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2. Ecopoetic and Ecolinguistic Approaches to ‘Broken Places’: Orature of Displacement Around the Ethiopian Capital

  • Assefa Tefera Dibaba (author)
  • Adugna Barkessa (author)
Chapter of: Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation(pp. 83–112)

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Metadata
Title2. Ecopoetic and Ecolinguistic Approaches to ‘Broken Places’
SubtitleOrature of Displacement Around the Ethiopian Capital
ContributorAssefa Tefera Dibaba (author)
Adugna Barkessa (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0405.02
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0405/chapters/10.11647/obp.0405.02
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightAssefa Tefera Dibaba; Adugna Barkessa;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2025-01-31
Long abstractThis paper uses ecopoetic and ecolinguistic approaches to analyse the oral traditions of the Oromo people living in two areas surrounding the Ethiopian capital city, Koyyee Faccee and Boolee Arraabsaa. It explores how oral traditions have been affected by the forced displacement of local people as a result of top-down and unplanned urbanization and industrialization. The present study contributes to the ongoing green discourse about the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment, which is of global concern. We folklorists, poets, and linguists have not yet considered the relevance of ethnoecology. The relationship between people and their environment has been a vital source of inspiration for the literary traditions of Oromos living in the two areas under analysis. When people are forcibly displaced from their environment, a part of their identity – that part derives meaning from the land and the landscape – dies. Abandoned, wrecked by war and violence, or turned upside down in the name of state-driven “development”, these places become, from the perspective of their old inhabitants, lost or “broken”. Orature practitioners that derived inspiration from a specific stream or mountain also lose their source of literary creativity. Orature is not only a passive victim of these changes though. In this paper we investigate how orature has been a powerful tool of resistance for displaced people, who have used songs and poems to articulate counter-narratives of protest and dissent.
Page rangepp. 83–112
Print length30 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Assefa Tefera Dibaba

(author)

Assefa Tefera Dibaba is a poet, educator and researcher based at Addis Ababa University (2019 to the present). He is the author of anthologies of poems in Oromo including Anaany’aa (1998, 2006, 2022), Edas-Edanas (1997, 2022), and Finfi (Ilyaada) (2014), and in English: Decorous Decorum (2006), The Hug (2011), Symposia (2018), and Ate-Loon (2020), and he has published works of prose including Danaa (2000), Eela (2009), and Theorizing the Present (2004). Faced with persecution in Ethiopia because of his writing, Assefa relocated to the US in 2010 thanks to the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, and subsequently completed a PhD in Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University (2011-2015). He presented his recent research in ethnoecology and ecopoetics at SOAS University of London in November 2019 as part of the MULOSIGE research project. Assefa's latest book is a voluminous (511 pages) ethnographic autobiography in Oromo (Anis-Atis, 2023), written in a poetic-prose style, which looks back at his personal and professional endeavours through the prism of the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic aspirations of the Oromo people and their movements for freedom.

Adugna Barkessa

(author)
Associate Professor at Addis Ababa University

Adugna Barkessa Dinsa is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics and Development at Addis Ababa University, a post he took up in 2008. Adugna teaches courses in applied linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, dialectology and language standardisation. He is the author of seven books: Terminology Related Problems in Teaching Afaan Oromoo (2009), Introduction to Afaan Oromoo Grammar (2010), Basics to Teaching Afaan Oromoo and Literature (2011), Introduction to Applied Linguistic Research (2011), Afaan Oromoo Word and Its Structure (2012), Arra Gurba ‘Novel’ (2017) and Afaan Oromoo Textbooks (grade 3, 6, 11 and 11). His PhD research was on “The Discursive Construction and Representations of the Waata Identity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Oral Texts”. His articles include “Discursive strategy of Orommara: A critical discourse analysis of Abiy Ahmed’s Political Rhetoric” (Ethiopian Journal of the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2010), “Back to or Away from the Glorious Past: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Abiy Ahmed’s Political Talk” (East African Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2021), “Oath in Oromia courtroom: A critical discourse analysis” (Oromia Law Journal, 2020) and “A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gendered Representations in Afaan Oromoo Textbook” (East African Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2020).

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