The Romance of Ethiopia

The Romance of Ethiopia:A Critical Introduction Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), Salamishah Tillet (bio), and Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis (bio) Appraising the literature, life, and culture of Ethiopia is a daunting undertaking. Like its history, Ethiopia's literary and cultural traditions are so vast, and so rich, that they exceed the grasp of a single volume. Indeed, as we embarked on editing this special issue, we were well aware of the challenges in representing a civilization that began to thrive before the common era; whose earliest manuscripts are millennia old; and whose archive includes not only the remains of human effort and creativity, like texts and monuments, but also the remains of the earliest form of our species. Given the challenges posed by the expansiveness of Ethiopia's timeline, how to give this special issue its focus was one of the three conundrums we faced. Another was drawing together the writing and art of Ethiopians in Ethiopia as well as its Diaspora. And still another challenge was how to align narratives from historical Ethiopia with those from outside its borders, like the New World, where the idea of Ethiopia has been a source of spiritual and political armor and creativity. We met the first challenge by narrowing the focus of this issue on modern and contemporary Ethiopia. Of course, a broader discussion of the Horn of Africa would be remiss not to acknowledge the utter prestige and age of Ethiopic civilization-one whose legacy stretches back past imperial Abyssinia to the Proto-Axumite period beginning in the fourth century BCE. The early beginnings of what is today modern Ethiopia already garner significant attention in the world of classical and ancient history, and rightly so. This was an early, complex civilization built and controlled by an indigenous African people. And we know from history that Axum was not just an early civilization; it was also a major one: at its height in the third century CE it covered a vast region including parts of southern Egypt, northern Sudan, Djibouti, Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia, and it was considered by contemporaries (including the well-traveled Persian thinker Mani) to be one of four major empires of the world alongside Persia, China, and Rome. Axum was also the first African polity to print its own coinage as currency-with the insignia on one side in Ge'ez and on the other side in Greek. One might think of these minted coins as perhaps a prescient harbinger of the intense battle over power and status that would later mark Ethiopia's imperial legacy and its subsequent Afro-Marxist upheaval. In much of the scholarly literature, the romance of Ethiopia does seem to begin here: as a powerful ancient merchant society of sub-Saharan Africans that spoke a written language and minted coins, and that had the ambition and nerve to conquer the people and land around them. This romance is almost naturally distended to the well-marked story that follows [End Page 8] Axum: that of the Christian Ethiopian empire, whereby it becomes one of the world's first Christian states and also the sole African people to stave off successfully European colonization. The cast of characters and their sets are mighty and well-known: Makeda, Menelik I, Tewodros, Magdala, Menelik II, Taitu, Adwa, Haile Selaisse, et al. This romance of Ethiopia-from Axum to Adwa-indeed evokes a riveting past, not only historically but also politically, culturally, and anthropologically. It is also not insignificant that it unmasks what much of the world assumes about the history of Sub-Saharan Africa. However worthy, Axum-to-Adwa is decidedly not the Ethiopia that we call attention to in this issue. We wish to highlight a less-heralded era of Ethiopian society that has no chiaroscuro under which to sit; thus we are being deliberate in turning away from the more conventional measures of Ethiopian greatness-war, wealth, conquest, and power-and towards a more subtle and critical understanding of its literature, life, and culture. Modern and contemporary Ethiopian literature, one of the three focal points of this issue, is a relatively new enterprise. As Yonas Admassu points out, "unlike their literary progenitors who wrote in Ge'ez

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