Culture, unity and Hadrawi videotapes: When personal becomes political

Hadrawi is no stranger to reaching Somalis by means of tapes. Along with other prominent poets, notably Dhoodaan, Qays, Gaariye, Said Salah, Hadrawi has been a public poet. As such, through a network of distinct distribution system, where small traders, cab drivers, chat traffickers (Yaacay, in Somali) and students are central, Hadrawi tapes, armed with his potent poems and songs, have played a significant role in the development and accentuation of the Somali culture for the last forty years.

I first heard one of Hadrawi's songs on a phonograph in Jigjiga in 1973. Still in middle school, it was customary for my generation to sip tea under the shads of the verandahs of storefront teashops of which Jigjiga had plenty, and listen to disc players on phonograph. Most of the disc players were imported from Cairo via Djibouti. One of the most popular songs often played at Jibbax's storefront teashop, a place my friends and I frequented, was Hadrawi's "Hoden" with its memorable lyrics about Ilmi Boudheri singing deep down from the Heavens. Conveyed by the powerful and melancholic voice of Mohammed Sulyman, the lyrics, which left me with lasting impressions, went this way:

Hodann, Hodan iyo Jeceelkeed Dani iga mahaysee;
Dadkalaa Haweeyo Hablo Xuural Caynaa Haswiyaaye
Haye Nabad Walaaley, Haye Nabad Walaaley.
Geelihii Herwayn baa Igu soo Hormanayo, Haye Nabad Walaaloy

Almost thirty years later, I stumbled across another Hadrawi's work. This time, it was a videotape of his own wedding in the city of Burco. During a recent family vacation with my family, at a suburban town called Chantilly in Fairfax County, Virginia, I had the opportunity to watch this videotape while sipping a cup of Somali tea laden with sugar and a touch of ground Cardamom, cloves and cinnamon sticks. For the entire two hours I watched the videotape, I was transfixed on and overwhelmed by how the wedding ceremony of a man and a woman turned in to a cultural event. I was surprised to discover how deeply attached I am to Somali literature despite my 21 years of residence in America.

Alexander Stille assesses the cultural aspect of the video tape. Writing in Hatuuf, Issue No. 145 of Somaliland Times, Mr. Stille says, "that the wedding video tape of a poet, showing a traditional Somali ceremony with guests seated on straw mats, drinking camels' milk and eating dates, but filled, like most other wedding videos, with random footage of cars arriving and crowds milling around-should have commercial appeal is a perfect expression of Somalia in the new millennium, a strange hybrid of ancient nomadic culture and modern technology."

In a conversation with Mr. Stille, whose book on Somalia and the role of the oral culture features an article on this video tape, Hadrawi says, "the purpose of the wedding for me was to show the Somali people, [my emphasis added], that their forefathers left something for them, even if they don't follow that example-that they should not live in a vacuum and lose their identity." Indeed, the message carried in the videotape is speaking to all Somalis, whether they live in Somaliland, Puntland, Banadirland, Baydhaboland, Jubaland, Djibouti, Somal Galbeed, or Kenyan Somaliland. Therefore, Hadrawi's message transcends provincial feelings and addresses the concerns of many Somalis regarding the fate of Somali culture that he so defiantly defended.

Hadrawi's videotape about his wedding ceremony made an important and bold political statement-it spoke of the oneness of the Somali people's culture and the degree to which the destiny of this distraught nation is tied together. The same feeling was expressed by several spectacular speakers who took the podium.

Hadrawi's wedding ceremony was also a show case for Somali cultural unity when delegates from all the Somali inhabited regions made their trip to the podium. One by one, delegates from Awdel, Djibouti, Sanag, Sool and Somali Galbeed stood up and delivered their words of wisdom in the preservation and protection of the Somali culture. All speakers' rightly payed homage to Hadrawi for his role in nurturing Somali culture. Some even went farther and furtively called him the embodiment of Somali culture. Intended or not, the collective words of these delegates represented a renaissance of Somali cultural unity that had lately suffered a disproportionate mutilation and mayhem in the hands of its own inheritors.

Most impressive was the speech given by the head of the Somali Galbeed delegation, who was at the time a member of the Somali Nation State, Mr. Mohammed Sheik Ibrahim. Mr. Ibrhaim, a stocky-built, light-skinned man who wears a well-groomed goatee beard that is common to the Burco residents, touched on his days of being a refugee student in Burco, and how the Burco residents received him and his fellow Somali Galbeed refugees with open arms. He underscored the absence of any difference between the people he represents and the residents of Borco, or residents of any other Similar Somali city. In Mr. Mohammed, I could easily picture myself standing in front of a similar crowd, only in Hargaisa in this case, and imparting on them a similar message that the cultural oneness will outlast the current artificial Bantustization of the Somali peninsula.
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When as simple as an event as the wedding ceremony of the famous Somali poet Mohammed Ahmed Warsame, Hardwire, can generate such a cultural momentum, it speaks volumes about the strength of the Somali people's cultural and historical ties. It tells us that the force of Somali Cultural and historical ties can easily overshadow the current state of political disunity of the former Democratic Republic of Somalia. Hadrawi's wedding ceremony and how it is organized represented far more greater than the marriage of a man and a woman. It is a living testimony that the Somali society is more than a mere political entity; it is also stating the case that Somali society is a cultural nation with deeper and complex ties dating back to many years that we often care to recognize.

In post colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, almost all of the existing post-colonial nation states owe their present day unity to the social engineering of Africa by the departing European colonial masters. At Westminster, in England, departing colonial officers hastily conceived an African decolonization project in the later parts of the 1950s. It was that project that pulled together, for example, the Loa, the Kikuyo and the Massai in Kenya, the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo and the Yoroba in Nigeria, The Nuer and the Arabs in Sudan. The result is an acute ethnic strife that prompted the Nigerian-born Nobel Laureate, Wolle Soyinka to call the state of African nation states an "open sore." Open sore it is! Bu, absent of post colonial central governments, Africa's respective conglomerates of ethnic cultures would have had nothing in common to tie them together.

In the Somali case, however, things are different. For a long time, Somalis were a united, single people with all the attributes of a modern nation state, as understood in Europe in the 1900s. Unfortunately, the advent of a post-colonial polity that ironically united divergent African tribes rendered a hitherto culturally and linguistically united Somali society a warring and waning entity. In a stretch of imagination, perhaps, the Borco-hosted Hadrawi videotape represents a modest but effective effort to reverse the prevailing trends that have pauperized Somali culture in favour of provincialism. It may also be the only weapon to use to stop the dogs of war and the gathering clouds of war lurking over Sole, Sanag and Lasacanod region which is ironically the home of Hadrawi and his newly-wed bridegroom.

By: Faisa Roble