Engendering homeland: migration, diaspora and feminism in Ethiopian music

Abstract

For decades, the Ethiopian song most widely recorded and performed abroad was ‘Tezeta’, the so-called ‘Song of Longing’ that evokes love-sickness and nostalgia for a bygone time. Thanks to the Amharic lyrical technique of ‘Wax and Gold’, a singer could connote multiple meanings such that the pining of a lovelorn person could double as nostalgia for a place or time. Today, the many Ethiopians who live abroad and who produce and consume Ethiopian culture over the internet may develop a similar but virtual yearning for the ‘homeland’. This is particularly evident in a recent series of songs by female performers in the Ethiopian diaspora that revolve around the theme of ‘home’. These songs, embedded in repertoires centred on domestic relationships and family life, bear the lyrical and musical characteristics of the receiving country while containing strong lyrical allusions to a physical or metaphorical return to Ethiopia from diaspora. In this article, I will analyse two of the three recent songs that share the title ‘Home’: Wayna Wondwossen's and Cabra Casay's. In the broad concept of ‘home’ that is the crux of these songs, the emotion-laced meanings of ‘Tezeta’ coalesce with the condition of the woman in the diaspora enmeshed in the bonds of family, ethnie and nation. I will show that this creative fusion of the national nostalgic mode with the domestic starkly illustrates the fertile convergence of issues many more cautious scholars like to separate methodologically, if not analytically: the ‘personal’ or ‘private’ issues of gender and family with the ‘political’ or ‘public’ issues posed by national belonging and migration.

Keywords:

• Ethiopian music
• migration
• feminism
• transnationalism
• home

Notes

The two dominant musical styles from Addis Ababa during the Emperor Haile Selassie's reign were Azmari performances and Ethiojazz. Ethiojazz is the native musical style best known outside Ethiopia thanks to the influential Ethiopiques series. As its name suggests, it constitutes a fusion style of Ethiopian performance practices and melodic modes from Azmari music and liturgy with western instrumentation and influence from soul jazz. There was a great deal of cross-fertilization between Azmaris and Ethiojazz performers owing to the fact that most musicians in Addis Ababa trained either as Azmaris, as members of the church, or as participants in Haile Selassie's Imperial Guards, the national brass band (Tenaille 2002, 166).

Levine (1965) explains the process of lost-wax casting as a metaphor for literary use of the Ethiopic root system: gold is cast in wax, and when the wax layer is chipped away, the gold can be accessed readily. This metaphor applies to the broad practice of literary double meaning in Amharic. Azmaris practice wax and gold, and Levine argues that it is central to Ethiopian civilization.

Her rendition can be found here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIIS1q7ztP4> (Accessed June 2, 2012).

Aster Aweke's music was distributed in the UK in the late 1980s before becoming popular in Europe and the USA (Kimberlin 2000, 255).

http://www.myspace.com/asteraweke/music/songs/kezira-album-version-50518025 (Accessed June 2, 2012).

The vitality of Oromo and Eritrean separatist groups notwithstanding, Amhara leadership has successfully constructed a national narrative that privileges the Amhara conception of Ethiopian history.

A precise number is difficult to assess due to the population's transnational nature, and due to the sketchiness of the identity marker ‘Ethiopian’ among migrants from secessionist regions.

Although this also rekindled several border disputes (specifically among Eritreans and the Oromo).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn0Hnh_bpds (Accessed November 5, 2012).

Wayna is a contemporary musician, so scholarship about her has not appeared yet. However, she gave an interview in March 2012 to Tadias, the authoritative Washington, DC-based Ethiopian cultural magazine, providing biographical data: http://www.tadias.com/03/20/2012/celebrating-women%E2%80%99s-history-month-q-a-with-wayna/ (Accessed October 28, 2012).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn0Hnh_bpds (Accessed October 20, 2012).

The Ethiopian-Israeli migration story is documented exhaustively by scholars in the field of Beta Israel studies (Ben-Ezer 2002).

There are two notable exceptions: first, the so-called Black Hebrews who live in the southern town of Dimona, and second, the expanding population of labour migrants from West Africa and refugees from Sudan who populate the slums of Tel Aviv's Neve Sha'anan neighbourhood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGHZM-Yclw (Accessed November 5, 2012).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGHZM-Yclw (Accessed June 2, 2012).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkTNEjBgDT8 (Accessed November 5, 2012).

Roy estimates that diluting a symbolic system to favour identity politics over depth of content (2010, 142) requires the stripping away of cultural characteristics.