Literature of Eritrea
Encyclopedia
Eritrean literature in the Tigrinya language
dates, as far as is currently known, from the late 19th century. It was initially encouraged by European missionaries, but suffered from the general repression of Eritrea
n culture under Fascist rule in the 1920s and 30s. The earliest published works were primarily translations or collections of traditional poems, fables and folktales, but the renaissance of Eritrean culture promoted by the British administrators after 1942 included the appearance of the first novels in Tigrinya.
was the main language of Eritrea
, and for some time thereafter it remained the language of literature. This literature, shared between Eritrea and Ethiopia
, consisted mainly of historical tales about royals and other nobles; ecclesiastical works, often in translation; and religious poetry. Ge'ez passed down to modern Tigrinya
the Ge'ez alphabet
and a substantial vocabulary.
The continued dominance of Ge'ez as a literary language after it was supplanted by Tigrinya as a demotic tongue means that very little is known of 'low' literature prior to the arrival of European missionaries in the 19th century. The first work published in Tigrinya was a translation of the Gospels, written in the 1830s and published in 1866. European missionaries were responsible for a stream of publications from the 1890s onwards, including the first Tigrinya language newspaper in 1909.
giving an account of his journey to Italy
five years earlier. Giyorgis was a scholar who taught Tigrinya in Naples
, as well as studying the Italian and Latin languages. He was very conscious of his trailblazing role as "the father of Tigrinya literature": in his foreword to the work, he wrote that, "our main drive has been... to furnish those who yearn to learn Tigrinya with material for exercise". The content of the pamphlet indicates that his primary audience, however, was the educated elite of his home country, as it focuses on the author's impressions of the exotic country to which he had travelled. Negash praises the artistic quality of the work, arguing that it is, "endowed with special linguistic mastery and artistic, literary craftsmanship".
The early years of the 20th century saw several further works appear: the first of these was a collection of forty fable
s and folktales by Ghebre-Medhin Dighnei. This was published in a journal in Rome in 1902. It contains nine fables with animal characters, typically depicting the stronger animals as unjust and untrustworthy, while the weaker animals are virtuous but powerless. The other thirty-one stories are folktales, including (number 34) The Boy Who Cried Wolf
.
Other publications of this period included three collections of oral poetry
by Carlo Conti Rossini, Johannes Kolmodin and Jacques Faïtlovitch
. Conti Rossini published his Tigrinya Popular Songs between 1903 and 1906: this ran to 166 works, with notes and commentary in Italian. It is divided into three parts. Part one contains 73 love poems, mostly by men, while part two consists of lovers' complaints. Part three, called 'Songs of Various Arguments' includes more substantial works, notably: masse
poems, written for special occasions and combining entertainment, education and praise for tribal leaders; melke, written for funerals and praising the deceased; and dog'a, poems of general mourning. Two of the masse are accounts of the late-19th-century conflict between two chiefs, Ras Weldamichael of Hazzega and Deggiat Hailu of Tsazzega, an event which has continued to be the subject of folk narratives down to the present day. It is also a substantial presence in Kolmodin's collection, Traditions of Tsazzega and Hazzega, which forms a narrative of the history of Eritrea over the few centuries preceding the Italian colonization. Finally, Faïtlovitch's Habasha Poetry is a collection of 125 dog'a poems, assembled from the preceding work of Winqwist and Twolde-Medkhin of the Swedish mission.
One original work from this period was How the World Was Set Ablaze because of Two Serpents, a 270-line poem published anonymously in Rome in 1916. The work is a commentary on the First World War, which the author sees as a war between the true Christian
countries of the Entente Powers
and the 'champions of Islam', Austro-Hungary and Germany
. In his preface, he explains that he wrote it because, "I want you to know in time about this terrible darkness which has deeply affected my conscience".
in Italy, was a lean time for Eritrean literature. Education became a matter of indoctrination, emphasising the superiority of Italian over native culture. The missionary education efforts which had helped to give birth to an Eritrean literary culture were discouraged by the colonial administration.
The only substantial fruit of this period was a further volume from Conti Rossini: his Tigrinya Traditional Proverbs and Songs was published in 1942, immediately after the end of Italian rule. This was again a work in three sections: the first, a collection of almost 500 proverbs, with Italian commentary; the second, accounts of Eritrean traditions and lineage; and the third a mix of 86 messe, melke and dog'a poems. The effect of the occupation is apparent in a number of poems praising the Italian rulers.
has said that, "The 30 years from about 1942 until the early 1970s witness the greatest flowering of Tňa writing hitherto encountered". One of the driving forces behind this blossoming was the Eritrean Weekly News. Supported by the British authorities, this publication went through 520 issues over ten years from 1942, with a circulation of around 5000 copies. It was edited by Ato Waldeab Waldemariam, another employee of the Swedish mission in Asmara
, and published a wide range of fiction and non-fiction as well as news stories. The paper was also associated with the Tigrinya Language Council, a body established in 1944 to promote a modernised, correct form of the Tigrinya language.
Despite this literary renaissance, no Tigrinya books were published until the late 1940s. This has been attributed to a lack of funds and publishing know-how among the Tigrinya intelligentsia, and to the continuing control by Italians of the country's few printing presses. The breakthrough came in 1949, when Yacob Ghebreyesus published Legends, Stories and Proverbs of the Ancestors. Ghebreyesus was a Catholic priest and teacher, and published his collection of a hundred stories, 3300 proverbs, and various poems in order to provide reading material for his pupils.
The first Tigrinya language novel appeared in 1949-50, although it was originally written in 1927. A Story of a Conscript, by Ghebreyesus Hailu, tells the story in 61 pages of a group of Eritreans forced to fight for the Italians in Libya
. The hero returns to his village after many travails, only to find that his mother has died in his absence. He composes a melkes poem mourning her death and condemning the rule of the Italians. Another novel, Dawn of Freedom, published by Teklai Zeweldi in 1954, has a similar theme, telling the story of several generations of one family opposed to Italian rule. It is written on a more sophisticated technical level than Hailu's work, often interweaving multiple narrative strands in a single chapter. A third work published around this time, Resurrection and Victory by Zegga-Iyesus Iyasu, is an "unambiguously moralistic and religiously didactic" allegory. Over the next 20 years, many further volumes appeared in the already-established traditions of didactic fictions, novels, anthologies and translations.
Tigrinya language
Tigrinya , also spelled Tigrigna, Tigrnia, Tigrina, Tigriña, less commonly Tigrinian, Tigrinyan, is a Semitic language spoken by the Tigrinya people in central Eritrea , where it is one of the two main languages of Eritrea, and in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia , where it...
dates, as far as is currently known, from the late 19th century. It was initially encouraged by European missionaries, but suffered from the general repression of Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
n culture under Fascist rule in the 1920s and 30s. The earliest published works were primarily translations or collections of traditional poems, fables and folktales, but the renaissance of Eritrean culture promoted by the British administrators after 1942 included the appearance of the first novels in Tigrinya.
Origins
Between the fourth and eleventh centuries AD, the Ge'ez languageGe'ez language
Ge'ez is an ancient South Semitic language that developed in the northern region of Ethiopia and southern Eritrea in the Horn of Africa...
was the main language of Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
, and for some time thereafter it remained the language of literature. This literature, shared between Eritrea and Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, consisted mainly of historical tales about royals and other nobles; ecclesiastical works, often in translation; and religious poetry. Ge'ez passed down to modern Tigrinya
Tigrinya language
Tigrinya , also spelled Tigrigna, Tigrnia, Tigrina, Tigriña, less commonly Tigrinian, Tigrinyan, is a Semitic language spoken by the Tigrinya people in central Eritrea , where it is one of the two main languages of Eritrea, and in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia , where it...
the Ge'ez alphabet
Ge'ez alphabet
Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is a script used as an abugida for several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea but originated in an abjad used to write Ge'ez, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Church...
and a substantial vocabulary.
The continued dominance of Ge'ez as a literary language after it was supplanted by Tigrinya as a demotic tongue means that very little is known of 'low' literature prior to the arrival of European missionaries in the 19th century. The first work published in Tigrinya was a translation of the Gospels, written in the 1830s and published in 1866. European missionaries were responsible for a stream of publications from the 1890s onwards, including the first Tigrinya language newspaper in 1909.
First publications
The first literary text in Tigrinya was published in Europe itself: in 1895 Feseha Giyorgis published a pamphlet in RomeRome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
giving an account of his journey to Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
five years earlier. Giyorgis was a scholar who taught Tigrinya in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, as well as studying the Italian and Latin languages. He was very conscious of his trailblazing role as "the father of Tigrinya literature": in his foreword to the work, he wrote that, "our main drive has been... to furnish those who yearn to learn Tigrinya with material for exercise". The content of the pamphlet indicates that his primary audience, however, was the educated elite of his home country, as it focuses on the author's impressions of the exotic country to which he had travelled. Negash praises the artistic quality of the work, arguing that it is, "endowed with special linguistic mastery and artistic, literary craftsmanship".
The early years of the 20th century saw several further works appear: the first of these was a collection of forty fable
Fable
A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...
s and folktales by Ghebre-Medhin Dighnei. This was published in a journal in Rome in 1902. It contains nine fables with animal characters, typically depicting the stronger animals as unjust and untrustworthy, while the weaker animals are virtuous but powerless. The other thirty-one stories are folktales, including (number 34) The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
The Boy Who Cried Wolf, is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. From it is derived the English idiom 'to cry wolf', meaning to give a false alarm.-The fable and its history:...
.
Other publications of this period included three collections of oral poetry
Oral poetry
Oral poetry can be defined in various ways. A strict definition would include only poetry that is composed and transmitted without any aid of writing. However, the complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain, and oral...
by Carlo Conti Rossini, Johannes Kolmodin and Jacques Faïtlovitch
Jacques Faitlovitch
Jacques Faitlovitch , an Ashkenazi Jew born in Łódź, Congress Poland, studied Ethiopian languages at the Sorbonne under Joseph Halévy. He traveled to Ethiopia for the first time in 1904, with support from the French banker Baron Edmond de Rothschild. He traveled and lived among the Ethiopian Jews,...
. Conti Rossini published his Tigrinya Popular Songs between 1903 and 1906: this ran to 166 works, with notes and commentary in Italian. It is divided into three parts. Part one contains 73 love poems, mostly by men, while part two consists of lovers' complaints. Part three, called 'Songs of Various Arguments' includes more substantial works, notably: masse
Massé
Massé is a French surname and may refer to:* Marcel Massé , Canadian politician* Victor Massé , French composerIt may also refer to a billiards cueing technique - see Glossary of cue sports terms#Massé...
poems, written for special occasions and combining entertainment, education and praise for tribal leaders; melke, written for funerals and praising the deceased; and dog'a, poems of general mourning. Two of the masse are accounts of the late-19th-century conflict between two chiefs, Ras Weldamichael of Hazzega and Deggiat Hailu of Tsazzega, an event which has continued to be the subject of folk narratives down to the present day. It is also a substantial presence in Kolmodin's collection, Traditions of Tsazzega and Hazzega, which forms a narrative of the history of Eritrea over the few centuries preceding the Italian colonization. Finally, Faïtlovitch's Habasha Poetry is a collection of 125 dog'a poems, assembled from the preceding work of Winqwist and Twolde-Medkhin of the Swedish mission.
One original work from this period was How the World Was Set Ablaze because of Two Serpents, a 270-line poem published anonymously in Rome in 1916. The work is a commentary on the First World War, which the author sees as a war between the true Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
countries of the Entente Powers
Allies of World War I
The Entente Powers were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire; Italy entered the war on their side in 1915...
and the 'champions of Islam', Austro-Hungary and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. In his preface, he explains that he wrote it because, "I want you to know in time about this terrible darkness which has deeply affected my conscience".
Fascism
The remainder of the Italian colonial period, particularly after the rise of FascismFascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in Italy, was a lean time for Eritrean literature. Education became a matter of indoctrination, emphasising the superiority of Italian over native culture. The missionary education efforts which had helped to give birth to an Eritrean literary culture were discouraged by the colonial administration.
The only substantial fruit of this period was a further volume from Conti Rossini: his Tigrinya Traditional Proverbs and Songs was published in 1942, immediately after the end of Italian rule. This was again a work in three sections: the first, a collection of almost 500 proverbs, with Italian commentary; the second, accounts of Eritrean traditions and lineage; and the third a mix of 86 messe, melke and dog'a poems. The effect of the occupation is apparent in a number of poems praising the Italian rulers.
Renaissance
The incoming British administration had a much more enlightened attitude to its subjects than its predecessor. Edward UllendorffEdward Ullendorff
Edward Ullendorff FBA was a British scholar and historian, especially in Semitic languages and Ethiopia.-Biography:...
has said that, "The 30 years from about 1942 until the early 1970s witness the greatest flowering of Tňa writing hitherto encountered". One of the driving forces behind this blossoming was the Eritrean Weekly News. Supported by the British authorities, this publication went through 520 issues over ten years from 1942, with a circulation of around 5000 copies. It was edited by Ato Waldeab Waldemariam, another employee of the Swedish mission in Asmara
Asmara
Asmara is the capital city and largest settlement in Eritrea, home to a population of around 579,000 people...
, and published a wide range of fiction and non-fiction as well as news stories. The paper was also associated with the Tigrinya Language Council, a body established in 1944 to promote a modernised, correct form of the Tigrinya language.
Despite this literary renaissance, no Tigrinya books were published until the late 1940s. This has been attributed to a lack of funds and publishing know-how among the Tigrinya intelligentsia, and to the continuing control by Italians of the country's few printing presses. The breakthrough came in 1949, when Yacob Ghebreyesus published Legends, Stories and Proverbs of the Ancestors. Ghebreyesus was a Catholic priest and teacher, and published his collection of a hundred stories, 3300 proverbs, and various poems in order to provide reading material for his pupils.
The first Tigrinya language novel appeared in 1949-50, although it was originally written in 1927. A Story of a Conscript, by Ghebreyesus Hailu, tells the story in 61 pages of a group of Eritreans forced to fight for the Italians in Libya
Libya
Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
. The hero returns to his village after many travails, only to find that his mother has died in his absence. He composes a melkes poem mourning her death and condemning the rule of the Italians. Another novel, Dawn of Freedom, published by Teklai Zeweldi in 1954, has a similar theme, telling the story of several generations of one family opposed to Italian rule. It is written on a more sophisticated technical level than Hailu's work, often interweaving multiple narrative strands in a single chapter. A third work published around this time, Resurrection and Victory by Zegga-Iyesus Iyasu, is an "unambiguously moralistic and religiously didactic" allegory. Over the next 20 years, many further volumes appeared in the already-established traditions of didactic fictions, novels, anthologies and translations.