Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology · Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology

Xasan Daahir Ismaaciil (Weedhsame) with Christina Woolner

·53 min·3 clips

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Hargeisa is not treated like scenery here. Christina Woolner begins in Somaliland's capital, with cars, people, and mosque loudspeakers pressing into the recording before the interview settles. The place stays present. Wetsame comes through as a poet, mathematician, and lecturer at the University of Hargeisa, with love songs as well as political and social poems in his work. Christina starts with process. When she asks how emotion turns into language, he avoids a tidy answer and calls it a long road. Sometimes words arrive almost as dictation. Other times, an image comes first, like a house design waiting for bricks and cement. Feeling and idea have to meet. The conversation moves to Qirashu, a love song explained to listeners as confession. Its origin is close and uneasy. A singer named Ubah had met a girl who had loved one of her relatives for almost ten years, but speech was the obstacle. Wetsame describes how even simple affectionate words could take hours to arrange because confession carried fear and weight. That delay stayed with him. For him, the poet can speak for someone whose feeling has not yet found a public shape. Christina asks the authorship question gently. If the poem begins in someone else's situation, where does his own voice sit inside it? His answer is relational. He points to the poem's stretch, the perspective he brings, and the blend between poetic voice and the role he calls voice for the voiceless. Authorship here becomes carried speech. The episode leaves poetry feeling like translation between emotion, rhythm, craft, and voice.

As heard by us

A quiet, attentive conversation about how poetry carries emotion, lineage, and public meaning.

A poet in Hargeisa explains how feeling hardens into form: first an idea, then a remembered image, then rhythm, line, and a voice that can speak for someone else.

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Press play for a field-recorded conversation about how a poet turns feeling into rhythm, line, and voice.

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