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Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland

Online ISBN:
9780226827384
Print ISBN:
9780226827377
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland

Christina J. Woolner
Christina J. Woolner
University of Cambridge
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
24 November 2023
Online ISBN:
9780226827384
Print ISBN:
9780226827377
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

On first listen, both music and talk about love are conspicuously absent from Somaliland’s public soundscapes, muted both by religious ambiguity towards the permissibility of music and gendered norms regarding the expression of emotion. Yet listen closer and the voices of love-sufferers singing their pains and aspirations become audible—voices that seem to draw people in and open people out to a more vulnerable, more intimate way of being. Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland follows these voices as they congeal in and around love songs (hees jacayl). Based on two years of ethnographic research with poets, musicians, singers, media personnel and love-suffering audiences in Hargeysa, this book tracks love songs as they move and are put to work across both private and public settings: as they are composed; circulated and storied; listened to privately; sounded by musicians; and performed live in a complex postwar urban setting. Wherever they travel, the deeply personal yet thoroughly multivocal voices of love songs open unique and rare spaces for dareen-wadaag (feeling-sharing), a form of intimacy that is profoundly transformative for individuals and that, in turn, makes space for a different kind of politics. Set in a region where stories of love and longing are usually overshadowed by narratives of violence and political instability, Love Songs in Motion is an intimate ethnographic account of the mediation and making of intimacy, and the ideas of voice and practices of voicing that open space for expressing, imagining, and sharing love.

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