Tigrinya literary deep-dive — the Mehari quarterly and the new diaspora press

<p>*Mehari* (Tigrinya: &#x27;compassionate&#x27; or &#x27;merciful&#x27;), the Mekelle-based Tigrinya-language literary quarterly, was the most important post-Derg Tigrinya literary venue from its 1994 founding through the 2020 war shutdown. Ras Publishing — the Mekelle press that produced *Mehari* — reissued the quarterly in 2023 with a double-issue covering the war period&#x27;s writing, including underground manuscripts produced during the federal-and-Eritrean siege of Tigray. The reissue is one of the clearer markers of the post-Pretoria-Agreement cultural recovery.</p> <p>Reesom Haile (the Asmara-born poet who lived in exile in the United States until his death in 2003) remains the most-cited single Tigrinya-language poet of the post-independence period. His *We Have Our Voice* (Tigrinya original *Wedi Sahul*) is the standard reference text for the late-twentieth-century Tigrinya literary canon. The Eritrean state&#x27;s literary establishment around the PFDJ-linked Hidri publishers (Asmara) and the Eritrean Cultural Affairs Bureau has produced a more institutionally consolidated Tigrinya literary infrastructure than Mekelle&#x27;s, partly because of the longer continuous state support and partly because Eritrean language policy has been more straightforwardly Tigrinya-centric than Ethiopian federal multilingualism allows.</p> <p>The diaspora press is the part the international literary community has under-covered. The Atlanta-based Africa Tigrinya Studies publishing initiative, the London-based Awasem Press (founded by Eritrean exiles in the 1990s, now publishing both Eritrean and Tigrayan Tigrinya-language writers), and the Frankfurt-based diaspora print-on-demand operations have together sustained the Tigrinya literary world through the periods when the Mekelle and Asmara infrastructures were either suppressed or destroyed. The cross-fertilization between the diaspora and the home Tigrinya literary scenes is now structurally different from how it was a decade ago — the diaspora press is more central than it has been in the language&#x27;s history.</p> <p>Sara Marzagora at SOAS, and the Tigrinya-and-Amharic comparative literature work of Wendy Belcher at Princeton, have provided the principal English-language scholarly engagement with the Tigrinya literary tradition. The Eritrean Studies Association&#x27;s translation programmes, the broader Horn of Africa Studies networks, and the *Journal of Eritrean Studies* (when published) have been the academic infrastructure. The translation pipeline from Tigrinya into English remains thin — fewer than a dozen full novels and poetry collections have appeared in English translation in the past two decades — and this remains the principal barrier to broader recognition.</p> <p>The political dimension is unavoidable. The Eritrean state has treated the Tigrayan-Tigrinya literary revival as politically threatening; the Tigray Interim Regional Administration has used the literary recovery as a soft-power demonstration of cultural-political vitality after the war. Both framings are instrumental; the underlying literary work transcends them and is increasingly produced with explicit awareness that it must serve the language and the readers rather than the immediate political utility either government wants to extract. The 2024 *Mehari* double-issue was edited with that explicit framing, which is part of why it has been better received than the more politically instrumentalized publishing from both Mekelle and Asmara in the past five years.</p>