Burnt Eucalyptus Wood - On Origins, Language and Identity

Ennatu Domingo was adopted from her native Ethiopia at the age of seven and transplanted to Barcelona where she learned to be and to speak both Spanish and Catalan. But she never forgot her nomadic childhood in the mountains and meadows of Gondar, near the northern border with Eritrea. Having suffered great loss at an early age, she was inspired to study the patriarchal structures that underpinned her individual experiences, both in the West and in contemporary Ethiopia. She has lived in Kenya, Belgium and the UK, and has travelled across the five continents, but keeps returning to the country of her childhood, to relearn her first language Amharic and to immerse herself in the sights and sounds of her birth mother s life. Torn between forgetting and remembering, Ennatu explores the dilemma of international adoptees and the quest for belonging in a book destined to be a classic of its genre.