TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘If there was no jaad’
T2 - poetics of khat and remembering the future in a London Somali community
AU - Ermansons, Guntars
N1 - Funding Information:
I owe debts to my Somali friends, particularly Abdirahman Salah, and all interlocutors for conversations and welcoming me into their lives. I am grateful to Dominique Behague, Carlo Caduff, Hanna Kienzler, Tara Mahfoud, and Hamda Mohamed for their invaluable suggestions for improving the manuscript. Thank you to two reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Fieldwork for this project was funded by King's University of London Scholarship Scheme, University of London. Names, except of public figures, have been changed.
Funding Information:
I owe debts to my Somali friends, particularly Abdirahman Salah, and all interlocutors for conversations and welcoming me into their lives. I am grateful to Dominique Behague, Carlo Caduff, Hanna Kienzler, Tara Mahfoud, and Hamda Mohamed for their invaluable suggestions for improving the manuscript. Thank you to two reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Fieldwork for this project was funded by King's University of London Scholarship Scheme, University of London. Names, except of public figures, have been changed.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute.
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - The Somali people have suffered from a devastating civil war and large-scale forced displacement since the late 1980s. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Northwest London Somalis during the khat (Catha edulis) control debates that led to the prohibition of the substance in June 2014. It argues that diaspora poetics can become an expression of a deeply divisive past offering ways to rearticulate ruptured interpersonal and community relationships in terms of their restorative potential. When Somali diaspora people in the United Kingdom used poetry to engage in the khat prohibition debates, the anti-khat poems entangled this mild stimulant with the Somali history of state collapse and displacement. This revealed that, for Somalis, the stakes of the prohibition vastly exceeded concerns about potential social and health harms of khat in the United Kingdom. The poetics of khat situate acts of remembering within a distinctive conception of ideas about Somali nationhood, the need for conciliation, and visions of a common future. Yet remembering proved to be less about nostalgic longing for the past and more about enacting new moral and political relations enabled by the momentum of the khat prohibition.
AB - The Somali people have suffered from a devastating civil war and large-scale forced displacement since the late 1980s. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Northwest London Somalis during the khat (Catha edulis) control debates that led to the prohibition of the substance in June 2014. It argues that diaspora poetics can become an expression of a deeply divisive past offering ways to rearticulate ruptured interpersonal and community relationships in terms of their restorative potential. When Somali diaspora people in the United Kingdom used poetry to engage in the khat prohibition debates, the anti-khat poems entangled this mild stimulant with the Somali history of state collapse and displacement. This revealed that, for Somalis, the stakes of the prohibition vastly exceeded concerns about potential social and health harms of khat in the United Kingdom. The poetics of khat situate acts of remembering within a distinctive conception of ideas about Somali nationhood, the need for conciliation, and visions of a common future. Yet remembering proved to be less about nostalgic longing for the past and more about enacting new moral and political relations enabled by the momentum of the khat prohibition.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138276034&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1467-9655.13825
DO - 10.1111/1467-9655.13825
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85138276034
SN - 1359-0987
VL - 28
SP - 1290
EP - 1308
JO - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
JF - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
IS - 4
ER -