“…natives must assert counterimaginings to create their authentic presence as what Vizenor calls postindians. Such imaginative self-recreation is accomplished primarily through storytelling because Indian was and is a stereotypic substitute for actual natives created by white storytelling…” Karl Kroeber, “Why It’s a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor is Not an Indian,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 29.
Term coined by Parisa Ahmadi, Ph.D. Candidate of Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University.
Tezeta was the soundtrack of my childhood as it was frequently played in Empress Taytu Ethiopian Restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio. Azmaris are poets who improvise verses while playing an instrument called the masenqo. They are lyrical storytellers who simultaneously critique and entertain society. They are living archives of oral history.
The origin story of coffee.
I am using Vizenor’s terminology to refer, in this case, to the fabricated reality and unbalanced perspectives produced by the White Gaze about Ethiopia, the continent, and Blackness.