Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses preliminary findings of on-going research on modernity and revolution in Ethiopia. It focuses on the poet of the ethio military socialist regime Assefa GMT, and his book The Voice, dedicated to Agostinho Neto, inquiring its rhetoric and context of production, and present erasure.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents and discusses the preliminary findings of an on-going research on modernity and revolution in Ethiopia, focusing the cultural environment with special regard (in this case) to the literary production in the last fifty years, against the broader picture of postcolonialism, internationalism and pan-africanism.

The episode brought into attention concerns the awarded and once most praised poet of the Ethiopian Socialist Military regime, Assefa Gebremariam Tesemma, who dedicated his book The Voice (1979) to the Angolan poet President Agostinho Neto whom he met in Luanda at the Afro-Asian Writers Association Conference.

Assefa passed away last year in exile. National press ignored it while praising the emergence of the newly appointed Prime-Minister, and while, in the streets, images printed on stickers of Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam were sold side by side with the new and past Ethiopian 'heroes'. The multiplicated cummulative reproduction if images is not yet followed by the public debate about an almost silenced period of Ethiopian contemporary history, nor by new reading and study of literary and art works bringing into the light the recent and traumatic past that post-1991 regime attempted to erase.

Besides a brief analysis of the poetic rhetorics and topics of The Voice, the paper will question the ambiguities between the rehabilitation of Mengistu's image as new icon for consumption, and the erasure of the poet's pamphletary words. Is one word finally more powerful than ten thousand reproduced images?