Maya Tessema, one of the leading voices behind Ogina, tells us what Ogina means, how it came about and also about the first issue of the quarterly OGINA. Without further ado, I’ll link you to the Ogina zine but I want to quote part of what Maya said about the first issue of Ogina below.
We discovered that ogina is not static because of our task of creating it. Like the townspeople of Passaic, NJ, in Michel Gondry’s recent film, Be Kind, Rewind, we actively participate in the creation and re-creation of our past. We take myths and legends and investigate them, or enlarge them to epic proportions. We also have the space to remix. In the film, people claiming to be from different backgrounds are making a film about their city’s past. In our case, as young Oromo people bound by a common experience we are labeling ‘culture,’ we are spread throughout the world but continue to find ways to come together and create a future we could not imagine individually.
So in our first issue of Ogina, each of the contributions has taken on the task of creating art and conversation that looks both forward and backward. We look backward by drawing on the history we know to be painfully present, and look forward by finding new ways to understand and think about our situation. Through the interview with Joe Riemann of Equal Exchange, Steven Thomas’s essay on an Oromo Renaissance, the poetry of Efrata Obsa, Ziyad Kadir, and Hana Tesfaye, we are teaching each other to discuss Oromo-ness in new and challenging ways. The visual art of the Rammy Mohammed and Abdiwak Dawit Yohannes help us to see our situation in a new light. Siraj K. of Norway has helped us to navigate the growing complexity of Oromo identity in an unlikely way – by reprogramming an iphone in Afan Oromo and by contributing to the nascent Oromo Wikipedia.
But of course, this “new” art must have had some precedent, so we at Ogina would like to extend gratitude to Dhaba Wayessa for helping to create a pathway of Oromo art through his literature, and for allowing us to show his film The Fallen Beats in our inaugural issue.
As we are creating, questioning, and sharing our work, I remember what Pastor Gemechis Buba talked about at the fundraiser in March. He spoke of translating our “orality into literality” so that we may document and disseminate our world to others and to ourselves. This may be the first time many in the audience had been forced to consider that art is not merely ornamental or a display of cultural pride, but a medium where we figure things out as a community: speaking, responding and participating in the world as we have never done before.
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