Tizita

My interest in Ethiopian political life stems from a need developed early in life to understand ‘the meeting of force and meaning’[1] in the various popular and academic narratives constructed around the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. If I had an intuition that meaning was always inextricably accompanied by a relation to force, this is because my own childhood experiences were profoundly shaped by the residue of sadness that permeated Ethiopian family life for those who emigrated from the country in the 1970s and 1980s. As I grew up in Canada, Guyana, and Barbados while also travelling between other major metropoles, I found that what framed any meaning I might construct out of being Ethiopian in these various geographies was an intense sense that the émigré adults around me had lost something that none could name explicitly. What bothered me most as a child – although some of this might be exaggerated memory constructed in retrospect – was that nearly every Ethiopian social event I attended with my parents in the 1980s seemed to end with the burning of myrrh and a replaying of variations on a typical ballad taken from the Amharic songbook entitled Tizita (Memory). This song form, which has probably been re-recorded by every major contemporary Ethiopian singer worth their salt, was exemplified at the time of the revolution by Mahmoud Ahmed’s stirring version, recorded one month after the revolution and running nearly 13 minutes.

Directly addressing an absent lover and an absent memory, Mahmoud Ahmed’s song laments:

Tinan’tenan t’so, zaren tentereso
Kenegem teweso, amna’nem adeso
Yemetal tizita gwazun agbesbeso

Outdoing yesterday, shouldering on today,
Borrowing from tomorrow, renewing yesteryears,
Comes tizita (memory) hauling possessions

Other typical Tizita song lyrics echo similar sentiments, such as:

Tizita’ye antewneh, tizitam yelebgn
Tizita’ye antewneh, tizitam yelebgn
Emetalhu eyalk, eyekereh’ebgn

My tizita [memory] is you, I don’t have tizita [memory]
My tizita is you, I don’t have tizita

You say you’re coming, yet you never do.[2]

Dagmawi Woubshet has written that the word Tizita has three related meanings in Amharic: the first is memory and the act of memory, which some translators also associate with the English word nostalgia; the second meaning refers to a scale or mode of Ethiopian music; and the third meaning, Woubshet tells us, incorporates the first two meanings by referring to the type of song cited above.[3] As musical scale and popular song form, an actual Tizita song has the ability to capture the complex ways in which memory conveys both collective and individual experience; as a mode of music Tizita reminds us that memory always depends on a structuring principle if it is to be communicated and shared with others. At the same time, Tizita is a formal musical style ‘which positions lack and longing as the song’s spatial and temporal coordinates (lack is “here”, longing is “then”)’. This implies that the structure of memory can betray the present as much as the lover does, if not more: ‘My tizita [memory] is you, I don’t have tizita [memory]’. At the same time, as a popular idiom Tizita also shows us that lived memory has a way of usurping formalised styles. Thus, as we saw earlier: ‘Outdoing yesterday, shouldering on today, / Borrowing from tomorrow, renewing yesteryears, Comes tizita (memory) hauling possessions’. The very definition of memory in Tizita is what Freud called the uncanny.[4]

If Tizita was a popular song form in the post-revolutionary period in Ethiopia this is because it not only conveys a profound sense of lost memories, but worse, it also conveys a sense that through loss of the object of love the very art of memory can also be lost. Not only does the song lament the loss of content, the very polysemy of the word and the song form laments the loss of a structure of feeling. Without the action of love, both form and content have the potential to disappear. In essence, then, Tizita conveys a feeling of time as being out of joint with itself: social life in transition.

My tizita is you, I don’t have tizita
My tizita is you, I don’t have tizita

You say you’re coming, yet you never do.

Thinking back to my childhood dislike of Tizita, what seems to have bothered me most was that the replaying of this melancholic scale felt like a way of adding salt to an open wound. In particular, the replaying of Mahmoud Ahmed’s recording, with its insistent rhythm, became for me the embodiment of a communal effort to make knowable what was in fact an invisible presence; at the same time, this plea to make contemporaneous that which belonged to another country also felt like nothing less than an invitation to occult practices: the adults were collectively talking to ghosts. Of course, as a child of émigrés all too aware that the adults around her ought to assimilate into new proper modes of behaviour, I felt ashamed of those who in their weakness seemed to be something other than responsible. Instead, I wanted to cure the adults of their commitment to nostalgia. Even as a child I sought to reconstruct the past that I thought belonged to the adults around me in as forceful and present a way as possible, so that they would feel obliged to let go of their longing for an absent memory. In other words, I felt compelled to sketch notes towards an account of the socially determinative forces of social change, loss and apathy that allowed the adults around me to recognise each other through a structure of feeling that spanned across multiple borders. Here, then, were the childhood seeds of the research practice that has led to this book.

1 Gordon 2008, p. xv.

[2] For both of these verses I am relying on a translation of the song in Woubshet 2009. Woubshet points out that ‘Amharic thrives on polysemy. Here the possessive tizita’ye, my tizita, refers to the singer’s own melancholy memory, but also to the absent lover, since in Amharic the possessive is an ornament placed around certain nouns – “my” love, beauty, life, memory – to show affection in addressing a beloved. The second clause in the first two lines contains another generic trope – the singer’s disavowal of all memory but that of love loss – which positions lack and longing as the song’s spatial and temporal coordinates (lack is “here”, longing is “then”). The third line – the absent lover’s empty promise of a return – reprises and affirms the longing stated ambiguously at first’.

[3] Woubshet 2009, p. 629.

[4] Freud defines the uncanny as the class of things which lead us back to the familiar but which had been forgotten by conscious memory: ‘Our analysis of instances of the un-canny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe, which was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings … It would seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has traversed it without preserving certain traces of it which can be re-activated, and that everything which now strikes us as “uncanny” fulfills (sic) the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression’. Freud 1955, pp. 217–56.