By 
Spear through the Heart
Director: Bruno Sorrentino
Executive Producer: Awol Allo
A woman is weeping.
She cries and will not be comforted.
There is a spear through her heart,
but it is still beating.
In her arms are her girl children.
On her lips,
through the tears,
are words of regret.
“I never told him how great he was.”
Her face stills into the brief composure that is the serenity of grief.
It contorts suddenly into the agony of a knowledge too heavy ever to carry alone.
Then it stills again, and the serenity returns.
“I feel the weight of his sacrifice. I want to dedicate this song to him.”
And there is the briefest of smiles, like water in a parched desert.
As the film – Spear through the Heart, (directed by Bruno Sorrentino with Executive Producer Awol Allo) closes on the penultimate frame, we learn that the film is dedicated to this woman, whose name is Fantu, and her children; this woman who weeps and stills herself as she dedicates her dead husband’s song to his memory.
The frame lingers on her changing expressions, her face clothed in sorrow, then it shifts, and the subtitle adds, “and to all who fell on the road to freedom and justice in Oromia and Ethiopia.”
We have been watching a tragic love story and an epic struggle for justice. It could be set in any of the world’s well-narrated struggles – Syria; Palestine; Apartheid South Africa; the German Democratic Republic before the fall of The Wall. Here, this one woman represents the grief of all the Oromo people for their beloved Haacaaluu Hundeessaa; her face is the face of the Oromo people now, her body the one bearing the spear through the heart that the Oromo struggle bears.
Fantu’s face is the face of the Oromo people now, her body the one bearing the spear through the heart that the Oromo struggle bears. “Haacee is in all of us,” she murmurs with the strength that only comes in deep sadness. With these words, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa becomes an icon, joining others assassinated in their non-violent struggles for justice for their people.
Sorrentino’s film is a praise song to the dead; in the genre of tribute, of the great saints, intellectuals, prophets, and artists, those who have spoken truth to a people thirsting for the sounds and words that might free their lives from tyranny and oppression.
His body was the beauty of the Oromo language, and in his performance, the language, with all its vibrancy and resonance, fused with his singing body at full stretch. Watching him perform is mesmerizing – even for one such as myself who does not readily understand Oromo. It is impossible not to be drawn in by the lythe, radiance of his performing, the effortless energy of his song, by the irresistible need to dance and dance and dance, and break forth in songs of freedom and hope.
In the freedom movements around the world, music has always played a pivotal role. It is memorable; songs impress themselves onto the spirit; they find their way into head and heart and breast and belly. They become feet that move and hips that sway and hands that reach, and heads held high as songs spill from the lips. Such energy defies all the forces of death and captivity, all the necropolitics that would deny a people its language, custom, rites, and place.
Songs – the powerful ones; the prophetic ones; the ones which burst with truth and story – are liberation. They are not what bring liberation to a future, but they become it through collective singing. In those instances when a concert hall or stadium or congregation sings as one with the cantor, freedom is. It simply is. It is not something that is glimpsed or in reach, but it is fully embodied in the audible incarnate of a people made into a song. And this is terrifying for those of whom a terrible truth is sung.
In Sorrentino’s film, we are treated to a hagiography that pays tribute and does justice to the icon’s story told through key interviews with key friends, family, and leaders who have been inspired by the man and the singer. We learn through them of Haacaaluu’s integrity, courage, steadfast truth-telling, of his conviction, and generosity. We don’t need to be told or convinced of his generosity. Again and again, it is his generosity that spills out from the frame of the film such that long after the final credits, the music, and his life force are still coursing through the veins, still ringing in the ears. It is an unstoppable, unquenchable force.
To make a film that achieves this, is a great accomplishment, a difficult one. And necessary. For Haacaaluu Hundeessaa must be remembered, his songs archived and reproduced, his voice heard. For the Oromo people, yes, but also for those engaged in epic struggles for freedom themselves – the Palestinians; the Rohinga; the Eritrean people; the Uighur, and so many many others.
I have written of Haacaaluu as a prophet – not in the sense of someone who is predicting the future but in the sense of one with a prophetic imagination, capable of fusing his own suffering in prison, with a calling that is indeed ‘a fire in the bones’. Such a prophetic figure is called to sing out freedom, to sing out justice, irrepressible in its clarity, unflinching in its courage, unnerving in its accuracy, and alive, alive, alive with the compelling beauty of the truth. In the film, Haacaaluuu says:
“Those engaged in artistic work have generous spirit and I believe this generous spirit is instilled in us when we receive the calling to be an artist. This generous spirit does not only mean supporting those in need but when an authoritarian regime oppresses its people the artist comes forward and speaks out. It is the artist who comes forward to condemn oppression not because he is a terrorist but because of this generosity of spirit.”
Prophetic words indeed and words which, with such careful curation as is before us in the film, Spear through the Heart, will last and will continue to do their work, in song, like yeast. Leavening. It is from such a generosity of spirit that anthems are born which will move people for centuries, praise songs or laments, like Maalan Jira 2015 – what existence is mine – where the grief for the loss of the Oromo lands historically to oppressors is like the agony, we see in the grief of a lover separated from their beloved. Those dispossessed of their land everywhere can find themselves at home in this song.
“I choose what I sing,” says Hacee defiantly, confidently, and vibrantly in an interview, shortly before his lifeless body was found in a car on the outskirts of Addis in June 2020. There is no denying his choice. His freedom. He says these words deliberately, and, qualifying them with “we never know when we will die”, he also reveals that he has said these words deliberatively in the traditions of Oromo deliberative democracy, a tradition carried in song, and ritual, and cloth and color, in circles and trees and the land, the land, oh! the land.
He says it because he has said it many times to many people. He says it because he has said it to the woman who will become his widow. He says it because he believes “my girls deserve a future.” He says it to set his people free. Singing of this future, inspiriting the present with this future for the millions who will sing with him in Oromo, and sing along, imbibing his spirit, becoming one with the song, is the danger feared by the powerful. For the powerful are the ones who hear only the monotonous din of the realm, who beat the drums of war and give precedence to their fantasies of ethnic cleansing over the hard struggles for peace and justice. By contrast, such an irrepressible, freeing life energy makes for a people who will sing in the face of death.
In the preamble of the founding documents of UNESCO, these words speak to the potency of such filmmaking and of Haacaaluu Hundeessaa’s spirit:
“If war is made in the minds of men and women, then it is in the minds of men and women that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”
Mostly when thinking of defense in war and oppression, the move is to armaments and fighting, or, if we are lucky, to international diplomacy. But Haacaaluu’s legacy, as shown in the film documentary, reveals that, at heart, the kinds of freedom which make for peace, and which build the defenses of peace, are born in spirit and in song.
A woman is weeping.
She cries and will not be comforted.
There is a spear through her heart,
but the heart,
the heart,
it is still beating.
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