Writer Hannah Giorgis first started garnering attention on the social media platform Tumblr for her witty yet unapologetic commentary on race relations in the U.S. Giorgis was perhaps able to draw such an audience because she was intriguing yet relatable—the girl next door spitting knowledge that shakes your understanding in the best way possible. Giorgis’ ability to use her humor to tackle difficult issues on her blog Ethiopienne.com inspires readers to think critically on current events. Graduating from Ivy League Dartmouth College, Giorgis is continuing to write and inspire young black girls around the globe. Habesha LA sits down with Giorgis to learn more about the voice behind the pen.

What may be the potential consequences of being labeled as “the young east African girl” as heard in hip hop and music?

Giorgis: I remember the first Drake reference to Ethiopian girls [in his music]. I was so excited when that was happening, like yes we’re getting shouted out! We’re being represented in music, I didn’t see myself before and now people appreciate me and I’m beautiful. I thought it was so flattering. After a while, I started to think are these depictions necessarily valuing East African women and the complexity of who we are? Or is it reducing us to a stereotype about how we look?

A lot of the stereotypes that you see especially in hip hop about how East African women look are about one kind of East African look. It’s not about the versatility or the variety that we are. I’ve had a few creepy guys come up to me using Drake lines [laughs]. I think there is an increased occurrence of men who are able to fetishize [East African women] because rappers are doing it and look at you like an accessory or flavor.

Just thinking about the way African women and black women already have to deal with being hypersexualized in the media already makes people think that our bodies are accessible all the time. Also, when East African women are being elevated it’s at the direct expense of other women in the African diaspora. For example, West African men have said things to me that are wrapped in compliments but in actuality are putting me in direct competition with West African women in a way that neither of us signed up for.

If you are complimenting me by putting down another woman, that’s not actually a compliment. I think that’s really what this phenomenon is, complimenting East African women and putting down other women at the same time, which doesn’t serve any of us. All of us are kind of hurting because of this weird arbitrary decision that East African women look like an ‘acceptable’ kind of blackness. Which is sad because there are so many different types of beautiful blackness.

I want to challenge you on that because I feel like a lot of young Habesha girls are flattered by this type of labeling and like that status of being elevated. I think it’s really important for these girls to realize the consequences of that and what that really means about being hypersexualized.

Giorgis: Absolutely. And there’s a reason that I’ve been talking about this by saying when this first started happening I was really flattered. There are some moments even now when it’s hard to not be. There’s that one Drake line about ‘flying you and your mama to the motherland’ and even though I’m so annoyed about Drake doing this, that line gets me because like tickets to Addis are actually really expensive [laughs]. I think it’s natural to hear you being represented in a way that feels positive and to want to latch onto that.

I really do not want to shame any young girls who are coming up and feel positive about that. I think this is another one of these situations where you have to let people come to their own understanding and realize you know if someone is elevating you in a way that feels icky, and after a while it starts to feel icky. I think that’s obvious in places like DC where you walk down the street and guys will say stuff like ‘qonjeet (pretty woman), come here!’ and you think at first, ‘how do you even know this word?’ Then, you realize it’s because they hit on that many Habesha girls.

The appeal of it at first is that you feel special. Then you realize that you’re not special because you’re just one of the East African girls that people are seeking out. It’s not about me being special it’s about me being something that you see as being trendy right now. I think there’s something that’s a little upsetting to come to terms with that, but after a while it’s like ‘I don’t have to be trendy for you, I don’t have to be your flavor of the week.’

I can just be myself. And if you happen to love me and I happen to be Habesha, dope. But if you come to me only because I’m Habesha you don’t appreciate the entirety of me, so you don’t deserve me. I think it’s hard to deal with because being a teenage girl already isn’t easy. Being a young adult is not easy. So when it feels like you have a moment of validation, it’s easy to take that and run with it, and to not want to think about it critically. It’s also really freeing to realize that you don’t have to be the perfect silent East African video girl for somebody. You can be whoever you want to be.

We went from not being able to point out our countries on a map to guys using the word ‘qonjo’. But if a guy likes us only for being East African, rather than who I am as a person and just clumping all of us together, then we are becoming accessories.

Giorgis: Literally, this guy hit on me in a bar on Saturday. Then, I saw him hitting on another Habesha girl afterwards. So, today I ran into both of them by my house at a coffee shop on a date. You hit on me, and then you hit on another Habesha girl and you go on a date with her. We’re clearly interchangeable for you. You really had to seek out the only other Habesha girl in this bar.

I hope more Habesha women realize this and see it’s not necessarily empowering to be labeled as the East African Girl, or ‘foreign’ girl.

Giorgis: And it’s doesn’t mean you can’t dance to the songs. Whatever, have fun with it. It’s just about not wrapping up your identity into being “the chosen girl.’ Which is easier said then done.

Please tell us your transition from graduating and what you are currently working on.

Giorgis: Sure, I graduated in June of 2013 and went home and was applying for jobs. I now work for the NOVO Foundation. I love being in a space where I can think about movement work from a big picture perspective and that’s what I get to do during the day. This summer is when I decided I will be writing more and got to a place where if an editor tells me they don’t want to run my piece, then that’s fine. But I don’t want to be the person who stops me from going further.

I realized that if I have the time to post five sentences on Tumblr, then I have the time to develop that into an essay. I think the thing that changed for me is my work ethic got stronger. I just recently found out that I’m a contributing writer for The Guardian. Meaning, I’ll be writing opinion pieces for them once a month. I’m writing for OkayAfrica and thinking about how I can showcase the talent in the broader African community. I’m also going to be writing from a more issue-based for them [OkayAfrica].

I feel that I’m in a space where I have the support of my community in a way that I was scared to reach out to before. Habesha people contact me on my blog or email and Twitter and are so wonderful and affirming and encouraging. They’ll say, “I didn’t know I could do this before, and now there’s a Habesha doing it, so now I can.” I just want to be the person that I wish I would have had when I was 13 or 14. If I could be that for a 12 year-old Habesha girl somewhere, then dope. That’s what I want to keep doing. That’s the dream – to make young Habeshas around the world smile and think critically and love the world in a different way..

Writer Hannah Giorgis first started garnering attention on the social media platform Tumblr for her witty yet unapologetic commentary on race relations in the U.S. Giorgis was perhaps able to draw such an audience because she was intriguing yet relatable—the girl next door spitting knowledge that shakes your understanding in the best way possible. Giorgis’ ability to use her humor to tackle difficult issues on her blog Ethiopienne.com inspires readers to think critically on current events. Graduating from Ivy League Dartmouth College, Giorgis is continuing to write and inspire young black girls around the globe. Habesha LA sits down with Giorgis to learn more about the voice behind the pen.

Tell us about your background and how you started writing.

Hannah Giorgis: I grew up in Anaheim, but went back and forth to LA for church. I was all over So-Cal. My parents moved to the U.S. in the early 80s. In 2009 I left California to go to Dartmouth. I graduated in 2013 in English modified with African/African-American Studies. The way I used my degree at school is that I’ve always always always been into literature. I’ve always loved reading. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved thinking about how to use words to make sense of the world.

It just made sense after a while that I would get an English degree. College is the first time where I was constantly interacting with the work of black authors. [I thought] Oh there are people representing experiences, that aren’t exactly mine, but still mirror how I fit in the world and I can read their writing. I remember being really excited about that and just kind of wanting to delve into it and make sense of myself through the word of black authors and that’s how I ended up choosing the concentration.

It’s really hard for me to think about when I got into writing, I’ve been reading for so long and writing things in my head and I didn’t necessarily start calling myself a writer I should say until later into my college years. Even though I remember the moment I felt like this is something that I could do and be good at was in high school

You were able to establish a following on Tumblr. Is that where you created your fan base?

Giorgis: It’s so weird for me because the first original version of my Tumblr I was going to post Afro-Diasporic fashion and it was going to be me posting pictures of fashionable Africans from all over the diaspora. And then I started realizing, ‘Oh I go to school in New Hampshire I don’t interact with many people from the continent or diaspora, I can’t post pictures of people if I don’t see them.’

I started using more of an exploratory way of making sense of where I was at in terms of school and where I was and process the world around me. I never really intended for it to be this thing that I shared with the world and it sort of just happened. I guess I would say that’s where I started feeling like I came into my voice, definitely.

You talked about how your parents immigrated here like most of our parents. Were they always supportive about your interest in literature and writing? Or did they ever want you to take a more traditional route?

Giorgis: I think that they’ve always supported my intellectual passion. They have always supported me in being someone who loves to learn. In high school my mom was kind of like, ‘hey look into medicine!’ And we would have these back and forths and I would tell her ‘No mom, I hate science.’ I think after a while she came around and realized this is not going to be the path for my daughter. And I think my Dad still has ambitions of me being a lawyer, but he knows that’s pretty unlikely.

They very much do have those dreams that a lot of Habesha parents have. But, I still have continued along this path and they have been rooting for me very much so.

A lot of it isn’t just because it’s arbitrary and they just think lawyer and doctor for no reason. Actually when you’re an immigrant there’s a whole lot of security in those particular professions. I totally understand the appeal of that even if I recognize that for everybody’s sake it’s good that I’m not going into medicine.

I think for a lot of young black college students, experiencing African-American classes shifts their perspectives on how they view the world. I want to hear your experience taking African/African-American studies classes and eventually identifying yourself as a black feminist.

Giorgis: The first thing that comes to mind for me is that my mom jokes that there was some professor that radicalized me and took her daughter and turned her into this militant [laughs]. I know that it’s mostly a joke, but there may just be this part of her that thinks I went to college as this blank slate and there were some professors that were like ‘hey read the black panther party’ and I emerged suddenly. To think about the way my mom jokes about that makes me think, ‘okay, I know that wasn’t my process, so what was it actually?’ So I realize when I went to school my first term on campus I took an Intro to African-American Studies class.

I thought ‘I want to do this, I grew up in Orange County, the only thing from a black author that I ever read in all of my classes was a narrative of Frederick Douglass and I’m pretty sure it was during Black History Month.’ I remember what was mind-blowing for me from that class is that not only was I being taught by a black woman, it was the first time I was allowed to have a space to understand blackness through the lens of black peoples’ words and the way that black people thought about blackness. For so long growing up I’d been taught about blackness and black people from a lens that wasn’t from us.

All the ways that I understood blackness were not coming from black people themselves. It was the first time I had a chance to explore that. What happened was that I was just told all of these beliefs and I absorbed them. It was more that I found the words for things that I had been feeling for a long time. As a writer, one of the most liberating and empowering experiences to ever have is to know that you have been feeling something for a long time and you find words to explain that.

I took a class that following term on black feminism and womanism. Suddenly, I was confronting all of these things about gender that I never was able to think through critically and had the words of Audrey Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins to help me make sense of things. I have roadmaps now. What those classes did and what those texts and books have done is fundamentally inform me that I’m not alone and show me who is out there thinking these other things and giving me the language to relate to them.

You just know you’re different. And you feel that maybe there’s something wrong with me if people are reacting to me in this way and I didn’t do anything. Then you learn, ‘oh wait I live in a country that was built on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and so many forms of structural racism.’ It makes sense when people treat you in a racist way, it feels bad, but given the logic of this country, it’s not illogical when racism happens. For me to be able to understand that in a historical and literary context was strangely empowering and freeing.

How do you think you can best explain to young Habesha people that we are in fact black and what being black means in this country?
Giorgis: I try to think about things that connect. I think that Habesha people are pretty sensitive to ‘famine’ jokes right? And we’re pretty sensitive to ‘Starving Ethiopian’ jokes. We know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that. There’s a layer of getting people to think, ‘we’re also black’ and then under that there is also a layer of how to get Habesha people to think about how we interact with African-Americans specifically and why there may be some problems with that. When I talk to people about ‘famine’ jokes they can recognize off-the-bat why that’s messed up.

When I enter these conversations I try to do it from a place of vulnerability, and as African immigrants there are things we feel vulnerable about that other people point out. Similarly, because we have entered this country that has this particular history, sometimes when people look at us they don’t have the time or energy or desire to see Ethiopia or Eritrea. What they see is something that they are more familiar with, which means that’s a history that you have to deal with too. I want to build a curriculum around this. There’s so much need for it.

I think where the biggest point of difficulty lies is that Habesha folks don’t necessarily want to admit another point of vulnerability.We know that we are vulnerable in the sense that we are African and immigrants and all the negative things that can come with that in the U.S. People may be hesitant to also take on this other thing. I think acknowledging that vulnerability is the first way I’ve been able to make ground. When you tell people I know it’s scary and intense for you to admit this and think of what the consequences are to being black in this country, when you’re willing to do that emotional work with people then they are more willing to walk along that journey with you.

My frustration sometimes is when conversations get too hung up on facts and you forget that you’re talking to people that may have seen the news and see that black people deal with particular things that they wouldn’t want to deal with. If those people feel like they can distance themselves from those consequences by saying they are not black, then what you have to deal with is the trauma that comes from realizing you are not distant from that. You’re not dealing with necessarily a logical conversation.
I think this is a different conversation depending on what generation you are talking to as well. I think the way I talk about this with my parents that grew up in Addis where black wasn’t a useful distinction versus how I talk about this with my peers that grow up with some sort of vague understanding of being Othered in some way.

When I’m talking to my peers I ask more ‘why do you see yourself as being separate from black folks in this country’ and use that question to see if they are answering that question with a bunch of stereotypes and figure out that it’s not that you want to distance yourself away from blackness, but rather distance yourself away from these stereotypes. Those are two different things. I understand where the division comes from. It is not from not noticing things, but rather being scared of the consequences of what it feels like to be on the other side.

Blackness and Habeshness are not mutually exclusive. You can be black and Habesha and the thing about blackness is that it has room for multitudes. You can be black and American. You can be black and West Indian. You can be black and Nigerian. That’s part of the beauty of it. You can retain the culturally specific heritage and still be part of this incredible kaleidoscope of international blackness. When you think of yourself as one piece of a puzzle it’s a lot easier to follow..