When Herbert Marshal McCluhan penned his famous one-liner about the "world becoming a global village," over 30 years ago, he apparently had several things in mind. Prominent among them were the stereotypes of African society that run through his writing, based largely on photos from National Geographic magazine, Tarzan movies, and the reports of a few superficial anthropologists. The phrase has entered current usage over time, and perhaps it can accurately, and uncannily, describe phenomena that McCluhan could not have predicted, and perhaps could not have understood. If the world IS becoming a global village, it is doing so through odd and unpredictable alliances of the technologies of super corporations and the art forms of micro-cultures. It does so in part by the efforts of hearty "explorers" and "anthropologists" who come from African communities to earn a living in the strange and alien cities of North America and Europe, Somet work in esoteric fields such as computer programming and bio-engineering. Then they bring lessons -- often lessons in what NOT to do -- back to their own homes.

Rock 'n' roll has become, for better or worse, the first universal art form. It was largely the invention of African communities along the Mississippi River and the African towns within such cities as Atlanta, Kansas City, Chicago, and Detroit. One of the offspring of rock 'n' roll, reggae, has reached out from the micro-culture of Jamaica to wide audiences of dark skinned people in Africa and India, and, carrying a somewhat different message, to the light skinned people of Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia. Mega-corporations such as Sony and Phillips may be responsible for the delivery systems of the music, but the music retains much of its origins in the musical forms of East Africa and their development among slaves and the descendants of slaves in the Western Hemisphere. Through these forms, seemingly powerless micro-communities have reshaped the ruling classes' lives in a total fashion -- one that has altered everything from the way they walk to the way they dress to the way they work to the way they perceive the passage of time to the way they dream.

Although this example gives the world a common means of communication, it also tends to wear down local traditions, many of which remain useful and salutary, the product of long evolution and careful testing over many generations. If we ARE moving into a global village, we should strive to retain the best features of village life. This means preserving the distinctive characteristics of different parts of the village, while at the same time not isolating those parts into antagonistic ghettoes and suburbs. Here in the United States, many of us hope to see the now almost entirely African city of Detroit pull itself out of the desperate economic wreckage of the American automobile industry. If it accomplishes this massive social feat, it will serve as a beacon and a model for other African cities around the world. In Africa itself, the rebirth of the ancient and venerable Eritrean nation may prove an inspiration and a model for other parts of the world, particularly those ravished and blighted by the atrocities of the slave trade, colonialism, and the dogmas, coercions, and bribes of competing religions and ideologies. If it succeeds, YES, PARTICULARLY AGAINST ALL ODDS, it will do so in part by the strength, flexibility, and wisdom of its people, which in turn have allowed it to maintain its own unique identity without retreating into the dead end of isolationism in a world that could obliterate it with a single nuclear bomb. It will also do so through the poetry of people like Reesom Haile, who have worked out the means of retaining and defending their indigenous culture while simultaneously finding ways to integrate it into the other cultures of the world.

In this universal context, Reesom Haile's poetry plays a major role, as poetry should in any form of social evolution. This poetry is at once local and global, as its author is at once a devoted champion and integral member of Eritrean community, as well as a confident and adept citizen of the world -- and, perhaps, one of the first prophets of a truly habitable and humane global village, seeking a type of poetry at once specifically and indelibly Eritrean, and a significant contribution to the poetry of the world at large.

Understanding this poetry, from the point of view of a total outsider to Eritrean culture, Reesom Haile's love of the Tigrinya language may seem difficult at first, but the language itself may play a crucial role in reaching a global audience. Reesom Haile states this love plainly in his poems, and of course, the statements come through with perfect clarity in English translations. But for a man to SAY he loves his language and to actually FEEL it are two different things. A curious indication of this love comes through from the way Reesom Haile speaks and writes in English. His discourse is full, rounded, suggesting that he relishes speaking, likes to sound good to himself and to others, and that he constantly searches for the right way to say what is on his mind. If he had not learned to love his own language, it seems unlikely that he would take such delight in another. In some parts of Africa, and perhaps more prominently in India, you can find Anglophiles who have turned their backs on their native language and put their energy into English. But there is usually something sadly missing in their English. If I am not mistaken in my belief that Reesom Haile's fluency and felicity in English comes in part from his love of his own language, perhaps this is one of the first and most profound things he has to tell us about the global village. If you do not love and respect your native tongue, you may have difficulty talking to or understanding people from other parts of the world -- whether they be Eritreans living abroad or English speakers from Canada or Australia, England or the United States. In saying this I am not arguing for ANY kind of linguistic purity. People growing up in multi-cultural and multilingual communities often show great felicity in code switching and in creating new languages out of the different tongues spoken around them. But they, too, have learned to love their linguistic environment; and they often supply the ingenuity that keeps language evolving into something suitable to new needs. This has certainly been the case in many parts of Africa, and the impact of speakers and singers nurtured in the mysteries of linguistic syncretism keeps, and has kept, such languages as English and Spanish alive and dynamic.

Love of spontaneous native speech moves into the more deliberate and conscious areas of art. Although this dimension remains specific to Tigrinya, there are things that an attentive listener can comprehend without knowing a single word of the original language. The sound properties of Reesom Haile's poetry become immediately insistent on hearing him read, even on tape or compact disk. The intricate rhymes, consonances, what seem to be grammatical vowel shifts, and other sonic characteristics not only testify to the poet's skill, they produce delightful sounds in themselves, whether you understand them or not. In some places, the poet repeats lines, and this leads to one of the most intriguing characteristics of the sonic dimensions of the poetry: In some instances, the author produces lines that mean different things but sound so similar that only very careful listening (and probably some pointers from someone who knows the Tigrinya) allows an outsider to hear the difference between them. Rhetorical structures, often built on apposition, parallelism, and antithesis, can come through in exquisite, sharply defined sonic units if you can follow the poem in translation. In yet other instances, minimal variations in sense come through in other languages. This became particularly clear in reading translations into Icelandic, German, Spanish, and French which I put up on my Internet World Wide Web site. One of my favorite poems illustrates this very well: