Review of Hama Tuma's poems

»Of Memories and Dreams in Hama Tuma’s”Of Spade and Ethiopians ‘
By arefe
By Kumlachew Fantahun


‘The struggle of the writer is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness.’

Milan Kundera

Many critics are of the opinion that Ethiopian literature in English is a closed book. Apart from a few novels, poems and plays, one can find scattered here and there; writing in English is not the norm in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia boasts of an ancient writing tradition and unique alphabet in Africa and accordingly it has a rich Geez and Amharic writing heritage. But when it comes to English, it lags very far behind other African countries.For example, our neighbor, Kenya far surpasses Ethiopia in the amount of literary production in English. The reason of course, is not far to seek. Debebe Seifu in his master’s thesis ‘Ethiopian Literature in English’ has the following to say about the dearth of writing in English. ’Looked at from the point of view of the hoary Geez and Amharic literature creative writing in English is a baby tradition in Ethiopia…. It has brief history of only two decades. When we look at the amount of English writings produced in some other African countries, the output in Ethiopia strikes us scanty intermittent and not very encouraging.’

The reason for this paucity of creative writing in English are the following, according to Debebe
1.Ethiopian writers have a strong background in Amharic that disallows them to resort to or at least give an undivided attention to writing in English … And, English has never been the first official language in Ethiopia.
2.English has not been given emphasis in Ethiopian schools; hence, lack of adequate mastery or command of the language inevitably barred those who might otherwise have as pined to write in English
In I In particular, English poetry is a rare phenomenon in Ethiopian. There are notnotnot many writers trying their hands at poetry.

ha Debebe’s theses treat only two poets writing in English, Tsegaye

Ge GebreMedhin and Eyasu Gorfu.

E Nowadays, the situation appears to be improving with many writers

incr increasingly trying thier hands at poetry English.Hama Tuma ‘s poetry pc collection, ‘Of Spade and Ethiopians,’ (Free Ethiopian Press, 1991) is a cas a case in point.



The predominant theme in Hama Tuma’s ‘Of Spade and Ethiopians’ is that of cultural memory and an attempt to make archeology of wrongs and cruelties of the Red Terror, and infamous phenomenon that followed in the wake of the misdirected-1974 Revolution. It seems that those who survived through those dreadful days are nowadays looking back and putting the memory of this Ethiopian Holocaust to writing, there by redeeming the lost, if only in imagination. They reminiscence on the horror and heinous acts of the ‘inhumanity of man against man’ wrought by the then rulers. Fictional and non-fictional works that are coming out bear testimony to this tendency of invoking the past and reminiscence on it.

Himself a significant actor in the EPRP and with first hand experience, Hama Tuma often dwells both in his fiction and poetry on the horrendous acts perpetrated by the architects of Red Terror. We read of such appalling cruelties as cutting the penis of a man and make his mother eat it, women’s genitals ripped open by hot iron, bottle of wine filled with sand hanging by thread on a person’s penis. In particular, his poems, ‘Of Spades and Ethiopians’, “To Bury a Brother’, ‘No Wine Bottles please!’ ‘Voice of the Dead’, ‘The Grader and Dreams. ‘Responsibility’, ‘Breaking the Monoculture Economy’, ‘Some Threads from History’ deal with those evil days and the attendant atrocities.

In ‘Of spades and Ethiopians’ the poet not content to write about the events says

What I need is not a pen, but

A shovel with which to dig the dirt

And throw it down the garbage can of non-history’s oblivion.

A country of ‘an ignorant mass, backward and more’, though blessed with ‘a modern king far sighted to the core’ was still wallowing in misery and poverty until the monarch’ successor took the throne and assert “it pulled Ethiopia out of the middle ages in just a handful of years.” by introducing land to the tiller, Soviet style democracy and mass-organizations. Since the country is lucky enough to have the privilege of being governed by this ”cool, intelligent, wise and determined leader’ in order for his noble objectives to be achieved and for the country to remain safe, nobody should be-allowed to tamper with the progress of the revolution. The mighty wave has to go untrammeled, sweeping everything that stands in its way to reach its destination.

All revolutions devour their sons

be they French or Russian

Why do you want an exception in the Ethiopian one?

Reminiscent of the communist saying, ‘revolution is not a dinner party’, the next stanza gently reminds us of the sorry but ineluctable choice the revolution was faced with;

So don’t exaggerate the Terror bit

For the enemy must be hit

Too bad if a generation dies

Revolution means trying times

As is the case with his brilliantly ironic stories, his poems also are full of wry humor and subtle irony. The laughable silliness as well as the slavish servility of the revolutionary leaders are portrayed very vividly and also mocked.

If Brezhnev hums a tune,

Mengistu will sing it loud

The stupidity that results from total allegiance to an alien creed is brought out in the following sarcastic poem;

I have been to Russia and even Georgia

But the worst Russian I’ve ever met lives some where in north Ethiopia

He thinks Stalin’s death is an imperialist plot directed against Ethiopia.

Some of the atrocities of the red terror were so horrible that any question as to appropriateness and rationality of the actions could be silenced with a resort,’ it also happened in Russia.’

Human life was rendered so cheap amid easily expendable that towns were turned into killing fields where minions off the powers that be could shoot people at will and with impurity, so eyewitnesses tell us. The Red Terror people were busy killing and with so many people to shoot they eventually run short of bullets, which therefore had to be retrieved from the corpses and be paid for by any one who came to claim the bodies of the dead. The following lines depict this gruesome picture; the lesson ostensibly being in a worthy revolution nothing comes gratis.

The soldier outside

counted the bullet holes

in my brother’s corpses.

I paid the price

got the receipt

and took my brother away.

Away from the pile

forgotten already




I still had a burial to pay.

Here we are faced with the irony of paying for having for brother killed for the sake of revolution, which promised better days.In ‘No wine bottles, please’, the poet relates the gory spectacle he witnessed in the third police station. A wine of bottle filled with water is hung with a nylon thread on a penis of ‘anarchist recalcitrant’. In case some find this too horrible to contemplate, the poet adds some mitigating remarks, which implies that this manner of torture pales in comparison with other crueler ones;

A torture to make you holler

But some say it is bland

And not so bad

Compared to other threatens they have had.

In ‘The voice of the Dead’, the personae of the poem confronts its implied readers with penetrating and piercing questions to which, one has to give satisfactory answer or be tortured with guilt feeling. It seems that the one to whom the question is posed won’t able to escape unless he can account for what course of action that he took in relation to the massacre.

Where were you?

When you brother screamed for help

When young girls got raped

And mothers went mad seeing their children butchered

Right in front of them.

In another similar poem, those who felt it unwise to be engaged and dirty themselves with realities of the day are castigated and brought to task. The crude and absolutely deeds were such that, the poet seems to say; it would be a crime to simply stand and watch, unengaged and non-committal.

When the knife entered

your brother’s heart,

You simply watched

worse still,you walked away

without a protest or a shout.

The tragedy of the Red Terror was not only physical. It killed bodies yes. But it did much more than that. It killed and buried a nation’s beautiful dreams and hopes. The student movement which helped to overthrow the centuries old feudal system gave rise to hopes of better future and emancipation. But no sooner was the monarch ousted than a new and more sinister leader took his place, there by dashing the hopeful expectations of the people by snuffing out the lives of the educated youth who with enthusiasm and verve were trying to inaugurate democracy to the nation.

The short poem, ‘The Grader and the Dream’ deals with this poignant loss,

The ditches are filled

The burial complete

no speeches are made

no epitaphs planned

no building rises up

It’s only dreams

of a fair tomorrow

only the nation’s hope that is getting buried .

However, though the revolution is chiefly to blame for the dashing of hopes and dreams of the nation, the poet points out that we Ethiopian as a people are not much given to dreaming and imagination. He seams to attribute this paucity of imagination and incapacity for being visionary to moral cowardice and pursuit of ephemeral pleasures.

In “An empty cry” he deplores what he takes to be his fellow countrymen’s myopic vision and inability to transcend inconsequential hedonistic pursuits, He asks rhetorically.

Are we born so wretched

that our dreams

got only as far as a woman’s thighs.

as to clap for the boots

which crushes the flowers to dust.

The poet seems to imply that our fear of change is such that it would amount to visionary quixotism to dream of an Ethiopia free of war and famine. Of course, when a people are so accustomed to a succession of misfortunes, it would take courage of utopian scale to ever imagine a radically different future. This appears to be the idea contained the following lines, suggesting incredulity at the thought of an Ethiopia bereft of strife.

Who knows what will happen

If Ethiopia finds peace.

Will the world turn upside down?

Or will is stay the same

The point, of course is not lost on the reader. A peaceful Ethiopia is almost impossible to imagine. Their phonetically similarity nonetheless, Ethiopia and utopia are poles apart. Hama Tuma says facetiously to dream of utopia in Ethiopia is crime, a treachery because it would threaten its pact with its plight. In a supremacy ironic poem, ‘I love my nightmare’, the poet echoes the observation many writers have made about the Ethiopian (and African) fear of change.

Last night I had such a dream

an utopian unEthiopian dream

I thought I saw famine gone

He goes on to relate a bright scenario he envisioned, people smiling “with their hearts and eyes; a noise of festive drums, well-fed peasants, mothers going to church to praise not to pray. But somewhere along the poem, the poet tells us that he wakes up from his dreams in-fear for having such ‘a terrible dream’ because he saw the future and it was not… bleak’

I woke up in fright

scared the kebeles might jail me

as a dissident not content

with his nightmare present

and dreaming like those in forest.

As the above sketch attempted to show, memory and dream are the salient features of Hama Tuma ‘s poem.