In February of this year, while adjusting the scarf that was supposed to cover my hair, I found myself facing one of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever witnessed. The rugged and abrupt contours of the terrain carve the Jamaican gorge that leads to Bob Marley Beach. From above, on a kind of suspended plain with an "infinite edge" view, it was possible to contemplate the Caribbean Sea opening up completely before us.
I and a group of researchers from the Latin American Realities extension project waited patiently in front of the entrance to Bobo Hill Rasta Camp, a Rastafarian community located about 22 kilometers from Kingston, the country's capital.
Amidst the lush landscape, a sign caught the eye: "Welcome to Ethiopia".
At that camp, we observed a Saturday of Lent. Not all of us women could fully participate in the religious activities, since some segments of Rastafari have specific rules related to the female menstrual cycle and participation in rituals. The ceremonies, marked by prayers and the breaking of the fast, took place in Jamaican Patois—a local English-based creole language—which made the experience even more distant for us, the only foreign visitors, accepted by the community after lengthy negotiations with the local coordinators. The religious readings themselves also deviated from the more familiar references to Western Christianity, mobilizing their own interpretations of the Ethiopian Bible and its tradition.
The prayers referenced figures central to the political and spiritual history of the movement. Among them was Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican intellectual and activist associated with Pan-Africanism and reflections on Black identity, diaspora, and the return to Africa as a political and symbolic horizon in the face of the historical violence of Atlantic enslavement. Another figure constantly evoked was Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia between 1930 and 1974, whose image gained enormous importance within Rastafari for representing, among other things, Ethiopian resistance to European colonial incursions in the 20th century.
It was evident there that the Ethiopia evoked at Bobo Hill did not correspond exactly to a contemporary national territory, but to a political and spiritual memory. It was Ethiopia transformed into a symbol of resistance, permanence, and identity reconstruction in the face of the violent processes of colonization, racialization, and forced dispersal of African populations across the Atlantic.
The idea that, upon crossing the gates of Bobo Hill, we would be entering "another country" made me think about how this exercise of displacement almost always refers us, in the contemporary imagination, to European references: "New Switzerland," "Brazilian Dubai," or "New Venice," names familiar to us, but which we almost always reproduce without reflecting on their symbolic importance.
But what intrigued me most, as we turned right to greet Ethiopia, was realizing that we rarely wish to occupy just another space: we also want to occupy another time.
I then began to wonder: to which Ethiopia exactly would one wish to return? To contemporary Ethiopia, marked by profound economic transformations and its insertion into liberal reform agendas? Or to that Ethiopia which became a historical symbol of African sovereignty and anti-colonial resistance during the 20th century, but still with its problems and contradictions?
This reflection brought to mind the Bulgarian novel Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize. The book constructs a powerful reflection on nostalgia, memory, and the desire for historical return. The plot begins with a businessman who creates clinics for Alzheimer's patients where he meticulously reproduces the aesthetics and objects of specific decades. The idea is simple: instead of living with the permanent discomfort of inhabiting a present they no longer recognize, patients could remain indefinitely in the period when their memories still made sense.
Gradually, however, the idea transcends medical boundaries and transforms into a political phenomenon. Entire countries begin to choose, through plebiscites, which historical period they wish to return to. Some societies of the former socialist bloc recreate the years of stability and social security associated with the final decades of the Soviet Union; parts of Western Europe attempt to revive the so-called "Golden Thirty Years" of the postwar period, marked by economic growth, expansion of social welfare, and relative political stability. In other cases, however, the desired return is directed towards much more ambiguous and violent periods: moments of imperial peak, colonial prosperity, or economic expansion sustained by profound social inequalities and political exclusions.
The novel is unsettling precisely because it reveals something difficult to admit: often, our relationship with the past is guided not only by ethical values or moral judgments about history, but also by material conditions and concrete experiences of security, belonging, and prosperity associated with specific historical periods.
As we left Bobo Hill and the "Welcome to Ethiopia" sign faded into the distance, I thought that perhaps no return is truly possible. The past never returns whole: only the fragments we choose to preserve, romanticize, or forget do. Perhaps that's precisely why all nostalgia says less about who we were and much more about what we miss in the present. Ultimately, we don't just choose a time to revisit—we also choose which conflicts we are willing to erase so that that past continues to seem habitable.
And since then, back in Brazil, I've been wondering if it would be possible for us to choose our own imagined time of return. Which past, after all, would we transform into a collective refuge if we were also offered the possibility of indefinitely inhabiting a single moment in our history?
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
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