Speaker: Christina Woolner

In this talk, we will travel deep into the musical world of Somali love(-suffering) via the storied life, love and songs of Hargeysa-born singer Khadra Daahir Ciige.

Fondly known as hooyada jacaylka (‘the mother of love’), Khadra is especially beloved for her stirring performances of calaacal (a genre of love-lament) and a voice that listeners say can ‘make you feel what she feels’. While Khadra’s popularity rests squarely on an ability to convey deeply felt love experiences in her voice, in this talk Christina Woolner explores how songs, singers and voices become increasingly ‘sticky, or saturated with affect’ (as Sahra Ahmed puts it) as they move across both space and generation and are envocalized by an ever-expanding number of actors.

Christina Woolner specifically considers how love songs’ aesthetic form and artists’ accessibility to their fans precipitates a particularly intimate form of talk that plays a critical role in constantly (re)making the voice of a singer and her public intimate. Weaving together stories that Khadra’s fans tell, stories that Khadra herself told, the texts (and sounds) of her songs, and Christina Woolner's own reflections on encountering Khadra, she ultimately aims to demonstrate how the ongoing and multivocal making of celebrity voice works to mediate intimacy and contributes to the snowballing ‘stickiness’ of love songs in motion.

Christina Woolner’s research broadly explores how forms of popular art and practices of ‘voicing’ are entangled in processes of sociopolitical transformation, especially in the wake of violence: how words, as language and sound, shape how people relate to themselves and others. Inspired by work in anthropology, ethnomusicology and sound studies, her research considers the political and affective affordances of ‘the voice’ as both a sonic thing and a social phenomenon. For the last decade, Christina's ethnographic focus has been Somaliland, where she has worked with poets, musicians, singers, politicians and cultural activists to understand the power of music and oral poetry to shape both everyday intimate relationships and state-level processes of change.