Sing and Sing On

Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226810331
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

A sweeping history of Ethiopian musicians during and following the 1974 Ethiopian revolution. Sing and Sing On is the first study of the forced migration of musicians out of the Horn of Africa dating from the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, a political event that overthrew one of the world's oldest monarchies and installed a brutal military regime. Musicians were among the first to depart the region, their lives shattered by revolutionary violence, curfews, and civil war. Reconstructing the memories of forced migration, Sing and Sing On traces the challenges musicians faced amidst revolutionary violence and the critical role they played in building communities abroad.Drawing on the recollections of dozens of musicians, Sing and Sing On details personal, cultural, and economic hardships experienced by musicians who have resettled in new locales abroad. Kay Kaufman Shelemay highlights their many artistic and social initiatives and the ways they have offered inspiration and leadership within and beyond a rapidly growing Ethiopian American diaspora. While musicians held this role as sentinels in Ethiopian culture long before the revolution began, it has taken on new meanings and contours in the Ethiopian diaspora. The book details the ongoing creativity of these musicians while exploring the attraction of return to their Ethiopian homeland over the course of decades abroad. Ultimately, Shelemay shows that musicians are uniquely positioned to serve this sentinel role as both guardians and challengers of cultural heritage.

Notes

Editorial Policies

1. Wolf Leslau, Concise Amharic Dictionary (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Harrassowitz, 1976), xiii–xiv.

2. Thomas Leiper Kane, Amharic-English Dictionary, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Harrassowitz, 1990).

Preface

1. The suggestion that local ethnography can speak to broader issues elsewhere is succinctly addressed by Jean and John Comaroff, “Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction,” Ethnography 4, no. 2 (2003): 147–79, https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381030042001, who set forth a four-part methodological operation for “mapping extensions of the phenomenal landscape” [italics in the source]; they propose that such work “demands an ethnography that, once orientated to particular sites and grounded issues, is pursued on multiple dimensions and scales” (169). The light that this study sheds on musicians’ roles cross-culturally is explored in the afterword.

2. Thomas P. Ofcansky, “Imperial Bodyguard,” in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, ed. Siegbert Uhlig (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Harrassowitz, 2007), 3:127–28. Henceforth, references to Encyclopaedia Aethiopica will be abbreviated to EAe in the notes.

3. Ofcansky, “Imperial Bodyguard,” EAe, 3:127–28.

4. Ofcansky, “Imperial Bodyguard,” EAe, 3:127–28.

5. Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 10–11.

6. Jelis (often called griots outside Africa) “are musicians, singers, public speakers, oral historians, praisers, go-betweens, advisers, chroniclers, and shapers of the past and the present” (Eric Charry, Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 91).

7. Simon D. Messing, “The Highland-Plateau Amhara of Ethiopia” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1957), 487. Messing does not offer any further details about the “secret musical note like a code,” but it could well have drawn on the short melodic segments from the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian chant repertory that are the basis of the notational system mələkkət (melekket, signs) associated with the text and melody of a specific liturgical chant. Melekket has an additional meaning of an identifying mark or a means of identification (Kane, Dictionary, 158).

8. For a discussion of African instruments that perform as speech surrogates, see Joseph S. Kaminski, “Surrogate Speech of the Asante Ivory Trumpeters of Ghana,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 40 (2008): 117–35, https://www.proquest.com/docview/235107827/B6F298C9C99C4778PQ/1; and Adwoa Arhine, “Speech Surrogates of Africa: A Study of the Fante Mmensuon,” Legon Journal of the Humanities 20 (2009): 105–22, https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ljh/article/view/121552. These articles discuss closely related traditions of Ghanaian Asante and Fante people in which ivory trumpets serve as speech surrogates. Kaminski details a case study of Asante ivory trumpets and Arhine discusses the Fante mmensuon, an ensemble in which the lead horn, sese, is used in the Fante court “as a talking instrument for recounting histories, singing appellations, uttering proverbs, and conveying messages, announcements and signals depending on the context” (Arhine, “Speech Surrogates,” 116). Both articles discuss in passing other Ghanaian instruments such as the Asante atumpan drum that are speech surrogates as well as comparative examples from elsewhere on the African continent. An example that serves as a speech surrogate from outside Africa is the textless songs that convey specific semantic meaning among an indigenous people of northern Veracruz, Mexico, in Charles L. Boilés, “Tepehua Thought-Song: A Case of Semantic Signaling,” Ethnomusicology 11, no. 3 (1967): 267–92, https://doi.org/10.2307/850266.

9. Kane, Dictionary, 1016. For discussion of the negarit’s symbolic association with royal power from early dates, see Anaïs Wion, Anne Damon-Guillot, and Stéphanie Weisser, “Sound and Power in the Christian Realm of Ethiopia (Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 62–67, https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.19.1.904.

10. The Nägarit Gazeta first appeared in March 1942 as a monthly publication with the provision that no new law would be valid until published in the document, today an online platform (Theodor Vestal, “Nägarit Gazeṭa,” EAe, 3:1106).

11. “Wax and gold” (sämənna wärq) uses the lost wax process of goldsmithing as a metaphor for hidden meanings; a clay mold is created around a wax form, which melts as it is replaced with molten gold (Donald N. Levine, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965], 5).

12. Jenny Hammond, Sweeter than Honey: Ethiopian Women and Revolution; Testimonies of Tigrayan Women (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea, 1990), 141. The guitarist quoted here is identified only by her first name, Atsede; she learned to play the guitar as part of a revolutionary cultural troupe to be discussed in chapter 4.

13. Minale Dagnew Bezu, interview by author, January 7, 2008, Washington, DC.

14. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) acknowledges this uncertain etymology, noting that the French words sentinelle and Italian sentinella are gendered feminine (“Sentinel, n.,” OED Online, accessed January 21, 2020). However, other dictionaries, including the Merriam-Webster, suggest that Old Italian sentinella comes from sentire, “to perceive” in Latin, accessed January 21, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentinel.

15. Ewa A. Miendlarzewska and Wiebke J. Trost, “How Musical Training Affects Cognitive Development: Rhythm, Reward and Other Modulating Variables,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 7 (2014): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2013.00279; and Aniruddh D. Patel, “Why Would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis,” Frontiers in Psychology 2 (2011): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00142.

16. Kane, Dictionary, 18; Wolf Leslau, English-Amharic Context Dictionary (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Harrassowitz, 1973), 1139. I thank Dr. Getatchew Haile for confirming the relationship between these two words. Both həwas and səmmet connote sensation.

17. Kane, Dictionary, 18, 462, and 472.

18. Thomas Campbell, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell: With a Memoir of His Life, Lovell’s Library, vol. 10, no. 526 (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1855), 161. The first reference to the sentinel stars was by Richard Lovelace in “To Lucasta” in Lucasta: Postume Poems (1659): “Like to the Sent’nel ...