Ye Wonz Maeibel (Deluge): Salem Mekuria’s Ethiopian Self-portrait
By Moye Okediji
Ethiopian Review, July 1996
Remapping her fractured dreams along the bloody streets of Ethiopian history is what Salem Mekuria tackles in Ye Wonz Maeibel (Deluge). Why, therefore, is Deluge broaching the genre of graffiti art? Autophilia, self-portraiture (exposure?), tagging. Projecting voice of self over visuals (rap?); text as image as text; autodocumentary iconography; aquatic autoanyltical fetishism; graffiti/montage moviea Basquiat aesthetics crowned with I-locks. But is there not some sense of heroism, of danger, in the graffiti artist, a disdain/admiration for, fear of authority, of the L.A. police, of Haile Selassie? A sense of trenching up in the underground, moving swift and silent in the night, tagging, drive-by shooting, tagging by shooting, shooting by tagging… when days turned to night, right at midday noon? A la Mogadishu, merely playing hide and seek with war whores. And then growing up too rapidly to learn that it was not a theater, a nightmare, but hard reality, things that actually happened, what continues to happen? The graffiti artist survives along the bloody streets, using the paint canisters and spray (sometimes real) guns. Surviving along the bloody streets of Ethiopian history, film canisters in tow, is what Salem does in this autobiographical work, Ye Wonz Maeibel (Deluge.) These are mean streets stained with the blood of close relatives friendly victims. How do you deal with all this carnage? How to make a narrative of all these stories spun from a single, complex tale of Ethiopia? How do you wash this mess from the mind?
Her tag in Ye Wonz Maeibel is water. Among many African societies, water is the fetish of purification, of life and abundance, of healing and feeling. But, on the contrary, water in swift rapids could be deadly. And when boiling, the same quantity of water that quenched the thirst could cook the throat. The febrile political change in temperature came with the dethronement of Emperor Haile Selassie. Inheriting a revolution which they did not initiate or understand, a revolution hatched by the intellectual sector of Ethiopian petty bourgeoisiethemselves utterly alienated from the realities of the masses of the peoplethe Ethiopian military wrecked an ancient system without the mechanism to install any workable alternative.
The students and professors who initiated the struggles against Haile Selassie did not have an orchestrated vision, making it easy to split them into factions, and turn them against each other. Ye Wonz Maeibel shows how the fracturing of the student revolution in Ethiopia ripped apart members of the same family, childhood friends, traditional allegiances and all forms of stability. The entire streets of Addis Abeba became one long night during which only outlaws and gangs of sanguineous graffiti artists stalked the shadows, sporting spray guns.
The autobiographical, autodocumentary narrative in Ye Wonz Maeibel adds a tangy texture to the picture. It is not some impersonal documentary. It is the case of a writer/director/producer shooting her own life, (taking her own life, shooting herself), in the volatile gallery of contemporary Ethiopian history, with the obvious implication of fatality. There lies the graffiti movie, gangsta-rap, dionysiac youth tragedy. Her real brother dies, just as in the inner cities. Organized violence. Death is the adjective of this film, constantly (dis) qualifying life. Cold, political, not Hollywood death. Her best friend dies in most undignified circumstances. The calligraphy of death and young blood is boldly tagged on the wall, in the hemoglobin and wailing of those who died in the revolution, those who continue to grieve from their losses, those who remain completely dislocated physically, mentally or spiritually, by the events following the fall of the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Haile Selassie I.
Salem enters Ethiopian archives as if it were a family album. With a casual style of elegant familiarity, she shows us the pictures. Sordid her framings often are. Excavated mass graves ringed by moaning mothers form pictures in the mind that do not fade easily. Montages of death and hope. And life continues. And the dying continues, and the suffering continues, and the autobiographical reels keep rolling, even as the water torrents bleach the old writings on the graffiti wall, and the streams of the past flow into the present and form the deluge of the future of modern Ethiopia. At the end, even hope is a scarce commodity, but not water with which to tag.
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Moyo Okediji is Assistant Professor/Artist at Department of Art, Wellesley College, Massachusetts.