Asafa Tefera Dibaba (PhD Student)
Summer, 2012
Indiana University
Folklore/Anthropology
Prof John McDowell
Prof John McDowell
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I. Introduction
This summer, I am working on two classes: TOWARDS ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE POEITCS (F800) I & II. In this search for ethnographic paradigm, one independent reading class focuses on a model (methods) in collecting data in Folklore and Resistance Culture and another class focuses on Theory for interpreting the data. In constituting a theory, I will be working towards resistance poetics. That is, in challenging hegemony and any form of social and political injustices, the oppressed re-story what happen(ed) to them, sing and turn grievances and disenchantments into humor and thus the oppressor is “jockied” about. In so doing, the oppressed locally theorize the politics and history from below. James Scott’s (1991) Ethiopian saying, when the land lord passes by riding his horse, the serf deeply bows and silently farts is a typical example of such a critique of both the power and the powerful. This is a silent, yet public resistance best summed up in Jean Paul Sartre’s prefatory note to Fanon’s (1963:8) The Wretched of the Earth: “dogs that bark don’t bite!” and thus the tenant shows outwardly a tactical smile to the landlord and secretly brews contempt, deception and plot to unsettle the power relation.
In both the independent studies, I have two aims: one is to approach the data and my ethnographic field notes as a kind of “dialoguing” with the folkloric and anthropological ancestors in the region and, second, to reframe my views on the ethnographic craft in a historical perspective. Hence, towards that end, for this class on Resistance Poetics (Theory), I present in this paper a comparative analysis of my close readings into two books: Jeff Conant’s (2010) A Poetics of Resistance, and Frantz Fanon’s (1962) The Wretched of the Earth.
II. Why Poetics of Resistance?
The oppressed theorize the brutality, hunger, thirst and physical and psychosocial experiences through stories, myths, songs, rituals, and festivals into “everyday resistance” in such a deeply imaginative and profoundly visionary artistic stance that necessitates a poetics of resistance. The poetics of resistance interprets and analyzes the collective shared experience constituted into local history and serves as a reference point to direct attention to understanding the features of “resistance from below” against the historically unjust power relation.
Jeff Conant writes in his A Poetics of Resistance (2010) that “resistance is a strategy for cultural survival” (p34). That is, the struggle of the ordinary people is not just economic but also spiritual, and more subtle which necessitates a poiesis as an action of ‘making,’ ‘transforming,’ and continuing the world and resistance through ‘word’ and ‘praxis,’ through ‘theory’ and ‘practices’ to sustain the struggle against injustices. The ‘word’ is a testimony for the re-existence of the oppressed who tells the oppressor he resists therefore he exists. The reality of the re-existence of the oppressed is beyond his collective imagination, beyond the forceful homogenization of the nation-state. It is the truth to be materialized through fighting and fiercely defending, wording, naming and re-creating the social reality, and reconstructing it into various histories, not just the monolithic single History of domination, but into many other such facts elsewhere. The struggle is partly to fit this world of the oppressed into many other such worlds elsewhere through resistance poetics.
Paul Sartre is right to tell bluntly his fellow Europeans that when they tame a member of their own species, they reduce him not only to animal but also affect his output, however little they may give him. Hence, his suggestion is that the settler should stop domestication of humanity for at the end “neither man nor animal is the native,” humiliated, beaten, undernourished, ill and terrified, always he has the same traits of character, whether black, yellow, or white, i.e. considered only as mischievous, lazy, thief, and left with nothing, but one who understands only violence (Fanon, p16). In line with Paul Sartre’s metaphorical “domestication” of and “giving little” to the ordinary man, Fanon basis his theory of violence on the uneven distribution of resources in the countries which, after independence, believe to have benefitted from the large European settlement and the wide streets and big houses. As a result of the “wrong perception,” seeing the colonial legacy at its face value, those countries disregarded those “poverty stricken, starving hinterland,” and gave themselves the impression that their towns are symbols of independence (Fanon, p100, f. n.).
Hence, the study of the facts needs an interdisciplinary methods and model which is the focus of resistance poetics. The basic assumption is that ordinary people turn to words as emancipatory social praxis when they are put indefinitely in unequal historical power relationships. They turn their wretched conditions into words, into jokes, stories, myths, songs, festivals and rituals and dances to all that is overtly incommunicable. In so doing the oppressed critically and creatively communicate what happened to them and propel their cause by clearly articulating their demands (justice, work, land, food, freedom, rights, and all that humanity cannot survive without) to the oppressive state and also to the world community.
When the poiesis of non-violent resistance fails to expect change and betterment of the resister, then Fanon’s violence or Conant’s Chiapas’ ya basta! enough is enough become evident (Fanon, p99; Conant, 330). It is Fanon’s strong conviction that the Third World ought not to be content to define itself in terms of the colonial values before it, but it ought to do at its utmost to find its own particular values, methods and style peculiar to it (Fanon, ibid). Similarly, Jeff Conant believes that, the Chiapas’ struggle led by Zapatista is not a struggle to overthrow a colonial foreign power but against internal colonialism which reduced the indigenous culture to a subaltern position within a dominating state (Conant, p108). However, this argument is not to rule out the possibility that resistance by the ordinary people is in search of human liberation, or fundamental human freedom.
The oppressed historicize the local politics and crystalize the local history out of the brutality and hunger, disease, and man-made famine, and all the physical and psychological hardships, atrocities that humanity cannot bear up, and the collective shared experience lived to witness under oppressive state structure, an agent for neoliberal capitalism. Hence, the poiesis of such an ongoing creative resistance should be emancipatory at most as its ultimate goal is to seek for an unconditional and fundamental human freedom, but not just a system change of one oppressive state ideology for another neoliberalist power ploy. It is crucial to carefully construct an ethnography of resistance poetics, a suitable method/model of study into the creative social praxis of the oppressed through examining their folklore and resistance culture which involves part folkloric, and part anthropological and historical inquiries.
Though Conant focuses on the Latin American Chiapas’ experience and Fanon aims at a universal moral principle to direct the struggle waged by the disenfranchised humankind, but both take as a point of departure the pre-colonial culture and the survival of the ancient beliefs and customs still in existence in contemporary cultural forms beneath Western forms (Conant, p133). The survival of the indigenous culture is in the hands of the elites whose way of thinking is already marked by the technical advances they spring from. That is, where “modern ideas” reign, Fanon stresses, and the same elite classes (bureaucrats, military, business sectors, intelligentsia) struggle against the tradition, change old customs, and “enter into open conflict with the old granite block upon which the nation rests” (Fanon 109). These forces, among others, who serve as agents of internal colonialism and the power-holder, determine the effort to constitute and the practicability of resistance poetics since they force the route of local history to veer in a different direction along the mainstream one.
Next, I will turn to show how the “universal” and the “particular” objective facts and subjective realities of human and historical conditions are treated in both works under scrutiny.
III. Resistance Poetics: the “Universal” and the “Particular”
Jeff Conant’s “A Poetics of Resistance”
Conant’s Poetics of Resistance is pleasingly the analysis of history of the Zapatista insurgency as the first “postmodern revolution” based on the communiques about the “Zapatismo” ideologies, the organizing methodologies and communication strategies of the movement. The book much draws on the author’s field research into the compelling and aggressively effective language and aesthetics of the Zapatista movement which sustained its appeal and survival as a popular struggle in the 21st century in the last decade. The grassroots level popular struggle used creative resistance to convey its vision and constitute resistance poetics to direct the liberation so that the means justify the end. By interlacing varied elements of poetics and symbolism, “Zapatismo” has emerged as a “reach in” and “reach out” mechanism of resolutely radical public relations campaign for human liberation working on mobilizing the oppressed Chiapas from inside while launching attacks against the oppressive state in default.
The poiesis of the popular resistance served as a complex and evolving web of social praxis using a wide range of folkloric performances in a profoundly imaginative and deeply visionary stance to sustain the resistance and mobilize the people. The Chiapas danced to their disenchantment on rituals and festivals, sang songs and told stories of their lived experience to clearly communicate to their friends and foes their unshakable belief in the emancipatory liberation struggle. Conant’s book is a practical research outcome though heavily drew on the colorful communiques of subcommandante Marcos.
The analysis of the ski masks, uniforms, toy dolls, and other accoutrements of the insurgents and murals, songs, and other popular cultural forms are carefully recreated into the poiesis of resistance of the ordinary Chiapas who lived to vitalize truth both in “arms” and in “words,” i.e., in aesthetics and in praxis, to gain publicity on a global scale (Conant, p119ff). Thus, A Poetics of Resistance is a living example of a participatory bottom-up revolution of the Chiapas in the last decade, the struggles that survived for a while despite the top-down neoliberalist massive campaign of populism, i.e. meeting short-term demands of the people and dismantling the struggle through a divide-and-rule policy.
From a postmodernist view of cultural populism, cultural analysis such as the Chiapas’ needs to be located where theoretical struggle becomes political and political struggle becomes theoretical, and, hence, through a carefully co-crafted poiesis of popular resistance, culture becomes a site where this location of culture is either suppressed or made visible. The poetics of resistance is made obvious in the analysis of how differences in language can make it difficult for a meaningful negotiation between the indigenous population and the State. The paradox of the principle of nonviolence such as “our words are our weapons” and at the same time carrying guns, and vesting power in the people and working collectively but creating the non-Chiapas subcomandante Marcos a public figurehead is strikingly puzzling for an outsider.
Following the 1994 sudden attack on the Mexican nation-state, the Zapatistas succeeded particularly in establishing an autonomous self-governed region in the Chiapas, where, as Conant notes in the last chapters of his book, “the people lead and the government obeys” in the Chiapas. However, the state legislation and regular crackdowns by the military did not leave the mass movement without disintegration, though, comparatively speaking, there are similar other South American revolutions and anti-globalization movements spread like a wildfire. The genealogy of the Chiapas popular resistance points at the holistic cry of defiance, “Ya basta!” of January 1994 to maintain itself as “a point of reference,” as part of rebellion for the same cause in the world but in “pluriforms” (p330). However, the Zapatistas also justly claim the resistance to be the continuation of the 500 year of Mayan rebellion against oppression.
In “The Story of Words” (democracy, liberty, justice) and Durito the dung beetle provides witty and insightful analyses of neoliberalism, which may make a concrete example of the “Poetics” of the Zapatista movement. Through combining narrative history, literary criticism, ethnography, and media analysis, Conant’s A Poetics of Resistance provides a clear understanding of a “postmodern revolution” by a complex web of “words” and “arms”. The means, meanings, and mythos of the Zapatistas' famous “¡Ya basta!” meaning, Enough already!, are the center of the poetics of a new story of untying official monolithic History, uncovering buried seeds of popular resistance, and revealing the glimmer of hope for a truly insurgent modernity.
While working in a particular setting of the Southeast Mexico, Jeff Conant is a writer, educator, and social justice activist echoing the plights of mankind. In his book he offers an engaging and innovative tool for organizers and environmental educators and also for popular activists to help understand how the Zapatistas' strategy works and the nature of their effective messages of participatory resistance, how they mobilized and sustained the bottom-up revolution through merging both “words” and “arms”. Both the title and the front cover picture, a masked Zapatista doll carrying a rifle, suggest an activist readership, which is evident from the content of the first couple of chapters also inclining to be overly a literary analysis of the Zapatismo, describing the history of the movement from 1994 to 2010.
Resistance poetics is the echo of the multitude, the earthly deep voice of the people embodied in the elders. The Chiapas’ earthly deep voice reiterated in Old Antonio’s dreams constitutes the history of the genesis of popular struggle of the oppressed. It is the will to power that reveals itself to the oppressed as a driving force in popular movements rather than the brutality experienced in daily life practices and the gruesome life conditions. The need for free land, full table, peace to oneself, one’s home(stead) and the world at large is a precious reward to be fought for. It is not a fact to be found at leisure; it is a truth to be made through intense labor. The heroes’ wit reveals the truth uttered in the deep voice of the oppressed as much as the heretics’ wisdom does. Old Antonio’s voice represents the ancient Mayan heretics’ voice and of the future Chiapas’ bandits and pundits until freedom is gained as a fundamental human essence (pp72, 73).
As it is believed, heroes and bandits disappear in order to be seen, they die in order to live or re-exist in the mythos and wisdom of the heretics and pundits. Such paradoxes are also inevitable in the war/peace, life/death, and destruction/construction bipolar. Old Antonio’s philosophical premises hold this fact that the war that the Zapatistas forced to wage is to redistribute resources, reconstruct the unequal historical and social relationships. The war of nature against nature and humanity is also metaphorical: by destroying, the river reconstructs the land and to yield abundance such as corn, beans, and bread on their table there in the jungle for Zapatistas symbolizing equality, justice, and freedom (p77).
The universality of the liberation struggle of one community in one place is a justifiable human thing conditioned by the universal nature of “freedom,” and the “right” to land, food and work, and procreation”. One may find those demands in the prelude such as the Chiapas’ “Ya basta!” “Enough already!” also recur in Salale’s metanarrative (metadiscursive) resistance ethos, a prelude into a set of stories they tell and songs they sing, stories of historical resistance and contemporary re-existence. The reason why the oppressed tell stories of resistance over and over again, sing protest songs and re-create mythos of opposition is that those serve as the poiesis of communicating the unfavorable life experience and have a commemorative function and strengthen and root the struggle more deeply in belief and in practice to make more concrete and ideologize it, and in so doing sustain the struggle. It is true that “through arguments we only come to conclusions; only stories make sense,” and also that “what is a revolution not built on stories and not sustained by poetry?”
People communicate through the poetics of resistance not just what they demand but also what they try to embody and symbolize in the historical resistance in which language plays a major role. In the case of the Salale, the use of both Oromo and Amharic languages interchangeably used as a gateway for both the native and the outsiders into the Salale indigenous methods of resistance is not only linguistic but also systemic bastardization of the oppressive structure evident in all religious, cultural, and sociopolitical aspects of their everyday life. The use of foreign language by the oppressed is to communicate to the outsider what they demand and what they don’t, in which case language can serve as a tool of resistance as among the Chiapas.
The poetics of resistance challenges the critiques of the social movement as romanticizing indigenous culture and banditry (armed struggle), and over-reliance on the history of ethnic heroes and oversimplification of the existing social and historical reality. Byway of the counter-critique, resistance poetics strictly follows up and builds on the profoundly imaginative vision and deeply ethical commitment of the social movement activities. The poetics helps the debate and feeds into the poiesis (action, to make) against the surface readings into the meanings carried in the mythology of resistance.
For a social movement to expand its territory geographically and psychologically the war of arms and words are equally important. Thus, the poetics of resistance is important to mobilize supporters and a counter-text against the hegemonic ideology (propaganda) and to dedicate full attention to the poiesis that gives the resistance (social movement activity) a transnational resonance and to keep it on track.
The poetics is about “winning and losing” (note Henry Glassie’s experience about the Stars of Ballymenon) and through the taking of the territory by military actions on the ground, communal development actions and actions of solidarity, festivals and rituals (note rituals as tools of political resistance). Hence, using the Chiapas’ “particular” local experience as a case study, Jeff Conant defines the notion of resistance poetics as a “universal” sum total of common good, values and visions that resound in the voice of Zapatismo (p13), which voice the plight of disempowered mankind. It is also the symbol and sense used to resound the voice of the popular struggle, the hope and ethical commitment of the people. That is, the struggle of the oppressed is not just demanding change but also embodying it, and it is to unseat the powerful and also to unsettle the power (Conant, p13, citing Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, 2006). As a guiding principle, resistance poetics is based on such ideological guidelines as the Zapatistas’ “Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves!” (Conant, p14).
The “particularist” trajectory of Resistance poetics, I argue, seems an account of ascendingly failing social rebellion that might appear disarticulated from its cause without a short term benefit or any benefit of history lingering under permanent threats of attacks. However, resistance poetics is not a failed narrative but a silenced outcry of a shockingly wretched citizen struggling to create a world where many worlds would fit, decenter a monolithic single History and instead tell/record several versions of histories. The myth of a purportedly emasculated struggle is turned into jokes, tales, and songs of prison to restory the hard times suffered under massive oppression and, in so doing, sustain the resistance in local history. Popular resistance is not about seeking to take state power; it is rather about opening chance for everyone to cherish the right life to its fullest. Hence, put in its “universalist” trajectory, the poetics of resistance is a canon of the oppressed that decree power resides not merely in the authority of the state. It is popular power, public power that resides in the common, ordinary people who can hand it over to an authority and transfer it at their will to a succeeding elect than indefinitely owned by a demagogue. That is, power resides in the production and cultivation of human dignity, in nurturing and disciplining rather than in controlling humanity.
As a dynamic mode of communication, the poiesis of liberation goes beyond a reciting of history of oppression or consequent rebellion, or as Jeff Conant puts it succinctly, it goes beyond “an academic illustration of social movement theory”. As a profoundly imaginative reflection of everyday life, resistance poetics is a communicative strategy used by the oppressed for a common goal of approaching their real life situation from diverse contexts. That is, the oppressed draw on the collective historical memory of resistance to show their profound sense of dignity and to revitalize their cultural resistance as a continuation of indigenous methods of peace making and defending their sovereignty. Thus resistance poetics is a tale of the journey from the trapped struggle and distracted resistance to collective re-existence. It reaches in, takes route, and grows in the rural villages, in the Chiapas Mountains in the southeast Mexico as in the Jamma and Mogor gorges and caves of the Salale, Ethiopia, to reach out beyond those local villages to the oppressed everywhere engaged in unseating the powerful and unsettling oppressive power structure. Thus, as a poiesis of liberation, resistance poetics is a song of “the war of the flea,” a reach-in and a reach-out communicative mode of the oppressed used to keep the struggle on track and sustain solidarity with the wretched of the earth elsewhere.
Jeff Conant is right in saying that the first front in any war of liberation is the front of language (p177). Thus “art is in the service of the revolution” when, since the end of the Cold War, the Zapatista movement brought about mass insurgency sparkling rebellion on a global scale against corporate globalization (Conant, pp30, 31). Hence, it is true that resistance poetics by drawing on songs, tales, rituals and dances and performances on varied faces and facades of culture revitalizes society to thrive and constitute words of hope not just of violence. Resistance poetics is the language that a hounded heart brews a poiesis of disenchantment, praxis, and voice of peace against forces to subdue the struggle of the oppressed but in vain; it is emancipatory as it is critical.
Emancipatory resistance is critical and universal in its ideological orientation because it aligns with the wretched of the earth to safeguard justice and democratic principles. The power to name, articulate, oneself, one’s community, one’s history, re-naming, re-enacting and re-creating as a metaphor of re-existing is a characteristic feature of those engaged in an emancipatory struggle. The naming and renaming is part of claiming a geographical as well as psychological territory recapped only in memory up to the point but carried in the resistance poetics used as a roadmap of the struggle, the road that leads beyond the bodies and lives broken and taken. By this time, history is the first casualty under the attack of dictatorship and oppressive global economy that strives to silence the rebel, and as a result, memories fade, and pantheons of gods are deserted (Conant, p27). What remains is the revolution, the moment when the true past is commemorated to re-exist, the dislocated self to gather together, and the future is once again reformulated as the present is rather a troubled water. Emancipatory resistance is a rebellion not against change but against a controlling and domesticating change, a change that is not a “guest” but a “gate-crusher”.
In sum, examples of a “particularist” resistance poetics, Jeff Conant lists in his study the union’s songs of American labor movements of the early 20th century, the Yippies and Diggers street theatres of US in the 6os, the songs of the Spanish Civil War, the Murals of the Sandinistas, and the quilts of the abolitionists (pp37, 38) not to mention the gospel songs of the Civil Rights Movement. They are “particularist” in that they are parts of the whole liberation movements waged against social evils set in a single historical current and, relatively, same spatial and temporal milieus.
Those “particularist” forms of resistance cause emergent forms of folkloric genres. A substitution of socialist ideas for populist and neoliberal capitalist idea of populism, among other things, causes the emergence of folkloric variants—as it does with the subaltern groups also with reactionary nationalists. “Populism” affects markedly the nature of “particularist” resistance poetics. State populism, in this regard, is a discourse about an attempt from above to mobilize the rural grassroots to obtain support among peasants and farmers on the basis of agrarian myth, the effects of the neo-liberal capitalism, i.e., “industrialization, urbanization and capitalist crises” (Oregmeyer-Velazquez, 2010:8). “Populism” as a political style is a “close bond between political leaders and led” or a connection between leaders and followers mostly based on a direct personal contact by way of a “political perosnalism,” initiating a new form of poetics and poeisis.
Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"
As Franz Fanon calls his book, as a subtitle, “the handbook for the black revolution that is changing the shape of the world,” Conant also told me informally in his e-mail, that “my thought is but the merest shadow of [Fanon’s], as I seek to work in that lineage and tradition, to contribute a single grain of sand to the mountain of work that revolutionaries of thought and action like Fanon have brought about.” By “the Black revolution,” I believe Fanon is meant to give voice to the black nationalism in his time both in Africa and the US, as well knows injustice and racism have no color nor danger! It disrupts human agency, worsens human condition.
Thus, in his “Concerning Violence,” Fanon declares decolonization is a violent phenomenon, though the process is labeled as national liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people or whatever new formulas are introduced (Fanon, 1963:35). For Fanon, decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men. Whether or not the Zapatistas’ outcry “ya basta!” justifies this sudden upsurge of the oppressed from below as a blow to the oppressor is without any period of transition, and absolute substitution of one “species” of men (or women) by another “species,” as Fanon claims, is a success, despite the violence, is dubious.
The struggle of the oppressed, as Conant asserts, is to retake history so much as it is to reoccupy the territory recuperated from the memory of the indigenous peoples in songs, tales and in every face and façade of culture for the common goods of the oppressed and for a global new form of wellbeing (Conant, pp27, 326, 327). The reoccupation of history and territory starts with establishing the resistance well in the poetics of liberation, that is, with creating narratives of not just what the struggle demands but also what it embodies! The reason is that the struggle of the oppressed is also a strategy for cultural survival. Since the essence of the struggle is not just for bread but for dignity, which certainly will include bread (Fanon quoted in Conant, p236), then the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change, according to Fanon, is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colonizers.
Once the resistance has fully evolved into a direct action and armed struggle has began, the blaze spreads like wildfire, voices are raised at the very core of the oppressing nation, drawing attention to the gravity of the situation (Fanon, p127). Fanon describes the euphoric ardor of open/public resistance as a ritualistic orgy of human liberation that the people join in the mud of their hut, in their dreams, in their breath and heart’s core singing endless songs of praise for the glorious fighters (ibid, p128). This time, the tide of rebellion has flooded the nation, and the poeisis and poetics of resistance now consolidated into a social praxis.
Of the peasants’ spontaneity Fanon stresses they are rooted in the country districts and occur to the “universal” and usually solid presence of the emergent nation. The peasants’ spontaneity is that they have no speeches, no political program, nor resolution, and their one unchanging plan is, “the foreigner must go,” and towards that end they should form a common ground against the oppressor (Fanon, p131). This historical transformation of human condition through self-sacrifice and “ritualistic rebellion” marks a new development of both the resistance poetics and ethnographic search of the myth of the emergent nation.
The role of the poetics of resistance is paramount pre- or post-liberation of the nation, more than just a social critique. Fanon’s argument is that the protracted resistance and national consciousness degenerate into petty identity politics among the poor when the national liberation is indefinitely postponed. The same happens when in the newly independent underdeveloped countries when the elite groups of natives educated by the colonial power staff the post-colonial economy, seek its own benefit and fails to generate new resources, plunging the masses into ethnic and religious dissonance. They secure profits, governmental concessions and be bosses rather than leading the nation towards development.
Fanon details the consequence of identity politics along ethnic and religious boundaries that colonial economy developed: certain regions and some people under the colonial economy prosper while others remain poorer, some people have more access to resources, land, jobs, education while others not. Once the resistance is territorialized and the state backed one ethnicity and pushed another then civil war brews and ethnic strife is enviable as in Africa and Latin America. Ultimately the unity of the anti-colonial resistance degenerates into harmful ethnic (identity) politics between various ethnicities as the national middle class is trapped to degenerate new resources to sustain the people. This degeneration of emancipatory resistance into reactionary resistance arrests the decolonization process. Hence, the role of resistance poetics as an emancipatory practice is more than a social critique.
IV. Conclusion: A Transnational Resistance Poetics
What does a folkloric resistance researcher take in a “universalist” roadmap of Black revolution and “particularist” principle of “peasant/elite” insurgency? Resistance poetics of the oppressed works against the codifying rules, the homogenizing art serving the continuation of the traditional nation-state ideology. Set in the everyday life practices of the common people, resistance poetics is the art of challenging hegemony. The poor woman whose husband disappeared for evading tax sings work songs subtly embedded in resistance poeisis. Resistance poetics of the oppressed is an example of a positive struggle both in aesthetics and praxis in which case the role of folklore is abundant. Hence, against the forceful homogenization process of the hegemonic public resistance to subdue the voice of the multitude, poetics of liberation is a demand for a “world in which many worlds fit” despite all odds. From the 1593 when the Oromo-Abyssinian first encounter was recorded for the first time, the Oromo presence in the heartland of Ethiopia in the Horn was by itself resistance against Showan and highland Orthodox Christian invaders. In other words, to say as a Mayan Chiapas in Mexico, if the Oromo did not resist, they could not be there where they are today. They are there because they resist(ed).
History of the resistance has been carried down from generations in oral tradition (songs, stories, myths) as people engage critically to resist both geographical and cultural invasions. The story of resistance of the oppressed (by armed resistance, passive resistance, vocal resistance, and silent resistance) which, however, in all those resistance genres, is a varied form of poetics of resistance. Resistance of the oppressed is to defend what belongs to them, to defend their resources, territory and culture without which they cannot continue to survive as people.
In both works we see that metaphors and symbolic representations encrypt miseries of the rebel and the rebellion to reverse the unbearable life conditions. Like the seven words and seven roads representing the seven Chiapas ethnic groups rallying behind the Zapatistas rebel army, for example, the Salale waadaa / covenant traces descents of the Galan, Abichu, Obori, Jidda to recount ancestral willingness to offer divine help and as a poetic outfitting of justice, peace, and liberty, life and death and all that recurs, as truth, earth and sky, wind, water, and fire and all that they can name as swearwords to renew their commitment to the struggle. The death of the ancestors fighting injustices and oblivion for the betterment of the living is recapped in the poetics of the historical resistance from the 16th century onwards when the Salale Oromo first encountered the Orthodox Christian Abyssinians in the highland Ethiopia much like the Mayan Chiapas’ 500 year resistance in the Southeast Mexico.
The resistance poetics of the Salale Oromo, like any insurgents practice at the grassroots level, informs the social praxis of liberation both to survive and re-exist in such adverse situations as the people demand land, work, freedom, justice and the right to a successful and peaceful life on their homeland. The universality of resistance against social injustice is thus inevitable. As among the Chiapas, among the Salale Oromo, the tales and songs of the great dead such as Tadassa Berru, Mulu Asanu, Baqala Gurre, Badhadha Dilgassa, Agari Tullu and his two other brothers, who must die so that the remaining may live and sustain life to all human and living creatures is a universal destiny of the rebel. The struggle is for life by relieving the suffering of the oppressed while commemorating the great dead in the poeisis and poetics.
Put on a “universal” scale, resistance poetics is more than an aesthetic sphere or imaginative representation of the struggle to signify instance from which history is constructed but it is also a historical plot recorded in the memory pool of the oppressed about the unequal historical relations and to sustain resistance in its every emancipatory form. As the echoing cries of those martyrs, resistance poetics remains a tell of hope for the poor agrarian Salale Oromo as for the Chiapas or the Black working class, and dignity for the wider embattled and disenfranchised poor—the tales and songs are effort to recapture the historical plots since the reign of Ras Darge in the region (Salale)—resist oppression and misery, cultivate humanity and build autonomy. As can be evidently seen in the Oromo safuu (social/moral order), just every society like a state controls public discourse. Hence songs and stories are re-created out of the existing repertoire of the aesthetic / cultural expression in line with the underlying principle of the local historical experience.
The Salale Oromo resistance poetics is the echo of the general Oromo voice silenced by conservative regimes in Ethiopia. As in Chiapas and the Black rebels, since storied events are known by the public, the aim of stories and songs is naming things, restorying, repeating, narrating, problematizing and mystifying it to deepen its future in memory. Through performance, the key to getting messages across is by repetition, which is a common strategy in stories and songs as subjects of resistance poetics to unite a revolutionary praxis. Prohibitions by local officials against singing songs, praise of ethnic heroes and telling stories about their sufferings and heroic exploits is a war against imagination enforced by imprisonment, forced exile or killings and harassments as a war against physical body. All those atrocities invite the need to constitute poetics of liberation, stories, myth, songs, and humors (jokes). The violence against the physical body such as torture, hunger, disease and brutality and the psywar (verbal abuses) all give content and shape an imagination to prepare for counter offensive in the form of poetics of liberation (where there is physical resistance).
Thus the resistance kept in language and in culture is what makes resistance poetics resistance of memory against forgetting, the oblivion, brutality, hunger, thirst, and want under oppression. Hence, poetics of liberation is about turning grievance into art through singing it, telling it, burning it to rituals and dancing to it on festivals and on spirit possessions as a poiesis (recreation) of action against oblivion. Dipped in the hardened soil of the Chiapas or the Salale, resistance poetics is the resistance that rooted itself in the language and culture of the people that transcend the geographical and cultural boundary by ebbing into the borders of its kind and outsider. By developing around stories, songs, rituals and festivals, resistance poetics is a means by which history is spelled out day by day becoming culture, becoming memory, becoming codes of action handed down by gods, saints (Conant, p37), and by heroes and heretics, and in the careful hands of bandits and pundits, those who represent the wretched of the earth.
References
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, 1963
A Poetics of Resistance, Jeff Conant, 2010.
