THE HUG: RESISTANCE POETRY

Asafa Tafarra Dibaba

Indiana University

USA

Following is a Prefatory Note to the Collection of my Poems

Published as THE HUG (Resistance Poetry) in September 2011.

Now as it all happened to pass, or as it seems so,

and the Past left its trace once again  

and this time of the Present, in THE HUG... 

There we see in the footprint of Time, 
the Future is the move forward into the Past, 

in which case we are going but going nowhere! 

And the Journey is not the Destination in itself! 
But a Ritual-- journeying into Nowhere! a Human element! 

To go  forward and going Nowhere, to an Impasse!

This is an interesting paradox 
of being (and/or becoming) Human(e)! 

If this is something to the fund of human knowledge

And if Words matter and make Humanity any better, 
and I write, but I

Write Poetry as Life is too short a Journey! 
And as the Oppressed, we have but no Patience
but Preponderance. We have no Time to wait  

No Time to kill no Time to die… we sing songs…
and beat drums…and tell tales

Stories of Bygones times…of Resistance…to Today

as Humanity IS, Time WAS!

January 1,  2012

IU, Bloomington

____________________________________

CONTEXT: POETIC (-SELF) RESISTANCE

In the beginning. These two dreams of mine that follow my other disposable dreams! Have I been a dream storer/storier? Yes & No. First, a folkloric interpretation of dream, as a psychic discharge of the mind. To see twice my five year old son Ebba running away from me in my dream was much exasperating for a father poet living alone on exile. Folkloric dream interpretations signify an aspect of oneself and childlike qualities of the primitive self. It also means that one's sense of morality and character is in conflict. The metaphor of child in dream could also mean retreating back to a childlike state and longing for the past: trying to satisfy repressed desires and unfulfilled hopes. Perhaps there was something that I needed to see grow and nurture.

Second. I saw me and my younger son Doti fall to a bottomless pit only to overspill us soon like a child belch or like the overflow of some mystic emotion. Hence, I decided to take some time off to meditate and cater for this inner child impish.

Alternatively, the dream may be also alluding to innocence, purity, simplicity, and carefree attitudes impairing the developing self. To save a child in dream signifies attempts to save a part of oneself from being destroyed. To be separated from one's children in a dream could also symbolize failure in some personal endeavor or a setback in some ideal one had.

With this in mind, in April 2011, I went to present a paper titled “The Self in Folkloric Field-research” at the MELUS Conference hosted by Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, to come back to Atlanta imbued with some seeds of The Hug still entangled by more astounding (and recurring) fearful dreams.  

Fear. Fearful dreams to inspire such apprehensive poems! "Not I but Zeus owns the thunder," the Greek poet Callimachus¹ once said, when critics complained that he was ignoring his civic duties preferring to write small poems about love rather than poems aspiring to a great deal of cultural weight. When the poet was meditating the Muse (Atete) ², Apollo is said to appear and reprimand, "fatten your animal for sacrifice, poet/but keep your muse slender," the same story echoed in the pastoral landscape of Virgil's "a Shepherd / should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song". To meditate the natural order of things, to evade the ruses of mischievous and rough demigods, I worship Atete, the goddess of fecundity and bountiful creativity.

Philosophers, politicians and literary critics have always distrusted poetry. Distrust is normal as the stuff of poetry, of its intrinsic opacity. The problem is the refusal to recognize that in a society engaged in some social change and transformation poetry has a great role. Also poetic language is said difficult. (One notes such complaints around my Anaan’yaa (1998/2006) and others.) Poetry revels in duplicity and disjunction. And how is it that one judges any particular poetic gesture is inevitably responsible or irresponsible to the culture that gives the language meaning? It is believed that a poem's opacity and obfuscation of the established terms might be the poem's most accountable act.

My unequivocal reaction to Ethiopic Apolo's reprimand is this: Atete put the thunder in my hand. And where the thunder bolt falls, there I erect the sacrificial altar, the miiloo³, and sing songs of freedom and resistance with the oppressed. Only an irresponsible and opportunist Shepherd may fatten Ate-lon⁴, a totem for the muse (Atete), and starve and slender the muse and the multitude with less or no dutiful songs of cultural weight.⁵

In such a song of desolation performed by one Salale fiddler, a celebrated Naggasa Abdi,

nan deema bariitee                 

nan bula yoo dhiitee               

halkan ka’ee boo’a                 

nami bultiin miitee.

                       

the dawn is near for me on the long trek

and to sojourn, if weary, at dusk!

one sits upright over night to whine

to woe wretchedness, to lament being, wretched.

the oppressed clearly communicate fundamental socio-historical issues in their folksongs and narratives as they do through violent resistance. Through the deconstruction and articulation of ‘subjectivity’/‘captivity,’ folk artists turn what is a mere ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ or ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ into ‘objectivity’/‘freedom’. The aesthetic presence in the oral poetry and the ‘phenomenalization of the poetic voice’ render it objective articulation of the real life situation of the people. Here, to ask “do we believe the singer or the song, the teller or the tale?” as Edward Chamberlain asks⁶, may not do any justice or may be misleading. It is only believe it and not; not believe it or not! My folks still sing with resentment about their ritual sites desecrated, sacred trees destroyed and religious leaders converted and humiliated their home deserted, their people dispossessed, dislocated, and dehumanized. And should I feed to fatten my animal and slender the muse?

In the collection of my poems, Decorous Decorum (2006), the alliterative ‘de-‘ is an allusive reference to the de-humanization processes ‘We’ are put in Ethiopia. It is the antithesis, an attempt to de-mystify the historicism of nation-building thesis, the mystification that we have been suffering. It is an organ of the ongoing struggle to ‘de-linking’, ‘de-centering’, ‘de-colonizing’, ‘disengaging’ the Self from bondage and from the mainstream discourse we have grown to experience: the Unity deprived, in its all organic whole, of equality, mutual respect, recognition, and, above all, Common Factor, a shared vision. Before ‘We’ are united, tolerated our differences, if any, we cannot talk of unity with others. The ‘de-‘ is the language of ‘breaking free’ and separating from a hegemonic Past and Present in a manner that is so decorous, but so curious. It is a search for willpower through indigenizing the struggle both in its conceptual and empirical manifestations (see the poem, ‘My People,’ in The Hug).

The Tibetan religious leader, Dalai Lama, was once told by a group of American scientists that around twelve percent of the American population suffers from depression. In his discussion the Dalai Lama came to infer the main cause of the acute problem was not lack of material necessities but a deprivation of the affection, love and care, of others.

The metaphor of ‘the hug’ is far-reaching. It is the need for love and compassion that lies at the very foundation of human existence. It is the language of profound interdependence humans share with one another from early days on in one’s mother’s cute arms. Set in here-and-now, and tucked in a hug, huggers focus in opposite directions though: they look at two separate antipoles. Even folded in a full-shoulder hug (unlike in a half-shoulder hug today where huggers pretend to focus in the same direction), the difference remains irresistible but tolerable! Now, it is time to give and take the hug to begin and end the positive action and to emphasize the kaawoo, the 'common factor' set before us.

In The Hug there can be a nasty side like anything else but that is not all the book brings to the table. Behind the poems is struggle. Struggle of the oppressed. Struggle of the poet with personal ayana. Pain, laughter. Success, failure. Much love, not much hate (or how much is much?). Politics and poetics of exile, or raided humanity! And faith. (I said faith?) But what do we have faith in if one soul's god is another’s stone? It is just believe it and not. 

The meaning is in the "common ground".

The fear of failure in Man projected towards Wo-man from the time of the mythic Adam/Eve biblical metaphor is revealed through men's negative actions and attitudes in cyclic existence and to be subverted by women’s resistance! It is an inescapable fear in Man that the Salale elder reiterates as

dur yeroo dhirsi qotuu

niitiin meeftuuf’ footuu

eenyut’ baatee

eenyut’ nyaatee

lubbuun lubbuu hin caaltuu?

in the beginning when Man plowed

and Wo-man span and hoed

who was Master

who was Slave

no one soul better; nor one bitter?

The poetic voice impressionistically critiques events which relate to the present but remain oblique and unsaid.  Harshly commenting the social evil around, he remains safe and isolated from the myriad of events, protected behind the time’s cart dur (in the beginning) whereas the focus is to critique the present as time enforces the need for a certain cohesive unity that the surrounding universe seems to lack.

There are things we have heard before and are likely to hear again in The Hug. The use of anecdotal situations and clear real-life examples is common in the book. We may need to maintain some modicum of dignity, some decorum as we expect in the anthology. We may be offended by the cutting-edge style used as a vehicle for rebellion and experimentation against every form of dehumanization, domination, wherever-whenever. The feeling accompanying resistance poetry is impressive but can be heavy. In spite of inevitable disillusionments in the world, one may see in poetry a shining beacon of hope in an often violent, tragic, and chaotic universe.

Poetic relevance. A freedom of expression matters when in Ethiopia one could swing the poet activist by the neck for speaking/writing truth. Folks were crucified in the struggle against the injustices and dehumanizing activities. Both still exist, i.e., the domination and the resistance/resister against it.  In the end, when the poet is banned to sing songs of freedom in his homeland, and his voice is muted, not echoed, he cannot also live at peace in his songs on exile. The reason is, as an interim measure, there are intimate relations between the host country and the one outlawing resistance literature, critical pedagogy and the struggle for self-determination. To choose to stay silent, particularly for the poet, is like to come out of the dessert to the sea and to choose to stay dry. May be one can be predisposed to the cultural baggage that surface his/her creative groundwork and work on succumbing to or getting over it already.

One prime subject of The Hug is the significance of love, compassion, decency, morality and wisdom as ideal principles of peace. All world religions, including the African Oromo traditional belief daniya, or waqeffanna, hold peace as a fundamental rule to benefit humanity through love and compassion with the help of the underlying divine moral order, safu, and the altruistic principle of ubuntu. Through the basic moral precepts do not lie, do not steal or do not take others' lives, religions, beyond a political ideology, aim at the advancement of mind, body and action based on unselfishness. In conditions, ‘globalizers’ may believe in telling lies or taking the lives of others to save others as morally justifiable, which still simply has a zero-sum effect by leaving humanity in a vicious circle! 

For peace to overrule war, no religion is better than another. Every religion is suited in its own way to the orientation of a particular group, i.e., orientation to their varied ways of life, diverse spiritual needs, and inherited national traditions. Every society has some spiritual significance or material and social capital to contribute in some way to world civilization and world peace. As a society, should we hoist as our own the problem of the world religious differences and the consequent devastating effects, to fail to work towards interfaith understanding  and some degree of unity among us, respect for each other's beliefs and ideas and concern for human wellbeing will have an unbearable direct impact on our common interest whatsoever!  If we think we are paving the way towards the future, what would be our future like when our present is entangled by too many a conundrum?

Whatever we build let it not be of selfishness and lust based on hatred and anger but on vibrant love, tolerance and compassion toward each other and toward others. Let us give each other the hug that the world denied us as the oppressed, seeing us as wretched of the earth. If the foundation for building our free nation is love among us and peace at large, we remain salt for this part of the earth. To disregard the fundamental principle of daniya, i.e., the Oromo divine moral order, safu, is to sacrifice the best part of humanity and intelligence, i.e., wisdom (oguma), the ability to decide on right and wrong.  

In the "Postscript" to Anaan'ya (1998/2006), the collection of my poems, I stated that every one of us, in our basic instinct, we have a strong sense of concern (anaan) toward humankind and owe moral obligation to enact it to maintain human agency. As humans, we are compassionate, kind, benevolent, loving and caring by nature—that is what we are and what we all need(ed) as infants beyond the location of culture.

Borders can be demarcated on the ground, not in our hearts. And in The Hug, not to wait until "…over our heads the hollow seas close up," as if we were sleepy, and we sang those songs of bygone days to conciliate god, we told stories to console the drowsing self, and to mend the broken heart. A poem's consolation is neither permanent nor complete. For a moment, we are rescued from the narratives of desperation that structure every second of our life as the poem's language creates an interior space where for a moment we can hide. But at the end of the journey, the therapeutic effect of poetry is self-evident: a poem can't help but it may speak as easily to us as to the oppressed. Resistance poetry is nourishing because of the fervor with which it confronts itself, harnessing the inevitable tendency of language to mean one thing because it threatens to mean another.

When a culture threatens to foreclose a poem's potential for subversiveness, the assumption of poetry's relevance can be oppressive to the poet unless the poet embraces the system. Similarly, the assumption of poetry's irrelevance can be liberating if the poet voices the plights of the people, poetry (song, in the case of oral society) being a medium that succeeds by exploiting rather than suppressing the inevitable tendency of culture to resist.

Resistance Poetry also helps us remember who we are and why we are as in the verse, "consider well your seed / you were not born to live as a mere brute does, / but for the pursuit of knowledge and the good" which scare away a feeling of self-forgetfulness and desolation. The feeling of its wisdom may be far from consoling. The lines, however, aim at luminosity to glow the darkened side of the self shattered by the spectacular failure of quest. We may see the mountain of purgatory looming before us and drown with all our hope before reaching the destination.

To fail to discover one's true potency, for the poet, is to feel the ghost of Callimachus bearing down, to cool the thunder bolt, to bemuse the lightning and to choose to stay silent. Without some mechanism of poetic self-resistance, we could not feel the wonder of poetry more than once nor could we rediscover our pleasure in the unintelligibility of the world.

In the view of critical cultural resistance, the dissent is not in response to a manifestation of a particular oppressive system but resistance grounded in a belief in fundamental freedoms. That is what an emancipatory resistance is/does! Creative resistance is viewed not as an individual’s casual response to a particular oppressive situation. It is a catalyst for collective awakening to the possibility of fundamental social change.

Imagine forgetting for a while what we are for even when lamenting a funeral song or singing a love song.  Poems/Songs never ask us to be justified; they ask us to hug (and) to exist or to resist.⁷

_________ NOTES

1. Callimachus (Kallimachos) was a poet and scholar who lived c. 305 to c. 240 bc at Cyrene / Shahhat, now Libya. He was known to be the most representative poet of the erudite and sophisticated Alexandrian school. He also worked in the Library of Alexandria, the most important in the Hellenistic world.

His most famous poetical work, illustrative of his antiquarian interests, was the Aitia (Causes). In the prologue to Aitia, he claims that Apollo visited him and cautioned him to "fatten his flocks, but to keep his muse slender," a clear indication of his choice of carefully crafted and allusive material. He urged poets to "drive their wagons on untrodden fields." That is, rather than following in the well worn tracks of Homer and the long epic poems, he idealized a form of poetry that was brief, yet carefully formed and worded, a style at which he excelled.

2. Atete is the Oromo goddess of fertility, creativity and abundance. As a symbol of gender relationship between man and woman, Waaqa and Ogliya represent the patriarchal view of man and the physical world and Atete represents the matriarchal view of women's divinities known in different names as Ayyole, Maram, Ayyo-baar.  Atete Guyye, among the Salale Oromo, is a guardian of the gates, doors or doorways, like the Roman god Janus. Most often she is depicted as having two heads. Symbolically they look simultaneously into the future and the past, back at the last year and forward at the new.

3. Miiloo is a metal post used in the traditional Oromo society to mark a ritual site that belongs to a specific gosa, clan also known as miiloo.

4. Ate-lon is the totem of Atete, the cow revered as a symbol of fecundity, productivity (creativity) and praised in rituals and songs to appease gods and goddesses.

5. In “The Arts and creation of the Mind”, E.W. Eisner (2002) states that the arts have an important role to play in refining our sensory systems and cultivating our imaginative abilities. In this regard, a culture populated by people whose imagination is impoverished is believed to have a static future. Also there will be little chance because there will be little sense of possibility.

6. In his If this is your land, where are your stories, Ted Chamberlin (2003) clearly reveals his concern for the new global community, where often those peoples and traditions that were and are essentially local are overlooked, and which calls for glocalization. Indeed, the use of the very term ‘indigenous’ peoples seems to evoke the stigma of the backward and primitive, rather than its actual meaning of those who are rooted in the land of their ancestors re-enacted through stories and songs. Through songs and stories the indigenous people are able to speak their experience of the oppression in their own voices and pass it on the succeeding generation to contemplate.

7. Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

__________ Allen Ginsberg
In Barry Miles Ginsberg (1989), ch.5.

___________

One can find the book at Universal Book Center, Addis Ababa or on 

Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Hug-Asafa-Tafarra-Dibaba/dp/1465356428

and eBook on http://www.amazon.com/The-Hug-ebook/dp/B005N9GOIK/ref=tmm_kin_img_popover?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

"THE FAILURE OF HAILE SELASSIE AS EMPEROR"

Editorial by Marcus Garvey in the Black Man - London, March/April 1937

http://www.jamaicans.com/culture/rasta/MarcusGarveeditorial.shtml

When the facts of history are written Haile Selassie of Abyssinia will go down as a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin and left the millions of his countrymen to struggle through a terrible war that he brought upon them because of his political ignorance and his racial disloyalty.

It is a pity that a man of the limited intellectual calibre and weak political character like Haile Selassie became Emperor of Abyssinia at so crucial a time in the political history of the world. Unfortunately, Abyssinia lost the controlling influence of a political personality of patriotic racial character like the late Menelik, whose loyalty to his race and devotion to his country excelled all his other qualities, to the extent that he was able to use that very strength to continuously safeguard the interests of the Ethiopian Empire. What he did so well to preserve, a cringing, white slave hero worshipper, visionless and disloyal to his country, threw away. This is the impression the serious minded political student forms of the conduct of the ex-Emperor of Abyssinia.

EVERY NEGRO ASHAMED

Every Negro who is proud of his race must be ashamed of the way in which Haile Selassie surrendered himself to the white wolves of Europe. These statements may be considered very severe, and in fact, they are. We could have been otherwise apologetic and sympathetic, but that would have been only if we were dealing with a Coptic Priest or a Religious Monk and not a[n] Emperor who held and presided over the political trust of twelve million people of his own country, and the political destiny of the entire Negro race. This little misguided Emperor could not realise that he held in his hands the political trust of the hundreds of millions of Negroes of the world, men and women, who were looking up toward the firm establishment of political sovereignty, and that Ethiopia, like Liberia and Haiti were to them prizes of glory to be perpetuated and strengthened in the maintenance of the dignity of that black race that other men have claimed to be incompetent, inferior and unworthy, which every black man must disprove.

LOOKED WITH HOPE

When the war started in Abyssinia all Negro nationalists looked with hope to Haile Selassie. They spoke for him, they prayed for him, they sung for him, they did everything to hold up his hands, as Aaron did for Moses; but whilst the Negro peoples of the world were praying for the success of Abyssinia this little Emperor was undermining the fabric of his own kingdom by playing the fool with white men, having them advising him[,] having them telling him what to do, how to surrender, how to call off the successful thrusts of his Rases against the Italian invaders. Yes, they were telling him how to prepare his flight, and like an imbecilic child he followed every advice and then ultimately ran away from his country to England, leaving his people to be massacred by the Italians, and leaving the serious white world to laugh at every Negro and repeat the charge and snare - "he is incompetent," "we told you so." Indeed Haile Selassie has proved the incompetence of the Negro for political authority, but thank God there are Negroes who realise that Haile Selassie did not represent the truest qualities of the Negro race. How could he, when he wanted to play white? how could he, when he surrounded himself with white influence? how could he, when in a modem world, and in a progressive civilization, he preferred a slave State of black men than a free democratic country where the black citizens could rise to the same opportunities as white citizens in their democracies?

TELL THE TRUTH

The truth must be told so that the white world will realise that it was not the pride of the Negro that surrendered in Abyssinia. It was the disloyalty of a single man who was too silly to take pride in his race, who played such a game as to disgrace the political integrity of a noble people. The Negroes of Abyssinia and of the world are satisfied however that Abyssinia was not conquered by Italy and the European forces of Mussolini. Abyssinia was only conquered by the black levies of Italy. The Askaris have really been the victors in Abyssinia. [Rodolfo] Graziani only marched into Addis Ababa after he had made sure of the advanced guard of the Askaris. Every battle that the Italians won in Abyssinia resulted from the advanced charge of the Askaris. It was black men fighting black men, and this was made possible in Abyssinia because the regime of Haile Selassie had given a bad taste to the mouth, not only of the blacks of Abyssinia but of those of the surrounding territories. They felt that they had a cause against the Amharic white loving Emperor who liked to chain and flog black men, and whose brutality to them gave Mussolini the cause to fool the world that he was bestowing a blessing upon the people of Abyssinia by freeing them.

NO SLAVES

It was a piece of impertinence to suggest that black men should be held as slaves. We must admit that we glorified Haile Selassie when the war started, fought his battles to win international support, but we ever felt deep down in our hearts that he was a slave master. We had hoped that if Abyssinia had won that we would have forced the Government of Abyssinia to free the black whom they held as slaves. We would have preferred this than seeing the country taken by Mussolini or any European power; but now that the country is temporarily lost and the Emperor has cowardly exiled himself, the truth must be told.

WHAT RIGHT HAS HE?

The future freedom of Abyssinia must be built upon the highest principles of democracy. That is why it is preferable for the Abyssinian Negroes and the Negroes of the world to work for the restoration and freedom of the country without the assistance of Haile Selassie, because at best he is but a slave master. The Negroes of the Western World whose forefathers suffered for three hundred years under the terrors of slavery ought to be able to appreciate what freedom means. Surely they cannot feel justified in supporting any system that would hold their brothers in slavery in another country whilst they are enjoying the benefits of freedom elsewhere. The Africans who are free can also appreciate the position of slaves in Abyssinia. What right has the Emperor to keep slaves when all the democratic sections of the world were free, when men had the right to live, to develop, to expand, to enjoy all the benefits of human liberty[?]
The Emperor who has been exiled in Europe must have seen the civilization of Europe. In England where he lives he sees that men are not flogged and chained and kicked because of their colour or because of their condition, but where true human liberty guarantees to every man the happiest pursuit he can bring to himself. It has been reported that he is leaving England for Syria, where a large number of Abyssinian refugees are living. There is an interpretation that the decision to leave England and to live among "his people?" in Syria is to perpetuate his divine majesty in the presence of that king worship that he doesn't get in England, where men look at others as equals and not as masters by divine right. In truth, the Emperor is out of place in democratic England. He wants to be once more in the environment of the feudal Monarch who looks down upon his slaves and serfs with contempt. Except he changes the attitude of thinking himself better than the Negro who constitutes the larger number of Ethiopia and profit by the experience he has gained, he should not be a fit person to be in authority in the very country in which he was born. After all, Haile Selassie is just an ordinary man like any other human being. What right has he to hold men as slaves? It is only the misfortune of the slaves that causes him to be a slave master. Negroes who have the dignity of their race at heart resent the impertinence of anyone holding the blacks as slaves. Haile Selassie ought to realise this and abolish his foolish dream of being an Emperor of slaves and serfs and try to be an Emperor of noble men, and for him to be that he must himself be the noblest of them all. He hasn't proved his nobility in the war between Italy and Abyssinia. Ras Desta proved to be the Lord, the Nobleman of Ethiopia whilst Halle Selassie proved a cringing coward!

"MODERNITY" IN THE HISTORY OF FOLKLORE STUDY

Four Folklore Readings

(a Comparative Analyses)

Indiana University 

Fall, 2011

Introduction

In this paper the aim is to compare and contrast the notion of “modernity” as the same is voiced differently in the four folklore readings selected for this purpose. The four readings are: Folktales and Society (Degh 1962/1989), All Silver and No Brass (Glassie’s 1975), In Search of Authenticity (Bendix 1997), and Voices of Modernity (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). We discuss them in line with the primary goal of the course, History of Folklore Study (F517), which is to contextualize folkloristic concepts (including genre, performance, beliefs, authenticity, worldview) within the major theoretical currents (social evolutionism, diffusionism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, formalism, performance theory, and postmodernism). In so doing, the aim is to explore the past and survey the present as to what theoretical currents influenced folklore scholarship during the 19^th, 20^th, and early 21^st centuries to the present.

“Modernity” in Four (American) Folklore Readings

What initiated folklorists in the 19^th century was the challenge of science and human condition, changes and the consequent nuances between the modern ways of living and doing things (Bronner 2007). Early ‘folklorists’ brought collections of traditional tales, songs, and crafts to the attention of the “modernizing” society for different purposes. In America such a collection of stories among the Ojibwa in Michigan Territory by Henry Schoolcraft, the Colonial agent (1828-1832), was mainly to peep into the dark cave of the minds of the natives (Bauman and Briggs, 2003:227) and to make pliable the dissidents than for ‘genuine’ folklore scholarship (can folkloristics be ‘genuine’ or ‘spurious’ also?) or for nationalistic allegiance as in the Grimm Brothers.  However, the narrative of origin of “American” folklore study is less told, the genealogy of the field is less traced either into the collection of stories, songs, and beliefs by colonial agents in early 19^th century (or before by missionaries, travelers) among the Native Indians or into the collection of dissident counter-hegemonic texts handed down by Native “tradition bearers,” or if the ‘(re)searcher’ is still at the crossroads.

“Modernity” in the History of Folklore Study

The point of departure for American Folklore Study, as it seems, has not been clearly marked yet, (un)like the Trail of Tears. In discussing “modernity” Bauman and Briggs (2003:255ff) draw attention rather towards Boas' anthropological and folkloric legacies among the Northern Native Indians and Eskimos, which is perhaps a starting point of an ethnographic field study  among  the Natives. The timeline for folkloric and anthropological studies by Boas (and his students) is, however, later than The Indians Removal Act of 1830 and the consequent Trail of Tears, in the South-east. If not “nationalism” in its modern sense of political movement, what is the place of the Seminole resistance (1835-1842), the Cherokee rebellion in the History of American Folklore Study since, in fact, “modernity” is spread across the globe not by diffusion, nor by the “folklore” of it, but by gunpowder and Danish butter?

For our purpose, let us suggest two nation-building theses: hence, one is based on acts of removal with its racial and stereotypical dehumanizing force to upsurge heteronomia (external rule) for colonial intent, and the other is based on democratic notions and institutions of freedom, equality and social justice leading into autonomia (self-government). The latter thesis relates to the Herderian thought of nationalism (in folklore “study’) as heralded by the Grimm Brothers and by Finish nationalists to reconstruct Kalevala as the nation’s heritage. In the former thesis, what is saddening is hearing Boas to reverberate Kantian “Perpetual Peace” (1991) to perpetuate hegemony (as if by an irony of fate) and suggest this: “when the narrow-minded local interests of cities and other small political units” had been overcome in the formation of nation-states, …the federation of nations is the next necessary step in the evolution of mankind” (Boas 1928/1962:97 in Bauman and Brigs, 2003:289, 290), and thus “provincialism” and “authenticity” of “tradition” diminish and “cosmopolitanism” and “modernity” flourish. 

In the face of “modernity” we need the intellectual history of folklore scholarship, as Dan Ben-Amos states, “to expose past debates, failures, and wished-to-be-forgotten errors, and air them in print again” (1973:114). Folklore scholarship has been more than mere enterprising of collecting and classifying of tales, songs, and gathering of historical facts. That is why we “tediously and laboriously would unveil whatever our predecessors tried to conceal, peep into their drawers of correspondence,” as Ben-Amos justifies why we need an intellectual history for folklore scholarship, and also not to fall into the “chronic fallacy” of “listing facts that relate to each other only in calendric succession” (p 114), which leaves folklore a craft rather than a science.

Regina Bendix (1997) rightly argues folklore has long served as a vehicle in the search for the authentic, satisfying a longing for an escape from “modernity” (1997:7). That is, one function of folklore not very vividly seen to a non-folklorist or a folklorist indifferent to an emancipatory function of folklore prompting change (or reform in a less radical term) “affirmatively in revolutions and negatively in counterrevolutions. Another political function of folklore is serving nationalism as a modern political movement based on folklore and folk culture as native cultural (re)discovery, the purpose folklore has served since the Romantic era, in the move away from monarchic rule to democratic institutions (p8), the move from heteronomia to autonomia (Gauchet, 1999).   In Bendix’s view, the “ideal folk” has been the “pure,” metaphorically speaking, unspoiled by “modernity” and free from every evils of it (p7), i.e., authentic. 

By the same token, Linda Degh’s Hungarian Szeklers (Degh 1962) carried their cultural (traditional) baggage with them everywhere they were displaced to as victims of “modernity” until they were perverted by cosmopolitanism and urbanized. The “natural provincialism of human community” that Boas sought to peacefully move to a rather “rational cosmopolitanism that he deemed necessary for freedom, democracy, peace, and the full development of each individual” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 256) is, in that case, another “disenchantment of the world”. And the search for authenticity is thus strayed caught up in the cobweb of modernity.  In Boas’ progressive political thought “modernity” (or “modern world”) could be redefined as a world without xenophobia, imperialism, racism and colonialism (ibid), which proved to be a disillusionment of humanity.

In those four readings, still more arguably, “modernity” and its contrastive mode of thinking and living, i.e., “tradition” in its new meaning is particularly important part of nation-building project in some societies, energized by nationalism and communication in the modern sense. Thus, “tradition” becomes an ideology, a program of action, a goal, a justifying base, a bonding cause as in miming among the Flanagans which “leaps over art and performance to purpose,” namely, “to bring unity among them” (Glassie, 122).

 “Modernity” and Literacy vs. “Authenticity”

Glassie explains W.B. Yeats’s search for authenticity, survival of “the ould customary thing…to set country people, their beliefs and arts, on the page, ‘unoffended or defended by any argument’” (Glassie, 1975:53). To conceptualize nationalism in its real romantic sense, to sharpen his s/word, the poet went into the countryside “to mystify his being” and demystify his poetry, and in so doing, to clarify his thinking on radical nationalism. The purpose was aesthetic as it was political. Glassie says, Yeats felt his early poems “too florid, too Victorian” and went into the countryside as the “aesthetic of the country people was purer, more primal” (ibid) and that would “lead him to an artistic wellspring where [Yeats] could drink to transcend the complicated materialism [i.e., “modernity”] of the nineteenth century arts,” since the “country people knew the tricks of the lock on one of the doors opening into the spiritual world” (ibid). Glassie himself seems into that unended quest towards authenticity entangled; into the search for the way out of the cobweb humanity was caught up in “modernity”.

Unlike in Hungary or in Ireland, like here in USA, but in Africa we may not think of “tradition-bearer” writing and reading, the two badges of “modernity”, not nonexistent but a rarity. There “tradition” supersedes “modernity” and is more “genuine” than “spurious”! It is against this dependence on literate culture to preserve “tradition” in print that Linda Degh refers to Malinowski’s cautious words about “a new method of treating the science of folklore, as it cannot be independent of ritual, or sociology, that folktales, legends, myths must be lifted from flat existence on paper and (re)placed within the three-dimensional reality of full life (Linda, 1969:54).

This view of relocating text back into its social matrix is contrasted in Glassie’s notion of “survival” of Irish tradition that  he reiterates Yeats as saying, no expect theory nor explanation but “to set country people, their beliefs, and arts, on the page” (Glassie, p53).  We are told that Malinowski collected the narrative materials of the Melanesian Aborigines and, Linda stresses, his statements are of great importance for the nature of collective phenomenon as he believes the mere test of a folktale is lifeless; it can be truly observed only in performance.  Against the tradition of situational micro-analysis of transmission of texts, Linda’s recommendation is the description and analysis of the life and artistry of individual performers who partake in the interpretation (p56). 

Yeats’s desire for “survival” of “tradition” “on the page” (Glassie, p53) had many implications with the spread of print and literacy before him. Literacy being one modernizing squad, Bauman and Briggs (2003: p203ff) clearly show us how the image of the folk diminished by citing a number of texts from John Aubery to the Grimm Brothers and later.  Contrary to the fact, in the process of scientisizing tradition, the Grimms linked texts explicitly related to the vanishing folk now to another imagined community, a notional one, and even transnational one, as their work was translated into more than seventy languages (p223).  Still when they were unhappy about the violence of “modernity” against “tradition” but they helplessly succumbed to “literacy” by confessing that when they reviewed the riches of German folk poetry they discovered nothing of it had been kept alive and even the memory of it was lost (p205).

Similarly, before the Grimms, John Aubery showed that by “modernity” and literacy women lost their traditional social status as tradition-bearers and socializing authorities, which is another discursive realization of Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world.” That is to say, the silencing of women was realized as Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition came—i.e., freeing of belief and knowledge from the traditional authority of custom—with the power of “the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder” (pp75, 76).  . Also to Joann Herder, modernity is a threat to language, depriving it of social, political and affective force, since language is intrinsically social (p197). Hence, modernity distances the more provincial, more traditional “native” world as it links and unlinks in the realm of humanity as more cosmopolitan, more modern it becomes. Now, to survive, the being persists against both the irresistible power of “modernity” and the becoming (conforming) self.  When in 1831 the French political thinker and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville asked why the Native Indian tribe Choctaw were living their homeland, the only thing the removed native said was, “to be free”—if “to be free” is humanly possible without “home”.

“Modernity”/“Tradition”: acquiescence/resistance

Somewhere “tradition” is in conflict; somewhere else it is in acquiescence. In Hungary, among the Kakasd Szeklers Linda Degh did her collections of tradition among peasants, as she says, unspoiled by literary culture or urban-industrial imports in 1960s (p289).  After two decades she went back to Hungary (in 1981) to see how it accommodates the old and the new life style but to her surprise the “tradition” and the “tradition-bearers” did not belong to one social matrix. Now that “modernity” overhauled “tradition” the cultural-ideological atmosphere of the community and their way of life has far changed. As she now explored anew whether traditional forms of folklore could persist or change along with the new network of social relationship evidently “tradition” could not flourish under the new system of work as they did under the old. Generally, by Linda’s ‘research-with-in-research,’ for the Kaskad the idea of relativism that, like vernacularization, foregrounds the provincial, the local, the dispersed (Bauman and Briggs, p15) is now weak to negotiate between the “provincial” and the “cosmopolitan” in the urban.  “Authenticity” was forgone! 

In the four readings discussed here, one would rightly argue, “modernity” changes the context for “tradition” and in effect the autochthonous life style changes. The central, but opposite, function of both “tradition” and “modernity” is the legitimating of a state of affairs in a society. The binary opposition between the two began with the Enlightenment and still remains a challenge. An attempt to tackle the challenge of the binaries invited the concept of “invidious comparison” that either a humane “tradition” is opposed to an inhumane “modernity” or the liberating “modernity” is opposed to an oppressive “tradition” whereby man became free and the ever existing heteronomia (lack of self-determination) was replaced by autonomia (self-government) (Gauchet 1999).   

Moreover, “modernity” is an external criterion about the society’s living style, thinking and acting. Traditionalism, on the other hand, is about the authenticating (Bendix 1999) and “Us-ness” of culture as an internal criterion of validation of life style, world-views and beliefs. As this is a double jeopardy in itself for the field, I don’t think that is what anthropology is for in essence nor what an anthropologist does, i.e., not squashing authenticity as the essence of humanity into a larger bogus whole when the part not authentic, not itself! For the indigenous, “development” means to become “more like ‘Themselves’ not “more like ‘Us’”. Since the adoption of Western cultural form is thus ‘rationalized’ more as international (cosmopolitan) than just Western and it has come to be difficult to decide for the natives what aspects of one’s culture are essential, authentic to preserve (Bendix 1997); Rhum 1996:328) as the standard is ideal, typical and not descriptive, creating a certain collective insecurity against the rest of the world.

Seeing oneself as seen by others as “underdeveloped” means for societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, to see the western world as far developed and economically secure because of “modernity” while most of those underdeveloped nations are still caught up in nationalist movements for independence, ironically enough in the post-colonial era. Though they were keen to preserve and (re)create “tradition,” they were working under the influence of the western world modernalizing agents, and nationalism and modernalization have thus been inseparable vis-à-vis “westernalization” (cosmopolitanism). In most cases “nation-building” and “modernalization” are twin aspects of a single social project.  Set in such a conundrum rendered by “modernity,” the possibility of “authenticity” has been taken up by great philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre, which Jacob Golomb (1995) two years before Bendix published his In Search for Authenticity exploring the literature and writings of those philosophers in his analysis of their ethics and the quest for the authenticity, particularly in the post-modern skepticism.

In the face of “modernity” the way to (re)create and preserve native cultural practices is revival and revision of ancestral rituals, festivals and performances, which can be of an entertainment function for Western world tourists but of a didactic function for the native performers and their audience.  Though nationalism preaches and defends cultural diversity and tolerance among cultures (multi-culturalism) as Ernst Gellner states it (1983:125 in Rhum, p333), it imposes homogeneity both inside and between political units (pluralism). Hence once structural and political integration has been successfully achieved, that is, when the “narrow-mindedness” of the provincial individual is overcome, in Boas’ words, then some degree of cultural pluralism can be tolerated. For the natives, their practices and structures are right, though, because they are “traditional” and handed down in the same way, authentic, which is by the indigenous theories of the world, symbolizes the “cultural identity” of the peoples. 

I believe the case of the Flanagans and the mumming squad living in the Lower End of the Parish, in Fermanagh, Ireland, would justifiably show how “modernity” and “tradition” live side by side like the people (mummers) who Glassie tells us, because they lived near one another and know who is who, he would not mention town-land names “for people's town-lands are their addresses” (Glassie, 1975: xviii). Glassie asserts that, though social scientists (and social sciences) habitually study people as conditioned animals, passive carriers of a closed, inert abstraction, i. e, culture,  but “the ideas of real people are developed in a quirky and open, continuous dialectic of the shared and the personal” (p. vi). For humankind to continue to exist, change is inevitable. Those ideas, “modern” and/or “traditional”), make the host of conversations that reveal, as the author tells us,  individual styles and cultural data which are our text and  also display “the variability without which culture could not change and a person could not exist happily” (ibid).

In Glassie’s view, scholars of the end of the nineteenth century were “carried into confrontation with grand panoply of foreign arts and cultures” byway of succumbing to modern episteme, which brought in the concept of relativism, that is, “all traditions could produce equally valid artworks (Glassie, p76). Thus, by cultural relativism, the Bambara mask owned by a pre-modern man can be put on a par with the modern Michelangelo’s portrait bust. Thus modernity is at least democratic that all cultures are equal, by a modernist precept, i.e., relativism, which, among anthropologists, is but interior malaise though accepted by historians, art historians, and literary critics. After political and structural arrangements (pluralism) have been made possible, it is at least faire to wage cultural relativism or multiculturalism.

In the Beginning

In the four readings in this paper, though "tradition" and "modernity" are widely used as polar opposites in theory of social change, the relations between the “traditional” and the “modern” do not just involve displacement, conflict, or exclusiveness, but submission, acquiescence, loss of authenticity and the unended quest of it. But “modernity” does not necessarily weaken tradition, as in Bauman and Briggs’s case, but rather both “tradition”/“language” and “modernity” form the bases of ideologies and movements in which the polar opposites are converted into aspirations and, once again, “traditional” forms may supply support for, and as well against change. The end is the starting point!

References
______________

Books

Bauman and Brigs. (2003). Voices of Modernity.

Henry Glassie. (1975). All Silver and No Brass.

Linda Degh (1962). Folktales and Society.

Regina Benedix. (1997). In Search Of Authenticity.

Journals


Dan Ben-Amos.(1973).  "A History of Folklore Studies: Why Do We Need It?" in  Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Special Issue: American Folklore Historiography

John W. Roberts. (2008).  “Grand Theory, Nationalism, and American Folklore” in Journal of Folklore Research, Volume 45, Number 1, January-April 2008, pp. 45-54

Volume 45, Number 1, January-April

Joseph R. Gusfield. (1967). “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change” in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 4 pp. 351-362. The University of Chicago Press

Marcel Gauchet’s. (1999).The Disenchantment of the World.

Michael R. Rhum. (1996). 'Modernity' and 'Tradition' in 'Thailand' in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 pp. 325-355

_____________________________

  

By Walleligne Mekonnen

   Arts IV, HSIU

   Nov. 17, 1969

(STRUGGLE)

http://walilegnfordemocracia.com/onationalqu.pdf

ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE POETICS

Asafa Tafarra Dibaba

Indiana University

Indiana

Dec 07/2011

In folklore research, operationalizing the “community” we study is imperative. That is, in approaching folklore as “artistic communication,” the “folk/group,” “tradition,” and “common factor” are significant, and that “significance” is what the society value most at a given time in history. It could be a concept of nationalism and nation-building, an “ideal type” to which people conform. And verbal art is the sum total of creation of a whole community overtime,¹ each genre of which has some unique didactic function at some point in time. As our general concept of genre tends to overemphasize certain qualities of it and omit others, and one genre valued over another, we may resort to select generic ideal type as a reflection of reality but not a mirror image of it, rather a “reflexivity”/(refraction) of reality.

To study the nationalist root of folkloristics in a given society, we may need to construct an ideal type of resistance poetics based on the facts of unjust historical (power) relationships. This “social invisibility” of the “oppressed” is part of “the disenchantment of the world”² as “modernity” overhauled “tradition” and humanity.  Thus, this historical root of resistance against injustice and nationalism in the genealogy of folkloristics, I posit, necessitates a theoretical model capable of responding to socio-political changes in the society and the academy in a form of ethnography of resistance poetics against the general apolitical disciplinary project.

Ethnography of resistance poetics attempts to offer the analysis of the neocolonial imagination of Euro-American empires tended to tame locality (provincialism) through such rhetorical and narrative strategies as surveillance, aestheticization, classification, debasement, negation, and idealization focused on nation-states used as allies. Third world nations are classified, analyzed, judged and admonished in negative patterns like “endemic poverty,” and actual biographied selves are excluded and rather debased as an individual savage troubled by dishonesty, suspicion, superstition, lack of self-discipline in the society also characterized by corruption, xenophobia, tribalism, and the inability to govern themselves.³ This is another predicament of “modernity,” I believe, engaging “nationalism” in its every multifaceted form of resistances, one among which is the role of folklore as a “creative resistance,” not simply resistance to change but a “critical” one, an “emancipatory resistance” which prompts change from “below.”

The “oppressed,” such as the Salale Oromo in Ethiopia deconstruct such hegemonic oppressive state ideology through counter-texts and performance forms such as laments, work songs, anecdotes, praise and historical songs of bandits/banditry. Here also in Salale, “folk” and “folklore” develop in parallel to “primitive” and “anthropology,” thus, “forms of culture” are connected with “kinds of people”.⁴ What the Patum does in Berga (Catalan) Nationalism, so the Irreecha does in Oromo, Ethiopia. The recent “Songs of Millennium” by Salale Oromo Women⁵ is such a case in point for ethnography of resistance poetics suitable for a scholarly appreciation and folkloristic research into the resistance culture of the people often undervalued by successive Ethiopian ruling class as mere social banditry.  

My PhD research focuses on this concept of “creative resistance” articulated through protest songs and narratives. It is about the legitimacy of non-violent tenets (and actions) enacted through waadaa (covenant) and held to reverse socio-political and economic domination, and in effect, challenge violations of human rights. It draws on (un)institutionalized acts and opinions articulated through narratives and songs that spring from a deeply felt denial of legitimacy of the dominating power and mainstream culture.

The purpose of the study is to explore the role of Salale Oromo protest songs and narratives in line with the pan-Oromo resistance culture as a non-violent means of reversing unlawful practices and rules that violate human rights and menace natural environment.⁶  Central to the study is theorizing contemporary Oromo narratives as resistance poetics focusing on the Salale Oromo and inquiring into what narratives do in the society and how they relate to and engage with the social base in which they develop.  

Hence, using ethnographic method(s) of folkloric, anthropological and historical enquiries, in my PhD research,

1) the social basis and political scope of the Salale Oromo protest narratives and resistance culture are to be pinpointed as thoughts and verbal expressions and as modes of communication where the technology of literacy, especially writing and print, are unfamiliar to most of the population. 

2) how folk narratives are closely allied to resistance culture, i.e. social/political banditry in the area and the principle of waadaa/covenant as a binding force will be closely examined, and what other possible human agencies are practiced to articulate power relations are identified. This problem has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the economic, political, institutional and human development of the oral society in focus. 

3) the moral components of narratives of rebellion related to the nature of resistance (ethical, political, socio-cultural and economic aspects), i.e., if “emancipatory resistance” or simply resistance to change, is investigated. It is to critically scrutinize what resistance (sub-)cultures impede or enhance development and help to maintain common good, peace, human rights, equity, social justice and democratic trends.  

4) in Salale local history,  the nature of indigenous forces the Salale Oromo use to shape social changes from below and enhance transformations, and in so doing, promote those values and boost their political, social, and economic well-being, in line with the pan-Oromo reality in history under the successive regimes in Ethiopia will be explored. 

On the whole, the aim is to critically study the Salale Oromo folk narratives used to valorize social/political banditry and the waadaa/covenant peace-making binding principle as part of resistance culture of the people. It is also to outline the responses, attitudes and views of the people to local officials and to the state about socioeconomic, political and administrative discontents in particular and examine Salale Oromo folklore in general as a “peace-by-peaceful-means” to challenge domination.

ENDNOTES

1. Americo Paredes and Richafrd Bauman (1972). Toward New Perspective in Folklore. University of Texas Press.

2. Max Weber describes the “disenchantment of the world” as it results from the intersection of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries… According to Weber, God, magic, and myth are now replaced with logic and knowledge (1946; also Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 2003).

In Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World (1999) development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity. The main argument of Gauchet is that secularization of society (the word "désenchantement" directly refers to Max Weber's Entzauberaung) is both rooted in Christianity and a process against Christianity. The Christian religion, by laying down the ground for it, made it possible for modern societies (say, after 1789 in France and continental Europe) to abandon heteronomia (government of the society and of the self by an external authority, be it God, tradition, etc...) and to switch to autonomia (in the Kantian sense, this is the self-government of the individual and of society).

3. David Spurr (1996) explores how Western writers (journalists, travel writers, and government bureaucrats) represent the non-Western world. Discourse has been promoted from being an adjunct of power to being its source and principal manifestation, so Spurr pushes this mode of inquiry beyond its usual zone of security and as empire administrators are primarily engaged in managing their tropes.

4. Dorothy Noyes.  “Folklore.” In The Social Science Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper, eds. pp. 375-378. New York: Routledge, 2004.

5. See my “Salale Oromo Women Songs of Resistance:” (OROMOIA, ETHIOPIA)

 http://oromofolklore-resistance.blogspot.com/2011/06/salale-oromo-women-songs-of-resistance.html

6. In Finnish folklore scholarship, of its two major goals one is that “the end of folklore research was service of the fatherland. This was a belief found support in the teachings of Herder. He argued that an individual could fully develop only as an integral part of his particular nation (Oinas 1978:53).  

References

Brown, Leslie and Susan Strega (2005). Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches. Canadian Scholars Press.

Hale, Charles. (2008). Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics and Methods of Activist Scholarship.  California University Press.

Hollander, Jocelyn and Rachel L. Einwohner. (2004). “Conceptualizing Folklore” in  Sociological Forum.  Vol. 19, No. 4. (Dec., 2004), pp. 533-554

Hoy, David. (2004).  Critical Resistance. From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. Cambridge MA & London:  The MIT Press.

Kovach, Margareth Elizabeth (2010). Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. University of Toronto Press.

Noye, Dorothy. “The Social Base of Folklore.” To appear in a Companion to Folklore Studies.  Eds. Regina Bendix and Galit Hassan-Rokem. Willey Blackwell, 2011 press

Oinas, Felix. (1978). Folklore, Nationalism, and Politics. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers.

Paredes, Americo and Richafrd Bauman (1972). Toward New Perspective in Folklore. University of Texas Press.

Roberts, John W. (2008). “Grand Theory, Nationalism, and American Folklore” Journal of Folklore Research. Volume 45, Number 1, (January-April), pp. 45-54. Indiana University Press 

Scott, James (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press.

___________(1992). Domination and the Art of Resistance: the hidden transcript. Yale  University Press.

Spur, David (1996). The rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration.

Veeser, Harold (1989). The New Historicism. Routledge.