[Linganth] Christina Woolner on Somali love songs

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
This week on the blog, Christina Woolner muses about her book, Love Songs
in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland, responding to Amanda Weidman's
questions.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: At first listen, both music and talk about love are
conspicuously absent from Somaliland’s public soundscapes. The lingering
effects of war, the contested place of music in Islam, and gendered norms
of emotional expression limit opportunities for making music and sharing
personal feelings. But while Christina J. Woolner was researching
peacebuilding in Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa, she kept hearing snippets
of songs. Almost all of these, she learned, were about love. In these
songs, poets, musicians, and singers collaborate to give voice to personal
love aspirations and often painful experiences of love-suffering. Once in
circulation, the intimate and heartfelt voices of love songs provide rare
and deeply therapeutic opportunities for *dareen-wadaag *(feeling-sharing).
In a region of political instability, these songs also work to powerfully
unite listeners on the basis of shared vulnerability, transcending social
and political divisions and opening space for a different kind of politics.

Taking us from 1950s recordings preserved on dusty cassettes to new
releases on YouTube and live performances at Somaliland’s first postwar
music venue—where the author herself eventually takes the stage—Woolner
offers an account of love songs in motion that reveals the capacity of
music to connect people and feelings across time and space, creating new
possibilities for relating to oneself and others.
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