by Dr. Charles Cantalupo, Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Located in the Horn of Africa, on the Red Sea, and roughly half Christian and half Muslim, Eritrea is a new nation but an ancient country with a tradition of writing going back at least 4000 years. A former Italian colony, Eritrea has nine major ethnic groups, each with its own language.
All of contemporary Eritrea’s greatest contemporary poets participated in the Eritrean struggle for independence (1961-91) from Ethiopia as freedom fighters and/or as supporters in the Eritrean diaspora. As might be expected after such a long war, its presence in Eritrean poetry predominates. Naturally, more than a decade or two has to pass for this to change. Even then, since Eritrea’s liberation in 1991 the nation has experienced the outbreak of war with Ethiopia again – resulting in over 100,000 deaths on both sides – subsequent to which the relationship between the two countries has been described as “no-war-no-peace.”
Not that contemporary Eritrean poetry is only about war – on the contrary! Its near constant presence in modern Eritrean history highlights a fact that its poetry also cries out for peace. Moreover, subjects of war and peace in contemporary Eritrean poetry comprise a kind of spectrum, with poems that focus almost exclusively on war at one end, poems seemingly oblivious to war at the other end, and most poems falling somewhere in between.
In a poem called “A Candle for the Darkness,” which appeared in 1988 towards the end of Eritrean armed struggle for independence, Ghirmai Ghebremeskel seems to have foreseen how Eritrea and its poets would gravitate between war and peace for years to come. He imagines peace and its promise of freedom as a single candle – some light, at least, and even a bit of warmth, but doomed either to consume itself or to be snuffed out by
murder
And mutilation….
devils and death
In the shadows….
Further on, however, the poet claims that
a candle
Comes out of the darkness
And lights up the horizon
Brimming with people
Marching into the light –
Candles and more candles
Coming from all directions….
The vision seems like a triumph, “brimming with people” who survive the war and whom the poet sees
all refusing
Any more death,
And restoring, adoring
And rejoicing in life.
But “the light” is ambiguous. The phrase “Marching into the light” has a religious or spiritual connotation, suggesting that for such a “light” to be experienced it might have to be in the afterlife, which is, only experienced after death. This ambiguity suggests that “The light” and death may be inseparable.
The fact remains that at any time, or least for very long, during Eritrea’s thirty-year struggle for independence, and most of the years since then, Eritrea ever unilaterally decided to refuse “any more death” and war, the nation would not exist. Eritrea’s mindset for war is nothing if not empirical. Eritrea’s state of war with the government of Ethiopia seems perpetual. War in the Horn of Africa seems like a given and, whatever country or countries in which it occurs, the rest cannot remain untouched or unaffected.
Yet in poetry beyond Eritrea and the Horn such a mindset is traditional and hallowed, too. Homer’s Iliad and Exodus in the Bible have a similar mindset of war, as do many national epics, like Beowulf, El Cid and Le Chanson de Roland. Simone Weil famously called Homer’s Iliad “the poem of force” (“le poème de la force”). A similar poetics of force, although not epic, animates the work of Eritrean poets like Fessahazion Michael and Solomon Drar, who write in Tigrinya, Mussa Mohammed Adem, who writes in Tigre, and Mohammed Osman Kajerai, who writes in Arabic. In Weil's terms, their “bitterness … is offered us absolutely. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality.” Again in Weil's terms, “the true hero” of their poems, “the true subject, the center…is force…. Force that enslaves…. The human spirit is swept away.”
Emerging from a violent 20th century of two world wars, the cold war, and now amidst a 21st century pile up of global terrorism and war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – not to mention elsewhere – our appetites for war poetry and a poetics of force may be sated or, if it is palatable, only from the distance of one or two thousand years or more, in the form of ancient or medieval epics. Horace’s famous line in Latin, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (Odes, III.2.13) – To die for one’s country is honorable and sweet (or satisfying) – has long been deconstructed to be heard only as ironic, as in Wilfred Owen’s poem based on and titled with this line in 1917, recalling “All went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue” and “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning….” Sweet? Satisfying? Hardly. And no quality poem of World War I, World War II or subsequent wars in the west has been able to go back from Owen and recover the original meaning or heroic tone of the phrase in Horace’s third ode.
Aware of Owen’s perspective on Horace’s famous line or not, contemporary Eritrean poets write as if they know all too well the horrors Owen recounts. Eritrea’s war poetry can be unflinchingly and profligately violent yet ultimately without regret. A poetics of force and war often animates the poetry of emerging nations, although to different degrees. The critical quality and achievement of such poetry, however, is questionable, especially if it is recent and translated into languages of nations and cultures where war poetry and a poetics of force are usually viewed negatively if they are contemporary. Precisely this problem becomes the challenge in translating contemporary Eritrean war poetry. Can one find the language in English to represent such a contemporary and genuine Eritrean fact of existence and the indubitable emotion it generates? Yet can one also find, as a good Eritrean friend once told me, that war is not only about fighting? Not all about death? But about friendship and the perennial issues of love and life? Does war have that, too?
The following translations are my answers: “Naqra” by Fessahazion Michael and “Who Said Merhawi Is Dead” by Solomon Drar, two poems originally written in Tigrinya; “The Invincible” by Mussa Mohammed Adem, originally written in Tigre; and “Singing Our Way to Victory” by Mohammed Osman Kajerai, originally written in Arabic. These poems can also be found in Who Needs a Story? Contemporary Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic (Asmara: Hdri Publishers; Oxford and East Lansing: African Books Collective, 2006), which I co-translated and co-edited with Ghirmai Negash. A more extensive discussion of these poems and the poets can also be found in my book, War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2009).
The Poems
Naqra
by Fessahazion Michael (originally written in Tigrinya)
At dead center
The sea
Has no fish,
No ships, no storms and no tides
But an island –
Naqra!
All that the storms and tides
And the surrounding water
Reveal
Is desolation
With nothing
To keep a human
Or anything alive
Except the unreachable
Stars above and fish below.
The sea has nothing to show
But Naqra,
Lonely in the distance,
Graceless,
Smelling only of death
And hell.
You know the history –
How many of our people
Fighting for our country
And imprisoned there,
Succumbed in despair
On Naqra.
(translation by Charles Cantalupo and Ghirmai Negash)
Who Said Merhawi is Dead
by Solomon Drar (originally written in Tigrinya)
Buried in the ground
Heaped with stones,
Silent and at peace,
Merhawi comes home,
Back to his land-
Desert, highlands
And fields he farmed.
Is Merhawi dead?
His mother stands proud
And his bed blossoms.
From near and far
His sisters and brothers
Come and sing
"Thanks, Merhawi, thanks,”
As they stroll down
Liberation Avenue.
“We love Merhawi!
Yeah Merhawi!”
Who said Merhawi is dead
And rots in a grave,
Or that the Red Sea salt
Eats him, and the frost
North on Rora
Burns his skin,
If we see his blood
Shimmering in our veins,
Stride with him
Instead of limping,
And see for miles
Instead of being blind?
Who said Merhawi is dead?
Can’t they hear
Merhawi, Merhawi,
In the whirlwind
Of the revolution?
We must walk with his knees,
See with his eyes
And live by his words
Or we fall like unripe fruit
Into corruption,
Selfishness and greed,
And the rot spreads
With no respect
Or care until
Oblivion cracks
Us limb by limb,
Enemies pour in
From all directions
And the answer to
“Is Merhawi dead”
Will be “Yes. It’s true,”
Meaning our end, too,
Instead of his vision
For our future:
Working together
Like water and milk
And a perfect fit
Of hand and glove –
Eager for the test
To build our nation
Today, tomorrow
And always with him
Who will never die
Showing the way:
One glorious beam
And millions of eyes
Knowing how to shine
With no need for tears
And memorials . . .
But only if Merhawi lives!
Only if the lion slayer
Lives unrepentantly,
His name, Merhawi, Merhawi
I the whirlwind
Of the revolution!
Can you hear?
Who said Merhawi is dead?
Can they save us
Like his name,
Harvesting the fields of gold?
Who said Merhawi is dead?
(translation by Charles Cantalupo and Ghirmai Negash)
The Invincible
by Mussa Mohammed Adem (originally written in Tigre)
Say what you like, but step over the line
And he feels his first scar burning again.
Smell the smoke. He has that true killer look
Because he always sees war – it’s ugly,
And dirges play like soundtracks in his head –
Shimber, Hebo, Wazafin – constantly
Making him think, “Encircle, attack, attack . . . .”
He sees enemies like sorghum bending
And breaking, their heads spilling out all red.
Never missing the target, his bullets
Fall like rain hitting the lake, and it floods
As in the days of Noah, only with blood.
Fast and taking too many forms at once,
He’s blinding and leaves no time to react –
Like July lightning, thunder, downpours and
Fifty days straight of sandstorms uprooting
Boulders like arrows winging from the bow
Of the hero mercilessly slashing
The tendons, crushing and splashing the marrow.
Like rainy season torrents pounding down
From the highlands with more storms behind them,
He comes to fight, saying “Try and stop me.”
He crosses any desert, sets a trap
And waits for the strong to choke on their blood.
Crocodiles run away from his jaws.
He lives according to his law.
Wisdom lets a lion or tiger sleep.
Seeing him, you better stay far away.
Fakes and fanatics may think they’re heroes
And pluck a whisker but then, catching fire,
Caught in the eyes where they wanted to play,
They have nowhere to hide and no more to say.
He throws the trees and rocks out of his path
And grabs his weapons – nobody’s laughing.
Fields planted thick with mines, impossible
Desert sand and heat, crocodiles swarming
Rivers and gaping valleys in his way
Reveal him close and watching overhead
Before he leaves them choked with too many dead.
The third offensive explodes with sirens
And unrolls black clouds like giant bee hives
Disgorging armies fleeing for their lives,
Out of control, surrounding him like knives
And helplessly knocked away in the swing
Of his crushing sword – his entire flesh
Bloody and broken with wounds and lead as the field
Where he stands unafraid, letting no one
Flee as he fulfills the ancient lines,
Playing and singing them too: history
Repeating itself, prophecy come true
And the clear reality to witness:
Welcome to free Nakfa, Setit and Belessa.
Like thunder and lightning, it surprises
Enemy invaders and ululates
Continually to all who can hear
No matter how much bombing and terror
Our country and its people have to bear.
Since the invincible guards our borders,
No more battles like Adwa can take place here,
Though he has seen plenty dig their own graves
Thinking it could if only they were brave
Enough to face him and die, and they did,
And not until we see the Red Sea dry
Will the verdict be any different.
Adi Hakin, Adi Mirug, Deda,
Bada, the deserts and wadi of Dahlak
And the Gash, tumbling from the highlands
Down where the lions drink after their prey,
Also testify to the gift of life
Or death overflowing and in his hands –
In the end, perhaps, all that he understands,
Taking aim with his spirit and his gun, v
Measuring the last breath of anyone
Who forgets him and casts the first stone,
And ready to bear every burden
And horrible fire demanding his blood
Yet strangely leaving the hero happy,
Even when he dies without finding his home.
(translation by Charles Cantalupo and Ghirmai Negash)
Singing Our Way to Victory
by Mohammed Osman Kajerai (originally written in Arabic)
Dear friends,
Faithful through the night
I’m back from exile.
With dawn at my door,
The voice of injustice
Doesn’t scare me.
I’ll make it listen to my gun
And a thousand explosions
Declaring that our struggle
For freedom
Will gleam in the sun
And I will proudly
Witness what I’m made of.
Past the point of anger
As we sing our way to victory,
I can either serve revenge
Calmly and cold,
Crack like lightning and thunder
Across the horizon,
Raining blood to feed the land,
Or I can sow the seeds of hell
So quietly that the prophets can go home.
Even after I die,
My blood and my fire
Will always glow,
Consuming and drowning
Any invader who tries
To waste our fertile land.
Crouching in its heart
With dawn beside me
And joining the centuries
Of singing our way to victory
As a people as sure to remain
As the rocks jutting out of the earth
Like the rage pounding in our chests,
I’m ready for the latest enemy
Who wants to dig my grave.
Looking for the moon,
I feel the breeze and rain instead.
It washes our path in the sand
Where, together again dear friends,
I plant the landmines for our struggle
To continue, raising our flag
As the gunpowder explodes
Into fire and smoke –
The valley of death’s shadow
Making white mercury purple,
Suffusing the horizon
And lingering in the air like chrysanthemums.
Every rock conceals a freedom fighter.
Our flag rises red with the dawn
And brightens with the day,
Bursting into song the news of victory.
(translation by Charles Cantalupo and Ghirmai Negash)
Submitted by Marilyn Turkovich on Mon, 2011-07-18 11:12
Three Eritrean Plays
Title: Three Eritrean Plays
Authors: Solomon Dirar, Esaias Tseggai and Mesgun Zerai
Genre: Plays
Written: (2005)
Length: 63 pages
Includes:
A Village Dream by Mesgun Zerai
The Snare by Solomon Dirar
Aster by Esaias Tseggai
Edited and with an Introduction by Jane Plastow
Three Eritrean Plays is currently not listed at Amazon, but can be purchased directly from the African Books Collective
The complete review's Review:
Three Eritrean Plays collects three very short pieces by contemporary Eritrean authors, all written in English while they were studying at the University of Leeds and first performed there between 2001 and 2003; as Jane Plastow explains in her Introduction, they are published: "for use in Eritrean schools to support English teaching and help teachers use drama in schools."
The plays are very short -- two of them are only ten pages apiece, and all three take up only half of this very thin book -- but there is also considerable supporting material. In the introductory section Plastow offers some historical background, as all three plays deal with or come out of the Eritrean liberation struggle that culminated in Eritrea becoming independent in 1991 (see also Michela Wrong's "I Didn't Do It For You" for a good overview of recent Eritrean history and the conflict with Ethiopia).
Plastow also presents information about all three playwrights -- who were all born in the 1950s, and active in the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, and who all saw combat -- and writes at some length about the plays themselves. Given the brevity of the plays, some of the scene-by-scene descriptions are superfluous, but some of the background and explication she offers is presumably of use, given that many readers will probably not know the context otherwise.
The plays themselves are spare but quite polished. Mesgun Zerai's A Village Dream is the most ambitious and has the largest cast. It is also least specific about locale: "set in a village somewhere in Africa", it is meant to be universal. With music, choreographed steps, and a transitional scene in which a heavy rain falls and seeds of grains sprout and grow, it is also the most stylized.
The plot is simply that the women of the village reassess their roles and find: "we do everything without any help from our husbands" So they abandon the village and retreat to the mountains, leaving the men to fend for themselves. Love (and lust) draw men and women back together, and in the end it looks like they'll work things out, as one of the women recounts that ages ago it had been men who had done all the work and walked out on their women, and the same story had unfolded, only with the roles reversed. So: "let's share the bad and good together" seems to be the solution to their problems.
Solomon Dirar's The Snare is a three-man drama, dealing with staying true to the cause. From the description of one of the characters, Sheka Haile -- "He is greedy, smooth talking, and a good diplomat" -- it's clear who the bad guy is going to be. A local leader, he reports that a huge bounty has been put on the head of an EPLF fighter whom he has summoned to his house. Though he doesn't make it immediately clear, he is setting a trap for him, drawing his poor cousin into his plot. Dirar does a decent job of presenting smooth-talking Sheka Haile, and the money is tempting -- but, in dramatically effective fashion, the tables are, of course, eventually neatly turned. For all its predictability, it's still fairly satisfying.
Esaias Tseggai's Aster is more directly in the line of fire, tackling the difficulty of balancing a love-life with complete commitment to the cause. With its tragic hero, suffering terrible injuries at the front, it raises interesting issues in a fairly affecting manner, though the leaps in pace and time make for a less cohesive play. There's some somewhat stilted dialogue -- including, in the climactic scene: "I love you too. Don't make me nervous. We are at the junction of love and hate." -- but it gets its message across.
These are all plays with messages, but they aren't hammered home too blatantly. The plays have been fashioned fairly carefully and well, and all work well despite the great concision. Still, they feel almost more like scenes rather than full-fledged plays (though A Village Dream could probably be drawn out on stage at some length).
Given the dearth of fiction (and drama and poetry) from this region available in English, Three Eritrean Plays at least offers a welcome glimpse of the creative output and potential there, and all three works certainly rise above the merely amateur.
Links:
Complete Review
African Books Collective
Authors: Solomon Dirar, Esaias Tseggai and Mesgun Zerai
Genre: Plays
Written: (2005)
Length: 63 pages
Includes:
A Village Dream by Mesgun Zerai
The Snare by Solomon Dirar
Aster by Esaias Tseggai
Edited and with an Introduction by Jane Plastow
Three Eritrean Plays is currently not listed at Amazon, but can be purchased directly from the African Books Collective
The complete review's Review:
Three Eritrean Plays collects three very short pieces by contemporary Eritrean authors, all written in English while they were studying at the University of Leeds and first performed there between 2001 and 2003; as Jane Plastow explains in her Introduction, they are published: "for use in Eritrean schools to support English teaching and help teachers use drama in schools."
The plays are very short -- two of them are only ten pages apiece, and all three take up only half of this very thin book -- but there is also considerable supporting material. In the introductory section Plastow offers some historical background, as all three plays deal with or come out of the Eritrean liberation struggle that culminated in Eritrea becoming independent in 1991 (see also Michela Wrong's "I Didn't Do It For You" for a good overview of recent Eritrean history and the conflict with Ethiopia).
Plastow also presents information about all three playwrights -- who were all born in the 1950s, and active in the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, and who all saw combat -- and writes at some length about the plays themselves. Given the brevity of the plays, some of the scene-by-scene descriptions are superfluous, but some of the background and explication she offers is presumably of use, given that many readers will probably not know the context otherwise.
The plays themselves are spare but quite polished. Mesgun Zerai's A Village Dream is the most ambitious and has the largest cast. It is also least specific about locale: "set in a village somewhere in Africa", it is meant to be universal. With music, choreographed steps, and a transitional scene in which a heavy rain falls and seeds of grains sprout and grow, it is also the most stylized.
The plot is simply that the women of the village reassess their roles and find: "we do everything without any help from our husbands" So they abandon the village and retreat to the mountains, leaving the men to fend for themselves. Love (and lust) draw men and women back together, and in the end it looks like they'll work things out, as one of the women recounts that ages ago it had been men who had done all the work and walked out on their women, and the same story had unfolded, only with the roles reversed. So: "let's share the bad and good together" seems to be the solution to their problems.
Solomon Dirar's The Snare is a three-man drama, dealing with staying true to the cause. From the description of one of the characters, Sheka Haile -- "He is greedy, smooth talking, and a good diplomat" -- it's clear who the bad guy is going to be. A local leader, he reports that a huge bounty has been put on the head of an EPLF fighter whom he has summoned to his house. Though he doesn't make it immediately clear, he is setting a trap for him, drawing his poor cousin into his plot. Dirar does a decent job of presenting smooth-talking Sheka Haile, and the money is tempting -- but, in dramatically effective fashion, the tables are, of course, eventually neatly turned. For all its predictability, it's still fairly satisfying.
Esaias Tseggai's Aster is more directly in the line of fire, tackling the difficulty of balancing a love-life with complete commitment to the cause. With its tragic hero, suffering terrible injuries at the front, it raises interesting issues in a fairly affecting manner, though the leaps in pace and time make for a less cohesive play. There's some somewhat stilted dialogue -- including, in the climactic scene: "I love you too. Don't make me nervous. We are at the junction of love and hate." -- but it gets its message across.
These are all plays with messages, but they aren't hammered home too blatantly. The plays have been fashioned fairly carefully and well, and all work well despite the great concision. Still, they feel almost more like scenes rather than full-fledged plays (though A Village Dream could probably be drawn out on stage at some length).
Given the dearth of fiction (and drama and poetry) from this region available in English, Three Eritrean Plays at least offers a welcome glimpse of the creative output and potential there, and all three works certainly rise above the merely amateur.
Links:
Complete Review
African Books Collective
My Father's Daughter by Hannah Pool
In 1974 Hannah Pool was adopted from an Orphanage in Eritrea and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up unable to imagine what it must be like to look into the eyes of a blood relative until one day a letter arrived from a brother she never knew she had. Not knowing what to do with the letter, Hannah hid it away. But she was unable to forget it and ten years later she finally decided to track down her surviving Eritrean family and embarked upon a journey that would take her far from the comfort zone of her metropolitan lifestye to confront the poverty and oppression of a life that could so easily have been her own. (goodreads)
For npr radio interview click the below npr player:
For npr radio interview click the below npr player:
The Conscript: First Eritrean Novel Enters the Canon of World Literature - Abraham Zere
Having written the literary history of Eritrea and having translated the nation’s epic poem “Niguse-Niguse”, Ghirmai Negash has now translated one of the earliest African-language novels into English. Few scholars in their respective fields can have claim and influence as Ghirmai Negash did in the Eritrean literature.
Click here to continue reading the article in erigazette.org
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| The Conscript |
Click here to continue reading the article in erigazette.org
Eritrean Literary Giant Talks about Tigrigna Oral Poetry
Blogger Issayas interviews Solomon Tsehaye, eritre's leading poet. after the release of his latest work on massé and melqes, oral poetry genres in Eritrea. Solomon Tsehaye is the man who wrote Eritrea's national anthem:
Click on Interview to read the blog post.
Click on Interview to read the blog post.
SHIFTING IMAGES IN CONTEMPORARY ERITREAN POETRY - Vipan Kumar
A Journal of Arts, Humanities & Management,
ISSN : 0974-5416, Vol-VIII, Issue-1 January, 2014
SHIFTING IMAGES IN CONTEMPORARY ERITREAN POETRY
Vipan Kumar
Abstract
This paper explores the shift in contemporary Eritrean poetry and is based on the translated version of poems Who Needs a Story? Eritrea, like many other African nations, has a deep rooted oral poetic tradition, but written poetry is of a recent origin. Most of the poets were part of the Eritrean struggle for Independence (1961-1991) as freedom fighters and/or as supporters in the Eritrean Diaspora; their poems reflect some of the most compelling aspects of this struggle and humbling realities of the present. The paper will look at the poems that deal with the struggle and the poems that comment on the postindependence realities and issues.
Sky is the same everywhere, and literature is like that…there are certain local colourings, that’s all. R.K. Narayan
To discuss the entire contemporary poetry of most if not all countries requires more than a book, and Eritrea is no exception. The translated version of Who Needs a Story? broke through both the external, internal walls of silence that had previously surrounded the work and also shattered some of the internal barriers among Eritrean poets themselves and their readers. Now a speaker of Tigrinya with limited Arabic or a speaker of Arabic with limited Tigre could now have easy access through the translation into English of the original language of the poem that he or she did not know. Containing thirty six poems by twenty two contemporary poets and produced in two local and two global languages, Who needs a story? is the first anthology of contemporary poetry from Eritrea ever published.
All of the poets in Who needs a story? participated in the Eritrean struggle for independence (1961-91) from Ethiopia as freedom fighters and / or as supporters in the Eritrean Diaspora. Therefore, for the most part they focus either on war or peace. As might be expected after such a long war, its presence in Eritrean poetry predominates. Nevertheless, each of the points in Who needs a story? marks a distinct point in this spectrum of Eritrean Experience. Each unfolds a distinct story of war, peace or both as a part of the larger story of a new nation coming into being and an old country reinventing itself. This paper explores the shift in contemporary Eritrean poetry and is based on the translated version of poems Who needs a story?
‘Who said Merhawi is dead?’ by Solomon Drar enacts a kind of perpetual ‘martyrs day’, commemorating a war hero. Through linking and even equating the war hero and ‘fields of gold’, the pun on ‘Merhawi’ suggests a perpetually embattled spirit – a constant ‘wirlwind / of the revolution’ – ‘[burial in the ground’, as stated in the poem’s beginning, but also exploding in the fields. The profound, mythopoic image of the blossoming bed (mother stands proud / And his bed blossoms), later complimented by Drar’s joining the heroic vision of Merhawi to the Eritrean present. The poet extends his thanks to Merhawi for nation’s hard won independence:
sisters and brothers
come and sing
‘Thanks, Merhawi, thanks’
As they stroll down
Liberation Avenue….
For Drar in ‘Who said Merhawi is dead?’, war is his only terra firma, beginning his poem where Merhawi is buried, ‘in the ground / Heaped with stones’. Nevertheless Eritrea’s war poetry repeatedly takes an Horatian and / or Homeric stance on war, unflinchingly and profligately violent yet ultimately without regret if it serves the cause of Eritrean nationalism.
All of the poets in Who needs a story? participated in the Eritrean struggle for independence (1961-91) from Ethiopia as freedom fighters and / or as supporters in the Eritrean Diaspora. Therefore, for the most part they focus either on war or peace. As might be expected after such a long war, its presence in Eritrean poetry predominates. Nevertheless, each of the points in Who needs a story? marks a distinct point in this spectrum of Eritrean Experience. Each unfolds a distinct story of war, peace or both as a part of the larger story of a new nation coming into being and an old country reinventing itself. This paper explores the shift in contemporary Eritrean poetry and is based on the translated version of poems Who needs a story?
‘Who said Merhawi is dead?’ by Solomon Drar enacts a kind of perpetual ‘martyrs day’, commemorating a war hero. Through linking and even equating the war hero and ‘fields of gold’, the pun on ‘Merhawi’ suggests a perpetually embattled spirit – a constant ‘wirlwind / of the revolution’ – ‘[burial in the ground’, as stated in the poem’s beginning, but also exploding in the fields. The profound, mythopoic image of the blossoming bed (mother stands proud / And his bed blossoms), later complimented by Drar’s joining the heroic vision of Merhawi to the Eritrean present. The poet extends his thanks to Merhawi for nation’s hard won independence:
sisters and brothers
come and sing
‘Thanks, Merhawi, thanks’
As they stroll down
Liberation Avenue….
For Drar in ‘Who said Merhawi is dead?’, war is his only terra firma, beginning his poem where Merhawi is buried, ‘in the ground / Heaped with stones’. Nevertheless Eritrea’s war poetry repeatedly takes an Horatian and / or Homeric stance on war, unflinchingly and profligately violent yet ultimately without regret if it serves the cause of Eritrean nationalism.
Mussa Mohammed Adem introduces the readers to ‘The Invincible’ through a kind of psychological portrait:
he has that true killer look
and dirges play like soundtracks in his head …
constantly
making him think, ‘encircle, attack, attack ….’
The poet praises the courage and boldness of ‘The Invincible’ soldier who is always ready to attack without any fear. Framed as a war hero who is human and vulnerable, ‘The Invincible’ is also a war monster.
He sees enemies like sorghum bending And breaking, their heads spilling out all red.
By overcoming his enemies he overcomes nature, too, becoming the most violent animal of all: ‘crocodile run away from his jaws. / He lives according to his law.’ So the poem becomes an account of the bravery of the Eritrean soldiers.
‘Singing our way to victory’ by Mohammed Osman Kajerai has also indelible impression in/on the mind of the readers. His ‘Singing’ is all but literally synonymous with his ‘gun / And a thousand explosions / Declaring … our struggle / For freedom….’ The poem’s epistolary opening becomes throwaway salutations and relatively unimportant verbal niceties compared with what the poet really wants to say, resembling Adem in deploying the fiercest imagery without any hesitation. Whatever the beauty the poet sees in nature seems trivial compared with his mission to ‘plant the landmines for our struggle’.
Kajerai praises even women soldiers’ contribution. The poet brings them out from the stereotype and traditional representations of their being passive, powerless, domestic and long suffering victims. Here the poet transforms the benevolent image of an Eritrean woman’s breast in to the mere earth where she should leave her dead behind and go on fighting, ‘Woman of Eritrea’ can always be counted on for ‘high spirits and passion’.
‘A Dowry to see Freedom’ takes on the voice of a father who gives a dowry:
The most precious dowry I can give,
Dear love, is for you always to see freedom.
The poet further reveals the sacrifice of heroes and sees an image of ‘Free Eritrea… shining in our eyes’.
Kajerai’s ‘Wind and Fire’ reinforces the bleak, exultant, unforgiving message in a sequence of brief,self-contained stanzas, as in a series of epigrams of war each one of unflinching violence. Displaying self-determination, resilience and no respite from war and struggle, poems of Mohammed Osman Kajerai sound defiant and exalted. He seems to revel in the violence and abject conditions he portrays.
Tsegai does not withheld a single syllable in describing the abject reality of war that Drar,Adem,Kajerai and Michael do not let a reader forget, but for Tsegai war is not the end-no more than death is an elegy. Somewhere and somehow, however miraculously or invisibly, it contains a turn/shift and a movement towards life and peace. ‘I am Also a Person’ engagingly self-dramatizes this turn. Committing a kind of poetic act of self-elegy, Tsegai simultaneously focuses on an individual’s destruction and, in an intimidating stroke of brutal psychological honesty, his or her self destruction, too, be it justifiable or not. Moreover, the poet even sees himself ‘embrace’ such ‘suffering’, whatever its outcome.
The wind wanted my bones…
I wished I was never born…
The poet seems pessimistic here. It is a sort of futility of war. The expectations that he had of freedom do not seem to be fulfilled.
El-Shiekh (Madani) needs more than a ‘poem of force’, with a candor that poets of force would never admit, ‘To beat back my fear/ Of dying in this war’. For him children should be free of war, at least an escape from war and not its reiteration. His poems portray the situation where he expresses a turn from war to peace and prosperity. Regardless, the poet plays another role, shifting his identity to that of a character who survives at the end of a tragedy. He becomes the elegist who, however diminished, must testify to what he knows:
The dead
Sons and daughters of Adai ....
I ask, ‘Is this the promised end?’
‘If He Came Back’ by Fessehaye Yohannes explores that post-war Eritrea is so ‘harsh’ and ‘brutal’ that even someone who has come back from the dead is vulnerable and could die twice! As an elegy, it repeatedly becomes anti-literal, as if there is no expressive alternative to recalling a war hero’s ‘memory and home/ and proudly moving on because of them’. The real greatness of his poetic vision is that it has no ‘centre’ but scatters almost unaccounting from one image to the next.
Sibhatu too shows another dimension of war. She engages a less traditional,less conventional, perhaps more difficult subject: a war experience surely as universal, timeless and significant as the heroism recorded by her fellow poets. All of her fellow poets write about the deaths of their heroes but she remembers her ‘cell-mate’,Abeba.
‘Remembering Sahel’ of Paulos Netabay, reminds us of British Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. The poem of Netabay sounds like ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and seems to ‘take… its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility’. And the poem becomes a pastoral elegy. Heroes, the poet does not simply praise the heroes, he also describes the beauty of nature that shows the varying attitude/image of the some contemporary Eritrean poets. In this changing attitude of the poets, Ghirmai Ghebremeskel is no exception. His ‘A Candle in the Darkness’ begins with war’s absurdity and near madness, formenting a kind of hysterical desire to be a part of it. Ghebremeskel begins to swell into an astounding visions of natural paradise of peace.
Angessom Isaak in ‘Freedom’s Colors’,sheds the role he has at the beginning of the poem. The poet becomes more content in addressing the frustrated and humbling realities of the present rather than the wild and heroic expectations of the past. He wonders why his vision of Eritrea changes. He becomes more honest than ever, answering ‘I don’t know why’. The poetic achievement of ‘Freedom’s colors’ reveals no absence of artistic delight in contemplating the nature of freedom and democracy in contemporary post-independence Eritrea. Isaak’s poem reveals a profound awareness- “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”,—that is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. And this is the beauty of ‘Freedom’s Colors’ that it reaches such a realization. It portrays a manic condition changing from battlefield euphoria to the more practical everyday, protracted and often depressing matters of carving a livelihood and a society out of third world want, poverty and underdevelopment.
Contemporary poets of Eritrea who write without addressing or alluding to its armed struggle for Independence or war in general have no such dramatization to offer, other than on a general and universal human level of human emotion responding to everyday events. There is a noticeable shift in Negusse’s poems like/as ‘We miss you, Mammet’ and ‘Wild Animals’. The first poem/one describes the devastation of the Eritrean landscape and psyche through the lens of the death of Mammet. It (poem) dramatizes being driven beyond a poet’s ultimate devastation.It shows a unique power of remembering a traditional, literary historical figure as Mammet. In another poem ‘Wild Animals’ the poet expresses an abiding faith. There will come a day when ‘the gate opens’ to ‘the city’ where ‘we all get along’ where the desire for this and the prevailing conditions against it are hardly unique to Eritrea. The poet longs for a city that will welcome all of us.
There are poets as Saba Kidane, Reesom Haile and others feel free and are able to describe what they see; the everyday realities of a post-war Eritrea yet of many a nation in Africa as well all over the world. Though the struggle remains but it changes. It becomes more domestic, humorous, crude or personal. It engages subjects like raising children, flirting, unwed mothers, immigration, household products, etc
There are more concerns about harsh realities of life in the poem ‘Growing Up’ by a popular poet Kidane. It is a remarkable poem which is about the care and future of a growing child. 'Go Crazy Over Me’ portrays an exuberant and powerful statement of a human desire to live free of any conflict. She concentrates more on love rather than any other thing. She highlights a mother’s special, spontaneous sense of the moment, warding off the world and all its destructive force with a gentle distraction. She feels pain for her son as well as for herself. She remains caught in a near constant state of crisis. She has no choice but to try, seemingly against all odds. Her maternal powers joining rather than separating the responsibilities she has at home and on the battlefield, she is driven by her sexual power, too.
She takes a breath
And catches fire,
Her breasts bouncing….
‘Let’s Divorce and Get Married Again’ by Hailemariam focuses on the inevitability of love and romance. It takes the readers into a new reality. It picks up the often told, universal story of men and women at a different point. ‘For Twenty Nakfa’ by the same poet recounts a brief, humorous anecdote that sounds almost like an expanded Tigrinya proverb. It functions as a kind of parody. The poet’s irreverence and disrespect in giving the money goes against the Eritrean grain of discouraging public begging.
‘Breaths of Saffron on Broken Mirrors’ portrays poet’s erotic obsession not the problem but the solution by shifting his focus from himself to the natural world around him. An erotic irrepressibility confronts a reader:
‘Lust won’t leave me alone’. Unhesitating, a scene of a masturbating, poetic fantasy immediately unfolds:
Confused and wanting you
Bathed in juicy colors
We fall on each other
And I bathe like a hero
In your body full of desire….
Representing a long standing and wide ranging poetic tradition of erotic poetry, Osman’s ‘Juket’ also reads alike. Unabashed in his description, the poet is similarly bold in expressing his overwhelming desire to ‘taste’, ‘drink’, ‘breath’, ‘nibble’ and bathe in all the sexual pleasures he sees his beloved can offer. Thus the details of the poet’s song within the poem create a distinctly Eritrean portrait or idealization of a physically beautiful young Eritrean woman.
There is a quite noticeable shift in the poems of Ghirmai Yohannes (San Diego). An actor, poet and comedian, Ghirmai Yohannes (San Diego) picks up where the war leaves off, confronting a number of different experiences that everyday Eritreans would encounter in their various walks of life. ‘Like a Sheep’ focuses on a causality of emigration. ‘Blithely’ innocent, like a sheep, he is ‘Led with a rope around his neck,/… blindly follow(ing) the trader/ And the butcher’. The poet sounds sardonic. His objectivity allows his poem to attain a kind of universal description of the perils of an illegal immigrant. Another poem by San Diego, ‘Next Time Ask’, presents a similarly mordant voice, only its acerbic attitude encompass not merely the sorry plight of an illegal immigrant but the entire range of human endeavor. Fatalistic yet funny, ‘Next Time Ask’ shrugs off any emotion, ideology, aspiration or even personal attachment to confront:
One fact (that) won’t go away
Tomorrow or today
You know you have to die.
Don’t think of asking why.
In the poem, a sheep or any animal maintains a state of innocence with no expectation that it is to be slaughtered, which he also implies about the illegal immigrant in ‘Like a Sheep’. The poet cultivates an awareness about the limits of human understanding and expression in order to stress what might be humanity’s greatest gift to both the world and itself as well as an ultimate insight for its survival. San Diego wants his reader to contemplate some of life’s most basic questions about human survival. In ‘Unjust Praise’, the poet focuses on Eritrea’s salt that offers a readily identifiable and accessible image to provoke a reader or a listener again to reflect on life itself:
In proper measure
Bringing out the taste,
The flavor and spirit
Of our food, hot or cold….
‘Who Needs a Story?’,on which Eritrea’s first anthology of contemporary poetry is entitled, provides a perfect focal point to consider all of the stories that his contemporary Eritrean poetic colleagues employ in their work. Everybody has a story to tell; everybody is a story in him/herself. At this point, San Diego dramatized self-examination of his writing process becomes most unrelenting. The poet realizes, ‘I already have a story/ That nobody knows and it’s great—/I am the story’. So every Eritrea’s contemporary poet has a story of his own.
References:
1. Cantalupo, Charles and Negash, Ghirmai. Who Needs a Story? Contemporary Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic, edited and translated by Charles Cantalupo and Ghirmai Negash
(Asmara: Hdri Publishers, 2005; Oxford and East Lansing: African Books Collective, 2006).
2. Cantalupo, Charles. War & Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry ( Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Mkuki na Nrota Publishers Ltd., 2009).
3. Connell, Dan. Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (Asmara: The Red Sea
Press, 1993).
4. Kajerai, Mohammed Osman. Silence and Ash ( Khartoum: n.p., 1960[?] ).
5. Keats, John. Poetical Works, edited by H.W. Garrod ( London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 210.
6. Negash, Ghirmai. A History of Tigrinya Literature in Eritrea: The Oral and the Written, 1890-
1991 ( Leiden: CNWS Publications, 1999).
7. Yeats, W.B. The Poems, edited by Richard J Finneran ( New York:Macmillan Publishing
Company, 1983), pp. 346-8.
THE AESTHETIC OF DIFFERENT CONCERNS IN CONTEMPORARY ERITREAN POETRY - Vipan Kumar
Research Scholar
An International Refereed e-Journal of Literary Explorations
Vol. 2 Issue III August, 2014, www.researchscholar.co.in
An International Refereed e-Journal of Literary Explorations
Vol. 2 Issue III August, 2014, www.researchscholar.co.in
THE AESTHETIC OF DIFFERENT CONCERNS IN CONTEMPORARY ERITREAN POETRY
Vipan Kumar
Lecturer in English
Adikeih College of Arts and Social Sciences
Eritrea, NE Africa
Abstract
This paper explores aesthetic of different concerns in contemporary Eritrean Poetry and is based on the translated version of poems Who Needs a Story? Eritrea, like many other African nations, has a deep rooted oral poetic tradition, but written poetry is of a recent origin. Most of the poets were the part of Eritrean struggle for independence (1961-1991) and their poems reflect some of the most compelling aspects of this struggle and humbling realities of the present. The exploration of work by poets in Who Needs a Story? reveals their different concerns aesthetically. They have a varied body of work, with individuals having written many different kinds of poems covering a wide range of experience in war, peace, post-independence and in between. Each of the poems in Who Needs a Story? marks a distinct point in this spectrum of Eritrean experience. The Eritrean poets tailor the beauty of their work in a way that is agreeable to the tastes of aesthetes. Aestheticism believes that the impact of a work of art on the audience must be pleasure born of beauty. Everyone possesses a sense of beauty, but only the aesthete has the aptitude for tasting beauty. The contemporary Eritrean poetry is primarily concerned with the search for freedom, and giving expression to it. All aspects and dimensions of freedom are seen in it. The sentiment of freedom is present in contemporary Eritrean poetry not only as its life essence, but also as beauty. The three values of life—equality, freedom and solidarity—can be regarded as constituting the essence of beauty in contemporary Eritrean Poetry. The paper will look at the poems aesthetically that deal with the different concerns in contemporary Eritrean poetry.
Keywords- aesthetic, concerns, tailor.
You’ve seen our country. Now you know why we want to be free.
The Ethiopians came, they bombed our villages, they slaughtered
our cattle and burned our children. Everything is burning now.
Even the stones are burning.
—Mama Zeinab
The concept of beauty tends to revolve around the feelings of pleasure and empathy aroused by viewing the object. The pleasure and empathy generated by beauty concerns aesthetes. Artists have to tailor the beauty of their work in a way that is agreeable to the tastes of aesthetes. The preferences of aesthetes are important for the artist. Aestheticism believes that the impact of a work of art on the audience must be pleasure born of beauty. Every one possesses a sense of beauty, but only the aesthete has the aptitude for tasting beauty. A person is gifted with sensitivity. The ability to imagine beauty is the gift of high culture. In NG Chapekar’s opinion, ‘To experience beauty, a cultured mind, health and enthusiasm are necessary’ (Chapekar, 66).
The aesthete is a product of circumstances. But in the process of taste, the aesthete is as important as the artist and the artistic creation. And this is why one must recognize that beautyrelated experiences are object-specific, person-specific and situation-specific—there cannot be a general concept of beauty. However, the aesthetic of different concerns in contemporary Eritrean poetry has given primacy to the pleasure of aesthete.
If pleasure is the basis of aesthetics of White literature, reality and honesty is the basis of the aesthetics of contemporary Eritrean Poets. Will readers be distressed or angered, or will they be pleased by reading the reality and sacrifice expressed in contemporary Eritrean Poetry? It is an anthology that is intended to make readers conscious of the beauty and contribution of the poets for telling the actual odyssey of the Eritreans. How can the aestheticism in discussions of beauty be reconciled with this consciousness in contemporary Eritrean poetry? This revolutionary consciousness is based on ideas of equality, liberty, justice and solidarity, rather than pleasure.
In every age, the imaginary of beauty is linked to prevailing ideas. At one time, for example, kings and emperors used to be the subject of literature. But today, the life lived in huts, cottages, and slums has been become the subject of literature. And it is so special in the context of contemporary Eritrean poetry. It has become necessary to transform the imaginary of beauty because it is not possible to investigate the creation of contemporary Eritrean poetry and its commitment to revolt and rejection within the framework of traditional aesthetics. Not only is contemporary Eritrean poetry new, its form and purpose too are different from those of the literature of whites. Therefore, it cannot be appraised using traditional aesthetics.
The contemporary Eritrean poetry is primarily concerned with the search for freedom, and giving expression to it. All aspects and dimensions of freedom are seen in it. We should remember that the imaginary or idea of freedom has an aesthetic aspect, as much as it has political, economic, social and moral facets. The sentiment of freedom is present in contemporary Eritrean poetry not only as its life essence, but also as beauty. The three values of life—equality, freedom and solidarity—can be regarded as constituting the essence of beauty in contemporary Eritrean Poetry.
Is it appropriate to expect pleasure or beauty, instead of inspiration for social transformation, from a literature that has been written primarily to raise awareness? We find that their poetry should be analyzed from a sociological perspective focused on social values than on beauty. Rejecting traditional aesthetics, they insist on the need for a few and distinct aesthetic for their poetry—an aesthetic that is life-affirming and realistic. In other words, contemporary Eritrean poets have demanded different yardsticks for the literary appraisal of their works. It is the firm conviction of Eritrean poets that if yardsticks change, the concept of aesthetics will change too.
Like many other countries Eritrean poetry, however belatedly, got its recognition. The Contemporary Eritrean poets began appearing in the first decade of the 21th century in some reputed literary journals like Left Curve, Words Without Borders, Modern poetry in Translation, etc. Who Needs a Story—an anthology of Contemporary Eritrean poetry like other nation’s poetry is rich. Though Eritrean poets writing in their own languages or translation could not be found on the shelves of the world’s bookstores and libraries but now Contemporary Eritrean poets are well on their way to being known and enjoyed throughout Africa and the world. Its journey for gaining acclaim and recognition is not less than an odyssey in itself. The exploration of work by poets in Who Needs a Story reveals their different concerns aesthetically. They have a varied body of work, with individuals having written many different kinds of poems covering a wide range of experience in war, peace, post-independence and in between. Each of the poems in Who Needs a Story marks a distinct point in this spectrum of Eritrean experience.
Though classical poetry is powerful in creating imagery and it contains flowery language. Mostly it talks about morality and philosophy. It remains strict to the form. The poems provide the utmost pleasure of reading. They are impregnated with mellifluous words. But modern poetry, especially in the context of Eritrean poetry, we witness that it is away from superficiality and gives a real description. It is a‘free verse’ poetry at certain points. Even it is free from strict form of poetry as it used to be in the case of classical poetry. Most of the poems are woven from the first hand experiences of the poets. There is a natural flow of feelings in the poems. There is effortlessness in them. There is a healthy diversity of voices of which contemporary Eritrean poetry consists of. It ranges from what might be considered the pre-independence, mainstream poetry of resistance to post independence—necessarily more innovative and critical. From the poems of battlefield to the poems of post-independence, there is an authentic account of different concerns aesthetically. The basic purpose of theirs is to acquaint the readers with the sordid realities of life. It seems that they call a spade a spade. Sometimes even the language used by them is crude. It is a sort of purge.
Let me begin with Reesom Haile—the vanguard of Contemporary Eritrean poetry. He offers a wide range of subjects in his poetry that has a global dimension—in his words, ‘the indomitable struggle of humanity’. His achievement is doubly powerful and unique. The poetry of Reesom Haile reveals a joining of words and worlds from the perspective of the collective, the community, the society and the nation of which he is an integral part. He says:
Poetry is not a special activity of poets, for everyone is a potential a poet.
Only that some people are more gifted than others in the art and their
words and words more memorable. The poem is not an object separate
and apart from its function: to ease the pain and to celebrate the pleasure
of life. Women and men alike express themselves in music and poetry
while at work or at play.
Reesom Haile is a great literary figure. He is very realistic in his poetry. His language of self determination and political self-determination produce a supreme poetry of resistance with confidence. There is depth in his poetry. His poem Believe It or Not is a superb example of his realistic approach. He shows his deep concern regarding colonialism.
Remember the Italians
Who invaded and said
---------------------------
Don’t speak and don’t eat….
Believe it or not,
They want to kill us….
We have that is one of the most popular poems of post-independence Eritrea makes him a kind of rock star status. The poem extols a reputed essence of the Eritrean spirit: self-reliance, resistance, steadfastness, triumph, men and women, against all odds, working together:
We have men and women
Who sacrifice their lives.
------------------------------
We have men and women
Without end in the struggle
To grow, study and persist.
The refrain in the poem ‘We have men and women…./ We have women and men’ stresses the power of those who have lived through the war to change their society into a nation of peace, yet recognizing that the power of women makes them absolutely equal partners with men. Further, the poem affirms the presence of an informed and dedicated citizenry as avid to win the peace as it was to win the war. Unrelentingly in We have he implies that Eritrea’s people are fully prepared to rule themselves and that no one should think they might not be.
Who Said Merhawi Is Dead by Solomon Drar is one of the important poems in this anthology. The refrain ‘Who Said Merhawi is dead’, insists that the spirit of war never halts. The pun on ‘Merhawi’ suggests a perpetually embattled spirit—he is always ready for armed struggle. The profound, mythopoic image of the blossoming bed, later admired by Drar’s joining the heroic vision of Merhawi to the Eritrean present—
Working together
Like water and milk
And a perfect fit
of hand and glove….
-barely conceal a perpetually warlike and restless spirit. Such images enhance the beauty. In one of the parts of the poem Drar’s organic imagery of rotting fruit suggests that if a revolution merely follows its natural course ‘corruption’ may even be inevitable without the more dire perspective that the poem recommends. Nevertheless, Eritrea’s war poetry—be it totally about war or of war and peace conjoined-repeatedly takes an Horatian and/ or Homeric stance on war, unflinchingly and profligately violent yet ultimately without regret if it serves the cause of Eritrean nationalism.
Speaking about the same concern another important poet Mussa Mohammed Adem introduces readers to The Invincible through a sort of psychological portrait:
he has that true killer look
And dirges play like soundtracks in his head…
constantly
Making him think, ‘Encircle, attack, attack….
Every stanza of the poem includes murder, mayhem and causalities. The violence is excessive and endless but also timeless. It is a heroic kind of poetry. It can allow no other focus than on war and violence itself. Even the goal of Eritrean independence seems subsumed amidst such violence and the overwhelming reality that ‘until we see the Red Sea dry’, only ‘Invincible’ determines ‘life/ or death.’ It is ‘all that he’, the poet or the reader is allowed to ‘understand.’ The war shatters every other nuance. War, as one of the main concerns is aesthetically depicted in The Invincible that further justifies the appropriateness of the title too. For an ordinary reader it may look merely war imagery but for an aesthete it is more than that.
Woman of Eritrea by Kajerai gives a beautiful description about the Eritrean women soldiers. He breaks the traditionality. He purges them from being passive, powerless, domestic, and long suffering victims. Kajerai’s Woman of Eritrea can always be counted on for ‘high spirits and passion.’ The poet even considers an Eritrean female soldier to be stronger than a male fighter since she outlines him and goes on fighting. Moreover, the poet seems to revel in the violence and abject conditions as the other poets portray.
There are poets who tell their story involving war but also a revelation of peace. One of them is Isayas Tsegai. He offers the irrepressible voice of a poet: a voice that for him is identity as to his being ‘an Eritrean.’
The wind wanted my bones…
I wished I was never born…
He focuses on an individual’s destruction and, in an intimidating stroke of brutal psychological honesty, his or her self-destruction, too, be it justifiable or not. Moreover, the poet even sees himself ‘embrace’ such ‘suffering,’ whatever its outcome.
Tsegai talks about the sordid reality of war. He decides to confront with the poem’s warlike yet peace-loving refrain: ‘clenching my teeth, I said it again…// I am also a person. I am an Eritrean.’ It echoes in the wasteland of war; in starvation, in the thirst of the dying, in the blasted and poisoned earth and in whatever one imagines as an afterlife. The poet is deeply considered with peace and the futility of war. He remembers happier times before the war:
Birds in the swaying tree…
The rhythm of sea
----------------------
And devoted to good work.
I loved this country.
The poet begins the reclamation of an Eritrean identity buoyed by prosperity and selfassurance in addition to merely grim self-determination. He offers the irrepressible voice of a poet: a voice that for him is identical to his being ‘an Eritrean.’ Recalling when he ‘ate and dressed well’ and ‘want [ing] it back,’ he humanizes such an image and through his language frees it and himself from mere tragedy as a subject of pity and fear. By writing Lamentation that is an elegy, the poet touches the height of bleakness. He posits the starkest of insights and simply the truth about an Eritrean individual who also happens to be a poet and a friend of a dead soldier. His passion for his lost friend consumes him and transforms him totally:
pray to be the soil
Of the shrine and hold his body
--------------------------------------
Burn only with his memory….
Questions of life or death, the state or the individual, the religious or the revolutionary no longer matter. Instead, the poet would return to his origins as a human being and as a poet. He becomes too much pessimist that he wants to escape from reality. ‘Is this the promised end?’ he asks it to himself. Despondently, he finds the solution:
I thought I knew which way was best
But now I want to runaway
And hide in a monastery
Unlike the greatest elegies, a contemporary Eritrean elegy cannot promise much more than ‘hope’ and ‘dreams’.
El-Sheik (Madani) is a poet deeply concerned with ‘corrupt politics’. Evoking the failure of the political process that led to the war in the first place, he is a true believer in the goals of the revolution and a new era in which it is not betrayed. No one ever again should be fooled by the old ways of politics as usual with both sides paid, double deals, mere self-interest and power exercising nothing but corruption. Instead, he envisions a thoroughly redemptive political process succeeding after the revolution and banishing whatever failures of nerve and ideals that led up to it:
No more rooms of our dreams gone up
In the smoke of self-perpetuating
Politicians pretending
They will back our cause.
The very tone of despondency is quite visible in the poem A Candle in the Darkness written by Ghirmai Ghebremeskel. It opens with war’s absurdity and near madness, fomenting a kind of hysterical desire to be a part of it. He begins by challenging a volunteer ‘Fight for freedom?/ You want to fight for freedom/Because you love this country…?’ The poet’s incredulity at the paradox of a deliberate decision to fight for peace is clearly audible, except to the volunteer who, drunk on his or her idealism, ‘only want(s) to drink freedom.’ The poet here is very much concerned with ‘vision of peace.’
Whereas Ghebremeskel envisions the brightest of futures, Angessom Isaak is remembering the past that in comparison resembles ‘The one and only true/ color of freedom.’ The poem Freedom’s Colors stands as one of Eritrea’s greatest post-war poems for its personal and powerful expression of doubt: self-doubt on the part of the poet as well as doubt in what the Eritrean victory has accomplished. For Isaak, bravery in a new, post-war political light can be realized precisely through doubt and an honest questioning of self and country. Such a stance questions the viability or usefulness of the individual romantic poet. He becomes more content in addressing the frustrated and humbling realities of the present rather than the wild and heroic expectations of the past. Wondering why his vision of Eritrea changes, he becomes more honest than ever, answering ‘I don’t know why.’ The poetic achievement of Freedom’s Colors reveals no absence of artistic delight in contemplating the nature of freedom and democracy in contemporary post-independence Eritrea.
But freedom shines less now.
The colors run into each other.
I can’t see one color alone.
I don’t know why,
And never could I have imagined
My vision ending like this: black,
Blacker than a crow’s eye.
The poem reveals a profound awareness. It depicts the poet’s deep concern. He cites Keats’s poetic dictums “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Fortuna Ghebreghiorgis is one of the few female poets in contemporary Eritrean poetry. She explains that she has one battlefield and that is her psyche. A kind of inner violence stalks her work akin to the power of Emily Dickinson’s dire meditations on self. Psychomachia or spiritual warfare is her concern. In Help Us Agree, she strikes the rarest of private notes in Eritrean poetry. Since poetry is a very public art, widely practiced and appreciated in Eritrea, most poems feature less private and less embarrassing frankly insecure moments than her portrayal of someone engaged for an existential moment of reflection on her shadow. Looking into her self as well as at the world around her, all she sees is strife. The first stanza of her poem clearly states her position:
When will my shadow
And I agree?
Why won’t it obey?
Whenever I wear colors
Darkness comes back at me.
Really the writers are highly sensitive human beings. Everything that happens all-around has perfect imprint on their attitude and process of thinking. They are the representative of their time as they give an outlet to the fears, emotions, beliefs, customs, weaknesses, vices, morality, hopes, aspirations, etc. of that particular era in which they live and write. They showcase the society as it is. And Eritrean poets are no exceptions in this regard. They feel free and are able to describe what they witness: the sordid realities of life. Saba Kidane performs her poetry and displays the exuberance confidence by sketching what she sees around in post-war Eritrea. Really she comes up with deep understanding. She sees children growing older, boys and girls flirting and poor women begging in Asmara’s streets. She makes them as autonomous poetic subjects that need not be tied to or contextualized within explicit nationalistic or political concern.
Go Crazy Over Me portrays a situation that is normal and unremarkable nearly everywhere in the world. The poet moves effortlessly, adapting the voice of the prospective male seducer.
Take off those clothes
What do you have to lose?
She naturally develops such relatively artless, sexy if superficial and fatalistic comments into psychological, political and philosophical insights. Your Father by the same poet showcases that poverty is the hardest reality to bear. Begging on Eritrea’s streets may be discouraged and sometimes even denied as even happening, but it is an inevitable reality there as in most cities of the world. The poet sketches the mother in painstaking, even loving detail as if her body is itself a kind of living battlefield and female microcosm of the Eritrean struggle, haunted by heroism but facing despair. The woman has no choice but to try, seemingly against all odds.
Propped on the sidewalk
With a few coins near her legs
And a child wrapped in the folds
of her scarf worn to shreds,
She holds out her hand in the cold.
The poem, moreover, might as easily be applied to patriarchy itself or to the government of the country—yet any country—allowing for a society in which a woman can be left in such circumstances with no other alternative than to beg. The poet highlights a mother’s special, spontaneous sense of the moment. The pain she (mother) feels for her son as well as for herself is too overwhelming.
Focusing on the inevitability of love and romance, Hailemariam’s Let’s Divorce and Get Married Again picks up the oft told, universal story of men and women at different point. Here the poet delineates the lustrous early days of a marriage wearing off to reveal an irresolvable incompatibility between two people that ends in divorce. The poet makes young husband the poem’s speaker and constructs a manic, poetic, idealistic, naïve, self-centered if not wholly culpable or unusual persona.
rising like the star
The wise men saw
You overcame my fear
And I bowed to your light.
Such a presentation inescapably implies that solely emphasizing the husband’s perspective on the relationship reveals the root of why it falls apart. Based on the evidence of the poem, the couple seem to have little choice but to continue their struggle and hope for the best, despite the wreckage in their case, emotional—piling up around them, a little like the Eritrean nation itself.In this regard the poem can be read as a political allegory too.
The associative, the surreal and a distinct lack of reality lead Abdul Hakim Mahmoud El-Sheikh to discover ‘the power of revolution’. He finds the spirit of the ‘revolution’ not in obvious military exploits or extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice but in opaque poetic images. He makes his erotic obsession not the problem but the solution by shifting his focus from himself to the natural world around him. The poet reveals that he has been compelled to fantasize sexually about her beloved:
confused and wanting you
Bathed in juicy colors
We fall on each other
And I bathe like a hero
In your body full of desire….
There are many a grim concerns that one of the greatest icons Ghirmai Yohannes (San Diego) in Who Needs a Story deals with. His poem Like a Sheep is the best succinct in this regard. It focuses on a casualty of emigration. Those who flee their beloved Eritrea for the hope of getting into materialistic gains in another country are led blithely like sheep to a new place:
Led with a rope around his neck,
He blindly followed the trader
And the butcher and blithely thought
Of grazing in a new country.
It is a con game of human traffickers who entice the innocent people. Here the poet sounds sardonic. His objectivity allows his poem to attain a kind of universal description of the perils of an illegal immigrant. In this way neither place recognizes him, and he seems unable to recognize either place. Unlike Yeats, San Diego wants no ‘story’ of Eritrean myth or politics through which to project his own poetic concerns. He is absolutely implicit in dealing with the concerns. Throughout the poem the message that he wants to convey to the people gets its importance. And it keeps the tone of the poem objective.
Next Time Ask by the same poet presents a similarly mordant voice, only its acerbic attitude encompasses not merely the sorry plight of illegal immigrants but the entire range of human endeavour. The very first stanza of the poem is quite scathing:
One fact won’t go away.
Tomorrow or today
You have to know you die.
Don’t think of asking why.
Here San Diego reveals the ultimate folly of human rationality and its pretensions. The tone of the poem suggests that the poet’s wish is fatuous but the logic of his poem concludes that the vanity of human wishes to escape by any means the lot of our fellow creatures and anything alive is even more fatuous. The poem punctures humanity’s pride in its own accomplishments. The poet wants his readers to contemplate some of life’s most basic questions about human survival. His purpose is not simply to amuse, but to instruct the people and to save them if possible from a fiery future. He is not an allegorist merely playing with ideas and conceits.
Conclusively, it can be said that the contemporary Eritrean poets have taken and discussed different concerns aesthetically. They have been succeeded in tailoring the beauty of their work in a way that is agreeable to the tastes of aesthetes. The sordid reality of life that they speak out implicitly achieves its deep concern.
Works cited
Cantalupo, C. (2009). War & Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania:
Mkuki na Nrota Publishers Ltd.
Cantalupo, Charles and Negash, Ghirmai (2005). Who Needs a Story? Contemporary Eritrean
Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic, edited and translated by Charles Cantalupo and
Ghirmai Negash. Asmara: Hdri Publishers.
Chapekar, N G. Nivedak Lekh. Bhag Ek. [Details not available]
Connell, Dan. (1993). Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution. Asmara: The
Red Sea Press.
Haile, Reesom. (1997) Waza ms Qum Neger nTense Hager (“…………..kk”) Asmara:
Francescana Printing.
Horace. (1994) Odes and Epodes, edited and translated by Niall Rudd. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. p. 144.
Kajerai, Mohammed Osman. Silence and Ash ( Khartoum: n.p., 1960[?] ).
Keats, John. (1970) Poetical Works, edited by H.W. Garrod. London: Oxford University Press.
(p. 210)
Negash, Ghirmai.(1999) A History of Tigrinya Literature in Eritrea: The Oral and the Written,
1890-1991. Leiden: CNWS Publications.
Plato. (1963) The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Hungtington Cairns.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 17.
Yeats, W.B. (1983) The Poems, edited by Richard J Finneran. New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company. (pp. 346-8).
Yohannes, Ghirmai. (et al.) (2002). Abi Habti. Asmara: Sabur Printing.
Zeinab, Mama. (1985) cited in Stephen Levett and Fiona Douglas. Even the Stones are Burning
(Film) (Sydney. Freedom From Hunger Campaign.)
Book Review of ‘War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry’ by Charles Cantalupo
Book Review of ‘War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry’ by Charles Cantalupo
Tuesday, 19 October 2010 00:00 | Written by Prof. Tej N Dhar |
Charles Cantalupo, American poet and critic, is best known for his critical work on African writing, including Eritrean poetry. In fact, to him goes the credit of making Eritrean poetry known to the western world. It all started with his meeting with Reesom Haile in 1998, in Asmara, which led him to translate his poems into English, and publish them in two volumes, in 2000 and 2002.
After that, he collaborated with Ghirmai Negash, the best known critic of Eritrean writings, to produce a volume of English translation of the best poems written in the three of the nine Eritrean languages: Who Needs a Story?: Contemporary Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic ,which was published in 2005. When I wrote in my review of the book that it “will stimulate discussion and critical comment … about the chosen poems and their quality” (Journal of Eritrean Studies, 5, 2005), I hardly knew that he had decided to do this job as well.
War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is a companion piece to the earlier volume, what he himself calls “a kind of reader’s guide to the poems in Who Needs a Story?” For this, Cantalupo took the help of his collaborator of the earlier volume and several other distinguished Eritrean writers, who, to use his own words, “revealed contexts for these poems which I could never have imagined or discovered on my own.”
The opening and closing chapters of the book combine narration with discussion. The first chapter provides an account of the making of the earlier anthology: the main impulse behind it, the work needed to produce it, and the problems faced by the editors to get it published in Eritrea. An engaging and heart-warming story, indeed! The last chapter is another narrative of his meeting with Reesom Haile, followed by a discussion on his poetic theory and several of his known poems. The two provide the frame for its three main chapters: one each on war, war and peace, and peace, the three major themes that dominate the poems in the anthology. The analysis of each of the chosen poems begins with a short biographical detail about its writer.
The chapter on war provides a close reading of the poems on war from all the three languages, which include poems of Fessahazion’s Michael, Solomon Drar, Mussa Mohammed Adem, and Mohammed Osman Kajerai. It is widely known that most of the poems on war have been written by poets who took part in the long-drawn war against the Ethiopian occupation of the country. Cantalupo’s methodology for discussing these poems can be illustrated by the manner in which he deals with Solomon Drar’s “Who Said Merhawi is Dead?” Explicating it part by part, even line by line, he puts it in its immediate local context, by insisting that it arises from the Eritrean mindset of war, of people in a perpetual readiness for war. He also puts the poem in the larger context of the “traditional and hallowed” mindset that has descended down from the Greeks. This procedure helps the readers to understand that each poem is an independent entity, the product of a specific time and place, which can also be read in a larger and broader literary frame. This not only provides a rich context to the efforts of a poet but also helps the readers to see that placing poems in a larger poetic tradition helps in a better appreciation of the efforts of the poets.
Another group of poets, including Meles Negusse, Issayas Tsegai, Solomon Tsehaye, Angessom Issak, Ribka Schbatu, Paulos Netabay, Mohammed Mahmoud El-Shiekh and others mixes moments of war and peace in their poems, Each of the poems is subjected to a close analysis, with extended focus on images and objects, their association with the local landscape as well as with their ancient setting, to make us see that in each one of them war either creates or suggests peace. The quality of analysis is truly of a high order, proving Eliot’s assertion that poet-critics are the best critics of poetry. Cantalupo also shows how some of the chosen poets have used the elegiac form, almost like the poets of conventional elegies, to end their poems on a note of hope, and how many others “transform specific incidents of war or its immediate aftermath into moments of illumination.”
Moving away from the myth of Eritrea at war, the poems of peace envision life itself—the everyday realities of postwar Eritrea. The struggle that had a specific purpose during the times of war takes on a new coloration, for it now deals with children, love, unwed mothers, national pride, even the very process of writing. It could be Kidane’s problems about the growing up of children, or simply about going crazy with love: experiences that seem routine and familiar, but quite striking in a war-dominated psyche of Eritrea. Or it could be Hailemariam’s poem about “Let’s Divorce and Get Married Again,” in which we witness the birth, break up, and rebirth of a relationship. Or it could be Reesom Haile writing about national affirmation. All the poems are full of wit, humour, and feelings of joyous well being.
In the final chapter on Reesom Haile, we are not only introduced to a distinguished poet and his work but also made to understand why he is a typical Eritrean poet. Cantalupo writes about meeting him in a setting that he had “never experienced before, ” for Haile was not just reading but actually performing his poem among the public, which consisted of people from all strata of society, including women and children. He also quotes extensively from Haile’s views on poetry and poets. A few one-liners: “Or poetry is participatory”; “Our traditional poetry form is ad hoc”; “Poetry is not a special activity of poet, for everyone is a potential poet.” Cantalupo makes us see that the Eritean poet is truly a bard, a voice of the people with whom he lives and of whom he is a part. Commenting on his poems, he shows how, to combat successive waves of colonization, Haile crafts poetry of resistance that “is inseparable from the life of the poet and of his country.” And yet, as can be seen in the two translated volumes—We Have our Voice and We Invented the Wheel—Haile also manages to write on “a myriad of subjects.” Cantalupo also assesses his achievement in the context of the Asmara Declaration that was signed in Asmara in the famous conference “Against All Odds,” which pleaded that African writers should write in their own languages.
The Appendix provides the bilingual text of some of the poems taken from Who Needs a Story? that have been analyzed in the book. Like the earlier anthology of translated poems, War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is truly a path-breaking work. It will not only help the non-Eritrean readers to get the right kind of perspective on the creation of poems in Eritrea and their proper appreciation but also provide a model of critical reading of poems to the budding Eritrean critics. A very welcome book, indeed!
Last Updated (Saturday, 23 October 2010 15:07)
Source: http://www.shaebia.org/
Tuesday, 19 October 2010 00:00 | Written by Prof. Tej N Dhar |
Charles Cantalupo, American poet and critic, is best known for his critical work on African writing, including Eritrean poetry. In fact, to him goes the credit of making Eritrean poetry known to the western world. It all started with his meeting with Reesom Haile in 1998, in Asmara, which led him to translate his poems into English, and publish them in two volumes, in 2000 and 2002.
After that, he collaborated with Ghirmai Negash, the best known critic of Eritrean writings, to produce a volume of English translation of the best poems written in the three of the nine Eritrean languages: Who Needs a Story?: Contemporary Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic ,which was published in 2005. When I wrote in my review of the book that it “will stimulate discussion and critical comment … about the chosen poems and their quality” (Journal of Eritrean Studies, 5, 2005), I hardly knew that he had decided to do this job as well.
War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is a companion piece to the earlier volume, what he himself calls “a kind of reader’s guide to the poems in Who Needs a Story?” For this, Cantalupo took the help of his collaborator of the earlier volume and several other distinguished Eritrean writers, who, to use his own words, “revealed contexts for these poems which I could never have imagined or discovered on my own.”
The opening and closing chapters of the book combine narration with discussion. The first chapter provides an account of the making of the earlier anthology: the main impulse behind it, the work needed to produce it, and the problems faced by the editors to get it published in Eritrea. An engaging and heart-warming story, indeed! The last chapter is another narrative of his meeting with Reesom Haile, followed by a discussion on his poetic theory and several of his known poems. The two provide the frame for its three main chapters: one each on war, war and peace, and peace, the three major themes that dominate the poems in the anthology. The analysis of each of the chosen poems begins with a short biographical detail about its writer.
The chapter on war provides a close reading of the poems on war from all the three languages, which include poems of Fessahazion’s Michael, Solomon Drar, Mussa Mohammed Adem, and Mohammed Osman Kajerai. It is widely known that most of the poems on war have been written by poets who took part in the long-drawn war against the Ethiopian occupation of the country. Cantalupo’s methodology for discussing these poems can be illustrated by the manner in which he deals with Solomon Drar’s “Who Said Merhawi is Dead?” Explicating it part by part, even line by line, he puts it in its immediate local context, by insisting that it arises from the Eritrean mindset of war, of people in a perpetual readiness for war. He also puts the poem in the larger context of the “traditional and hallowed” mindset that has descended down from the Greeks. This procedure helps the readers to understand that each poem is an independent entity, the product of a specific time and place, which can also be read in a larger and broader literary frame. This not only provides a rich context to the efforts of a poet but also helps the readers to see that placing poems in a larger poetic tradition helps in a better appreciation of the efforts of the poets.
Another group of poets, including Meles Negusse, Issayas Tsegai, Solomon Tsehaye, Angessom Issak, Ribka Schbatu, Paulos Netabay, Mohammed Mahmoud El-Shiekh and others mixes moments of war and peace in their poems, Each of the poems is subjected to a close analysis, with extended focus on images and objects, their association with the local landscape as well as with their ancient setting, to make us see that in each one of them war either creates or suggests peace. The quality of analysis is truly of a high order, proving Eliot’s assertion that poet-critics are the best critics of poetry. Cantalupo also shows how some of the chosen poets have used the elegiac form, almost like the poets of conventional elegies, to end their poems on a note of hope, and how many others “transform specific incidents of war or its immediate aftermath into moments of illumination.”
Moving away from the myth of Eritrea at war, the poems of peace envision life itself—the everyday realities of postwar Eritrea. The struggle that had a specific purpose during the times of war takes on a new coloration, for it now deals with children, love, unwed mothers, national pride, even the very process of writing. It could be Kidane’s problems about the growing up of children, or simply about going crazy with love: experiences that seem routine and familiar, but quite striking in a war-dominated psyche of Eritrea. Or it could be Hailemariam’s poem about “Let’s Divorce and Get Married Again,” in which we witness the birth, break up, and rebirth of a relationship. Or it could be Reesom Haile writing about national affirmation. All the poems are full of wit, humour, and feelings of joyous well being.
In the final chapter on Reesom Haile, we are not only introduced to a distinguished poet and his work but also made to understand why he is a typical Eritrean poet. Cantalupo writes about meeting him in a setting that he had “never experienced before, ” for Haile was not just reading but actually performing his poem among the public, which consisted of people from all strata of society, including women and children. He also quotes extensively from Haile’s views on poetry and poets. A few one-liners: “Or poetry is participatory”; “Our traditional poetry form is ad hoc”; “Poetry is not a special activity of poet, for everyone is a potential poet.” Cantalupo makes us see that the Eritean poet is truly a bard, a voice of the people with whom he lives and of whom he is a part. Commenting on his poems, he shows how, to combat successive waves of colonization, Haile crafts poetry of resistance that “is inseparable from the life of the poet and of his country.” And yet, as can be seen in the two translated volumes—We Have our Voice and We Invented the Wheel—Haile also manages to write on “a myriad of subjects.” Cantalupo also assesses his achievement in the context of the Asmara Declaration that was signed in Asmara in the famous conference “Against All Odds,” which pleaded that African writers should write in their own languages.
The Appendix provides the bilingual text of some of the poems taken from Who Needs a Story? that have been analyzed in the book. Like the earlier anthology of translated poems, War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is truly a path-breaking work. It will not only help the non-Eritrean readers to get the right kind of perspective on the creation of poems in Eritrea and their proper appreciation but also provide a model of critical reading of poems to the budding Eritrean critics. A very welcome book, indeed!
Last Updated (Saturday, 23 October 2010 15:07)
Source: http://www.shaebia.org/
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