‘I am tired of earnestly placating him’: Women's folk songs about patriarchal oppression among the Guji of southern Ethiopia
Event details
Patriarchal belief systems are thriving among the Guji-Oromo society of southern Ethiopia, seriously impacting the life of non-literate women in complex ways. Women have never been silent about patriarchal oppression; however, studies on the Guji oral tradition fail to properly explain the multiple strategies used by women. In this talk, I will address the content, context and form of Guji women’s folk songs to show how they demonstrate patriarchal oppression embedded in family and married life. Second, the talk presents song as a method used by women to tell their stories, challenge patriarchy, and to generate data to create intergenerational solidarity among the women - which could be considered a traditional example of ‘feminist sisterhood’ but one that is neglected by anthropologists and folklorists. Lastly, drawing on the insights from two strands of feminist theory - the theory of patriarchy and indigenous postcolonial feminist theory - the talk refreshes and tests the limits of the feminist theories in the study of African oral imaginative expression, and also situates Guji orature, specifically women's folk songs, within broader feminist debates about gender and oral imaginative expression.
Dr Ayele Kedebe Roba
Ayele Kedebe Roba is Lecturer of African Literatures at the University of York. He holds a PhD in Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies from SOAS University of London (2022). Ayele stayed at SOAS after his PhD to take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics (2022-2023) before starting his current job at York. He specialises in the literatures of two widely spoken African languages (Amharic and Oromo) indigenous to the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on the novel, literary multilingualism, and the interplay between oral literature and literary texts. His research has been published in Critical African Studies, Research in African Literatures, the Journal of Oromo Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of African Literature and Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation.