Fozia Ismail has clear reminiscences of being summoned to the lounge the place the remainder of her household sat on the ground huddled round a cassette participant. When her mum pressed play, the voice of kinfolk in Somalia stuffed their north London flat. “I needed to hearken to those that I hadn’t met: uncles and aunties, after which document an ungainly message again,” says Ismail, whose household comes from Somaliland, a area that later turned autonomous.
Within the Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, earlier than cell phones, letter tapes had been one of many principal types of communication between Somalis within the diaspora and their households again house.
Quick-forward 40 years, and Ismail, a Bristol-based artist and the co-founder of Dhaqan Collective, is celebrating the legacy of letter tapes by Camel Meat and Cassette Tapes, an artwork and analysis venture.
The venture started in 2019 with a sequence of workshops that introduced collectively 14 Bristol-based Somali elders and 10 British-born Somalis, who mentioned the cultural and private significance of the letter tapes.
“It facilitated conversations that [young people] had by no means actually had with their mother and father, aunts or grandparents. They ended up discovering out a lot about them,” says artist and Dhaqan Collective co-founder, Ayan Cilmi.
“[In one conversation a mother] shares this heartbreaking story about this particular tape with the voice of her cousin who has since handed, and the way she nonetheless goes again and listens to it. So she thought it was great that her son now understands why tapes had been so vital,” provides Ismail.
By means of the workshops and with the assistance of Waaberi Telephone, a web based archival platform centred on preserving Somali artwork and tradition, Ismail and Cilmi gathered conversations and recordings of music and poetry.
“There was a narrative a couple of girl whose husband divorced her by way of letter tape,” says Ismail. “There have been love letters, recommendation for many who had gone to Europe, and loads of praying for the well being of the household, in addition to chit-chat, gossip about weddings, funerals.”
Many elderly tapes went past household information, they had been additionally deeply political, used as technique of communication throughout the Somali Nationwide Motion to begin a revolution towards the navy dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who later subjected the tapes to strict controls.
In 1988, Siad Barre launched vicious airstrikes in Hargeisa. Through the chaos, broadcasters at Radio Hargeisa grabbed 1000’s of cassette tapes containing what is called Somalia’s golden age of music (Nineteen Sixties to the Eighties) and buried them in a secret underground bunker, hoping they might survive. Extremely they did.
As we speak, the Hargeisa Cultural Centre homes the most important Somali cassette archive, and has been instrumental in preserving and digitising them.
Ostinato Data, a New York-based document label specialising in music from Africa and the diaspora, has additionally digitised a lot of the tapes, producing a CD of 15 songs in 2017 – which was nominated for a Grammy.
Somali individuals have a wealthy oral historical past: tales, poetry, histories, myths and songs had been handed down by generations by phrase of mouth. It’s no shock, says Ismail, that Somalis adopted the cassette tape as a type of documentation and communication.
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When the Somali civil war caused mass displacement and a refugee crisis, tapes took on a new relevance. Not only were they used as a means of staying in touch with relatives back home, but they maintained a crucial link to their cultural heritage and sense of self, while navigating environments away from family and friends.
Ismail and Cilmi hope to generate a similar sense of belonging with Camel Meat and Cassette Tapes.
The pair are now exploring the recording of nomadic weaving songs, a traditional practice under threat because the climate crisis is destroying the natural materials used in weaving.
Environmental instability has added a sense of urgency to their work.
“All of our projects relate to climate change in that Somali people are being displaced internally,” says Ismail. “People aren’t really thinking about preserving the culture out there, they are thinking about surviving and about being displaced.”
They are also determined to move beyond one-dimensional narratives of violence and trauma, to show the breadth of Somali culture – its humour, joy and creativity.
“I feel like there is so much humour in Somali culture,” says Ismail, laughing at the memory of one weaving song where a woman sings “you haven’t given us the snacks bitch. We’ve been weaving for you but you haven’t prepared the snacks.”
Ismail adds: “We’re using material to ignite a conversation, and to make space for playing around and laughing together.”
