Preface
As long as I, your slim son, am there for you, why should your home be destroyed?
Mekonnen Galaacha
I grew up in 1960s Addis Ababa, capital of Haile Selassie's glamorous barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions and the African Union, of old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz such as Tilahoun Gessesse and Mahmoud Ahmed.
I wrote my first poem about Ethiopia when I was thirteen, about a python. Many more poems followed but never quite satisfied, as if there was something underneath which my normal language and style could not dig out. Only when I started reading as much Ethiopian poetry as I could find, and after I had a go at translating some Amharic poems myself with the help of a friend, did the real voice of my boyhood come stuttering back to the surface and start to write its own sort of poems.
Ethiopia has more than seventy ethnic groups and languages, so as many poetic traditions. Unfortunately, I am not an expert in any of them. I can only imitate the poems which I have read or heard, and liked, encouraging them to lead me in my own writing. A lot of this poetry is oral or sung. It is only recorded when an enthusiastic researcher like Fekade Azeze or Alula Pankhurst goes into the field to gather verses about a terrible famine, for example, or painful jigger fleas or corrupt politicians. It is an urgent poetry of protest and complaint, as well as praise, sometimes even in the voice of the object of protest, like the famine or the flea, so a sort of ironic boast. And since it is spoken, it delights in the sounds of words and in the physical presence of the people it addresses.
Chris Beckett
2013
