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.

          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.