di Aulò

Ribka Sibhatu was born in Asmara in 1962, the year Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia unilaterally annexed the former Italian colony of Eritrea, triggering a slow-burning liberation war that would last for the next three decades. In 1979, at the age of seventeen, Sibhatu was sentenced to ten months in prison for criticizing the government, on false charges trumped up by an Ethiopian politician whom Sibhatu had refused to marry. Upon her release, Sibhatu first took refuge at a relative’s house, then adopted a false identity, finally fleeing to Addis Ababa in 1981, where she completed her education. Later she relocated to Lyon and then to Rome, where she published her first collection of poems. Although Sibhatu writes in many languages, the lost paradise of her native home always manages to sneak through, one way or another, as an act of preserving Eritrea’s cultural heritage whilst in exile.

What is clear to me about Sibhatu’s work is that the author’s uncompromising humanity is deeply embedded into each word, each poem of hers ultimately reconnecting us in both mind and heart to the wider human condition. Her poetry manages to deftly relay the experiences and traumas Sibhatu suffered during her youth, offering us a highly intimate personal history, as well as more overtly political poems. In addition to her work as a lyric poet and human-rights activist, Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to the assemblage and recording of Eritrea’s folkloric canon: a body of oral literature that has been handed down through the ages in the form of aulòs (literally, “Please give me permission! I have something to say publicly in rhyme!”), the Tigrinya term for chant-poems, or bardic songs, that are performed at public and private celebrations, as well as during religious rites. Her decades-long efforts in keeping these traditions alive—in the midst of her country’s continuing unravelling—mark her as one of the Eritrean diaspora’s most indefatigable voices.

I began to translate Sibhatu’s work in late 2010 and, over the past decade, I have received poems from her in Italian, Amharic, Tigrinya, and French. The poems included in this selection are presented both in their original language of composition, and in my English translation. The translations were worked from Sibhatu’s Italian versions of each work, or directly where the poem was composed in Italian.