Spectres of Loss: Diaspora and Yearning in the Work of Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot

Origins configure and prefigure the possibility of narratives of the present.

—Kathryn Yusoff

At my back:

The years ahead, strangely lit.

—Jenny Xie

Naming, however kind, is always an act of estrangement. To put

     into language that which can’t be

put) and someone who does not love you cannot name you right, and 

     even “moon” can’t carry the moon.

—Aracelis Girmay

There are bonds of blood and bonds that are formed over time. In families these bonds are often woven into one another: mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews—their bonds to each other are effected (affected) by presence. The amount of face-to-face time; how much a faraway relative is talked about; phone calls, letters, even how many photos of people are around the home: these all nurture feelings for them. Bonds of blood cannot be severed, but blood does not necessitate a relationship. Contact over time is required.

Hagere Selam Zegeye-Gebrehiwot and I have known each other since 2009. They​​¹ participated in a partnership between the artist-run centre I worked at, aceartinc., and a queer youth group run by the Rainbow Resource Centre in Winnipeg. They made their first film during a workshop run by Peter Kingstone. Since then I have followed their work and supported her practice through my job but also outside this role. Our relationship has travelled through artist / arts administrator, mentor/mentee, artist/artist, younger friend / older friend, friend/friend, artist/writer, and through all their intersections. We are part of each other’s queer family. But queer family is very different from blood family. I am a white English person who eventually applied for, and was granted, citizenship in Canada in her thirties. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot self-identifies as a transnational diasporic dyke born and predominantly based in Treaty One Territory (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada). Zegeye-Gebrehiwot has spoken of “having a base within relationships” as much as geographic location.​​²

Diaspora disperses the locations of dwellings into an interstitial habitus.​​³

Although this is likely common amongst those who have strong connections to the place of their birth (as well as the place of their ancestors), these relationships are perhaps a counterweight to not being of a place while at the same time feeling one is of a place. It could be that the feeling of multiple homes makes one more certain of who one is, since you are the constant. “I am my own place.”​​⁴

Queer people often talk about “chosen family,” those friends who love each other unconditionally, who can be relied upon to help, support, and sustain one’s emotional and physical life. These groups are a bulwark if one has been dispossessed by blood family. As real as the love is, the ties to one’s closest blood relatives and place(s) of origin still retain a powerful influence that never fully disappears.​​⁵

Loving or unloving, families contain complex emotional structures that are informed by blood ties, love ties, like ties, amalgamation, and separation. They are subject to forces of love, ambition, adventure, restlessness, fear, commitment, and escape. These forces within one generation shape the lives of their progeny.

Any kind of seeking carries within it the possibility of not finding what is sought. This binary (either the thing is found or it is not) contains real stakes.​​⁶ However, homophobia creates a specific set of tensions: the threat of it destroying the chance for relationships; the risk of being rejected; the fear of violence; finding a relative only to lose them (and the pain and trauma of this). These are spectres of loss. This concept is different from Avery Gordon’s theory of haunting, which posits past trauma and loss as things that gum up the present, preventing it from streaming into the future, and that creates a “something must be done” impulse.​​⁷ It does cross over with Gordon’s idea in that both the spectre and the haunting contain the overwhelming feeling of “there being no time to waste at all and the necessity of taking your time”​​⁸ and that they are “emergent rather than fatalistic.”​​⁹ The spectre of loss is emergent but is based in the future. It is derived from the expectation of personal or social trauma and loss experienced because of one’s queerness (or other fraught identity). The spectre is partly what queer utopic drives respond to(​¹⁰ and what much activism struggles against, both of which advocate social policies to protect against loss of rights and opportunities afforded to a heteronormative, white population. To re-tense Heather Love’s take on Walter Benjamin: “taking the future seriously means being hurt by it.”​​¹¹ However, the potential for loss can be subverted into a site of power and courage by rejecting it as negative.

We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place; not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new, but where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and visible pasts.​​¹²

But what if you do not have clear memories, traditions, or visible signs of a past to forget? What if you have shadows of these that are fading and taking with them a sense of self? Is it heteronormative for a queer person to seek biological family?

[Diaspora] can designate the root and the rhizome; a persistence in time and space as well as the emergence of new forms of time and space … the world to come.​​¹³

Familial time is a thick, complex, and densely textured multidimensional web. This temporality can provide members with a powerful sense of their place in the world, of lineage and futurity. It is also a sphere where erasure of blood relations is impossible but where denial can maim and poison. It is the latter that many queer people experience and are fearful of. The exile or incomplete acceptance by blood family, as well as from the broader community the family lives within, has been a powerful factor in queer family formation.

Delinking the process of generation from the force of historical process is a queer kind of project: queer lives seek to uncouple change from the supposedly organic and immutable forms of family and inheritance.​​¹⁴

yaya/ayat (Super 8mm, 5 minutes 25; 2010) is centred around Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s journey to see her Ethiopian grandmother in Greece. Her grandmother is not only diasporic in relation to Zegeye-Gebrehiwot; she has been part of the Ethiopian diaspora in Greece for roughly thirty years before returning to Ethiopia. The film tells us that their relationship has been shaped by the vast geographic space separating them. They are bonded by blood, and Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is compelled by an overwhelming yearning to form bonds forged in sharing time and space, that is, to get to know their grandmother and also to be known. The longing is for a home within their grandmother, a person they are unfamiliar with and a person with whom they share blood but not companionship. The film is in some ways a document of hiraeth, of yearning for something that one may not even have experienced firsthand, such as a homeland or relationship; hiraeth can be the call to one’s spiritual home.​​¹⁵ The word implies an imaginative engagement with the past and one’s place in it that has been conjured from stories, photos, and one’s own hopes. “Hearing the call,” as Bruce Chatwin describes it, a feeling that also seems well suited to the idea of wayfaring, which I’ll go into later.​​¹⁶

Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s yearning is haunted by a spectre of loss: “And I’m scared and I’m nervous that you won’t like me because of aspects of my identity that I wonder if I’ll even tell you about.”​​¹⁷ Her and her grandmother already have a deficit of time spent together and there looms the future years that Zegeye-Gebrehiwot will likely have without her grandmother.

The deficit contains time that might have provided them with shared experiences that lessen the chances of estrangement, or which might make estrangement far more painful. The “association between homosexual love and loss”​​¹⁹ extends beyond the loss of a subject of romantic desire or of human rights, to a loss of family and the particular sense of self that a family gives. However, Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s film is not an account of fear or sadness, but of other things that come from seeking and returning.

The film’s chronology seems to be linear, starting with urban power lines and silhouetted against the sky, passed by at a speed that suggests we are looking at them through a car window. This view fades into an aeroplane window, and then a street where we see other trees and a bird flying from them: we must be at her destination. It is a neat sequence with satisfying rhymes amongst the images (branches and wires; flight in a plane and the flight of a bird; one window clean, another slightly opaque; branches filmed from a vehicle, others filmed from the street), and this amplifies a feeling of familiarity. A journey, an A to B, has been established, but the window in the plane foreshadows the themes of the film—looking through it we can see the wing and some clouds, but the scratchy ice crystals obscure those large worldly things; they catch the light, and they bring the surface of the window into play, the surface of the thing that allows us to see outside (or inside) but which is itself determining what can be seen and how clearly. The disappearance of the window informs us, “The world as such has no surface for the wayfarer,”​​²⁰ that is, for the person who is seeking by being in the place of their seeking, being guided by this experience rather than chronology.

In the next scene we see cobbles and paving slabs, the bounce of them telling us the filmmaker is shooting whilst walking. The rough texture of dirty, melting ice is seen now and then: surely this is a Canadian street (although it is actually Berlin). It’s a clever visual pun on the iced plane window—the switch from a body flying (dreaming) to a body walking (grounded) again sets up an oppositional rhyme, and again Zegeye-Gebrehiwot extends it beyond a couplet (a binary). In the next scene, where she is behind a figure on a vehicle that reads as a moped or motorbike, the driver wears a small hat, buildings and scenery pass quickly, and are not observed through a window. The camera is then on Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, hair blowing, confident, perhaps proud, happy: at home. It is a key scene in the film. It’s the first and only time we see Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, and the first time there is so much colour (up until now it has been uncertain whether the film is black and white, or sepia). The colour, coupled with the speed and seeing Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s happiness and determination, is overlaid with narration that describes the imperfect communication that has been available to her and her grandmother up to now.

So I long for you, but I can’t talk to you, unless my mom or uncle Milto translates our phone conversations which is far more distancing for the two of us than the distance itself.​​²¹

As the scene flicks into a shot of a church dome dark against a blue-white sky, they say,

So I’m going to go and find you.​​²²

The present tense indicates to us it is going to happen, but the film tells us the travel has happened. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s use of the present tense throughout their narration puts the film, the action, hopes and fears, into a continual state of becoming, of aliveness and presentness. These things have not and will not only be in the past; the tugs and pushes of this love will always be at play. The present tense queerly unravels and tangles this film as a love story and a story of diaspora.

yaya/ayat is a document of seeking, a message from the past, perhaps even proof of it. 

Grown up as I may be, you’re still my grandmother and the last connection I have to that past of mine. The last of a line of grandparents generation.​​²³

The grandmother is Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s link to bodies, places, and time that has preceded them: she is a net of memory, a powerful site of lineage.

Earlier forms of feeling, imagination, and community may offer crucial resources in the present.​​²⁴

Because you and I have been separated by more than distance, because you and I did not choose this.​​²⁵

They do not share everyday space, and they share fragments of two languages, but yearning is beyond these things despite being born of them. It is situated in the body, in bringing something into the body that is desperately absent. Her grandmother embodies some of Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s familial geography: distance within distance. Yearning is a bedfellow of unattainability, a trope of homosexual experience: the unattainable object of desire, the unattainability of normalcy. A queer approach is to reject normalcy and reject loss, subvert their monumentalism, relocate power into intersectionality, repurpose failure as productive. yaya/ayat focuses on yearning as productive and emboldening; the desire for love and recognition along with the acceptance of fear of loss can lead to action and engagement. Yearning is an affective condition. A person changes as they pass through different places and acquire experiences. 

There are also stakes for the grandmother, for a future carried in her grandchild.

[Y]ou say shame on my parents for not teaching me my language … You were just, are just upset at the potential for a lost generation of your blood.​​²⁶

Yearning is a condition that drives people to shape their future. It is polyamorous, relating to hope, despair, delusion, courage, helplessness, and superactivity. But perhaps its most frightening partner is grief. It is a blessing to yearn for something possible, someone possible, even if there are no guarantees. The urgency of yearning is rooted in the possibility of loss—if I do not have you now, perhaps I never will, and perhaps you will die, or I will be replaced or fade from your life and memory; one of us will be effaced, or perhaps both of us will. Effacement might look like assimilation, a circumstance faced by diasporic people and those who are not heterosexual or heteronormative. However, when something has been withheld to protect what is hoped for, that is not self-effacement necessarily. It might merely be a matter of timing.

[Y]ou are still a person with your own reservations. So I need to make sure that when I tell you certain things that it is me who will be the one telling you.​​²⁷

Bodies together in time and space; not theoretical ones, not nuanced discoveries in an archive. A diasporic body and an origin body that is also diasporic; an act of return. The grandparent of a grandchild born and raised in another country may see as many losses as gains.

The movement of the handheld camera, the first minute of travel through sparse scenery, the disembodied voice: these communicate geographic and emotional distance. The material of Super 8mm carries the association of home movies. These things give us the feeling we have been invited into a private sphere and that we are the recipients of hospitality. However, the guardedness of the grandmother stands in for Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s own wariness of sharing the privacy of their journey and relationships; “What is shown is what is not shown.”​​²⁸ Zegeye-Gebrehiwot talks of laughter, misunderstandings, and church excursions, but does not show us any of this. Instead, we follow behind her grandmother or are shown interiors and objects. It is perhaps a tactic to preserve their intimacy, as well as showing the everyday things of a loved one’s life that become precious once known.

Halfway through the film, coffee is made, and the drink becomes an image of diaspora. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee and has a distinct relationship to hospitality and conversation. The beans and drink have travelled to and been adopted into many other countries’ identities and customs, so much so that the origins are obscured. When we see Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s grandmother stirring sugar into the small cups (the one in front of Zegeye-Gebrehiwot half full, perhaps an indication of the grandmother not viewing her granddaughter as old enough to have a full cup of the strong drink), we are in the latter part of the ceremony. The viewer is invited to watch the stirring, to notice all the small gestures of a body within a room familiar to her; it is a “choreography of intimacy,”​​²⁹ but the hospitality has only been extended so much to us, the viewers, the outsiders. The other parts of the ceremony have been withheld (the roasting of the beans, the sharing of their fragrance, the incense), and this might be read as protecting the intimacy that was extended to Zegeye-Gebrehiwot—we know of it but do not witness its entirety; it is for her alone. We see their grandmother’s skill at pouring the coffee, the discrepancy in the volume of liquid in the two cups, the graceful stirring, the tradition. Perhaps this is shared with us to show what Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is heir to but also what they must contend with. Traditions are at once a bridge and a gulf, depending on who and what one is. Yet by filming it, Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is making a claim on it. They have abstracted (removed) a part of the ceremony. The film is a series of such abstractions, which provide the:

[P]ossibility of creating a distinction between the emotions that are designed for us by a world of power and domination, and new feelings that can be built independently.​​³⁰

As well,

[A]n unstable identification outside of the accepted norms of human experience could be inclusive and enfolding.​​³¹

The aesthetics and storyline of yaya/ayat draw on tropes of familial nostalgia by using Super 8mm film, the material of home movies and family memory—documentation that fixes collective memory and is shared over and again. People who were not present can still participate in it by watching and joining in the reminiscences of what happens and their reactions to it; the images become part of their memories in a real way. The film itself does not record sound, and this provides the opportunity for stories to flow onto the story in the film. In a family setting, this often takes the form of members describing to one another what is happening, why, where, when, who was there but not seen in the film. There are disagreements and revelations. Children ask, “Who is that?” or will be moved at their parents’ youth and at themselves being so young. A child watching a home movie of parents and grandparents forms memories of these bodies in younger forms, that is, in forms closer to their own, and therefore see them as persons other than parents, which is both fascinating and incredible. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot disjoints the experience of the home movie and also draws on Super 8mm’s other strong association, amateur travel documentation, where authoritative narration would be expected to accompany the screening and explain or embellish the images. However, as I have noted, home and family for Zegeye-Gebrehiwot are not just situated within a familial setting. One makes a home, even fleetingly, with other people by sharing. They describe in an artist talk how screening the film one-on-one or in someone’s home or even sharing a password-protected link through email—the intimacy of sharing space and hospitality—has been very important to her.​​³² Tenderness is an element of the home movie that they emphasize as much as the subject matter.

Without the narration we deduce a journey, a young woman and old woman; we see one or more churches, domestic scenes. The older woman is the main subject of the film, as it is her actions the camera primarily records; it is a sort of portrait of the grandmother, recording how she moves and some of the everyday things she does. Movement is, of course, the primary distinguishing feature between a still portrait and one made in film—knowing how the people we love move, their gait, how they stir sugar into their coffee, these are intimacies that bind us. If we have not been a party to them before, they become precious. When we recognize a gesture as belonging to a body that means something to us, it is proof that we know something about that person. If it is a gesture in a private space, it is proof of our intimacy.

Portraits are a means to fix someone’s image in time and space (this is her, here.) and are a means of resisting being lost to time and space, not only through the ravages of mortality but through separation (“You and I did not choose this”​​³³). Filming her grandmother is a challenge to a spectre of loss.

Language and communication are integral to yaya/ayat. The narration describes the motivation for the journey, the apprehensions, some interactions. At one point it slips into a poetic refrain that rocks between binaries, then lands into a rejection of them and a new understanding of her grandmother.

This divided culture, this wonder, this wanting and untranslatable identity.
This diaspora’s diaspora, this self assimilation self appropriation and appropriating one’s own identity. This broken language, this reflection, this revival, to reconnect and connections.
These empty silences and off coloured comments, my autonomy, this anonymity.
Isolation’s isolation and this track, right track, which path? Off the beaten path. My cross culture, this feminist … this distance and I’m distant.
An absence, the way these intersect, my queerness, my questions, my growth, growing, regressing, exploring … your familiarity.​​³⁴

It is personal; the openness is calm, self-assured. The present tense collapses time, the journey, the yearning that preceded it, the journey of her parents, the life of her grandmother and her journey from Ethiopia to Greece, the time they spent together. Their presence is preserved in the present tense, a tense that testifies to the ongoingness of diaspora, the ongoingness and aliveness of one’s experiences and emotions and thoughts. Past, present, and future comprise an indistinguishable flock.

There is a scene in which pigeons fly down to a large feeder on the ground from above the camera. The feeder is in a narrow alley between a small corrugated shed and a couple of walls. The flurry of wings and descending bodies are complicated by the jumpiness of the film, which gives a flickering kaleidoscope effect and multiplies the flapping. The pigeons are a mix of grey, white, black, and brown. Those who have landed peck at the round trough full of seed. The jumpy film muddles some of the landed birds with the descending ones; there are instants where flying and landed birds are inextricable. There is a freedom from simplicity in this indivisibility. The area the birds occupy is busy with things: the shapes of the corrugated metal roof, a wall’s bricks, a sloppy rope or hose, a shelf holding plants and more pigeons, the bushy canopies of trees, the ground crowded with a couple of feeders and their guests. The birds’ natural movements and the unnatural movement of the film participate in an unruly hospitality. Pigeons are creatures who live in the sky and upon the earth, who can thrive in cities as well as the countryside, and inhabit most countries in the world. Pigeons do not migrate but are able to find their way home from many miles away. Their homing instinct has assisted humans for thousands of years, often being utilised for carrying messages.​​³⁵ Thinking about this in the context of yaya/ayat transforms the pigeons who gather in what is perhaps part of the grandmother’s garden into a symbol for the narrator’s return to the home held within her grandma, the number of pigeons speaking to the multiplicity of identity each woman brings to the meeting. 

[The] cycle of life is confirmed within each generation, inheritance crosses from one generation to the next.​​³⁶

The migration of birds is a useful way to think about diaspora in this film. An important difference between the two terms is their relationship to return. Migration is a cyclical journey, a regular to and fro. Diasporic bodies may never return to the place of their own or their ancestors’ birth. If they do, it may be a type of homing.​​³⁷​​³⁸ The narrator tells us it has taken nineteen years for her to reach the point where her desire to be with her grandmother has exceeded its containment, where the return must be undertaken, and such things involve disappearing from one place to appear in another. This brings to mind folklore that tried to explain where birds went when the seasons changed: they turned into barnacles, buried themselves in pond mud, or hibernated in unreachable cliffs. In Ancient Greece one theory explained that the birds turned into fish and took to a life in the sea for a while.​​³⁹ The latter is my favourite explanation of a phenomenon that is still not fully understood. There’s something about the transformation that speaks to the effect of serious journeys. Many migratory birds undergo profound physical changes before and during migration: internal organs such as the liver and reproductive organs shrink, the volume of body fat increases, and they moult. The moulting prompts thoughts of the child shedding their dependence to grow autonomous, shedding reliance on family members to translate her and her grandmother’s conversations, letting go of fear, defying the spectre, flying through it.

I’m tired of that and I’m better than that.​​⁴⁰

Although birds may have some kind of endogenous programming, such as an internal compass that gets them to an origin point, the map is not genetic; it is acquired through experience.​​⁴¹ The Ancient Greek explanation speaks not to the learning of a map but of becoming another thing, of extending what one is. A map is not internalized—rather, a body transforms through absorbing the route as it is taken.

The film’s collection of clips and images is like a collection of impressions, a kind of route. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is seeking to be impressed upon, to be imprinted by the experiences she has sought. The surfaces that their body comes into contact with—the church, the coffee cups, the walls and furniture—she presses into the celluloid. Movement is pressed into the material of the film and is then seen via its movement through a projector and its transformation into light. The buildings familiar to her grandmother and the pathways between them are now familiar to Zegeye-Gebrehiwot. The hue that is particular to Super 8mm film, its dusty warm yellow, is reminiscent of flowers placed between the pages of books many years ago. Collections of pressed plants served as a means of learning the names and characteristics of flowers and leaves, as well as a reference from which drawings and paintings could be made.​​⁴²

Named things are fixed points, aligned or compared, which allow the speaker to plot the next move.​​⁴³

Along with the ability to recognize what something is because it has been named, and the name shared with you, is the need to be selective about whom one shares those words with, so that the thing and its spirit are protected, kept private, kept sacred.​​⁴⁴ With this in mind, the remarkable generosity of this film and its equally remarkable integrity is visible. The preservation of flowers is an ancient practice: Ancient Egyptian tombs placed dried flowers and herbs to accompany the deceased to the afterworld; in Medieval Europe, posies of plants were used to repel disease. The attributes of comfort and protection might also be applied to film: preserving something that will accompany our lives, extend beyond our deaths, and so protect against our being forgotten or forgetting others. 

The narrative text names and explains Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s feelings; it feels open and personal, but they withhold most of her grandmother’s words as well as her voice. Those are her grandmother’s, and she gave them to her granddaughter, not to us. Viewers are always at a distance from this older woman—she is not an everyman’s grandmother; she seems serious, independent, and wary. Nevertheless, she has extended a kind of hospitality to us, which is represented by her permission for the camera’s use. This sort of protection and generosity occur when something of personal and spiritual value is at stake. The revelations of the narration coupled with the carefulness of what is recorded and made public assert a kind of sacredness. The withholding and the abstraction are queer moves and diasporic moves to protect and exist on one’s own terms.

From the beginning of the film there is religious singing. It is from a field recording made by Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, and the occasional tap and click emphasise the presence of a body apart from the singing bodies (the singing is at a distance from the close tapping sounds): immersed, attentive, but separate. The choral singing situates the film in ritual and community, but the dynamics of the field recording and the description of her waking to her grandmother’s prayers, rather than participating in them, make her separateness clear. However, the singing and chanting are not alienating, they are of a place, a marker of the distance between the women but also of a shared experience. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s voice overtop the singing make her part of it while also marking her separateness, but this is complementary—her words could be considered a sacrament accompanied by the choir, or vice versa.

The narrator mentions church excursions and waking to hear her grandmother’s prayers. One shot lingers on a hardback Amharic Orthodox Bible, on its cover a gold cross characteristic of this church, the intertwined latticework representing everlasting life.​​⁴⁵ Again, it is interesting to note this lattice in a secular context, working as it does to represent the mesh of blood family and history, as well as queer family and history. Here, it also presages the continuity of the grandmother’s line, something of great importance to her: 

[Y]ou were just, are just upset at the potential for a lost generation of your blood.​​⁴⁶

The first “just” could be read as indicating the justness of her fear of the terrible ease of erasure. The slow shot of a church dome with pigeons perched about it, a cross silhouetted against dark, blue sky. We follow the grandmother through archways and courtyards that have the ring of ecclesiastical architecture. These places are obviously familiar to her, and she is guiding her granddaughter—who follows at a respectful distance—through them. The film is steeped in her grandmother’s Christian faith, which Zegeye-Gebrehiwot preserves and honours while bringing her own sense of sacredness expressed in cherishing, honesty, hiding, naming, not knowing, not showing. Their journey is a kind of ritual that hopes to realize a connection as well as joy in understanding and deepening love, respecting her grandmother’s beliefs, recording who she is, and their relationship. This isn’t to say Zegeye-Gebrehiwot has produced a hagiography of her grandmother, but the sacred and its rituals are very much a part of this film.​​⁴⁷ We do not know if Zegeye-Gebrehiwot revealed all that she herself wondered about, and this might signify the sacredness of their private relationship with her grandmother. The skills of timing, observation, and judging what is respectful to oneself and to others may safeguard identity as well as relationships. The invisible forces within the relationship are preserved.

Lately, I have been struck by the similarities between film and scrolls. Each have a physical beginning and end but offer a multidimensional experience that can change, to a greater or lesser degree, according to the body that engages with it. Each deal in surfaces that require being seen and experienced to have an effect. They also reach within their surfaces into the mind of the viewer or reader. “[S]urfaces are regions to be inhabited, not spaces to be surveyed.”​​⁴⁸ Scrolls are an ancient way of recording text and images, and film, though not ancient, functions via analogue magic. As I was thinking through sacredness in the preceding paragraph, I wondered what sacredness does, what it serves. Partly it has the potential to relieve pain and transform uncertainty into certainty; it protects special knowledge and facilitates it being passed along. Sacred scrolls participate in this; they are beyond the body but also tethered to it or to a place.

Up until the late 1970s, healing scrolls were common in Ethiopia and were used by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. They are an ancient practice, probably originating sometime within the Aksumite Empire (first to eighth centuries, a period in which Christianity also arrived in the land, which was around the sixth century). “While plant and animal medicines alleviate physical symptoms, the medicinal scrolls alleviate spiritual symptoms.”​​⁴⁹ The scroll is made from animal skin and is created as part of a ritual through which “the finished scroll substitutes for [the afflicted’s] skin.”​​⁵⁰

Images on scrolls are non-representational talismanic designs that reveal mysteries and enhance the effectiveness of written prayers.​​⁵¹

As well as celluloid being thought of in terms of skin itself, it might also be thought of as substituting for the mind, its connections, its saturation in experience, its ability to function non-chronologically and to contain many places and times all at once.​​⁵²

Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s narration carries overtones of incantation. It names what she is seeking, what has been lost, the complexity of a relationship with someone in a different place. It is not a prayer they offer; they are situating the power in their own body and that of their grandmother. The narration is at once an account of accessing this power, as well as calling on it.

To work, talismans exploit the eye’s power to cause good and evil. In Ethiopian talismanic art, the eyes are the conduits through which illness-causing demons leave the body. … The eyes … reflect the gazer of the afflicted until the demon flees.​​⁵³

When the grandmother looks directly into the camera and thence out at us, she is uncompromising. She is not issuing a challenge or showing defiance. She communicates, “I am here. You are there. This is life.” She is answering the gaze trained upon her that she can and cannot see. The grandmother is formidable in her own watching.

This act of reciprocal viewing is key to the healing act, as invoking the names of god alone will not cause the retreat of demons.​​⁵⁴

Language is not enough by itself.​​⁵⁵

The eye you see is not

An eye because you see it;

It is an eye because it sees you.​​⁵⁶

Both scroll and film rely on being looked at in order to work, and the looking involves being carried along and carrying.

[We] get to know by moving around, not via a totalizing gaze.​​⁵⁷

Tim Ingold made the above observation while writing about medieval readers. He proposed a parallel between the experience of reading and the activity of wayfaring. Medieval readers mouthed the words on the page to both comprehend and fix them within their memory in order that they might carry the text in themselves and thereby continually engage with it, deepening their understanding and relationship with it as they put it into practice.​​⁵⁸ This active and multifaceted method of reading is more akin to following a trail, rather than navigating a route. Wayfaring involves looking as one goes, allowing oneself to be guided by happenstance as well as direction, spiritually or emotionally recognizing places along paths, dwelling in them, refusing the spurious gains of an efficient A to B. The wayfarer is her movement, and the movement is responsive to the surroundings.​​⁵⁹​​⁶⁰ Like migratory birds, old paths are followed in a general direction, but experience shapes the actual trajectory. As Zegeye-Gebrehiwot says, “Which path? Off the beaten path.”​​⁶¹ Although pilgrimage might cross one’s mind here, it does not ring true. The grandmother is not a relic or a site of holiness (something different from sacredness), and Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is not a devotee; she is creating the circumstances for a certain kind of self-knowing attained through wayfaring with another body.

Audre Lorde situates the erotic within black women’s bodies and the power of knowing and feeling: “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us … the passions of love in its deepest meanings … the self-connection shared.”​​⁶² Her grandmother’s body is an erotic site, that is, it is a site of female power. The film portrays this in the silent gaze of the grandmother. However, near the end of the film we meet her gaze more directly as she lies tucked under a white blanket on her wooden-framed sofa. The grandmother watches her granddaughter slowly pass the camera along the length of her body. It is such an exposed moment for both of them as they watch each other watching. The film cuts to a head and shoulder shot of her on the sofa, now on her side, turned away a little. This frank engagement with her grandmother’s body, the hint at death that comes from the white blanket (a glancing reference to a shroud?), and the permission the older woman has given for this gaze reveals and safeguards their intimacy and perhaps some of the peril involved in it.

A few moments before this scene, there is a lift of joy in the narrator’s voice as she describes time spent together.

So, I found you.
And you found me too and communication was hard but bonding through food and singing, church excursions and laughter over losing ourselves in translation was so great! It was wonderful!
And your early morning prayers that I woke to day after day provided me with comfort.​​⁶³

As the film ends, over the image of her grandmother, we hear Zegeye-Gebrehiwot speak four words:

Eshi?

Miakous?

Teseminyalish?

Yaya.

Perhaps they refer to specific moments they shared, perhaps they name feelings, perhaps they name their relationship. Her voice is tender, as if giving a gift only the recipient will understand.

Distance within Distance

What do you feel in your body right now?

Uh_____

Describe anything you feel.

There are so many memories in me

How do you feel about that?

I thought you’d know.

You don’t remember me do you?

Not when I’m not here, no.

Mm.

But I like you.

Mm_____ you remember where to come.

Yes. It’s not far really.

Are you telling me where you live?

No.

Good, good.

Uh_____

Yes.

Did you know me before?

Huh. 

?

What do you feel right now?

Here and there and whowho

And what does that feel like?

Like an owl with jack rabbit legs.

I would like to thank Courtney R. Thompson, Colin Smith, Maxine Proctor, and Emma Sharpe  for their help with this writing. Special thanks to shimby for everything. 

hannah_g is a writer, artist, and community radio producer from Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory. Her work is informed by queer echo-locating, contemporary art, and recollection. She is the former director of the artist-run centre aceartinc., and the editor of the gallery’s in-house annual publication, PaperWait. Here, she co-founded Flux Gallery, The Cartae Open School, and the gallery’s first Indigenous Curatorial Residency. hannah is a member of the Cartae Committee, a member of the Architecture & Design Film Festival programming committee, and a board member of Cluster: new music + integrated arts festival.

Spectres of Loss: Diaspora and Yearning in the Work of Hagere Selam “shimby” Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is part of a larger project titled Critical Fictions. Critical Fictions, an experimental writing project about contemporary art, will also feature monographs and fictions about Derek Dunlop, Kristin Nelson, Andrea Oliver Roberts, and Logan MacDonald. The project is funded through generous support from The Canada Council For The Arts.

Epigraphs

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 25.

Xie, Jenny. “Lunar New Year, 1988,” Eye Level: Poems, (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2018): 33.

Girmay, Aracelis. “The Black Maria.” The Black Maria, (Rochester: BOA Editions, 2016): 74.

Image Credit

Hagere Selam Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, yaya/ayat (film still), 2010.

1. Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘she’.
2. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot quoted in an interview with Hannah Godfrey, 9 August 2019.
3. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham and London: Duke U P, 1996), 141.
4. Godfrey interview with Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, 2019.
5. Stéphane Dufoix, trans. by William Rodarmor, Diasporas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 108.
6. Although one may hear “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” this maxim is so boringly dismissive, it begs to be dismissed itself.
7. Avery F. Gordon, “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” Borderlands 10:2, 2011:2, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol10no2_2011/gordon_thoughts.htm.
8. Gordon, “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” 8.
9. Gordon, “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” 5.
10. “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. … the queer aesthetic frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-thinking futurity.  … Queerness is essentially a rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York U P, 2009), 1.
11. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2002), 148.
12. J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2011),70.
13. Stéphane Dufoix, Diasporas, trans. William Rodarmor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 108.
14. Halberstam, 70.
15. “Hiraeth is a Welsh concept of longing for home. ‘Hiraeth’ is a word which cannot be completely translated, meaning more than solely ‘missing something’ or ‘missing home.’ It implies the meaning of missing a time, an era, or a person—including homesickness for what may not exist any longer. It is associated with the bittersweet memory of missing something or someone, while being grateful of that/their existence. It can also be used to describe a longing for a homeland, potentially of your ancestors, where you may have never been.” “Hiraeth,” Wikipedia, accessed 28 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiraeth.. Emphasis mine. See also “Hiraeth,” Word of the Week, https://sites.psu.edu/kielarpassionblog2/2016/04/02/hiraeth/.
16. For fascinating observations of Welsh hiraeth, see Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia,  (London: Vintage, 2011).
17. yaya/ayat, 1 minute 47 seconds.
18. Jenny Xie, “Lunar New Year, 1988,” Eye Level: Poems, (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2018), 33.
19. Love, 23.
20. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2007), 79.
21. yaya/ayat, 1 minute 15. All quotes from the narration are copied directly from the written script.
22. yaya/ayat, 1 minute 28.
23. yaya/ayat, 1 minute 31.
24. Love, 30.
25. yaya/ayat, 0 minute 19.
26. yaya/ayat, 3 minutes 53.
27. yaya/ayat, 2 minutes 20.
28. John Berger, Understanding a Photograph (London: Penguin, 2013), 112.
29. Leo Bersani, New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast: Leo Bersani and Adam Philips’ “Intimacies”, 19 March 2012.
30. Doug Ashford, “Empathy and Abstraction (Excerpts),” . published in conjunction with the exhibition Tradition at Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, 16 March 2013 – May 19, 2013, and Grazer Kunstverein, 7 June 2013 – 11 August 11 2013 (Maastricht: Marres/Centrum voor Contemporaine Cultuur, 2013), 3.
31. Ashford, 4.
32. Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, “Hagere Selam / Artist Talk,” aceartinc., 3 November 2012, accessed 29 September 2019, https://www.aceart.org/hagere-salem-artist-talk.
33. yaya/ayat, 0 minute 19.
34. yaya/ayat, 2 minutes 41, quoted from script.
35. Not all pigeons require a homing instinct to be cultivated by handlers. The American radio astronomer and Nobel Prize Winner (Robert Wilson and his team) described hearing “hissing noises from their antenna that would later prove to be signals from the Big Bang. But when they first heard the sound, they thought it might be, among other things, the poop of two pigeons that were living in the antenna. “We took the pigeons, put them in a box, and mailed them as far away as we could in the company mail to a guy who fancied pigeons,” one of the scientists later recalled. “He looked at them and said these are junk pigeons and let them go and before long they were right back.” But the scientists were able to clean out the antenna and determine that they had not been the cause of the noise. Cosmic microwave background radiation left behind by the Big Bang was. Mark Mancini, “15 Incredible Facts About Pigeons,” Mental Floss, April 19, 2018, accessed 23 September 2019, http://mentalfloss.com/article/535506/facts-about-pigeons.“The Pigeon, the antenna and me,” AEON, 19 January 2016, accessed 23 September 2019, https://aeon.co/videos/how-pigeon-droppings-nearly-derailed-a-massive-discovery-in-cosmology.
36. Ingold, 115.
37. “Homing is the inherent ability of an animal to navigate towards an original location through unfamiliar areas,” “Homing (biology),” Wikipedia, accessed 23 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_(biology).
38. “[P]lace is also a mobile imaginary, a form of desire.” Cindy Patton and Benigno Sānchez-Eppler, Queer Diasporas (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2000), 4.
39. Melvyn Bragg, “Bird Migration,” In Our Time BBC radio broadcast, 6 July 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wmk5j.
40. yaya/ayat, 3 minutes 44.
41. “It is all very well to offer proof of becoming a self-recognizing self in certain kinds of setups, but it is surely as critical to be able to recognize one another and other beings in ways that make sense to the sorts of lives the critters will lead,” indeed, the lives we all have and will lead. Donna Haraway provides a rabble of a case study of pigeons to illuminate her theory of trouble and interspecies worlding. Highly recommended. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2016), 19.
42. For the root of this train of thought, I must acknowledge Eleanor Eliza (Cripps) Kennedy’s sketch book of botanical watercolours and drawings. I offer my gratitude to Willow Rector for the generous invitation she extended to me to look at this book with her in the archives of the Manitoba Museum. It was retrieved for us by Dr. Roland Sawatzky, curator of history. As we leafed through the pages, I was struck by the maker’s melancholy courage to find home in a strange land. That the land was stolen from the Indigenous inhabitants deepens dreadfully the book’s well of pathos.
43. Chatwin, 175.
44. The small creature who made the smeuse might rather a fox did not know the name of it.
45. “Ethiopian cross,” Wikipedia, accessed 26 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_cross.
46. yaya/ayat, 3 minutes 59.
47. There is a fascinating essay by Wendy Lauren Belcker, “Same-Sex Intimacies in the Early African Text Gädlä Wälättä Petros (1672): Queer Reading an Ethiopian Woman Saint” (Research in African Literatures, vol. 47, no. 2, ‘Queer Valences in African Literatures and Film’ (Summer 2016), pp. 20–45). Belcker considers the life of Gädlä Wälättä Petros, which involved an intense and nearly lifelong relationship with another woman. The writers of the sacred text eschew but, Belcker argues, strongly imply the queerness of the intimacy. Belcker is at pains not to insert contemporary Western queerness, but according to her and her co-translator, the writers of this hagiography clearly felt something was going on. All this aside, I was reminded of this text whilst thinking about Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s meeting with her grandmother, specifically the description of when the two holy women met. It was love at first sight, a spiritual meeting, a recognition between two kindred spirits. Isn’t this what one seeks when meeting an important figure in one’s life, a person we have been seeking? And isn’t this what a spectre of loss nauseates us with: that is, its opposite, or—as bad—a tepid encounter?
48. Ingold, 16.
49. Kristen Windmuller-Luna, “Ethiopian Healing Scrolls,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), April 2015, accessed 26 September 2019, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/heal/hd_heal.htm, 54.
50. Windmuller-Luna, “Ethiopian Healing Scrolls,” 54.
51. Windmuller-Luna, “Ethiopian Healing Scrolls,” 55.
52. I am indebted to Colin Smith for this insight. For a detailed analysis of how film relates to embodied experience, see The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses by Laura U. Marks (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2000).
53. Windmuller-Luna, “Ethiopian Healing Scrolls,” 55.
54. Windmuller-Luna, “Ethiopian Healing Scrolls,” 55.
55. One might argue the film itself demonstrates the paralinguistics involved in talking. It also highlights the issues of language and diaspora that are raised in the narration itself. But like all metacommunication, there may be some difficulty making a definitive location of meaning.
56. Antonio Machao, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Robert Bly (Wesleyan U P, 1983), cited by Jenny Xie in Eye Level: Poems (epigraph).
57. Ingold, 16.
58. Ingold, 16.
59. Ingold, 16.
60. This also brings to mind something Bruce Chatwin writes about language in In Patagonia: “[Language] proceeds as a system of navigation.”
61. yaya/ayat; 3 minutes 14.
62. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, California: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56.
63. yaya/ayat, 1 minute 55.

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