Where Documentary Meets Poetry
Honoring my mother and foremothers with an intimate audio experiment.
Dearest Mother / Emebeat / Emuye / Etemete / Abiye / our family tree / is a story of geography / but the only maps I make are made of words / yours is a journey between two worlds / one I will never be / the other / you will never speak / aloud / unless I ask the questions …
Fragments are fascinating materials to work with, particularly, fragments of memory inherited from those closest to me. But memories are nothing neutral. They’re extremely (and explosively) more subjective than pieces of paper or scraps of words re-assembled together, like a puzzle. So, what do you do, then? How do you confront a history that's a mystery for the listener and misery for the speaker? How do you carefully uncoil the tight grip of the past or capture recollections of struggle with tenderness, with equal parts inquiry and delicacy?
JOURNEY(S): Addis to DC is my attempt to address those questions and others implicitly tied to the story of any first or second-generation family. I want to document my origins while filling in some of the blanks with my own thoughts and reflections.
The experimental docupoem is an intimate audio scrapbook that travels across time and between two capital cities—Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Washington, DC, where my mother, Emebeat Askale Bekele, immigrated in the early 1970s. I combine my mother’s oral history with my original poetry to create a layered narrative collage, inspired by Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.
I debuted the pilot episode (28 mins), earlier this month, on KPFA, a Bay Area radio station, as part of their International Women’s Day programming. And, now, thanks to funding from HumanitiesDC, under the DC Oral History Collaborative Partnership, I will be able to develop the project into a docupoem anthology. (I just got the news this past week.) The five-part series will include interviews with other elders from my village—especially, female elders, from the Ethiopian community, who are too often muted or entirely left out of historical accounts.
Because the project is so personal to me, it’s only fitting to begin with my mother’s story. I let her voice guide me through the creative process. Her anecdotes and slivers of memory helped me better understand how we both got here, literally and figuratively. I learned what it was like for her coming to America for the first time, arriving in DC, as a wide-eyed 18-year-old. Her journey has allowed me to explore my own identity; to unpack my cultural inheritance and re-examine the meaning of “home.”
You can listen to the 28-minute pilot episode of JOURNEY, here on KPFA’s website.
I’m also releasing a special, 38-minute extended cut, exclusively for Substack subscribers. This updated version has been re-edited to include over 10 minutes of bonus audio unavailable elsewhere. Scroll down to hear for yourself and share your comments below.
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