Ye Gulelew Sekaram in Amharic or ‘The Drunkard of Gulelle’ is officially recognized as the first modern short story in Amharic literature which was written and published around 1946 by Temesgen Gebre, a little known Ethiopian writer and a patriot during the war of resistance against Italian occupation of Ethiopia. He was a patriot who fought against Italian fascism in 1936 and spent most of his life in a somber northern district of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Temesgen’s only short story was discovered rather lately and was celebrated as the first story in a genre little know in Ethiopian literature at that time. No one knows whether Temesgen has written only one short story in his life or whether he may have left behind more tales that might have been lost without anyone being aware of them.
As the first Ethiopian tale in Amharic, Tmesegen’s story is the equivalent of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) frequently cited as the first American short story or “tale,” but the genre remained undistinguished until Edgar Allen Poe’s well-known 1824 review of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Twice Told Tales’.
Similarly, Tmesgen’s first and only short story remained unknown for many decades until the boom in Amharic short story back in the 1990s brought it to academic and then to public attention.
What I call the short story boom period is the years roughly running from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The boom made the genre unprecedentedly popular in Ethiopian literature. It was a boom because almost all young and beginning writers started their careers with the short story. Later on, even the best and established Ethiopian novelists too started to write short stories. That was also a period when the genre was very popular because it was neither time consuming nor requiring particular efforts. When we look at the short stories of that period, we realize that they depicted universal human conditions at a certain time in the history of Ethiopian society.
I started my literary career with the short story and my first book in this genre is entitled, yarada lijoch or “The Boys of Arada”. The short story is I think, the easiest path to start the long journey in writing. It is also the best way to learn writing on the job. The short story teaches us the basic tools of creative writing such as characterization, plot, theme, setting and style. It teaches the secrets of writing with economy before you embark on novel writing. The short story is the best school to graduate from before you become an established novelist. The second best school is writing for newspapers.
As a rule, the newspaper article is short, focusing on a single issue and written to be read within a short span of time. The same can be said about the short story which has a single theme, uncomplicated plot, and a story that can be read instantly. The difference between The short story and newspaper article is that the former is a product of the imagination while the second is about real events. Since I started writing for newspapers, it was easier for me to make the transition to the short story. I had only to read how to books on fiction writing to make a swift transition to fiction. However, this does not imply that writing short stories is a stroll in the garden.
Writing a good short story is particularly difficult because it requires the talent to imagine or see the beginning and the ending of the story in a single flash, beside mastering the art of showing rather than telling during the narrative process. It also requires economy of words, writing good beginnings and endings that are expected to grab the attention of the reader and lead them to a satisfactory denouement or ending. The beginning of the story needs to be captivating the attention of the reader. The first sentence as well as the first paragraph of a good story is expected to be a cliff hanger that can preferably encourage the reader to continue reading and not be discouraged by the first few sentences.
The short story is a relatively new genre in Ethiopian literature. Ethiopian literature has been characterized for many centuries by the unchallenged sway Ge’ez or the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that enjoyed preeminence over all aspects of liturgical writing in the form of chronicles of the saints and later on in Amharic literature. Ge’ez literature largely dealt with the lives and miracles of saints and angels and mainly consisted of church chronicles, so to say. It hardly dealt with secular themes and the lives of ordinary Ethiopians. Amharic, although an offshoot of Ge’ez, later on made a sharp break with this ancient tradition and started to serve as a vehicle for the feelings, emotions, aspirations and hopes and frustrations of ordinary Ethiopians.
However, it took a long time and the emergence of a rather secular intelligentsia in Ethiopia, for this to happen. The introduction of modern education and together with it, the advent of Western culture and ways of thinking and writing were decisive factors in this process.
The first full-length, and what some critics consider to be the first modern Amharic novel is called Tobia by Afewerk Gebretyesus. Literary commentators generally consider Tobia the first modern novel in Amharic, with a fully developed plot, imaginary characters, settings and dialogue . . . etc.
The Amharic short story dates back to an even later period. Critics maintain that the first published Amharic short story did not appear before ye gulelew sekaram (The Drunkard of Gulele), published some fifty years ago. This editor has included it in this first anthology. This is to show how story writing in Amharic began and changed eventually. The 1950’s and 1960’s have witnessed the spread of written Amharic literature in the forms of novels and short stories.
It was during this time that what many consider to be an Amharic classic, namely the novel by the foremost Ethiopian writer Haddis Alemayehu appeared under the now household name of fikir eske mekabir (Love unto Death). although Haddis Alemayehu is a novelist, he has also written folk tales or fairy tales akin to the famous fables by French writer La Fontaine.
A collection of fables by Addis Alemayehu was first published by Kuraz Publishing Agency in 1960 under the title teret teret yemeseret. This editor has taken the story from chapter five of the collection. He has done so both for the tale’s merit and the author’s special consideration for it in the introduction to the same collection.
Ba’alu Girma is an Ethiopian writer who was famous for for his fine literary style and language. He has influenced quite a number of younger writers and suddenly disappeared from the literary scene under mysterious circumstances back in 1984. He was the modern Amharic novelist and stylist par excellence. Ba’alu has written one short story during his literary career.
He sent it to a defunct Amharic language magazine known as Yekatit (February). This was on the eve of the publication of the ill-fated Oromay (1985) with which he is alleged to have criticized the former officials and paid for it with his life. His story appeared under the title yefitsamew mejemeria (The Beginning of The End). This editor has translated and included it in this collection.
As I said above, most of the new short story writers emerged in the late 1980’s. They experimented with style, subject matter and language. The editor has selected these stories for their intrinsic merit.
Daniachew Worku wrote short stories both in English and Amharic. He has also written a classic novel in Amharic called Adefris. He is the author of another novel in English in the African Writers Series – The Thirteenth Sun. I discovered one of his stories in a now defunct bilingual magazine called Guramayle. There were also a few writers who used English to produce heir works. It was back in the 1990s that I was inspired to translate some of them into English in the hope of publishing them with foreign readers in mind.
To be more exact, the idea of producing this collection dawned on me way back in 1993. I had the conviction that Amharic literature – or any literature in any of the Ethiopian languages for that matter – deserved to be accessible to the non-Amharic readers. I thought it should also serve as additional reading material for students of English in Ethiopian schools. These stories, both by their narrative techniques and subject matter, are closer to the lives and experiences of Ethiopian students and readers than, say, the stories by Nathaniel Hawthorn, Anton Chekhov or Guy de Maupassant.
This is perhaps the first attempt to produce a book of Ethiopian stories in English. One will have to make similar efforts in this direction in the future too. English is the international lingua franca. It is a vehicle of universal culture, science and technology. It is bound to stay so in the future too and the best way to learn it might be to blend it with local cultural colors. This is often the case in developing countries where English is a second language or a medium of instruction in schools and universities. But is has left an indelible mark in the history of Ethiopian literature.
What I called the boom in Amharic short story writing was short lived. It started suddenly and ended in the same way.
