Paper short abstract:

Weaving together stories and recollections elicited by listening to Somali love songs, this paper explores the deeply personal and political ‘work’ that memory performs in the shadow of war and forced displacement, with a focus on memory-work as a form of ‘re-membering’ and affective placemaking.

Paper long abstract:

‘Music’, writes Tia DeNora, ‘moves through time, it is a temporal medium’. For this and other reasons, scholars have noted the unique potential of music to trigger memories that are particularly dynamic and emergent—to make the past ‘come alive’, as DeNora puts it. Indeed, during research on the social and political lives of love songs in Somaliland, nearly every conversation I had with a diverse set of interlocutors included some kind of reflection on the way that love songs conjured powerful memories of people, of places, of special moments in individuals’ lives. And in the wake of a war that decimated the artistic sphere and scattered people—and cassette tapes—across the globe, the memories evoked by pre-war love songs seemed to offer a special type of comfort and connection, both for those who had returned to Somaliland and those still living abroad. In this paper, I reflect on the kinds of memories that are facilitated by listening to or speaking about love songs. Weaving together a variety of love song-elicited recollections, I pay particular attention to the kind of ‘work’ that memories perform in the shadow of war and mass forced displacement. Sometimes deeply personal and sometimes political, these stories reveal memory to be about far more than reminiscing about the past. I ultimately suggest that this love song-facilitated memory-work is about ‘re-membering’ the present, to borrow from Anne-Marie Fortier, and a kind of affective placemaking that stitches together people and feeling across space and generation.