By Solomon Deressa

Zalaalam Abarra’s sizable collection entitled simply Walaloota (Poems) is an uplifting encounter with high order poetry. The poems are in Oromo, a language that over its millennial existence in the Horn of Africa, has produced, and continues to produce, significant epic, heroic, ribald, elegiac, amorous and mystical poetry as well as rowdy limericks, rambunctious erotic couplets, and superbly bawdy quatrains. A re-awakening of the need for cultural and political differentiation has also given rise to verse devoted to promoting Oromo nationalism.  

That said, as far as I am aware, there is no poet whose recent work is of the caliber of Zalaalam’s work. This claim in no way diminishes the work of other poets currently writing in Oromo or in other Ethiopian languages. The operative words here are: as far as I am aware. Secondly, if in fact a faster gun has not already headed down the trail unnoticed, another may be “only half a day’s ride up the high plains.” And finally, if there is bias here, it arises from the fact that Zalaalam composes in a cadence that resolves itself into modulations and inflections of the Mecha Oromo to which I am as partial as I am to the modulations of Addis-Aba when it comes to Amharic.  Such personal predilections be as they may, even to be tagged as a runner-up to a poet of Zalaalam’s caliber, would in it self be no mean accomplishment. 

Two questions: To what class of poems are these works of Zalaalam being here compared? And what are the characteristics that raise these poems to such a high level? Responding to the first query is easy enough. Zalaalam’s poems, or this reader’s response to them, is being set side by side with the same reader’s responses to poems in Oromo, Amharic, English, French, Spanish (in bilingual editions) and translations into English from contemporary Hebrew, Arabic, German, Russian, Polish, et cetra.  Drawing a sharp boundary between high order and lesser-order poetry may be not much use and no easier than demarcating where orange ends and yellow begins;  and yet, anyone who spends time looking at colors for professional reasons or for pleasure, will not need to resort to spectrocolorimetry to name this hue yellow and that one orange. Going a step further, Zalaalam’s poetry stands out not only in the framework of fledgling contemporary Oromo poetry, or even in the larger context of modern Amharic-cum-Oromo poetic out-put, but in that of poetry anywhere. That said, simple sanity requires acknowledgement of the other eighty or so still living Ethiopian languages in which poems reverberate across the mountains and desert sands of the larger Horn. That no single one of us has access to more than, at best, five or six of these traditions does not mean they do not exist. 

To those who might thoughtlessly argue that only written material has claim to literary status, no more need be said than “dysfunctional literacy may be just fine for sound out grocery lists, but is not much of a platform from which to make pronouncements about poetry.” The mark of dysfunctionality in this case being ignorance of the seniority of poetry to writing and perhaps even to counting, and more coeval with language itself. It is not inconceivable that language, itself may be the younger sister of the poem in its primal form of rhythmic roars, grunts and hums. As for poetic prowess, it emerges, as it has always done, where and when it pleases—utterly independent of technical progress or the sophisticate’s resort to literary allusions.

The second query: “are there signs by which we might suspect, if not definitively recognize, the real thing when it hits?” may require a bit more space to say.

One sign that an encounter with the real thing has occurred, is a shiver along the spine that heads north until it turns into tingles up the back of the neck, and sensational gates open onto internal vistas that are at once familiar and unfamiliar—and above all a thrill. Given that poems are written, declaimed or sang by sentient beings to others who are equally sentient, we cannot pass without acknowledging the sensual bases of our response to these poems. The poem “Dua Gurraacha” (Black Death) is a tragi-comedy that the poet weaves out of 660 years European and Asian history and a geographic distance that stretches from China to Western Europe. It becomes a whodunit tense as piano wires that snap against living human flesh. In our wretched fear of and melodrama about death, our primitive tendency to blame calamities beyond our comprehension on minorities or strangers rarely fails to surface. In 14th century Europe, Jews, who qualified as both minority and stranger, were accused of poisoning water wells. As the poems progress tension snaps against nascent physics, chemistry and biology and the accusers go on as if they had done nothing out of the ordinary. 

The Ethiopian poet/playwright Mengistu Lemma, master of the light touch and abiding humor, who wrote in Amharic, comes to mind.  But there is a difference between the two poets. Whether in his elegiac mode as in “Hiywot” (Life), the lead poem in “Yegixim Gubaa’e” (Congress of Poems), or in the self-satirizing “Bexerra Cereqa” (In Clear Moonlight), Mengistu is the poet of buoyant barely audible laughter. He keeps his contact with the natural world as well as with the human realm delicate. Zalaalam’s humor is epic in conception and execution—and with a wicked roar to boot. In “Dua Gurraacha” the flea, the carrier of death and terror, arrives on a flood-lit stage worthy of Homer’s heroic “best of the Achaeans”—in full regalia, but on a battle mount worthy of a 17th century marauding Oromo warrior. That the war horse in this case is a mouse, is not only neither here nor there, it is the very dénouement of the planetary drama that ends in rib-cage rattling laughter.

Despite their highly localized tone and color, none of these poems trumpets its place of origin or its time of birth. None heralds either its destiny or destination either as a matter of national Oromo pride or as a point of apology. The poems exist as all living beings do, for no other reason than because they exist. Like you and me. Among biological life forms as well as among artistic objects, the power of presence can often be gauged by the absence of justification. The poems are neither for nor against Imperial Ethiopia. Neither for or against Ethiopian Christian Imperialism in all its fractious Monophysite, Lutheran, Catholic, Adventist, Pentecostal forms. Neither for or against Ethiopian Islamic Imperialism. For, say what you will, to include the other in one’s family by force, is to blast the symmetry of the other’s sense of self. In a sane world, it would be the duty and previlege of the outsider to beg to be included, and force would have no place. To convert anyone but oneself to anything is to take the high ground, and therefore to teach the other to despise what he/she is. Those who have not spent sleepless nights in Meles’s Addis-Aba and been subjected to the violence of megaphones blaring from the forty-four churches and forty-four mosques of the city have no right to argue this point. 

Zalaalam’s poems have no commerce with such insanity. His listener/reader is doubly fortunate, she/he is invited to poetry; that is to say, offered gifts without any strings attached, with no threats hurled. Because the poet offers the best of himself so completely from the heart, the listener or reader comes to feel and think that he/she is writing the lines just for the fun of it. Where there is no petty power play, identification arises spontaneously.

Such is Zalaalam’s rooting in his ancestral culture and the language he was suckled on, that his poems effortlessly rise out pristine Oromo myths and legends. Considering that the poet grew up in Naqamtee, probably less than a half-hour walk from the home of Onesimos Nesib (the great co-translator with Aster Ganno of the Oromo Bible) it is astounding that the mythic backdrop of the poems is so pristinely Oromo rather than the worn-out Judeo-Christian ragabash that continues to  clog the natural expression of native sensibilities among all Ethiopian peoples. That Zalaalam achieves this without once submitting us to the usual theological, ideological or doctrinaire catechisms, that he trusts our natural Amhara, Oromo, Guraggé (pick your favorite tongue) intelligence as if it never occurred to him to do otherwise, makes his collection a deeply satisfying reading/listening experience. And yet, that he does not deliberately exclude anything within his impressively large reach is demonstrated by the bonhomie with which he brings alive the relation of Westerners and their dogs, or the manner in which Westerners not only ignore but render one another down right invisible even in the unavoidable proximity that spaces such as public transportation impose on them, are put on paper with the same deft touch with which he gets the reader to shadow Hadha Margo, the quintessential Wallagay woman, as she goes about her daily chores.

Although he is beyond fluent in Amharic, reads, writes and speaks English and Finnish and Russian, Zalaalam composes in his mother tongue in a way that clearly indicates that it never occurred to him to write in any other language. So unconsciously taken a stance in a man who is obviously well read in other languages is at first almost bewildering. And the flood of images (most would lose their chi in translation) the unhesitating beat of his lines, more like the sound of self-assuredly unhurried charge of an already victorious cavalry that the beat of drums, and a seemingly easily retrievable vast vocabulary that hammers the perfect word in the right place, makes Zalaalam an extraordinary gift to the Oromo language. One would have to analyze each poem line by line, image by image to do justice to the power and beauty of the poems and the uncommon response they elicit.

• Solomon Deressa Letter to: Oromo Poet Zalaalam Abarra & His Likely Readers. Solomon Deressa is a renowned veteran Oromo-Ethiopian poet, screen writer, art critic and essayist.