Wilcox, Hui, and Melaku Belay. “Filega/To Search: Embodying Community in Ethiopia.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 5, nos. 1-2, 2022, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv5n1-2a115
Introduction
Every January since 2015, Ethiopian dance artist Melaku Belay[1] organizes Filega ፍለጋ (“to search” in Amharic), a series of street performances in Addis Ababa, during Timket ጥምቀት, an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian celebration of Epiphany. Christianity, introduced to Ethiopia during the fourth century A.D., has been tightly woven into local cultures. Timket celebrates Jesus’s baptism through both somber church ceremonies and jubilant street festivities. This paper’s analytical focus is Filega, a recently devised performance event within the context of Timket. The paper asks: How has Filega emerged from Timket? What is the social and political significance of Filega, considered through the lens of decoloniality?
This work draws on the growing literatures relating to African performance studies and dance studies (Andre et al. 8; Beckera and Schulzb 150; Castaldi 14). These fields emphasize the role of embodied performance in “African decolonization and postcolonial identity formation” (Kabir and Djbbari 314), recognizing performance as “a primary site for the production of knowledge” (Drewal 2). Building knowledge around identity is an important part of the decolonial process in Africa; as Achille Mbembe reminds us, “In order to decolonize, it was necessary to know oneself” (44). Artists and scholars in Africa have been on a quest to understand complex postcolonial identities, refusing “views, assumptions, and misreadings that have not always incorporated firsthand experience” (Andre et al. 12). Highlighting Melaku’s firsthand experience as a cultural producer and performer, our reading of Filega illustrates the creative agency of Ethiopian artists who envision and create spaces for community, joy, imagination, and freedom amid prolonged national political crises. Such agency has decolonial implications if we take to heart Mbembe’s assertion that “an active will to community, […] the will to life” is the essential meaning of African decolonization (2–3). Filega’s decolonial significance also lies in its disruption of dichotomies, such as discipline/freedom and sacred/profane, as well as in its potential to transform public spaces and collective memories in service of community.
In this paper, we seek to decolonize our writing practice by unsettling the theory/practice dichotomy and experimenting with modes of co-authorship. First, we explain how our different positionalities necessitate multiple voices and registers in our writing. Following an introduction to the historical and social contexts of Timket and Filega, Melaku shares his own theory about Filega—one that cannot be untangled from his artistic practice. To facilitate the reader’s imagination of Filega and prepare the ground for our conceptual exploration, Hui Wilcox offers a thick description of Filega based on video recordings. Afterwards, we shift into conversations that explore how Filega defies dichotomous understandings and opens up space for community and decolonial imagination. Our conclusion encourages learning from grassroot practices such as Filega in the effort to decolonize not only performance, but also our disciplines.
The co-authors Melaku Belay and Hui Wilcox occupy different geographical and cultural locations: Melaku is an Ethiopian dance artist and thinker, and Wilcox a Chinese-born American scholar and dance artist. Our collaboration began in 2016 when we co-wrote an international grant that funded a music festival in Ethiopia. Melaku grew up as an orphan in Ethiopia during the 1980s and did not have the opportunity to master academic English. In his native Amharic, Melaku is a charismatic orator and frequently interviewed on Ethiopian media. As global knowledge production is dominated by English and written words, Melaku’s knowledge as a dance artist and cultural producer requires translation for audiences beyond Ethiopia. Wilcox has taken up this task, fully aware of its potential pitfalls. Translation remains necessary in the global flow of knowledge that mirrors the dynamics of colonial exploitation, where resources are harvested for and consumed by the English-speaking world. Mbembe thinks more positively of translation as a co-occurrence of multivocality, and “a way to avoid perpetuating the knowledge/power asymmetries that currently fractures global humanity” (78).
Trust and shared curiosities grew as we collaborated as transnational cultural workers. When we realized the urgency of deconstructing the colonial narratives around dance in Ethiopia (Wilcox and Melaku 17–18), we started researching and writing together. This collaboration, both virtual and in-person, involves “deep listening” that “pays close attention to words, gestures, and affects of what is being communicated, when, and how” (Nagar 212). Wilcox organizes our ideas and writes; Melaku reads and gives feedback. We read passages out loud together to incorporate oral traditions in this “dance” of co-writing.
In our effort to publish together, we must also “dance” around existing academic conventions. With the aim of being transparent about our different positionalities, we used our respective voices for an article in 2020. The editors, however, insisted that we adopt a unified voice. Our accedence was reluctant, but we have come to see the conditional merit of a merged voice: despite the difference in our locations and identities, a division in voice runs the risk of reinforcing the false divide between theory (assigned to the North/academic) and practice (assigned to the South/non-academic). We are “relational and co-constitutive. […] Whatever we learn, whatever we come to be, becomes deeply contingent on what each one of us is prepared to give to the collective journey” (Nagar 212). The following questions we grapple with are thus relevant to decolonial knowledge production: How can the academy include thinkers and cultural workers not schooled in academic English without locking them in the role of practitioner and informant (McKenzie 7)? Can two thinkers from differentially powered locations merge their voices as is often the case when academics co-author? Will publishers accept the somewhat fragmented writing that reflects the ethics of our collaboration? That is, can we write as two distinct individuals in conversation, speaking not on behalf of but “in proximity to” each other (Balsom par. 16)?[2]
Together, we decided to combine univocality and multivocality. Although for the most part we speak with a unified voice, we also deploy the conversation form to elucidate our different perspectives: Melaku as a lifelong Timket participant and the organizer of Filega, and Wilcox as a viewer of Filega videos from 2019 to 2022. Our analysis draws on Melaku’s embodied experience, Wilcox’s empathetic viewing, and 18 interviews that we conducted with Filega participants and observers from 2021 to 2023.
The 1896 Battle of Adwa, wherein Ethiopians defeated Italian colonial forces, sealed Ethiopia’s status as a symbol of African freedom. But given the century-long colonization of the continent and the brutal occupation of Ethiopia by Italy (1935–1941), one can hardly imagine Ethiopia as having been spared from the pernicious impact of colonialism. European and North American powers exerted their political and economic influence as they monitored, curtailed, and engaged with the modernization of Ethiopia throughout the twentieth century (H. Marcus 123–127). From the perspectives of minoritized groups in the country, the building of the Ethiopian nation has been a process of internal colonization, subjugating peoples outside the political center through military conquests and cultural assimilation (Jalata 95).
The complicated relationship between Orthodox Christianity and colonization—both external and internal—is beyond the scope of this paper (H. Marcus 1–47). Suffice to say, Orthodox Christianity has become the dominant religion and effectively marginalizes indigenous spiritualities (C. Marcus 150). According to a 2017 report, Ethiopia has the world’s second largest Orthodox population (Diamant par. 2). The 36 million Orthodox Christians make up 43% of Ethiopia’s population, while Muslims and Protestants constitute 35% and 19% respectively. Partly as a result of the designation of Timket as a national holiday, “in living memory Timket became a civic festival” (C. Marcus 168). To Cressida Marcus, Timket illuminates how pan-Ethiopian nationalism, a civic identity, is expressed through religiosity. The system of ethnic federalism, instituted in the mid-1990s in Ethiopia by the post-socialist government, prioritizes ethnic identities over a pan-Ethiopian national identity. In this context, Cressida Marcus asserts that “religion offers an alternative communalism” (144) across ethnic differences. While tension between different religions and denominations exists, it is ethnic identities (more so than religion) that drive conflicts in the country. In popular portrayals, Timket stands in as an expression of “being Ethiopian”: “having the spirit of unity regardless of how different we are” (Lidya 49)[3] as it brings together people from different ethnic and even religious backgrounds.
Timket is a three-day celebration. The first day is for church processions on the street. Day two begins with a somber mass outside the temporary church tents and culminates in the holy water blessing of believers. On day three, the rivers of people journeying to and from the sites of blessing are punctuated by spontaneous whirlpools of singing, dancing, and praying. Filega stands out as one of the most orchestrated performances on day three, featuring singers and dancers of various ethnicities based in Addis Ababa and performers from southern Ethiopia. Led by Melaku, the performers convene at Fendika Cultural Center (of which Melaku is the founding director) in the morning. They ride minibuses to the vicinity of Yeka Mikael Church, then walk to the Church and back. During this walk surrounded by crowds of thousands, the performers make four stops to sing and dance. Onlookers in the crowd clap and sing along, with some even jumping in to dance with them.
In our study of Filega, we are vigilant against objectification—a function of colonial ideologies and positivistic methodology that assumes the separability of the observer and the observed (Drewal 12–17). Objectification is part and parcel of “particular forms of anthropological knowledge (knowing about Others)” that “never fully acknowledge these Others as thinking and knowledge producing subjects on their own terms” (Mbembe 79, emphasis ours). We thus center Melaku’s own thinking of Filega and prioritize his embodied knowledge over academic theories, although we are also wary of the theory/practice dichotomy. Melaku has a theory for Filega, albeit one that is not articulated in conventional academic language.
When I was growing up around Yeka Mikael Church, Timket was a huge melting pot of Amhara, Oromo, Gurage, Tigray, and Minjar[4] music and dance. That was where I learned how to dance. I love seeing people of all ages dancing together, perfect strangers dancing the same rhythms. Even though they don’t understand each other’s languages, they communicate through the language of dance.
With dance going on everywhere during Timket, one can join anytime for a variety of reasons. One may jump in claiming, “This song is from my village!”, “This song is about my river!”, or simply, “This is fun, and I would like to dance with them!” Our belonging that manifests at Timket can be ethnic, national, or just human. One of the biggest contributions of Timket is to showcase the co-existence of cultural differences within Ethiopia.
However, for many years, we didn’t see Dawro or Gamo[5] people in Addis Ababa’s Timket. Many of us in Addis Ababa are ignorant about our diverse cultures, especially those from southern Ethiopia, which are underrepresented in the mainstream. I do my part to strengthen our Timket tradition and to broaden its scope with Filega by bringing marginalized groups to perform in Addis Ababa. For example, the Gamo singers are migrant workers in Addis Ababa, living and working in their own neighborhood. They are known for weaving beautiful fabric but are looked down upon by society. Often enduring poverty, some of them gather and sell eucalyptus branches to support their families.
Currently in Ethiopia, we face the challenge of ethnic conflicts that are often instigated by self-appointed political elites. What happens at Timket shows the falsehood of these political deployments. Just watch how people of different ethnicities celebrate together in harmony, how they dance together, and how they embrace each other.
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Melaku articulated the above ideas during an interview (Fendika Cultural Center, Filega) and in a blog article (Melaku pars. 5–10) in January 2021. It was a time of escalated inter-ethnic violence in Ethiopia.[6] Critiquing the official culture of ethnic hierarchy and elite power struggles, Melaku espouses the ideal of a multi-ethnic nation and human co-existence. Seven months later, Ethiopian scholar Semeneh Ayalew published a commentary on the political crisis in Ethiopia. Recognizing the social fracture and suffering in the country, Semeneh calls for the rebuilding of Ethiopia’s social fabric through revitalization of traditional practices that bring people together across differences (pars. 7–8). He posits the ritual of collective mourning as “a site of possibility for healing” (Semeneh par. 7): “Instead of relying on political actors, […] we must insist on relating to one another with the depth of our humanity, our wailing guts and emotive faculties” (par. 13).
Melaku shares Semeneh’s vision of communalism through performative rituals that mobilize embodiment and affects. In Ethiopia, those who lose a family member are visited by family and friends for multiple days before the funeral service. Mourning is thus an affirmation of life and community, fulfilling similar social functions as other collective rituals such as Timket. What sets these rituals apart is their salient emotional registers: grief or joy. Having lost ties to his biological family at the age of three owing to political turmoil in the 1980s, Melaku knows grief firsthand. However, Timket and other community celebrations have immersed him in the joy of dancing since his childhood. Melaku has chosen to build communities with dance.
Despite the entanglement of meanings in rituals of Timket and collective mourning, Ethiopians avoid joyful music and dance when mourning. Melaku thus faced criticism for continuing music and dance programs at Fendika Cultural Center after the civil war broke out in November 2020. “Someone confronted Melaku, asking him, ‘How can you sing and dance when people are dying and starving?’” (Interview, December 2020). Instead of responding to this criticism, Melaku continued to work to make sanctuaries of creativity and love in a divisive and confusing political environment that fosters violence and hatred. Between 2021 and 2023, we interviewed 18 Fendika visitors (six of whom are regular Filega participants). Each talks about the sense of community they feel at Filega and/or Fendika, where they observe that “all are welcome regardless of difference” (Interviews, January 2023). Some noted a Tigray musician’s performance at Fendika to an appreciative audience during the war when people of Tigray ethnicities were imprisoned by the government (Interviews, January 2023). Filega and Melaku’s year-round work at Fendika Cultural Center attest to and shore up “the resilience of the social-fabric” (Semeneh par. 15).
Melaku could continue his work as a cultural producer in Addis Ababa because the capital city was spared the active warfare and infrastructure breakdowns experienced on the country’s periphery. But the conflict did affect Timket and Filega in Addis Ababa. Judging from the video archives of Filega, its 2019 edition (before the war) took place among bigger and thicker crowds than the 2020 edition (during the war). In the next section, Wilcox offers a thick description of the video of Filega 2019 to help the reader imagine this rich performance event.
These videos take me to the sunlit streets near Yeka Mikael Church on the third day of Timket in 2019. I see countless people—men, women, young, and old—dressed in holiday attires (white fabric with colorful brims). Some wear blue jeans and t-shirts. In people’s hands are cell phones, water bottles, and sticks for dancing. Some women carry folded umbrellas. Some keep their umbrellas open, providing shade for others nearby, too. The crowd takes over entire streets, with motor vehicles parked along the edges. People perch on any structure that offers a good view: an open-air veranda, a wall, or a pile of rubble. All are eager to get a good look at the action on the street.
This collective gaze falls on Filega, which is composed of two distinctive groups. The first group is a dozen women of the Gamo region, all in their 50s or 60s. They wear white, long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses with headwraps that frame their wrinkled faces. The Gamo women specialize in vocalizing and rhythmic clapping; they carry the melody or harmonize when others sing. Sometimes they join the dancing, especially when encouraged by two older Gamo men who dance constantly. Their dance steps are steady in a one-two rhythm, either walking in circles or jumping straight up and down on both feet, accented by sudden directional shifts of the torso.
The other group—the Dawros—is composed of dancers (two men and two women), two male drummers, and four male players of long wind instruments that make raspy sounds. They wear clothing with red, yellow, and white stripes. Their dance movements involve horizontal and diagonal isolations of the rib cage, shoulders, and head. The women’s form-fitting dresses fall just below their knees, accenting their swaying hips. Their feet shuffle close to the ground, allowing their hips to sway when they move in linear or circular formations. When the music intensifies, they jump sideways with vigor. When the dancers face the audience and sweep the length of the performance area—a clearing out of the crowd—feet leaping in the air and arms swinging back and forth, I can feel their earth-bound energy even from a computer screen.
There is a third group in Filega but they blend in with the rest of the crowd, the women in white or flowery dresses and the men in jeans and shirts. Melaku stands out among the group. He wears a traditional white outfit with embroidered details around the collar, wrists, and hems of the pants. He is not the only person dressed all in white, but clearly the busiest. In some of the videos, Melaku is seen shoving and shouting to split the thick crowd and create performance spaces for Filega artists. When the music starts, he shifts into performance mode, clapping and jumping to the beats while cajoling others to join in. At the same time, he stays a vigilant organizer and occasionally stops people from getting too close to the performers. Melaku’s “patrolling” keeps the choreography intact until the improvisation session begins. Then, he dances full out—but frequently steps away to make space for other dancers only to return to clapping and working the crowd.
When a young girl of six or seven stands out as a good dancer, Melaku dances with her. As a Dawro woman sashays over to dance with the girl, he leaves. Then, he sees two boys dancing together and guides the girl over to form a circle with the boys. The crowd goes wild. At the end of this session, he picks up the girl and lifts her overhead, cheering, “Yay!” Later, when Melaku dances in a circle with three women, the same girl watches from the inner ring of the audience and takes a tentative step forward as if she wants to join. However, she is pulled back by an older woman who is with her. This fleeting interaction does not escape Melaku and he moves over to invite her back into the dancing circle.
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In these videos, we see and feel the spirit of Filega: joyful togetherness. We see the breakdown of hierarchies and the inclusion of people of different ages and gender or ethnic identities. By incorporating minoritized groups in Filega, Melaku changed the soundscape and the colors of Timket in Addis Ababa. He also made it possible for migrants from the South to perform their cultures in public and socialize with others from the region. Filega carves out a space—however fleeting in time—for people to experience multi-ethnic harmony in a nation torn asunder partly as a result of the political manipulation of ethnicity. A woman observer of Filega commented, “The Gamo people are special: they are skilled weavers who dress all Ethiopians, and yet they are marginalized in our society. It is great that Melaku has brought them to join the celebration” (Interview, February 2023). A male photographer who documented Filega from 2019 to 2023 reflected on how “people are surprised to see the Gamo and Dawro artists. I myself didn’t even know that they celebrated Timket [before I joined Filega]. Seeing everyone together gives us new imagination and new perspectives. […] We fight each other because we don’t know each other’s culture. If we see that we worship the same God, we can have unity and peace” (Interview, February 2023).
Melaku, Filega participants, and onlookers agree on the performance’s unifying potential. But this annual day-long event did not happen magically. Through our conversations below, we aim to illuminate the multi-faceted work that brings forth Filega. The conversations took place over Zoom, starting in January 2021.
Wilcox: You were doing so many things during Filega! Dancing, cheering, clearing space…
Melaku: I’m usually exhausted by the end of the day. I look for good spots for the group to perform on the street; it’s better if we’re in the shade and near a shop so that we can buy drinking water. I make sure the performers are not too tired, especially the elderly Gamo women. [...] Because the groups sing in their own languages, which the audience might not understand, I try to connect everyone energetically through dancing and clapping.
Wilcox: I’ve heard you say that Timket is a place where you enjoy dancing with others until you can “fly”. Do you feel that while organizing Filega, your responsibilities compromise the feeling of freedom that comes from dancing?
Melaku: I always enjoy dancing regardless of the circumstance. Dancing is my prayer and my way to heal. I do the organizing because I want others to experience the same, and I want us to heal together.
Wilcox: From my perspective, I see that Filega participants can dance freely precisely because you stay disciplined as an organizer, never forgetting your duty. You are there to discipline others, too.
Melaku: Yes, but most importantly, people discipline themselves. Our peace and happiness together are possible only if we agree to stay disciplined.
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A woman artist of Fendika who has participated in Filega yearly since 2015 attests to the mutual constitution between discipline and freedom during the festival, saying, “I feel free singing and dancing at Filega. Even though a lot of people follow us, we all feel safe because we are together as a group with Melaku as our leader” (Interview, January 2021). Both Melaku and the Fendika artist acknowledge that to dance freely, discipline is necessary—especially at the group level, it is important to stay together and have a responsible leader.
Performance demands discipline and performance is a discipline. The discipline Melaku refers to signifies the constraints both individuals and communities must exercise. However, a discipline is also a system of knowledge and methods. Invoking Frantz Fanon, Mbembe talks about decolonization as “first and foremost a discipline. It equipped the colonized subject with the knowledge and method necessary for self-understanding and self-interpretation” (55). Even if Ethiopia was not colonized by European powers, decolonization of the mind and the body remains an urgent project against the tyranny of authoritarian states. Naming his event Filega, Melaku is in search. When asked by an Ethiopian journalist what he was searching for, he replied, “Identities” (Fendika Cultural Center, Fendika). Alongside him, the self-disciplining participants of Filega activate their knowledge of dance and music as well as century-old methods of living together. By doing so, they embody a decolonial “active will to community” (Mbembe 2–3) on the edge of state control and societal sanction.
The state maintains its control of the public space during Timket as security personnel are posted throughout the city. Police take over the broadcast system in between church services, telling people to be orderly and watch out for thieves. Permits are required for the use of professional cameras. If Filega were billed as a performance, Melaku would need to apply for a permit. To get around the regulation, he never publicly refers to Filega as a performance: “It’s easier to just go as part of the crowd” (Interview, January 2021).
But the state and religious institutions are not the only sanctioning forces confronting Melaku as he organizes Filega. Individuals sanction, too. The night before Filega in 2021, Melaku received a message on Facebook, “Timket is not a dance party. It’s a day when our king Lord Jesus Christ was baptized by John the Baptist. So we only celebrate it by singing spiritual songs and by worshipping. God bless!” (Interview, January 2021). Our next conversation explores the tension between Filega and the religious context it lives in.
Wilcox: What do you think of this message? It seems to show disapproval of your work with Filega in the context of Timket. Does your work as a dancer contradict your religion?
Melaku: I grew up with Orthodox Christianity. I know the religion well and the prayerful aspect of Timket is important to me. We pray not only for our own well-being, but for peace and love of [all of] humanity. Filega is about coming together, about seeing each other; it fits perfectly well with Timket.
Wilcox: From what I can see, Timket encompasses church processions as well as dance parties. During the culminating mass, clergymen use garden hoses to spray holy water at the crowd. These ecstatic people carry the celebration onto the streets [in what] looks like joyful dance parties. But I also see that dancing in Filega might fall outside of the sacred as defined by the Church. In one of the videos from 2019, when improvised dancing reaches a climax, one of the onlookers gets into the center and starts gyrating his pelvis with remarkable flexibility. People laugh. You are particularly entertained by his dancing. Laughing along with the crowd, you step out of your disciplining role for a moment and allow space for craziness.
Melaku: Yes! Everybody laughs, even though they might feel embarrassed to look. I love crazy moments like that. In Ethiopia, I am “the crazy one with the crazy hair”. People consider being a dancer one of the lowest occupations. They think we dancers are possessed by the Devil. But I am a believer! I might not attend church, but I follow the core teachings that might have been missed by many of the churchgoers—like praying for all of humanity.
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In our own conversation about the hip gyration, we might have reinforced the binary of sacred versus profane. It is important to note that hip movements are incorporated in spiritual dances of many cultures. On much of the African continent, it was the European colonizers that introduced the distinction between sacred and profane as defined by Christianity (Comaroff and Comaroff xviii), and the attendant denigration of the body in contrast to the mind. Despite the hegemony of Orthodox Christianity, indigenous cultural elements remain entrenched in Ethiopia (Abebe and Vambe 346–348). In Filega, indigenous dance knowledge is reflected in the fluidity of the lower body—not only by the twerking man, but also in the more formal performances that originated from southern Ethiopia.
However, the line between the sacred and the profane is commonly upheld in Ethiopia owing to the strong religiosity of the population (Diamant par. 2). Filega, and dance in general, disrupt this distinction, especially as Melaku asserts that neither Filega nor dance contradicts orthodoxy. To him, religion is about praying and envisioning a better world; so is performance. A participating artist concurs: “At Filega, our dance is our prayer for renewal and each other’s wellbeing” (Interview, February 2023).
In 2021, Timket took place amid intensified ethnic conflicts throughout the country. The international media exposed how many Ethiopians were experiencing hunger, while citizen journalism focused on ethnically motivated killings and lamented the lack of government intervention. Although the crowd was thinner than usual, people in Addis Ababa poured into the street for Timket. Melaku had doubts about whether to organize Filega in such a political climate, but artists from the south called him to express their interest in performing. Maybe the joyful Filega transposes people into a spiritual plane where worldly pains subside, or perhaps rampant suffering spurs the need for even more prayers. Whatever the case, the community of Filega artists has grown over the years. We shall now explore how the growth of Filega could effect cultural change in Addis Ababa and beyond.
Wilcox: The last few videos from 2019 show a huge crowd jumping and chanting. Everyone has a smile on their face; with their bodies wedged among other bodies, they have nowhere else to go but up and down. You are one of the jumping humans. What was it like being there?
Melaku: It was as if we were all flying together. Some people were crying because the feelings were so intense.
Wilcox: And what exactly were those feelings?
Melaku: It’s just the ultimate freedom.
Wilcox: What happens to the feelings when the day is over? Some people say events like this give people a chance to let out their emotions; afterwards things go back to “normal”, and nothing really changes.[7] What are your thoughts on that?
Melaku: The majority might be like that; that’s why society doesn’t change fast. But to me, the magic stays in my heart and in Fendika Cultural Center. After seven years, many people expect to see Filega every time when Timket comes. Fendika employees participate every year and they look forward to it.[8] At first, they called it “Melaku’s Timket,” but now they say Filega with me because they see the meaning behind it—we search together.
Wilcox: What is the impact of Filega on the broader public, beyond Fendika?
Melaku: The community is jumping and dancing with us right there! They are in the thousands!
Wilcox: True! And for those not there, some offer responses on social media. They comment on the beauty of the Dawro dances and the harmony of Gamo singers. People say, “Pure unity! You are blessed!” (Fendika Cultural Center, Dawro) and “You are doing a wonderful thing! This will bring wonderful harmony to our country—100% for sure!” (Fendika Cultural Center, Filega).
Melaku: I’m not alone in believing in our potential to change and to achieve peace through the arts. Filega is a condensed version of what I do every day at Fendika Cultural Center. We present music and dance concerts three times a week, and we welcome artists and audiences of all backgrounds. People come to Fendika for the same reason they go to Filega: a sense of renewal in community.[9]
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Filega (and Fendika, by extension) alters the space of Timket by integrating marginalized ethnic groups in Addis Ababa. For minority artists who live on the margins of the Ethiopian nation and imagination, “to walk and to dance through the city is to insist on space, to demand space, and perhaps sometimes to find it” (Davids 94). As Melaku has organized Filega annually since 2015, local audiences experiencing Filega in person or those who do so online remember the time of Timket differently. Performance “reframes and recodifies the way ‘history’ is traditionally recorded” (Davids 94). Suggesting the possibility of unity, these moments of community archived by Fendika on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram[10] have become part of the collective memory of Addis Ababans. Immediately after the 2023 Filega, Fendika’s Facebook post featuring photos of Filega reached 386,272 people between January 21 and February 3, 2023. A member of the Ethiopian diaspora who follows Fendika’s social media concludes, “Melaku’s Timket on the grounds of Yeka Mikael has become an institution” (Interview, February 2023).
Taking place as it does during Timket, a religious celebration, Filega engenders a shift from hegemonic religiosity to grassroots cultural practices that include and empower marginalized identities. However, Filega does not rebel against religiosity. It unfolds in the public space provided by the dominant religious institution and its founding artist, Melaku, proclaims strong faith in Orthodox Christianity. Our contextualized reading of Filega reveals the capacity of Ethiopian artists to create beauty, joy, and community; they do so by disrupting the dichotomies between discipline and freedom, the sacred and the profane.
Our method of collaborative writing confronts yet another colonial dichotomy: theory versus practice. Engaging with Melaku’s embodied practice on his own conceptual terms, we evoke Simpson’s idea of grounded normativity or “ethical frameworks generated by place-based practices and associated knowledge” (22). We share her belief that these practices contribute to decolonization by animating notions of governmentality not based on “enclosure, authoritarian power, and hierarchy” (22). To avoid the enclosure of meanings, we aim to speak in proximity through the conversation form, which leaves space for more perspectives to chime in (Balsom par. 16). This space is intended not only for our own perspectives, but also for those of our readers—much like how Filega makes space for anyone to jump in to dance. Shoulder popping, feet shuffling, hip gyrating: all are welcome. Along with Filega participants and witnesses, we search for decolonized understandings of self, community, and discipline.
[1] Per Ethiopian custom, we use given (not family) names to refer to individuals who self-identify as Ethiopians.
[2] Even though Trinh T. Minh-ha is speaking about film, her articulation affirms our choice of multi-vocality and conversation both as a form of speaking nearby and as a matter of decolonial ethics: “When you decide to speak nearby, rather than speak about, the first thing you need to do is acknowledge the possible gap between you and those [you represent]: in other words, [...] although you’re very close to your subject, you’re also committed to not speaking on their behalf, in their place, or on top of them. You can only speak nearby, in proximity [...], which requires that you deliberately suspend meaning, preventing it from merely closing and hence leaving a gap in the formation process. This allows the other person to come in and fill that space as they wish. Such an approach gives freedom to both sides and this may account for it being […] a strong ethical stance. By not trying to assume a position of authority in relation to the other, you are actually freeing yourself from the endless criteria generated with such an all-knowing claim and its hierarchies in knowledge. While this freedom opens many possibilities in positioning the voice of the film, it is also most demanding in its praxis.” (Balsom par. 16)
[3] What it means to be Ethiopian is fiercely debated among competing ideologies, such as pan-Ethiopianism and ethno-nationalisms (Assefa 113; Shelemay 12). Downplaying his ethnic identity (Amhara), Melaku identifies as an Ethiopian. His allegiance is to the people associated with Ethiopia, not the political entity.
[4] These are the names of some ethnic groups in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian census lists more than 90 ethnicities in the country; for details, see https://minorityrights.org/country/ethiopia
[5] Dawro and Gamo are two ethnic groups from southern Ethiopia.
[6] In fall 2020, military conflicts broke out between Ethiopia’s current federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominated Ethiopian government from 1991 to 2018. The current federal government mobilized support from Ethiopians with grievances against the TPLF’s corrupt and repressive rule. Critics also note the current government’s indifference to ongoing ethnic and gender-based violence around the country (Semeneh).
[7] This argument can be seen in Carl Lindahl’s 1996 article “Bakhtin’s Carnival Laughter and the Cajun Country Mardi Gras.” Even though Filega is not a carnival, the level of energy in its Timket context is comparable to that of a carnival.
[8] A Fendika employee states, “Because of Filega, Timket is now my favorite holiday. […] Having celebrated with Gamos and Dawros, I now question why my own people (Gurages) are not part of this” (Interview, February 2023).
[9] The Fendika visitors we interviewed affirm Melaku’s thinking. A young man in his thirties observed, “In today’s Ethiopia, you don’t usually see performances in different languages on the same stage. At Fendika, the performances are in many different languages from all over Ethiopia” (Interview, January 2023). A young woman in her late twenties concurred, saying, “Fendika is the only place in town where I meet all kinds of people and feel comfortable talking to pretty much anyone. Nobody cares about class or ethnic differences. […] Here when someone performs a dance from an ethnic group, it makes you want to be from that group. Our political arrangement doesn’t want you to feel that. It wants you to feel only [like] the small ethnic group that you are” (Interview, January 2023).
[10] See youtube.com/c/fendikaculturalcenter1, facebook.com/fendika_live, and Instagram.com/fendika_live.
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