Christina Woolner: “love songs are powerful because they are composed to be interpreted.”

A social anthropologist by training, Christina Woolner first arrived in Somaliland intending to study peacebuilding, but an unexpected moment—catching a televised performance of a man in fatigues singing about love on the outskirts of Hargeisa—shifted the course of her work. What began as a serendipitous curiosity soon became her window into Somali life, opening onto the hidden geographies of feeling and sociability that formal studies often overlook. 

Her book, Love Songs in Motion: voicing intimacy in Somaliland, is an exploration of how Somali love songs live both privately and publicly, mediating the delicate terrain between intimacy and community in a society negotiating the aftermath of war. Echoing anthropologist Veena Das, Woolner suggests that these songs help people ‘make the everyday inhabitable,’ creating spaces of dareen-wadaag—feeling-sharing—that allow listeners to work through loss, trust, and vulnerability.

Yet her inquiry does not stop at the emotional resonance of lyrics, but by tracing how songs are composed, performed, and debated, Woolner shows that they are not static texts but “semantic snowballs,” gathering stories, memories, meanings and political undercurrents as they circulate.

She also raises pressing questions about gender and composition in Somali music. Woolner notes that Somali women’s voices have long animated the soundscape as celebrated singers, yet most lyrics, even those written from a woman’s perspective, remain authored by men. She interrogates how this gendered dynamic shapes the voicing of intimacy and how, despite this, women’s material voices and affective force imbue the songs with meanings that transcend the mere lyrical word.

In this interview for Geeska, Christina Woolner sheds fresh light on the world of Somali love songs, inviting readers to consider them not only as repositories of emotion but also as arenas where gender, politics, and creativity are continually negotiated.

Ibrahim Osman: First and foremost, tell us what led you, as social anthropologist, to choose Somali love songs as the focus of your fieldwork, and why you saw that as a good window into Somali life, given that the idea is quite unique?

Christina Woolner: Hi Ibraahim, thanks so much for taking the time to read my book and for these great questions. As to how I came to this topic – the short answer is that it was by accident. I have a peace studies background, and I planned to focus my PhD on Somaliland’s peacebuilding process. I did a smaller project on this, which was fascinating, but by focusing on the formal work

of (mostly male) politicians, I felt I was missing out on the everyday experiences of people who were working to build a different type of sociopolitical community in the aftermath of the war.

Then I had a serendipitous encounter: I was living at the University of Hargeisa's guesthouse, and my housemates really wanted to watch Premier League football, so they hooked up a TV. One day, when the football was over, I happened upon Horn Cable TV’s music channel. I vividly remember a video of a man in military fatigues singing animatedly while walking around the outskirts of Hargeisa. I asked my Somali housemate what he was singing about, and he responded matter-of-factly: ‘it’s about love, of course! We don’t sing about war anymore’.

That moment stuck with me, especially as I’d not really heard any music on the streets. So I started asking people about love songs and a whole new world emerged. For one, people started telling me stories about their own love lives, which is a topic I’d never broached before – songs seemed to open space to talk more intimately.

I was also invited into spaces I’d not been before, like majlis, where people listen to and make music together, and where they interact in ways I’d not seen elsewhere. And then Hiddo Dhawr opened (the first music venue to operate in 25 years), which sparked an interesting conversation about the place of music and artists in Hargeisa’s urban landscape. So it was an exciting moment to be thinking about the place of the arts in the city’s redevelopment and the role of love songs in people’s personal lives.

IO: Your book, Love Songs in Motion, brings into focus songs that many people might not immediately consider relevant to the broader questions that emerge from the study of post-conflict societies. What do these songs reveal about Somali society that we might otherwise miss?

CW: So many things! I’ve come to think of love songs as leading both private and public lives, and as such they have a lot to reveal about personal relationships and politics. There’s an anthropologist named Veena Das who writes about the impact of violence on everyday life and the subsequent ways that people work to ‘make the everyday inhabitable’. I think love songs have something to teach us about this – about the everyday ways that people cope with suffering, work through issues of trust in interpersonal relationships, and articulate and enact ways of being with each other that require a form of vulnerability that is especially difficult in post-war settings.

In their public lives, love songs can also teach us about the negotiation of the political community. The redevelopment of the arts sphere in Somaliland lagged other sectors, and its rebuilding has not been without controversy. The way that musicians have negotiated space for themselves in Hargeisa can tell us a lot about a whole host of issues – from gender and local-diaspora relations to the politics and economics of building new institutions in a post-conflict space, to how people define ‘politics’ itself.

There’s a music scholar, Ted Gioia, who writes about the history of love songs in a global sense, and he makes the point that love songs everywhere are always inherently political, but at the same time they demand a renunciation of power. This is also the case in Somaliland – and as I think love songs can help us understand both the private and public workings of power in ways that we would miss if we focused only on ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘post-conflict analysis’ in a more traditional sense.

IO: You’ve described Somali love songs as spaces of “dareen-wadaag” (feeling-sharing). Can you unpack the significance of that concept, and explain why it was so important in your work?

CW: So the first thing I’ll say here is that the term ‘dareen-wadaag’ was suggested to me by one of my poet-interlocutors as the best way to capture the type of intimacy that love songs facilitate. Love songs are often about desire between men and women. But they also open space for feeling-sharing that exceeds this type of desire. The simplest way to put this is to say that love songs open space for people to know that their often very private and even unspeakable experiences of love(-suffering) are shared by others – and in a setting where speaking about love openly, either in public or private, is difficult, this is incredibly powerful.

Songs facilitate this in a few ways. Firstly, because love songs are collaboratively created by a poet, musician and singer, the making of songs requires that several people sit and think about the love(-suffering) experiences of others. So, love songs’ very existence suggests that it might be possible to feeling-share. It’s no surprise, then, that people use love songs to share hard-to-articulate feelings with others, to make sense of their own love challenges – and, ultimately, to feel less alone.

But love songs aren’t just a way to share feelings between intimate partners. When they circulate and are performed, love songs are very disarming – they allow people to let down their guard and feel vulnerable. In a sense, songs remind listeners that they are united by experiences of brokenness, of (love-)suffering. Ultimately love songs work to stitch together a community that desires to know that such feelings are shared – a community of shared vulnerability that transcends both time and space.

IO: In your book, you note that Somali love songs (hees jacayl) often doubled as political songs (hees siyaasadeed), with audiences attuned to hearing political messages even when poets insisted they were only love songs. What are your thoughts on this layered quality of Somali songs and the interpretive work required to uncover deeper meaning?

CW: One thing that makes love songs so fascinating – and powerful – is that you can never determine their meaning in advance. How songs are interpreted depends on so many things, from the broader political speech environment to a listener’s love experiences, to the mood in a performance space on a given night. So for me the question is not just about uncovering layered meaning but about why and to what effect songs can be taken up in so many different ways.

As you note, there are periods in Somalia’s history when love songs were heard as political critique, even when this wasn’t a poet’s intent. But in Somaliland during my research, people were adamant that love songs were about love: thanks to the free speech environment Somalilanders enjoy, poets could openly criticize the president and didn’t need to veil their critique.

Furthermore, a song heard as political in one historical moment might be heard by another listener in another time to be about their own personal experiences. Poets in fact told me that it is a good compositional practice to leave some space for listeners to hear what they need, to hear something of themselves in a song. There are a lot of Somali proverbs that convey this sentiment as well, for example: ‘Qofba meeshi bugtaa isagay belbeshaa’ which in this context can be translated as (‘Each person takes it to where his wound burns’).

In the book, I borrow the term ‘semantic snowballing’ from a scholar named Tom Turino, because I like the image of a snowball – it starts small and gathers layers as it rolls. Songs do this too – as they circulate, they are constantly drawing new stories to them.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t look closely at a song or interview the poet to get a fuller understanding of their intent, and if you’re interested in songs as historical documents it’s important to dig deeper in this way – and I found that people often have animated debates about songs’ origins. But a critical point I try to make in the book is that love songs are powerful precisely because they are composed to be interpreted, to be taken up by people in a variety of times and places. And as they move they become a whole complex network of layered meanings, memories, stories and associations.

IO: Except for a few female trailblazers, many Somali love songs are still written by men, even when sung from a woman’s perspective. How do you think this gendered authorship affects the way intimacy is voiced, and what did you observe about gendered power dynamics in the Somali music industry more broadly?

CW: Given that women compose poetry and there are whole genres of poetry reserved for women, I was perplexed early in my research that, as you’ve noted, the lyrics (and melodies) of love songs are written almost exclusively by men. There are different ways to read into this. The historian Lidwein Kapteijns suggests that Somali love songs undoubtedly helped mainstream issues of gender and romance, but ultimately, she says the emancipatory power of love songs was limited by the fact that they were written by men.

I’ve also had male poets tell me that although they try their best to ‘stand in the shoes’ of a woman to give voice to their experiences, they are ultimately constrained by the fact that they can’t know that perspective fully. So in a sense, we aren’t getting the full picture – the (public) voicing of intimacy is mediated, at least in part, by men.

But I also think we miss something if we look at these authorship dynamics as an issue of men simply speaking for women. Songs about women’s experiences ultimately need women’s voices

to come into the world – and that singing voice does more than articulate lyrics and follow a melody, it comes with its own affective force.

Historically and up to the present, love songs remain a rare public space where women’s material voices are highly audible, and women are unequivocally celebrated and revered as singers, at least as much as men (if not more – though fame can come at a cost). And if we think of love songs as a genre of poetry, they stand apart from other genres in that love songs have always been by men and women, for men and women.

Poetic genres, of course, are not static, and as women increasingly compose in genres historically reserved for men (e.g. gabay, or participating in silsilado), I will be interested to see if there’s also a shift in how love songs are put together.

IO: During your fieldwork, were there moments when Somalis challenged your interpretations of a song or corrected your assumptions, and how did those moments reshape your understanding and your writing?

CW: Well, I had my assumptions corrected on a regular basis – I write about this in the preface. But I’ll share one memorable moment where a friend helped put things into perspective.

A few months into my research I was recounting to him what I’d been up to, and at the point they seemed pretty disconnected – I’d been working in a cassette archive at the Hargeysa Cultural Centre, I’d been going to Hiddo Dhawr, I’d been to Radio Hargeysa, I’d been listening to songs on YouTube, interviewing artists, talking to friends and generally trying to make sense of the city’s soundscapes.

Every day was different, and I felt pulled in many directions at once. He looked at me and simply said: ‘What unites these things, Christina, is love songs.’

Retrospectively it seems so obvious: I’d had these disparate experiences because I was following love songs – so of course it is love songs that connected them. But this was kind of an ‘ah ha’ moment for me, that helped me realize that this is key to why love songs are so powerful. They regularly move from intimate private spaces into the public domain, and back again. And as they circulate, they connect people and feelings across space and across generations. This is really a central argument to the book, so I’m very grateful for my friend’s interjection!

IO: Finally, is there a Somali love song that stands out as your favorite, and what about it resonates with you?

CW: Oh, there are too many to choose from! If I had to choose just one, I’d probably have to say Xaafuun, because it conjures up so many things. Cumar Dhuule is a master kabaniste (oud player), and his playing on old recordings of that song is mesmerizing. This is also one of the first songs that my Oud teacher, Abdinasir Ma’alin Aydid taught me on the oud, and he taught it to me because he knew I’d been spending time with Khadra Dahir, who also recorded a version of this song.

So when I hear this song I think of the time I was fortunate to spend with Abdinasir and Khadra. I also just love listening to Khadra’s voice – it is warm, vulnerable and revealing of her truly magnanimous qalbi-furan (open heart).