Évènements

Avec Christina Woolner*

(A Reflection in Honour of Khadra Daahir Ciige, 1957-2022)

In this seminar, we will travel deep into the musical world of Somali love(-suffering) via the storied life, love and songs of Hargeysa-born singer Khadra Daahir Ciige. Fondly known as hooyada jacaylka (‘the mother of love’), Khadra is especially beloved for her stirring performances of calaacal (a genre of love-lament) and a voice that listeners say can ‘make you feel what she feels’. While Khadra’s popularity rests squarely on an ability to convey deeply felt love experiences in her voice, in this seminar I explore how songs, singers and voices become increasingly ‘sticky, or saturated with affect’ (as Sahra Ahmed puts it) as they move across both space and generation and are envocalized by an ever-expanding number of actors. I specifically consider how love songs’ aesthetic form and artists’ accessibility to their fans precipitates a particularly intimate form of talk that plays a critical role in constantly (re)making the voice of a singer and her public intimate. Weaving together stories that Khadra’s fans tell, stories that Khadra herself told, the texts (and sounds) of her songs, and my own reflections on encountering Khadra, I ultimately aim to demonstrate how the ongoing making of celebrity voice works to mediate intimacy and contributes to the snowballing ‘stickiness’ of love songs in motion.

* Christina Woolner is currently an affiliated researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a postdoctoral researcher on the Desert Disorders project at Northumbria University. Her research broadly explores how forms of popular art and practices of voicing are entangled in processes of sociopolitical transformation, especially in the wake of violence. For the last decade, she has worked in Somaliland, where her she has studied the social and political lives of love songs and the contemporary dynamics of political poetic debate; she has recently begun a project exploring the how ‘home’ is evoked both in word and sound in the poetry of diaspora Somali artists living in the UK. She is the author of Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland (Chicago, 2023) and has published work on the sociopolitical dynamics of Somali popular music and poetry in journals including American Ethnologist, Ethnomusicology, and Nordic Journal of African Studies.