Ethiopian Footprints
The Work of Falaka Yimer
Olu Oguibe
There are very few artists of our time whose works are so completely and consistently defined by notions of nation and history as those of falaka yimer. And there is perhaps no nation in history as totally defined by movement: transversions, cross-currents, and transgressions, as Ethiopia. From Greek recollections of the gods sojourning to Abyssinia for knowledge through the queen of Sheba’s legendary state visit to Solomon to the story of the Ethiopian court ambassador and eunuch whose chance encounter with Phillip brought state and Christianity together for the first time and initiated one of the worlds most regal and celebratory religious traditions, and on to king Menelik’s resounding victory over Italy at the great battle of Adowa, it is the foot that has drawn the map of Ethiopia; the foot, the horse, the chariot, the trail. Even Haile Selasie, the Divine King, travelled half-way across the world, and became a god. For the Ethiopians, to be is to sojourn.
On the other hand, history has not been entirely regal and legendary. Often the Ethiopian has sojourned not out of will or in spender and ease. In our time history has mixed celebration with anguish. From Haile Selasie’s defeat at the hands of the Fascists to his mysterious and ignoble fall; from the beginning of the pseudo-Marxist revolution of Mengistu Mariam to the triumph of Badaawi’s straggly urban guerrillas, history has been unkind to a very proud nation especially in the past one century. From the splendour of royaldom and venerated genealogy to the humiliation of colonial occupation and the trials of deprivation, from the optimistic air of revolution to the terrors of authoritarianism. Ethiopia has witnessed history sufficient for a host of nations put together, and wider than the temporal capacities of a century. Side by side in the psyche of its citizens stand images of colourful splendour, the regal images of the Coptic tradition and its gorgeous celebrations and festivals, and disturbing images of deprivation, hunger, war, separation and death. As the diaspora yearns to return, the homeland forces more unto the exile train.
Falaka joined that train in 1972 and headed for America. In America he discovered a huge community of his country men and women, escapees from a distraught moment toiling to massage memory and reclaim their sense of heritage and closeness. War and famine had split child from mother and father from son and whole communities dispersed to the four corners of the world, but in each city and in every nation the Ethiopians rebuilt their communities and their wonderful restaurants and held their family reunions and performed their ceremonies. Like has compatriot Skunder Boghossian, he was amazed to discover this burgeoning community not only of students and wayfarers but of entrenched Americans across several generations with networks across the country holding up, albeit precariously, the roof of a diasporic nation. Life in America was not easy. Falaka did odd jobs like most young Africans do while working on their degrees, worked in restaurants, scraped things together not only to keep himself at college but to keep producing his art. This was only one side of the period. The other was when he enrolled at Howard and had the great fortune of meeting some of the most important figures in American art: I refuse to say African American here because in addition to being African American, these artists, like Falaka today, were American originals.
One of his finest early drawings is a most captivating sketch of American great Charles White, done shortly before the master died. There were others in Washington at the period who, even without working directly with Falaka, inevitably impacted on his work. There was Skunder, fresh at Howard and rising in reputation. There was the Chicago group which, after carrying out the cultural revolution in that city, got together under AFRICOBRA and took the campaigns to Washington and Howard. The Howard art faculty at the beginning of the decade was more or less the last headquarters of the Black Arts aesthetics in the visual arts. Nobody could avoid the air sweeping through the cultural landscape, much less young artists from the African continent.
With the revivalist tradition which Skunder Boghossian, Uche Okeke in Biafra, and Salahi and the Khartoum School in the Sudan had established, on the one hand, and the traditional interconnectedness between exile, memory and nostalgia on the other, it is fair to expect that Falaka would look to the coptic heritage for reference. However, and this is worthy of note, after his early, almost tourist images of Amhari women, choosing printmaking was Falaka’s way of striking out away from the received and the fad of essentialist revivalism. He took up relief printmaking which, excepting the naïve work produced in the colonial art workshops in the fifties and sixties, was not a particularly popular medium with modern African artists.
The atmosphere of Black abstract expressionism in the 70’s in America was equally right for an experiment preoccupation, though we must add that the technique which defined Falaka’s work for the period had a different, less elevated story. As he once told me, he was working so hard in a restaurant trying to stitch things together and could not in any way afford requisite material for his printmaking, especially the quality paper and colour ink. So, he devised a way to take colour prints from polythene wrappings upon which he superimposed his relief prints. In one of these works there is the highly visible coca-cola logo which, though it was quite inauspiciously incorporated into the print in question, stands out with absolute symbolic prominence and completely revises the premises of signification and interpretation. The colour schemes, though they occur in no studiously thought out pattern, often redefined the prints and imposed on them more discursive structures of reference.
Where these prints reflected the artistic ambience within which they were created was of course in the fact that they were crosses between monoprints and classical printmaking. Through this, equally auspiciously, the artist could enjoy the aesthetic freedom and excitement of the chance effect which monoprints offer, and the authoritative dignity of mastercraftsmanship which through the ages distinguished the art of the printmaker. On projection, one could see also the interplay of a loose yet elitist medium, and a tedious but democratic other, a combination of the free and easygoing, and the strict, demanding, and dignified. Without meaning to, by combining monoprinting and classical intaglio, and improvised, found object relief in his prints, Falaka signified a new spirit; free from the intractability of tradition, experimentalist and open, yet not entirely anarchist. By hanging unto aspects of the classical printmaking tradition, the artist critiqued the blind anarchism of high modernism, and by incorporating the monoprint technique and violating the purist space of the print, he critiqued the intractability of tradition.
Falaka’s rejection of the iconic images of coptic art was not simply a critique of the intractable but also an essay against romanticism and a definitive of nationalism. The fall of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor in the 1970’s on one hand shocked and saddened many an Ethiopian. On the other, it was inevitable, perhaps a relief to many. The monarch had almost outlived his usefulness and surely his divinity was all but eroded especially as he failed consistently to find an answer to the poverty and deprivation which tortured his subjects, destroyed their families, drove them from ancestral land, and sent many unto the exile train. The emergence of a succeeding near-fascistic, rhetoric-peddling revolution did not bring hope to many either. It was not long before the dispensation of the Degue replaced the Emperor’s affable helplessness and insensitivity with hard line intolerance and active repression. The famine worsened. War broke out on many more fronts. An estimated 1.5 million people were driven out of Ethiopia. Many more were separated. Many more died. The yearly religious festivities went on and the custodians of the Lost Ark kept their watch. But anguish and loss continued. With the scavenging intervention of global media the Ethiopian was faced not only with the pains of exile but also with the images of his deprivation on world television. Falaka’s prints in the late 70’s and early eighties responded to his country’s predicament.
In his representations of the human figure Falaka opted for a more high renaissance anatomy which projects all veins, highlights all sinews, and profiles both strain and the resilience of the body. This way he celebrated not history and the national memory but the enduring, individual spirit which embodies both and often cancels out the falsity of unquestioning allegiance.
Exile and reunion are two of Falaka’s most preoccupying themes: departure and return, separation and reunification, dispersal and recohesion, the inevitability of survival. Except that in his prints he does not once fail to acknowledge that time not only heals wounds, it equally wounds all heels. In prints like the Reunion series, Falaka portrays families reunited after several years, even generations, of separation. The young are shown standing, strong, hopeful, perhaps angry and unforgiven; the old stoop by the side, aged but unyielding, occasionally facing out of the picture, away from the present as time draws to an end. The artist deliberately robes his figures in garb that is neither western nor 4th century coptic. This way he registers time rather than nostalgia. He celebrates culture without romanticising it, and affirms the resilience of the human spirit without ignoring the ravaging powers of passage.
Of all his work I consider The Ethiopians perhaps the most important. It summarises his career, his concerns, his history and his notion of nation. For one, it has the same history as some of the most exciting works of his career. One day while taking prints, he laid out a sheet of paper, took an impression from a string, and impulsively asked his daughter to walk all over the sheet. She stepped on the inking board, and walked all over the sheet. A red section was added to the result a little to the side on top. There was the close up on a vast, arid landscape, a continuous loop of trails, and myriad footprints across the landscape. On top, close to the horizon, the sun sat heavy and bloody, in turn rising and setting, signifying dawn and dusk, the cyclicity of history. Later the artist took impressions of his own feet.
In The Ethiopians Falaka brings together the themes outlined above and defines the history and destiny of his people as one of migrations and repatriations. On the one hand the Earth is a landscape into which history drives the Ethiopians, whether in the innocent form of seasonal pastoral or labour migrations or the historical, Saba’ic quest for adventure and knowledge, or the driving whip of famine, political repression, and war. On the other the Earth is a free place, a nation where the Ethiopian may walk as she/he pleases, traverse and return, again and again. In both cases the artist registers a history of cyclic waves of migrations and influxes, one best described by Christopher Okigbo’s final lines as ‘a going and coming/ that goes on forever.’ In The Ethiopians he inscribes the fate not only of his country and people, but also of what one might call the ‘Ethiopians of the spirit’, the disparate diasporas that surge across the face of the earth driven by the elements, the love of the wild, or the insanities of the human mind and cruelty of human authority. All exiles and stateless people are captures in The Ethiopians, fugitives and troubadours, escapees from ethnic cleansing, refugees fleeing war, crossing and cris-crossing, seeking the safety of time and separate space. The feet in this work represent not only the Abyssinians scattered all over the world, the Ethiopians Falaka met in Washington or those running restaurants in New York. They represent all of history’s displaced.
The Ethiopians is of course elevated from the category of determinist absurdism by the fact that these displaced leave footprints. They are not elided from history and their trails covered by the sands of time. They are a presence, not an ellipsis, and that reassures. Agaracha must come back, went a Biafran saying: the sojourner returns! The sojourner returns, not necessarily in body, but by leaving footprints to mark his trail. Nurruddin Farah once jarred a London audience by asking, ‘how can one dream of homeland if there is nothing to return to?’ But yes, there is always something to return to if one knows how. The cruellest fate is to walk the exile train and not leave a trail. Without a trail the exile cannot find his or her way home, not physically, not spiritually. It is the surviving footprint which points the way for the wanderer. If there are no landmarks even memory cannot find it’s way through history. And without memory no diaspora can sustain a sense of nation or homeland. The footprints in The Ethiopians are mapmarkers.
One other feature of Falaka’s work which cannot go unnoticed are his powerful horses. They exude vigour and force. They are strong and beautiful, and, according to the artist, they denote freedom. Horses as motifs are, of course, vulnerable to the opportunitisms of interpretation. They could signify the brutal force and power of an invading and conquering army, the triumph of strength over weakness. On the other hand they could denote the will to resist. They could signify power in the undeniable strength of the animal. But, ultimately, a horse is a beast of burden, subject to its master. All horses are driven. Perceived power is cancelled out be servitude, and there is, in reality, no freedom.
The interesting thing, though, is that Falaka shares his fascination for horses with that other freewheeling Ethiopian, Alexander Pushkin, who was obsessed by the equestrian figure of his benefactor and friend the Czar. And found in the horse the unfathomable strength and power. Quite revealing that the patriarch of Russian literature himself lived only an illusion of freedom and power, shackled, like the horse he so admired, to the Czar, and to the figure and element of the object of his love, his wife.
The artist eventually decides his or her direction and preoccupation. Some work for their own pleasure and others poach or ridicule. Falaka’s work has remained modest yet powerful, free of the insolent megalomania in most American art, and even in relocation, he has retained a map of his country in his work, which is more than many can claim.
- Olu Oguibe, 'Ethiopian Footprints: The Work of Falaka Yimer.' Savannah Gallery, London. 1993