From “Lega Harar” to Adowa to Haile Selassie: The Evocation of Popular and Contested Symbols of Ethiopian Topography, Culture, and History in Self-Representations of Ethiopia and Ethiopians in Canada

The history, the land: all this can be interpreted as, what did history do to us? Ato Mengesha Beyene In his exploration of overlapping territories and intertwined histories, Edward Said declares that “appeals to the past” are “among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.” Ethiopians and members of other interrelated Horn of African groups living within a contemporary global Diaspora embody the tenets of Said's argument. Histories of migrants and migrations do not begin in medias res . Ethiopian history, topography, and culture are prominently referenced in both public and private articulations of Ethiopian identities within the Diaspora. Ethiopians living within the context of a Canadian Diaspora perpetually reference, invoke, revere, contest, and engage with representative elements of their cultural, political, and historical identity, fashioning unique forms of self-representation. This Canadian case study is illustrative of the ways in which prominent signifiers of Ethiopian history throughout the twentieth century are integrated into self-representations by members of the Diaspora. With the exception of Mary Goitom's body of work, Canadian scholarship on the Horn of Africa Diaspora has largely focused on ethnic disparities as principal points for identity formation upon migration. This work instead examines the ways in which members of the Diaspora perpetuate and maintain preceding historical signifiers, as means of asserting both their heterogeneity and historicity. As defined by Stuart Hall, the cultural identity of the Horn of Africa Diaspora is, by and large, comprised of elements “which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.” Based on an analysis of selfrepresentations in contemporary Canada (whether they be textual, physical, and/or in narrative form), it is evident that Ethiopians take great pride in their long and rich cultural history, which precedes their dispersal into a global Diaspora. Through the use of oral histories as illustrative case studies, this chapter underscores the ways in which the interplay of history, politics, and culture continues to shape representations and perceptions of Ethiopian and other interrelated Horn of Africa identities in Canada. To a generation of Ethiopians living in the Diaspora, being Ethiopian and narrating Ethiopian history are symbiotically connected with events that have transpired in that nation, as much as they are connected to perceptions of this history by the outside world, reinforcing the proclamation by interviewee Elias Omer that: “Ethiopia is significant, not only to who we are, but who we are not.”

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