“Same-Sex Intimacies in an Early Modern African Text about an Ethiopian Female Saint, Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros”

Who: Wendy Belcher (Princeton University)
When: 12 noon, Friday, April 24
Where: Browsing Room of the Knight Library

The 17th-century Ethiopian book The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Wälättä P̣eṭros (Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros) features a lifelong partnership between two women and the depiction of same-sex sexuality among nuns.

The earliest known book-length biography about the life of an African woman, written in 1672 in the Gəˁəz language, Gädlä Wälättä Ṗeṭros is an extraordinary account of early modern African women’s lives—full of vivid dialogue, heartbreak, and triumph. It features revered Ethiopian religious leader Wälättä P̣eṭros (1592–1642), who led a nonviolent movement against European proto-colonialism in Ethiopia in a successful fight to retain African Christian beliefs, for which she was elevated to sainthood in the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church. An important part of the text is her friendship with another nun, Ǝḫətä Krəstos, as they “lived together in mutual love, like soul and body” until death. Interpreting the women’s relationships in this Ethiopian text requires care, but queer theory provides useful warnings, framing, and interpretive tools. The talk emerges out of Prof. Wendy Belcher’s work with Michael Kleiner to translate the text, which will be published in 2015 by Princeton University Press as The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Translation of a Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an African Woman.

WGS is co-sponsoring this event.