The Rehearsal: Poetry-Jazz in Addis Ababa

Abstract

T he date is March 24, 2018. Addis Ababa is in its second state of emergency. The new and current prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed Ali, will be appointed nine days from now, though nobody now knows who will be appointed or the day the appointment will occur. During this same spring, a group of German, US, and Ethiopian musicians, poets, artists, and curators met in Addis Ababa for the fifth edition of Poetry-Jazz. Poetry-jazz has become a form of art practiced by different groups in Addis Ababa. For the last five years, our semirotating group of artists, Poetry-Jazz, has been supported by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. These gatherings materialize as public performances, platforms, and publications reflecting the artists’ role as political ambassadors. We are meeting for the fifth time in six years in a kind of creative hopscotch, traveling between Berlin and Addis Ababa. Together, we instigate a semi-ancient form of Ethiopian poetry called Wax and Gold. This time we all agree that the gold, usually hidden in the wax, is to be on the outside of what we We want all gold, heavy things, heaviness itself, something solid that melts, like some heavy metals, at the temperature of the hand. The Rehearsal Poetry-Jazz in Addis Ababa by Eric Ellingsen “Poetry is not a form, but rather a result.” –Amiri Baraka In front of an average crowd of about 1,500 people, a group of poets and musicians perform in Ethiopia. Combining Wax and Gold poetry, music, and dance, a group known as Tobiya Poetry-Jazz acts as political ambassadors telling Ethiopia’s stories. The story behind the scenes, though, is a compelling one. COVER FEATURE MUSIC & LIT 54 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 PHOTOS: ERC ELLINGSEN make together. We want all gold, heavy things, heaviness itself, something solid that melts, like some heavy metals , at the temperature of the hand. We seek the gold through a form known as poetryjazz , which combines music and poetry. Songs in Ethiopia are stories, physical spaces where history is continually approached, negotiated, tuned, and returned to. If poetry resists the intelligence almost successfully , as Wallace Stevens says, then in poetry-jazz rehearsals, we seek the almost more than the absolutely there, the almost more than the already there waiting-foryou -to-arrive. And when the poets don’t know where to go next, the musicians go there. THE REHEARSAL SPACE for Poetry-Jazz’s fifth edition is a living compound called Fendika Cultural Center. The front entrance blends chameleon-like into the street-side lattice of small-scale, individually owned storefronts whose wares range from electronic parts to a single Band-Aid to diagonally stacked tables of tomatoes and limes. The inner courtyard is lined with benches, couches, tables, oil-drums for evening fires, a water pump for daily laundry, two water closets, two hand-dug latrines without any porcelain in site. At the end of the courtyard is an art gallery with three interconnected rooms. Blank scented smoke lazily issues from the center room. The gallery hosts internationally exhibiting contemporary Ethiopian artists, regulars in Addis Ababa’s Museum of Modern Art. The week we are rehearsing, there is an exhibition that takes the form of a 1,008-hour coffee ceremony, by Robel Temesgen , a sometimes poetryjazz co-instigator of sound things. It’s like our senses are surroundings surrounded ; the visual and smelly art around us, we feel visual and olfactorily surrounded by things that corresponded to the auditory space we care about and attempt to put into sounds leaning toward words. The rehearsal space itself is a series of one-story mud-stone-brick-timber-sheetmetal enclosures, a thick, living urban carpet, an organic Mat Urbanism that holds up under covered corrugated metal roofs that connect and carve into multiple smaller spaces, inner courtyards , smaller scale public footpaths. It is an urbanism of forms leaning into one another, load-bearing connections that hold themselves up. A wall wraps around the living compound, a bricolage sheath replete with gates (and probably Gates somehow). Over time, holes and doors are carved between connected but closed things, like the musicians’ notes in poetry...