Ficre was born in East Africa in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, in the midst of a three-decade-long war with Ethiopia for independence. There the story begins. Almost every family lost a child during those long war years. Ficre’s eldest brother, Kebede, was always described as “a freedom fighter who fell in battle.” The dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam’s “Red Terror” claimed legions of young people in Eritrea and Ethiopia—500,000, by Amnesty International’s final count—and years later he was convicted of genocide in absentia while in protected exile provided by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Ficre’s parents’ bravery was in constant evidence in those years. They faced down soldiers who broke into their home while the children hid in the bedroom, and when Ficre was a teenager his mother retrieved him from the front lines where he’d gone to enlist and promptly arranged for him to leave the country. So at sixteen, Ficre was a refugee, first in Sudan, then Italy, then Germany, and finally in the United States at the age of nineteen, in San Jose, New York City, and then, for almost thirty years, in the perhaps unlikely place of New Haven, Connecticut.
Before he came to this country, Ficre was exposed to U.S. black power rhetorics—an early visual icon for him was Angela Davis’s luminous Afro—and thinkers such as Martinican Frantz Fanon. Black soul music from Sam Cooke to James Brown rocked in his head along with Fela Kuti’s Afro-beat and Bob Marley’s reggae. Thus culturally he was a global diasporist, a “conscious synchretist,” in his own words. He was proudly and resolutely Eritrean, East African, and African. At the same time, he was unambiguous about being a black Eritrean American.
In a 2000 artist’s statement, Ficre told his story and described himself and his creative influences:
“I started painting ten years ago, but I suspect I have been metaphorically doing so all my life. When I started painting, I just did it. I had never felt a stronger urge. The pieces that flowed out of me were very painful and direct. They had to do with the suffering, persecution, and subsequent psychological dilemmas I endured before and after becoming a young refugee from the Independence War.… Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life.”
His statement continued:
“Asmara is a beautiful city at eight thousand feet above sea-level, planned and designed by Italian colonialists at the turn of the century. In addition to the collision of architectures, iconographies, and propaganda art there was the unique, and palpable visual aesthetic of death: Soviet tanks rumbled through the streets, fighter planes strafed the skies, and deadly uniformed soldiers rummaged through the streets. It was a medieval vision of hell incarnate. Government-sponsored death squads had ‘powers of emergency’ over any Eritrean citizen. I suspect I have carried this angst and fear of imminent explosion within me to this day, for when I paint I am accompanied by dissonances, syncopations, and the ultimate will for life and moral order of goodness.”
New York was a huge influence on him, as with so many artists before and after. Joseph Stapleton at the Art Students League was a connection to both Abstract Expressionism and the social realist history so prevalent at the League. He also worked for a time at the Cinque Gallery, where, if he were not before, he would have become familiar with Hale Woodruff’s work and the great tradition of Woodruff’s peers such as Charles Alston and Romare Bearden.
Beginning in 1996, Ficre’s work underwent a profound transition of palette and aim, into a period of brilliant abstraction that is concomitant with his work developing and inventing recipes and ambiance at Caffé Adulis. He described the cultural influence of Eritrea on his aesthetics: “A trip to the market guaranteed a dazzling range of traditional crafts repeated from one generation to the next without ongoing critical intervention and independent of religious function. The caves near my mother’s village are full of prehistoric rock drawings and paintings. My eyes took in all of this; my painting allowed me finally to process the seemingly dissonant visual information.”
He was an artist always, but what that meant in terms of making a life as an artist was still developing. “The painter as an individual, however, without church or mosque affiliation, and sanctioned by civilians and government is a relatively new concept for us in Eritrea, forty years old at most. When I paint in my studio in New Haven, some five thousand miles away from home, I still find myself reacting to this reality. My normative experience is inescapably Eritrean. And as it turned out for me, I also have to respond and account for the stimuli and influencing forces that I find myself open or vulnerable to, because of my life here. So far I have been able to cull the various forces such as Be-Bop, Modern Jazz (especially Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus), polyrhythms of the African diaspora, and the great many paintings that I spend time viewing in museums, when I can take time off. I am continually recontextualizing my normative experiences in early Eritrea, and one of those manifestations has been my work as a chef, where I have found myself integrating cross-cultures into dishes. I have become a conscious synchretizer. My cooking is how I make my living, but I have also been able to make a creative experience that in fact complements my painting philosophy.”
In his work is also the influence of maps, topography, the African and European study of geography, and the African awareness of changing maps and externally-imposed borders that cause so much suffering and chaos.
Connected to his love of books and his insatiable curiosity of mind was his relationship to languages. He spoke seven living languages well—Tigrinya, Amharic, Italian, English, Arabic, German, and Spanish. He could say hello and thank you in literally dozens of other languages (“What could be more important to know in a language besides ‘thank you’?” he used to say) and was teaching himself Mandarin Chinese and French. His language acquisition was an emblem of the politics of colonialism and exile. Eritrea was for some time an Italian colony; he received a beautiful early education from Italian nuns and that was the language of extensive book study for him. Amharic, also, was a colonial tongue for a long, fraught period. Spanish came from long years of restaurant work, communicating intimately with the people he worked with in his kitchens. But his relationship to language also said everything about his respect for others, his sense of all of us as connected global citizens, and his constant curiosity to learn and then amalgamate different ways of thinking and being in the world. He was an Esperantist, someone who understood profoundly that languages are epistemologies as well as human bridges.
Ficre also connected language to visual expression. “Storytelling comes naturally in Eastern Africa, where the mainstay of culture is orally transmitted from generation to generation,” he wrote. “Many Eritreans are still illiterate, and the culture of visual communication is relegated to Coptic Orthodox church facades and interiors. Murals and mosaics of saints and angels abound. There is an equally strong presence of Islamic iconography on the exteriors and interiors of mosques. Concomitant to these two ancient presences in my growing up years in the capital city of Asmara were war-time, mural-sized portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and—depending if he was in favor—Chairman Mao, as well as the Ethiopian dictator Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.”
Ficre dreamed of one day opening an arts school in a peaceful Eritrea. “Of the few painters that currently live and work in postwar Eritrea, most are relegated to didactic renderings of social/realist views of the painterly praxis, and inasmuch they have not done much to instigate critical participation from viewers by speaking for themselves, instead they keep speaking about a pre-supposed community with pre-supposed needs and solutions. In the light of such a backdrop my dream school will be about self-exploration and expression. I believe in it will be found great seeds for healing and peace.”