been fighting all my life for something imposed from the outside, all the while believing it was authentic?! Okay, forget the naming! What about blood and ancestry? Is that fiction, too?

I found some consolation in that fiction did not mean unreal. It just meant it was the product of human imagination but it is real. Well, I knew that much for Ethiopia; I just could not take it when it came to Oromo. I could point construction outward so well but not inward to myself. Okay, I learned that social categories create reality; they don’t deny reality. Or perhaps people’s realities create social categories? That doesn’t even occur to ardent constructionists, does it? My birth, my blood, my ancestry are all objective, genetic facts. But it takes on meaning only through language, through discourses and symbols and metaphors, as my people make sense of the fact and convert it into truth. Fact doesn’t speak for itself until people interpret and make it truth. The name Kuwee is itself a social construction created through language. But I know that more than just language is involved here. My grandfather was a local Ayantu—a local astrologer prophet who named children by watching the various constellations of stars and by listening for the spiritual signals of the times. Naming is not just born out of language; it creates language as well. I refuted this linguistic reductionism fiercely but embraced the partial role of language in creating reality.

If we could refrain from reducing everything to essence or construction, we would get to a deeper layer of social construction where essence becomes construction and construction becomes essence. And these are simultaneous relational processes, intimately and inseparably interwoven. We become subjects through delicate social processes by which our likes and dislikes are woven into our sense of Self and get lodged in our bodies. They become second nature, the external speaking from deep within us, and we may not even be aware of them (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1977, 1990, 1998; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Merleau-Ponty, 1999; Butler, 1990, 1997; Foucault, 1979, 1980; Giddens, 1984). Here, I was forced to turn my eyes inward and find this internalized external, to my horror! I am no stranger to reflection, but critical reflexivity is radically different from what I was used to. When I look inside in reflection, I see Self, and when I look outside, I see Other. Self and Other are reified entities apart from each other. Looking reflexively, I see Other inside and I see Self outside. More aptly, I see Self and Other as inseparably intertwined relational processes. As a person who constructed my identity around my oppression and always looked outside for oppressors, it is hard, indeed painful, to look inside and find the oppressor within myself. And, for me, this is the most deeply hidden face of social construction.

Now I understand why my Amhara Marxist comrades didn’t see anything wrong in their own camp and why they looked outside for the imperialist monster. They could not see the imperialist monster deeply entrenched within them. I know why my Oromo nationalist comrades did not see the gender oppression within our struggle but looked outside for the Abyssinian monster. They could not see the Abyssinian monster deeply entrenched within us. I understand why some Americans fiercely hunt for the terrorist out there. They could not turn those eyes inwards to find the terrorist in themselves that wreaks havoc around the world in their name. I can understand why some feminists could not see any other form of oppression but gender. I see why human rights activists so fiercely point away from themselves towards Others when it comes to human rights violations. I see why anti-racist and anti-oppressive practitioners sternly point outwards for the racist and the oppressive. I know why, as social workers, we are comforted by identifying as helpers, and not as violent oppressors. It is especially hard to look inside when we are activists out to get the culprit from out there. We spend so much time and energy looking for the enemy out there that we fail to find it inside.

Indeed, there is a good reason why this face of social construction is invisiblized and why it is so difficult to reach deep down and face that hidden face of our Self. Making it visible is also unmasking the structures of power and privilege. But with this awareness comes tremendous responsibility. I am deeply pained by the fact that I am implicated in the oppression of many Others, and turning blind eyes does not make the pain go away. I cope with it by taking this awareness to my practice and working to redress the injustice. The surprises of social construction continue to be woven into my sense of Self, encounter by encounter and thread by thread. I will conclude this chapter with an illustration of one such encounter.

I remember the deep sorrow and gnawing pain I took into this case. It was May 2005. A young Oromo was just charged with the murder of his wife, another young Oromo, leaving their two-year-old son virtually an orphan. It happened at the height of Toronto’s infamous youth gun violence, which became a big election issue that year. While “getting tough on crime” was high on the government agenda, “skills training” programs were also promised. Immigrant youths were particularly targeted as “delinquent youth,” “troubled youth,” “youth-at-risk,” or “marginalized youth” depending on the political agenda. Youth marginalization was rampant in the small Oromo community even before the election. Young Oromos were adversely affected by suicide; intergenerational conflicts; running away, leaving home; substance abuse, teen parenthood; premature disengagement from high schools, colleges, and universities; lack of meaningful employment; and involvement with the correctional system. Some were being charged and locked up for major and petty crimes related to drugs and youth gangs.

From such indicators, this was the proverbial multiproblem community. But I was also aware of social construction and knew that there was no problem inherent in the community. If there was an issue, it was the result of relational processes between the community and wider societal structures. There is no youth violence in a contextual vacuum, unrelated to wider forms of violence. I knew for a fact that most members of the small Oromo community in Toronto were refugees who came to Canada fleeing from the persecution and violence in Ethiopia. I knew that they experienced the violence of poverty and racialization in Canada. I knew that most Oromo youths also came from traumatic pasts both in Ethiopia and in the refugee camps around Ethiopia. They were born and raised in families and communities of Oromo liberation strugglers. I knew that they had gone through painful experiences of their own and that some had witnessed the torture and execution of parents and close relatives. But I also knew that all who experience violence do not become violent and all cannot be painted with the same brush.

Community concern mounted, however, as families felt solely responsible for the adversity that befell their youth. As a first step in its search for a way out, the community association conducted an informal needs assessment. The survey identified youth-at-risk as a major community concern and marked “youth skills training” as its main area of intervention. However, this effort did not come to fruition because youth were left out of the process. Community elders identified needs and planned well-being for youth without youth. It was at this point that elders invited me to do another needs assessment because, they said, I had ways with youth-at-risk. This was in reference to my previous doctoral research with youth. Confident as an activist academic that this could be a space for the redress of injustice, I joined the community initiative and planned a participatory action research. We had agreed earlier that, by refusing to participate in skills training, youth were sending a strong message: nothing about us without us!

I took this as an opportunity to unmask the relational construction of the community problem—yes, to implicate wider societal structures but also to claim agency and responsibility as individuals and as a community (for further details on accountability and responsibility, see Butler, 2005). I combined community work and research to redress injustice. I wrote up a tentative proposal for a small grant from my university and taught an overload course to make up for the financial shortfall. I scrutinized the proposal with my sharpest critical lens and, when a team of Oromo youth researchers came forward, I presented it with a caveat: I wrote up tentative beginnings and got the funds but the project was theirs; it was up to them to make it their own. I didn’t think anyone believed me. One scratched his head; others looked at me blankly. But I was adamant and asked to be challenged. When the youth obliged, however, it shook the earth from under me.

The youth took the proposal to pieces; I felt I was being taken to pieces myself! I defended it vehemently but felt ashamed and fell quiet. I feel like a child caught stealing. I just asked them to make it their own, and now I’m fighting to keep it mine!? The first thing they rejected was youth-at-risk. Why for God’s sake?! What’s wrong with being at-risk? That’s how we mobilize government support! Are they denying they are at risk? Well, they are! They think they know better than everybody? Surely these kids are digging themselves into a hole! I could not fathom why they resented youth-at-risk and I felt it as a personal affront to my own woman-at-risk identity. The most persuasive reason for their rejection was that no Oromo youth would participate in this effort if we used that term. There is stigma attached to youth-at-risk. It means you are in trouble and no one would want to associate with you. It means you are bad! Bad? As in inherently bad? I know “in trouble” means I’m in a situation outside of me, but bad is different! It is something about me! Was I inherently bad as a woman-at-risk?

The youth researchers took issues with several other concepts and we ended up dropping “skills training” and “the refugee” as well. Skills training assumed that youth didn’t have skills. What about the skills and gifts youth already have? What about supporting them to develop those? Whose need is “skills training” anyway? That took me by surprise. How come I didn’t think of that? And I thought I was the sharpest critical thinker!? The refugee was also seen as a space of perpetual unbelonging and nobody wanted to be called refugee. People called you refugee to keep you out—and many years after you’d become a citizen! Well, I had been challenged by youth before on this; obviously I have not learned. What a shame!

But the “at-risk” label continued to bother me though I knew it was a relational construct. I took the youth challenge as an invitation to learn. I went in to teach and empower; instead, I got an invitation to relinquish my expertise and sit down to learn. The youth have given me their meaning; the onus is now on me to find out what’s bothering me. It’s about time I explored my assumptions and uncritical acceptance. How are we constructed as youth-at-risk and woman-at-risk?

The youth research team committed to a critical engagement of the notions of youth-at-risk and we requested our research assistant to do a critical review of the literature for us. Indeed, the literature turned up rich material. The generic category of “youth” is considered a vulnerable transitional space, and a host of prevention, intervention, and postvention programs are suggested for the “proper” transitioning of youth into adulthood (see, for example, DeVore and Gentilcore, 1999; Kitano and Lewis, 2005; Resnick and Burt, 1996). Indeed, for those not transitioning “properly,” labels like “troubled youth,” “delinquent youth,” and “marginalized youth” are proposed to influence policy. We saw such framing of youth transition as problematic because it creates binaries between “good youth” and “bad youth” and between the human agency of youth and the agency of social structures.

Youth-at-risk seems to break down this binary as it does not locate the problem anywhere. It is probably an improvement on “troubled” and “delinquent” youth, since “troubled” seems to evoke pathology and invite curative interventions and “delinquent” seems to evoke deviance and invite punitive interventions. On the contrary, youth-at-risk seems to only hint at some tragedy waiting to happen and invite caring interventions to avert the impending catastrophe. But just what is it that youth are “at-risk” for? So, youth-at-risk eludes us on this crucial question.

Digging deeper unveils the discursive practices of the nation-state through which the category of youth-at-risk is produced and reproduced. There is a particularly intimate affinity between youth-at-risk and the discursive practices of liberal democratic nation-states because they narrate themselves as caring nations (see, for example, Kelly, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2007; Parton, 1996; Roman, 1996; Stanford, 2008). Immersed in the “catastrophe talk” of contemporary risk societies (Beck, 1992, 2004; Giddens, 1994) and hinting at an impending catastrophe, the caring nation creates the category of youth-at-risk to contain and regulate the instabilities of the rapidly changing world. In a global economy that generates such deep uncertainties and ontological insecurities, then, youth-at-risk becomes a synonym for nation-at-risk, and the institutions of the caring nation are deployed to turn youth into responsible citizens and save the nation from the impending catastrophe. Within this discourse, being at-risk is an indication of flawed identities and a moral failure to be responsible citizens.

However, we also realized that youth-at-risk is not a homogeneous category and that the caring nation packs different care packages for different communities of youth. And the experiences of Oromo youth are validated in studies documenting the double standard and differential deployment of the state’s institutions and regulatory bodies such as schools, police, social work, health services, justice systems, academics, and researchers (see, for example, Ahmed, 2000; Pratt, 2005; Roman, 1996). But this was no news to the Oromo youth researchers; indeed it was their everyday reality. In the era of heightened globalization, especially in the post-9/11 context of anti-terrorism where fear of the Other is particularly whipped up, many racialized minority youths in the West are being rapidly transformed from youth-at-risk in need of caring protection to risky youth against whom the nation needs to protect itself and its citizens (see, for example, Pratt, 2005).

When youth are constructed and normalized as embodying risk, risk takes a symbolic leap from some imminent danger out there onto the bodies of youth-at-risk and youth become the risk itself, the danger. And youth “in trouble” become “troubled youth” and inherently bad youth. Through these iterations, the problem becomes essentially their problem and society appears as if it had nothing to do with it. And these are not simple semantic manipulations but elaborations of how risk becomes embodied in social construction. Locating this constitutive process within the discursive practices of the nation-state is still beyond grasp for many of us. However, when they rejected the youth-at-risk label with such passion, the Oromo youth researchers seemed to have sniffed the danger of embodying risk intuitively. Indeed intuition is a deeply embodied and sophisticated knowledge that we often dismiss as lack of knowledge. It behooves us then to learn how to honor that intimate intuitive knowledge and validate it as legitimate knowledge.

I will now bring this learning to the woman-at-risk label/identity I wore so happily for so long and take this conversation beyond the bounds of the nation-state into the global family of nations (see Malkki, 2001, for family of nations and national order of things).⁵ It was easy for me to state that woman-at-risk was created by the United Nations and, therefore, it is a social construction. What I find harder is engaging in critical reflexivity to move beyond the obvious and peel the invisible deeper layer. My encounter with the youth-at-risk and the reflexive knowledge we produced relationally opens up just such a space to engage the deeper layers of social construction. So how did woman-at-risk ambulate through the family of nations and get woven into my sense of Self? Given the discomforting learning about youth-at-risk, what do I make of my comfort with woman-at-risk? I see two paradoxical threads in my relation to woman-at-risk: being at risk and taking risk.

In being at risk, I embrace woman-at-risk so dearly, and it feels so comfortable. My comfort comes from the depth of the human compassion that flowed and soothed me in my deepest moments of need. It comes from the beauty and warmth of the human spirit and the goodness in humanity that wrapped around me and protected me. My new life is a gift that others retrieved from the shadows of death and gave back to me with grace. This prompts me to live it out in the fight for justice. The love others show me fires up my own love for others; the risk others take on my behalf fires up my activism to take risk on behalf of others. To me this is a reflexive and generative relational process. And if woman-at-risk happens to be a vehicle for such relationality and mutuality in human kindness and empathy, I will continue to hold it closer to my heart and pass it on to others.

However, I also find another layer of my comfort in being at risk that does not feel as good. Here my comfort is the comfort of victimhood. I have no agency and so don’t have to take any responsibility for my actions. The wrongdoers are Others; I am just a passive recipient of their wrongdoing and I can legitimately point to them and curse and complain to the end of time. Public sympathy is with me so I can sit back and enjoy it. But what a shame! Being at risk in this way erases my subjecthood as a person and as a people. Were we really passive recipients of others’ wrongdoing? What about all that struggle, our overflowing passion about the liberation of oppressed masses and creation of a just society? What about my youthful energy and enthusiasm to change the world? What about my active risk taking rather than staying put and being at risk? All of that goes down the drain when I am constructed as a passive victim. What about my agency as an activist? I deny that part of my Self when I take comfort in woman-at-risk.

While my acceptance of a benign victimhood is just a surprise, there is a more shocking layer of woman-at-risk that social construction throws at me yet again. And that is the realization that I was just a pawn in the games of the global family of nations. The identity of each nation is constituted in the relational context of Other nations. The global family of good nations is constituted and held together through the banishment of bad Others. For example, in this discourse, America becomes the rescuer in the relational context of irresponsible Others who abuse and abandon. Canada becomes a peacekeeping nation in the relational context of war-making Others. Savage nations put women at risk and civilized nations rescue the women at risk. Alas! A neoliberal civilizing mission comes embodying a global feminist agenda, ironically to deepen the global oppression of women.

My comfort with woman-at-risk becomes deeply unsettling as I see myself taking part in this global injustice even as I ardently fight against it. I realize that I would perish in the Ethiopian dungeons and not even be named woman-at-risk if the communist military regime was not the bad Other. I shudder at the thought that woman-at-risk is less about the preciousness of human life than about the self-constituting games of good nations through denigrating bad Others. I reflect on the willful silence of the West on the atrocities of the current Ethiopian regime. It does no less evil than its communist predecessor but it is spared because it is put in place by the West. It pains me deeply that woman-at-risk was a garb of privilege that I wore comfortably even as I was documenting painful stories of hundreds of women who were at real risk being herded into dungeons and tortured by the current Ethiopian regime, of women who were disappearing and those whose unborn babies were torn out of their wombs. Helpless, I cry my heart out.

Tears nurture the seed in the rubbles of my shattered woman-at-risk identity, and a reviving activist Self rises up to meet a new sun. I learn that we don’t have to eschew “at-risk” in favor of “taking risk,” or victimization in favor of agency. Both are inseparably tangled up in our everyday living. Yet it is by participating in such dualisms that we also participate in our own marginalization. The youth researchers also processed their own learning and we were able to break the dualism. We realized that youth needed to embrace the rejected youth-at-risk at the same time as they nurtured the courage to take risk and construct their own empowerment. This process gave birth to the Heal and Connect (HAC) project.

HAC is the action phase of the Participatory Action Research we embarked on, but the powerful stories of the research phase that gave rise to HAC also need to be told here. While the research team was wrestling with conceptual issues and running a series of intense consultations on research design and methodology, so much was happening on the practical ground. Two Research Advisory Committees (RACs), one from among community youth (Youth-RAC) and the other from among community elders (Elder-RAC), were created. They were created to assist us in making sense of conceptual, methodological, and ethical concerns. Indeed, RACs proved to be extremely useful in breaking down the dualism surrounding risk. They facilitated the generation of multiple meanings of youth-at-risk from which we gleaned a strategic use of the term in constructing Oromo youth empowerment within and beyond the Oromo community.

Inspiring developments were happening alongside deeply distressing ones. A terrible tragedy befell us at the start of data generation when a youth participant was charged with the tragic murder of his girlfriend, a young Canadian. We lost another precious life while working so hard to prevent just such a tragedy. With this, we also lost to prison the life of a traumatized young man who was so in need of healing. Then our youth research coordinator was locked up for some petty charges. He had confided his innocence in several members of our team, so we were waiting for his acquittal. Alas! It was heartbreaking to see such youthful energy and enthusiasm disappear into the prison system. The research straggled on but another terrible tragedy struck again as we were writing our final report. A young Oromo was found dead, and the police reported that it was neither suicide nor homicide. There was no sign of violence. Nor was there any ailment of the medical type. How can a healthy young person just drop and die? Apparently, the violence that took the life of this youth was not of the visible kind.

The small Oromo community was deeply shaken when the tragic news of the murder echoed from the media. It was only a year earlier that another young Oromo took the life of his young Oromo wife. This time it was a young Canadian woman whose life was taken. Images of a devilish young Oromo murderer with a head full of dreadlocks peered back at us from the TV screens, side by side with the beautiful young white Canadian woman whose life was cut short. The name Oromo became a synonym for violence and murder. In such an atmosphere so thick with a sexualized, racialized, ethinicized, and nationalized face of the Other, any association with the murderer became a huge risk. Many Oromos responded by distancing from the evil murderer and denying any association. The initial shock and disbelief turned into rage, rage at the young Oromo charged with the murder. He was a disgrace to his people; he was inherently bad; he was evil. Well, what about our own responsibility as Oromos, as Ethiopians, and as Canadians?

Social construction was thrown out through the window and then invited back through the door in our research team. The disbelief and rage in the community echoed through the team as well and our work was stalled for a while. We felt betrayed by the young man who did just what we were trying to prevent. It came as an attack on us and our efforts. How could he do this to us? The fact that his father was murdered in the Oromo liberation struggle and that the young man was dealing with mental health issues arising from his own traumatic past were forgotten. The fact that he was a homeless youth abandoned by everyone was lost. He was evil; inherently bad. He was the offender. This rigid victim/offender binary made it hard for us to feel the pain of the victim and grieve the lost precious life of the young Canadian woman at the same time as we also supported the healing of the traumatized young Oromo offender.

The rigid binary was made worse by the locking up of our research coordinator. He must have been lying when he shared his innocence. He was guilty all along. He, too, betrayed us in doing just what we were trying to prevent. He was inherently bad. He was an offender. Breaking this rigid victim/offender binary and showing the intimate relationality of agency and victimization were out of reach. And social construction suffered until the quiet death of the young man where police ruled out suicide or homicide. Where is the violence here? Who is the victim, and who is the offender? With this blurring, social construction was invited right back.

While these tragedies marred our research process, they also underscored the crucial importance of the HAC project and solidified the resolve of our team. In a space where any association with violent murderers and offenders was a huge risk, our team took risk to address the issue. Denying the problem or pointing it towards Others was shirking our responsibility. Our resolve was fired up by the poignant findings of our research. The narratives of youth participants indicated that alienation was at the root of the problem. If there was a cause for the silent death of the young Oromo, it was alienation. The violence of dislocation and the ensuing alienation from the homeland and its sociocultural, material, and spiritual resources; the violence of racialization and poverty and the ensuing alienation from mainstream Canadian society; the violence of intergenerational conflicts and the ensuing alienation from family and community; and finally the violence of alienation from their own sense of Self and identity—all these cut deep wounds into the souls of young Oromos, and youth need to heal from all these ailments.

HAC was designed and facilitated with such intimate understanding of social construction to heal the wounds of alienation and reconnect Oromo youths to their sense of Self and identity, to their families and communities and to the wider Canadian and global society. The visibility of the violence that took the precious lives of the young women was considered in relation to the invisibility of the quiet violence that took the precious life of the young man and previous suicide cases. Quiet violence was implicated in the long list of other problems plaguing the community. Violence was seen as social construction; so was healing. Indeed violence and healing were seen as inseparably twined relational processes of Self and Other. If youth are inherently bad there is nothing we can do about it. If youth-at-risk is created by embodying risk through the violence of Othering, then we can take risk to go against the grain and instill a strong sense of Self.

HAC was just such a vehicle of healing and connecting youth to the various recourses of Self and identity. When the initial research team disbanded as a result of youth moving to other places in pursuit of schools and jobs, we created a new group called Oromo Coalition against Youth Alienation (OCAYA). OCAYA started HAC by mobilizing human and material resources. Enthusiasm ran low when grant applications were turned down but came swinging right back when OCAYA received a grant close to $100,000 for running the youth healing programs. That was a turning point. A youth program coordinator was hired and youth were actively engaged in enlisting volunteers and organizing homework and tutorial programs to address the staggering rate of premature school leaving. Movie and fun nights as well as soccer and basketball teams were organized to facilitate bonding and engage youth in afterschool activities. Cultural events were organized to connect youth to their elders and ancestral recourses. Recognition events were organized to celebrate youth achievements and to instill hope.

In this chapter, I elucidated two principles of social construction: the relational construction of our world and the denial of its constructedness. This paradox shows how a global family of good nations gels together through the banishment of bad Others and how the constructed national order of things gets reified as the natural order of things through a denial of responsibility for the construction. The constitution of Ethiopia through the banishment of its Others, including Oromos, is an example of the relational processes of Self and Other that permeate the discursive practices of nations.⁶ It shows how Oromos are put at risk and how risk is embodied via local and global historical, religious, sociocultural, political, economic, and military processes, and how embodied risk follows them through generations and into their countries of asylum. It also shows the paradoxical twist by which the denial of constructing risk turns a people at risk into a risky people.

The Oromo case is but a small dot in the grand scheme of the global family of nations in which we are deeply implicated as social workers. Social work being an institution through which the nation-state deals with its Others, we often find ourselves mediating between the state and its Others. We are comforted by our identity as helpers and take pride in our fight for human rights and social justice. I am comforted by our mediating role as it puts us in a space where we can feel the pain of Others very deeply. But I am also pained because, unaware of our constructedness, we can wreak havoc and pain in Others. We are at the cutting edge of local, national, and global transformation. Without losing our empathic we, can we also step back, cut through all the rhetoric and ask: How are we constructed as social workers? How do we own our constructedness and the ensuing responsibility? How do we hold ourselves accountable to the Others we put at risk? How do we promote global justice and global responsibility?

In our intimately relational world, the mighty, wealthy, democratic First World Self is constituted only in the relational context of the weak, poor, and undemocratic Third World Other it creates. But this relational construction is deeply hidden in order to hide the organization of privilege and the ensuing responsibility and accountability to the Other. The global family of nations deploys concerted defensive arms at any attempt of making visible such accountability. How do we take risk to hold ourselves and our nations accountable to the many Others we put at risk?

I will close by opening up to the example of Africa and the poignant current situation in Haiti. When we look at the poverty and deprivation in Africa, do we see the problem as inherent to Africans, their geography, their culture, or their corrupt governments? Or do we also see historical and contemporary relational processes of slave extraction, colonial and neocolonial exploitation, and the current structural marginalization in the global market as relations putting Africa at risk? When we see Haiti in such tragic devastation, do we see them as cursed sinners since they made a pact with the devil by fighting for freedom (remember drapetomania, the DSM diagnosis)? Do our collective hearts bleed just because Haitians are fellow human beings hit by tragedy? Or do we also see Haitians put at risk from the start by the risk following them from Africa as slaves and by the relational risk they are dealt throughout the years of independence? How do we take risk to hold ourselves and our nations accountable to Haitian Others?

2. See Foucault 1979, 1980, and Chambon, 1999, for details on the notion of historicizational, archaeological, and genealogical methods of digging in the present in order to excavate the processes that lead to the present. This goes contrary to the dominant historical method of coming into the present from the past.

3. Abyssinians are a people of Arabic origin believed to have come from Yemen, crossed the Red Sea around the first millennium, and mixed with indigenous peoples over the many centuries as they moved south into what is present-day Ethiopia. Over the centuries, they have also branched into two major groups—Tigreans and Amharas. See Melba, 1980, for more details.