What Were They Writing About Anyway?: Tradition and Modernization in Amharic Literature

Abstract

When we hear the word “Ethiopia” even today, when globalization is the ruling edict of the day, what we still have to grapple with is a persisting enigma: on the one hand, we have this image of remoteness buried in the recesses of a past that had been as enduring as it had been glorious—a wonderland of natural bounty, whose people have been described as so “blameless” that they were beloved of the Greek gods who made frequent visits to them, led by none other than the thunderous Zeus himself; a people at whose “banquet side Poseidon lingered delighted,” as also did Iris “to partake of the rites to the immortal gods.”1 This perception of the country still lingers with an even stronger grip on the psyche of poets and politicians alike, extending its reach further into the past—this time around, as the “enviable origin” of the human race. On the other hand is the dismal reality of poverty and backwardness that the country represented when it crossed the threshold of the twentieth century a hundred years ago, and still had nothing significant to show for it all. This is what ailed the early twentiethcentury writers who voiced their concerns directly (by addressing their ideas of change to the powers that be), or indirectly through fictional works in the didactic tradition. Granted, so they seemed to say, that its past had been as glorious as it could never have been, but where did it all go? Where did we miss the turn that other nations were quick to recognize and embark on, leaving us out in the cold, while we, its children, still boast of the thirteen months of sunshine in which we alone seem to bask? Or, were we that loath to part with our bumpy ride on our dignified mules, rain or shine? In words that seem to echo those of Diodorus about the Ethiopians “being the first to honor the gods” and to be “endowed . . . [with their] favors,” (Snowden 146) and at the same time wondering loudly as to what stopped us dead in our track, Aleqa Tayye GebreMaryam wistfully asks what seems to have been an unavoidable question in a letter to Emperor Menelik II. Writes Gebre-Maryam: