I wrote this book to set down what happened while I still can, with the documents in hand — and to admit what it cost, my own certainties not least. I am not writing to be proved right. I am writing so the next generation inherits a truer account than I was handed, and so that I can own, in the open, the part of the wreckage that is mine.
For seven years I gave the whole of a life to the Amhara resistance: the profession I was good at, the friends an ordinary man keeps, the ordinary life I might have shared with the people closest to me. I slept, for a stretch, on a bare floor; those were the lowest years of my life, and I walked into them with my eyes open.
Some of what I said in those years was right and some of it was wrong, and the harm I did with the best of intentions sits in these pages beside the rest. But even what I thought I got right changed little. It is where the title comes from. A knife that will not cut is half a knife. I was half-right.
There is a line in Geʽez on the cover: ርቱዕ፥ ወብዙኅ ጻማ ወመሥዋዕት፥ ወኢተፈጸመ ምክሩ። — right, and costly, and unfulfilled. That is the whole of it, in three charges.
Let me be plain about what this book is.
It is the testimony of a witness. …
The preface continues in the book.
The text above is reproduced from the printed preface, first edition.