A History of Tigrinya Literature in Eritrea:The Oral and the Written 1890-1991 (review)

A History of Tigrinya Literature in Eritrea comprises eight chapters, a note on fieldwork, an appendix, and a new preface to go with this new edition. A History of Tigrinya Literature grew out of Negash's PhD research project carried out between 1994 and 1999, and was first published in 1999 by the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Negash mentions in the preface to this second edition that the project's genesis lay in "two significant and auspiciously concurring developments . . . that together created conditions at once challenging and encouraging" (xi). The first development is political-historical: the emergence of Eritrea as a newly independent country. The second development is the historic rise into intellectual eminence of postcolonial discourse, offering a range of critical vocabulary and practice needed to identify, interpret, and contest older forms of hegemonic formulations. Postcolonialism afforded Negash an ideal prism through which to look at the Eritrean situation.

These two historical developments, auspicious and emancipatory as they seem to be, are not, however, without internal contradictions. In the case of the new nation, Negash, courtesy of Fanon, is aware of the "pitfalls of national consciousness" and is thus reluctant to cede ground to an overly jubilant and celebratory nationalism. Yet, the writing of the book would not have been possible had Eritrea still been in the clutches of Ethiopian domination. Then again, postcolonial theory offered the writer a range of options "to productively unmask relationships in societies and nations characterized by power differentials" (xiv). In this instance too, Negash is aware of the shortcomings of postcolonial theory, as shown when he writes, "Of course, I do not hold today a conviction that post-colonial theory as I dealt with it then is perfect or complete" (xv). The preface, therefore, not only contextualizes the book's genealogy but also delineates the parameters within which Negash's argument and intent assume their necessity and poignancy.

Chapter one explicates and contextualizes the aims and scope of the study. One of Negash's main objectives in this chapter is to force readers to unlearn the minimal, indeed nugatory, information they might have had on Eritrean literature in Tigrinya. He sees a collusion, a convergence of interests, between the scholar-researcher, whether foreign or indigenous, and the form of government in place. Expatriate scholars are, more often than not, at the mercy of the regime in power, since no research permits would be issued to those scholars whose views were (in real or imagined terms) antithetical to the objectives of the regime in power. Negash gives the example of two scholars—Albert Gérard and Joanna Mantel-Niecko—whose work he sees as ungenerous to and dismissive of Eritrean literature. In African Language Literatures, Gérard states that, as a result of colonialism and missionary incursions into the Horn of Africa, "several peripheral, non-Amharic languages, such as Tigré, Tigrinya and Galla [Oromo] were reduced to writing" (qtd. in Negash 21). The operative word in the preceding sentence, "peripheral," is both indicative of Gérard's uninformed judgment of the linguistic situation in the region as well as the machinations of the now defunct imperial regime in Addis Ababa. Negash's objection, I take it, is also to Gérard's imperial viewpoint that authorizes, without being ironical, the peripheral status of the non-Amharic languages. Amharic must be seen as a site where power and language intersect. Gérard's comments, however, appear innocuous compared to the words of Mantel-Niecko, who unabashedly claims that "no imaginative literature seems to have been produced in any of the non-Amharic vernaculars of Ethiopia" (qtd. in Negash 21). The less-than-sure tone of Mantel-Niecko's use of the word "seems" is not lost on the reader. Perhaps this is a case of ignorance camouflaging itself as knowledge, but the words of...