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ABSTRACT
Through a speculative reading of crime reports from the 1960 and ‘70s, this article grapples with the way in which Ethiopians who refuse to be fixed within gender binaries were introduced to readers as social problems. Considering the violence gender-non-conforming people are subjected to – including by some cisgender members of the queer community itself – I closely study some of these archives to ask what could emerge if we engage them imaginatively. I experiment with the crime reports to see what a speculative reading might afford us in writing a history of the present. I subject the reports to speculation on what might have been instead of being loyal to archives and what they present to us. In an act of defying the authority of the archive, which gives a narrow and skewed account of lived experiences, I introduce a speculative biography of three gender-non-conforming Ethiopians in a fashion that moves away from the crime narrative within which they were limited. In so doing, however, I do not claim to recover their voice, their wishes and desires; I rather read a theory of how their existence was made (im)possible/freedom was practised. Though I heavily draw on the crime reports from Amharic newspapers, I juxtapose these with recently produced documentaries, my own childhood memories, ethnography as well as conversations with members of the queer community at home and in the diaspora.
Disclosure statement
No conflict of interest was declared by the author. This article is one of the outcomes of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1–390713894.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this article to the loving memory of my colleague Richard Anyah. Our last chat was about a draft version of this piece about which he gave me generous feedback. I learnt so much from our conversations, and I hoped there would have been time for more of that enriching exchange.
Notes
1 This title is adopted from Michel Foucault’s ‘The Life of Infamous Men’ (Citation1979), in which he notes that individuals he came across in the archive – in police reports and medical records – were ordinary until their encounter with power. But with this encounter, we only get to experience the violence that produced them, not necessarily their lives as ordinary humans.
2 Engagement with archives is exciting when order is ‘no longer assured’ and when ‘the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered’ (Derrida & Prenowitz Citation1995, 11).
3 All translations from Amharic to English are mine.
4 ‘ወንድ ነኝ ያለው ሴት ሆና ተገኘች [Apparently, the one who said I am a man is a woman]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Hamle 1961 [23 July 1968].
5 ‘ወንድ ነኝ ያለው ሴት ሆና ተገኘች [Apparently, the one who said I am a man is a woman]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Hamle 1961 [23 July 1968], page 8.
6 A tsilat is a replica of the arc of the covenant that is found in every Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It is seen as expensive and sacred.
7 ‘ሰባት ፆታዋን ደብቃ የኖረችው ጽላት ሰርቃ ተጋለጠች [The one who hid her gender for seven years got exposed while stealing tsilat]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Nehase 1965 [23 August 1972], pages 1 and 4.
8 ‘ሰባት አመት ፆታዋን ደብቃ የኖረችው ጽላት ሰርቃ ተጋለጠች [The one who hid her gender for seven years got exposed while stealing tsilat]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Nehase 1965 [23 August 1972].
9 Using ‘played out’ Foucault (Citation1979, 78) points to the real-life consequences of the discourse of criminality on these individuals.
10 I had this conversation in March 2017 with Sami Tamene (name changed), a sex worker whose views are shaped by his experiences of going to places with rich, mostly foreign visitors. Interestingly, he has a comparative perspective because he observes how the police treat him when he is alone or with other friends in relation to when he is going out with rich men who take him to five star hotels and high-end restaurants.
11 For example, a debate running over some weeks in one of the earliest Amharic newspapers, Berhanena Selam (light and peace), dating back to the 1920s tells of rampant prostitution and how much the educated elite and state wanted to rid Ethiopia of prostitutes.
12 Williams writes of the existence of alternative and oppositional cultures in relation to the dominant one. Their existence as such is subject to historical variation. In some circumstances, what has been alternative and hence left alone begins to be regarded as a threat to the dominant. In 1960s and 1970s Ethiopia, there was a shift to sex work being perceived as a threat to hegemony.
13 Exactly why the men followed Sarah remains a mystery, and the police investigation focused on Sarah’s (petty) criminal record. Which bodies are respected, and why did the police not puzzle over two men following a woman into the forest? What would have happened if she were a ‘real’ woman? Could Sarah have feared that they were going to rape her? Has anybody asked how she felt? Why were the police not interested in such questions? Why did the young men want to follow her? Why did the documentary not ask these questions?
14 ‘Ketezegaw Dose - ከተዘጋው ዶሴ Episode - 10’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhFQGNfR-YM.
15 This confinement of masculinity to men has been subject to debates and criticisms by theorists such as Judith/Jack Halberstam (Citation1998) and Judith Butler (Citation2004).
16 To throw archives into crisis means to admit that they, according to Stuart Hall (2008, 92), ‘are not inert historical collections. They always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past’.
17 Here, Sadiya Hartman (2014) refutes Foucault’s (Citation1979) designation. In his piece on the lives of infamous men, he almost gives in to accepting the impossibility of grasping their lives by looking at the very material that brought them to our attention in a problematic way. Hartman pushes the limits of what can be done with archives but seems to realise that some history writing conventions have to be violated in order to do so.
18 For ‘an indecision between true and false’, see Foucault (Citation1979, 90).
19 A similar attempt at humanising the life and histories of those on the margins of heteronormativity was made by Marc Epprecht (Citation2008), whose work draws on interviews and archives. Epprecht experiments with vignettes and engages them imaginatively to reconstruct more humane histories of sexually minoritised groups in Southern Africa. While he focuses on sexuality, due to the nature of the materials I engage, mine are specifically focused on gender.
20 ‘ወንድ ነኝ ያለው ሴት ሆና ተገኘች [Apparently, the one who said I am a man is a woman]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Hamle 1961 [23 July 1968], page 8.
21 ‘ወንድ ነኝ ያለው ሴት ሆና ተገኘች [Apparently, the one who said I am a man is a woman]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Hamle 1961 [23 July 1968].
22 I frequented a small coffee and tea stall that was run by Alshanzi, in the Khartoum neighbourhood where I stayed in 2022. I was told that Alshanzi’s approach is unique (he was described as queer) in that he embodies and performs femininity unlike the other men who conduct themselves and arrange their make-shift coffee shops differently.
23 ‘ሰባት ፆታዋን ደብቃ የኖረችው ጽላት ሰርቃ ተጋለጠች [The one who hid her gender for seven years got exposed while stealing tsilat]’, no author, Polisna Ermjaw 15 Nehase 1965 [ 23 August 1972].
24 ‘Ketezegaw Dose - ከተዘጋው ዶሴ Episode - 10’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhFQGNfR-YM).
25 Ibid.
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Serawit B. Debele
Dr Serawit Debele is the leader of the Intersectionality Junior Research Group within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth.