An intimate account of everyday life in Somaliland, explored through an ever-evolving musical genre of love songs.

At first listen, both music and talk about love are conspicuously absent from Somaliland’s public soundscapes. The lingering effects of war, the contested place of music in Islam, and gendered norms of emotional expression limit opportunities for making music and sharing personal feelings. But while Christina J. Woolner was researching peacebuilding in Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa, she kept hearing snippets of songs. Almost all of these, she learned, were about love. In these songs, poets, musicians, and singers collaborate to give voice to personal love aspirations and often painful experiences of love-suffering. Once in circulation, the intimate and heartfelt voices of love songs provide rare and deeply therapeutic opportunities for dareen-wadaag (feeling-sharing). In a region of political instability, these songs also work to powerfully unite listeners on the basis of shared vulnerability, transcending social and political divisions and opening space for a different kind of politics.
 
Taking us from 1950s recordings preserved on dusty cassettes to new releases on YouTube and live performances at Somaliland’s first postwar music venue—where the author herself eventually takes the stage—Woolner offers an account of love songs in motion that reveals the capacity of music to connect people and feelings across time and space, creating new possibilities for relating to oneself and others.

“This book is a joy to read: conceptually innovative, empirically rich, and beautifully written, it takes us into the lives and thoughts of the people who create and circulate love songs in Somaliland. Combining musical and textual insights of a high order, Love Songs in Motion gives us new ways of thinking about intimacy, publicness, and creative work ‘in motion.’ It is one of the best ethnographies ever written on an African popular culture genre, and it will be an instant classic.” * Karin Barber, emerita, University of Birmingham *
“A beautiful and moving ethnographic account of the role and importance of hees jacayl, or love songs, in present-day Somaliland. Drawing on the author’s extensive and intimate experience in Somaliland, this finely crafted book presents a compelling alternative to ‘Afro-pessimist’ discourses in showing how the performance and circulation of hees jacayl is a hopeful, future-oriented act that fosters personal healing and postwar reconciliation and cultivates a sense of belonging in Somaliland.” * Amanda Weidman, Bryn Mawr College *

Christina J. Woolner is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.