Reasons Behind Our Decision To Publish Lions Roaring Far From Home (Part 1)

Lions Roaring Far From Home Book

After much anticipation, we released our long-waited anthology written by Ethiopian adoptees on December 6th, 2022. Our anthology is a collection of essays and poems written by 33 adoptees from Ethiopia who live in the US, Canada, Sweden, France, The Netherlands, and Ethiopia. There is a wide age-range, therefore we have writers who are children, teenagers, young adults, and middle-aged adoptees who are now parents. Our stories reflect life transitions and also specific events that made an impact on our lives and on our identities.

Our decision to create an anthology exclusively by Ethiopian adoptees was because the editors (Aselefech, Maureen, and I) felt that the voices and experiences of Ethiopian adoptees - but more broadly of Black, African international/intercountry adoptees had not been heard much within or outside of the adoption community.

Although our stories are very personal, we wanted to frame the book with the understanding that these stories are inherently political given the systemic nature of adoption. International adoption is the systematic removal of children under the guise of “giving children a better life” for the purpose of building and creating family in Western countries. Because adoption from Africa is less common and gets less media coverage, we felt strongly about giving more visibility to the experiences of African adoptees.

While there has been quite a few news reports about adoption fraud, unscrupulous adoption agencies, and films about adoptees returning to Ethiopia (usually produced by non-adopted people), there is always so much missing in terms of nuance and understanding the big picture of how adoptions from Ethiopia function to disempower families, and how these systemic removals fit into the larger dynamics inequality within the country, and internationally as well.

The few Ethiopian adoption stories that get some attention are told from an adoptive parent perspective or that reaffirms the dominant narrative of adoption as being acceptable, justifiable and “win-win” for adoptees, parents, and adoptive parents. The ethos can be summed up as “The suffering, pain, and loss that adoptees endure and experience is all worth it because they have gained so much and they live happily ever after. The End”. This is a shallow and self-serving understanding of the adoptee experience and it is inaccurate because it paints an incomplete picture of this experience. 

With our anthology, we wanted to position adoptees as storytellers, survivors, experts on their lived experiences and also individuals with agency over their lives.

Although our book does not singularly promote one view of adoption, it provides a glimpse into the very real happenings of family separation and lived experiences of adoptees from dealing with death, mental health to parenting and managing expectations about our racial/adoptee identities, and more.

-Kassaye Berhanu-MacDonald