Other typical Tizita song lyrics echo similar sentiments, such as: Outdoing yesterday, shouldering on today,īorrowing from tomorrow, renewing yesteryears,Ĭomes tizita (memory) hauling possessions
This song form, which has probably been re-recorded by every major contemporary Ethiopian singer worth their salt, was exemplified at the time of the revolution by Mahmoud Ahmed’s stirring version, recorded one month after the revolution and running nearly 13 minutes.ĭirectly addressing an absent lover and an absent memory, Mahmoud Ahmed’s song laments: What bothered me most as a child – although some of this might be exaggerated memory constructed in retrospect – was that nearly every Ethiopian social event I attended with my parents in the 1980s seemed to end with the burning of myrrh and a replaying of variations on a typical ballad taken from the Amharic songbook entitled Tizita (Memory). As I grew up in Canada, Guyana, and Barbados while also travelling between other major metropoles, I found that what framed any meaning I might construct out of being Ethiopian in these various geographies was an intense sense that the émigré adults around me had lost something that none could name explicitly. If I had an intuition that meaning was always inextricably accompanied by a relation to force, this is because my own childhood experiences were profoundly shaped by the residue of sadness that permeated Ethiopian family life for those who emigrated from the country in the 1970s and 1980s. My interest in Ethiopian political life stems from a need developed early in life to understand ‘the meeting of force and meaning’ in the various popular and academic narratives constructed around the Ethiopian revolution of 1974.
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