A Canadian anthropologist argues that Somaliland’s songs of love and loss are not mere distractions from politics, but rather a form of politics rooted in intimacy, vulnerability, and shared humanity
When anthropologist Christina Woolner first landed in Somaliland, her research plan was clear: she would study the country’s peacebuilding process. But one evening at the University of Hargeisa’s guesthouse, fate intervened. After a Premier League football match ended, Woolner lingered on Horn Cable TV’s music channel. A man in military fatigues appeared on-screen, walking the dusty outskirts of Hargeisa while singing passionately.
“I asked my Somaliland housemate what he was singing about,” Woolner recalled. “He responded matter-of-factly: ‘It’s about love, of course! We don’t sing about war anymore.’ That moment stuck with me.”
That serendipitous encounter changed the trajectory of her work. Instead of studying formal politics, Woolner turned to love songs—Somaliland’s hees jacayl—as a window into the nation’s intimate, social, and political life. Her new book, Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland, explores how songs long dismissed as sentimental actually animate public life, provide refuge from war’s aftermath, and forge what Somalis call dareen-wadaag—a “sharing of feelings.”
“Love songs are powerful because they are composed to be interpreted,” Woolner told Geeska in an interview. “They open space for people to know that their often very private and even unspeakable experiences of love—of suffering—are shared by others.”
Beyond Sentimentality
Woolner insists Somaliland love songs live “both private and public lives.” In their private register, they open up vulnerable conversations rarely voiced in a conservative society. “Songs seemed to open space to talk more intimately,” she said. “People started telling me stories about their own love lives, which is a topic I’d never broached before.”
But in their public lives, these same songs can stir political resonance. Audiences trained by history often hear double meanings, she explained. “One thing that makes love songs so fascinating—and powerful—is that you can never determine their meaning in advance. A song heard as a political critique in one era might be heard as deeply personal in another.”
Borrowing the phrase “semantic snowballing” from ethnomusicologist Tom Turino, Woolner describes how songs gather new associations as they circulate, “drawing stories, memories, meanings and political undercurrents to them.”
Love as Resistance
For Woolner, love songs are not distractions from Somaliland society’s challenges but ways of negotiating them. She invokes anthropologist Veena Das’s idea of “making the everyday inhabitable” in the aftermath of violence. “I think love songs have something to teach us about the everyday ways that people cope with suffering, work through issues of trust, and enact forms of vulnerability that are especially difficult in post-war settings,” Woolner said.
Even the revival of public venues has carried political weight. Hiddo Dhawr, Hargeisa’s first music house to open in 25 years, became a symbolic site for questions about the role of art in a recovering city. “The way musicians negotiated space for themselves in Hargeisa can tell us a lot—from gender relations to diaspora dynamics to how people define politics itself,” Woolner noted.
Women’s Voices, Men’s Words
Yet the gender dynamics of Somaliland music complicate the story. While Somaliland women are revered performers, most lyrics—even those written from a woman’s perspective—are penned by men.
“I was perplexed early in my research,” Woolner admitted. “Although women compose poetry and have entire genres reserved for them, the lyrics of love songs are almost exclusively written by men.”
This male authorship, she argues, limits how fully women’s experiences are represented. But she cautions against seeing the issue too narrowly: “Songs about women’s experiences ultimately need women’s voices to come into the world. That singing voice does more than articulate lyrics—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.”
A Community of Vulnerability
Perhaps most striking in Woolner’s account is her description of dareen-wadaag, a term offered to her by a Somali poet. It describes the collective recognition forged when love songs circulate.
“In a setting where speaking about love openly is difficult, this is incredibly powerful,” she explained. “Love songs are disarming. They allow people to let down their guard and feel vulnerable. They remind listeners that experiences of brokenness, of love-suffering unite them.”
It is this weaving together of private ache and public resonance that has kept Woolner’s attention fixed on Somaliland melodies for over a decade. One friend, noticing her sprawling research activities—from cassette archives to YouTube—helped her realize what held it all together: “What unites these things, Christina, is love songs.”
For Woolner, that realization crystallized her central argument: love songs move fluidly between intimate and public spaces, stitching together communities across time and geography.
Asked if she had a personal favorite, Woolner paused before naming “Xaafuun,” a classic made famous by singer Khadra Dahir and oud master Cumar Dhuule. “I just love listening to Khadra’s voice—it is warm, vulnerable, and revealing of her truly magnanimous qalbi-furan (open heart),” she said.
In the end, Woolner suggests, Somali love songs may be best understood not as diversions from politics, but as their own kind of politics—rooted in intimacy, memory, and resistance. “They are composed to be interpreted,” she reminded. “And that is precisely what makes them endure.”
For a nation still negotiating its place in the world, these songs offer more than solace. They are a way of binding hearts together—one verse, one melody, one shared feeling at a time.
