War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry

Chapter Two. War

21 Chapter Two War The Tigrinya poems in Who Needs a Story that focus unrelentingly on war are Fessahazion’s Michael’s ‘Naqra’ and Solomon Drar’s ‘Who Said Merhawi Is Dead?’ In Tigre, Mussa Mohammed Adem, more than any Eritrean poet in any language in the anthology, focuses on war to the exclusion of all else. In Arabic, war and little else inspires Mohammed Osman Kajerai, the oldest poet in Who Needs a Story. Born in 1956, Solomon Drar is a novelist, historian, essayist, historian and poet. With an M.A. in Theatre Studies from Leeds University, he is the director of Hdri Publishers. His books include two novels – Mekete (Challenge: originally written in 1988, published in Asmara in 1992) and Echa Hanti Sidra (A Family’s Destiny, 1994) – and a historical work, Eritrawiyan Kommando: Qiya 18 Deqayiq (Eritrean Commandos: A Legend of 18 Minutes, 1996). The original Tigrinya poem, ‘Who Said Merhawi Is Dead?’ is from the anthology, Mezmur Tegadalay. ‘Who Said Merhawi Is Dead?’ enacts a kind of perpetual ‘martyrs day’, commemorating a war hero yet an entire mindset of war that Eritrea’s life and peace, the poem maintains, must always depend on. The poem’s eponymous refrain, ‘Who said Merhawi is dead’, insists that the spirit of war can never be put to rest but must persist at the heart of peace. Even if it prevails to allow a ‘Harvesting [of] the fields of gold’, Drar perpetually hears ‘His name, Merhawi, Merhawi / In the whirlwind / Of the revolution’, which must also never cease. The image of ‘the whirlwind’ recurs repeatedly in Scripture as God’s way of waging war against the enemies of the Hebrews, the Hebrews themselves or any individual requiring some kind of physical or spiritual punishment or purgation. Drar’s poem would not be the first time that modern Eritrea has had a point of comparison with modern Israel: fiercely independent, selfdetermined , belligerent, a relatively new country based on an ancient culture, and often viewed as standing alone and persecuted. Yet ‘[T]he whirlwind / of the revolution’ in Eritrea similarly promises little peace, although traditionally in literature the image of ‘harvesting’ implies peace and fulfilment. Nevertheless, for Drar the name, ‘Merhawi’, punning in Tigrinya on ‘the fields of gold’, suggests that their seeming to denote an image of tranquility and a kind of final reward or fruit of one’s labors is ironic. Through linking and even equating the war hero and ‘fields of gold’, the pun on ‘Merhawi’ suggests a perpetually 22 embattled spirit – a constant ‘whirlwind / Of the revolution’ – ‘[b]uried in the ground’, as stated in the poem’s beginning, but also exploding in the fields. Drar sees in the character of Merhawi a perpetual readiness for armed struggle, even if it must be turned inward on the human heart. Merhawi’s ‘mother stands proud / And his bed blossoms’, but his memory and spirit foster a kind of perpetually aggressive attitude. The profound, mythopoeic image of the blossoming bed, later complimented by Drar’s joining the heroic vision of Merhawi to the Eritrean present – Working together Like water and milk And a perfect fit Of hand and glove…. – barely conceal a perpetually warlike and restless spirit unable to be content with such images because ultimately their beauty can make one forget the harshest kinds of reality and violence that make them so attractive in the first place. Whereas Ghebremeskel envisions a kind of solemn, wordless candlelighted procession en masse for Martyrs Day, culminating in transcendent and tremendous burst of light, Drar sees and hears a much more agitated demonstration: sisters and brothers Come and sing ‘Thanks, Merhawi, thanks’, As they stroll down Liberation Avenue…. Who said Merhawi is dead And rots in a grave, Or that the Red Sea salt Eats him, and the frost North on Rora Burns his skin, If we see his blood Shimmering in our veins…? For Drar, Ghebremeskel’s transcendent ‘candles and more candles’ to ‘light… upthehorizon’paleincomparisonwithEritrean‘blood[s]himmering’andcannot sustain the nation’s hard won independence. It can only ‘fall like unripe fruit / Into corruption’, caught in what might even be the illusion of Ghebremeskel’s dawn of peace. The specter of such dissolution stalks national liberation movements not only in Africa but worldwide, and Drar’s organic imagery of rotting fruit 23 suggests that if a revolution merely follows its natural course ‘corruption’ may even be inevitable...