Women are typically at the margins of war history: they send their men off with pride and sorrow, they serve as camp followers, they nurse the injured, they hold up the fort back home, and they mourn the fallen, while rarely featuring in the tales that are written after the war.
Through history, though, there are women who have played a more immediate part in wars of the past. Maaza Mengestu’s remarkable novel describes one such group: the Ethiopian women soldiers who fought against the Italian invasion in 1935.
This novel started off slowly for me, hampered as I was by my lack of knowledge of the Italian-Ethiopian conflict and subsequent Italian colonization of Ethiopia. The novel also draws on Shakespeare and Greek myth for its metaphors, and much of this was also lost on me.
That said, the novel picks up steam as it goes, even for the less knowledgeable reader, and by the second half of the novel I was riveted.
Mengestu’s novel is historical fiction, based on actual history and inspired by the photographs she found. These photos were taken by Italians (few Ethiopians had cameras), and they showed Ethiopian men and women of that period: some casual photographs, some of captives, some of the dead. Two of these photographs are reproduced at the beginning and the end of the novel. They are not identified, but it is a short leap for the reader to imagine that they represent the two main women characters in this book: Aster and Hirut.
Hirut is at the heart of the novel. She is a young servant, essentially chattel who was brought by Aster and her husband Kidane to her new home. She lives in
a small box of a room that she shares with the cook, that place where they go at night to shed their usefulness and sleep. […] It is less than a box, it is an airless hole enclosed in mud and straw and dung. There is no proper door, no crisp windowpane. They sleep on flimsy mattresses that they have to roll up so they can walk. There are only scraps of discarded blankets nailed over narrow openings, rags that trap dust and dark. It is a space made to fit two people who have been made to fit their lives around one woman and her husband.
Hirut has no agency or ability to leave. Her parents were servants of Kidane’s parents, and there is some unpleasant feudal history there: Hirut remembers her mother hiding from Aster’s father. Aster’s husband Kidane is attracted to Hirut, but this is dangerous: Aster is jealous, has complete control over Hirut’s life, and can extract revenge as she pleases.
The Italians, driven partly by revenge for their loss in the 1880s, are massing on Ethiopia’s northern borders. Aster’s husband Kidane is a senior officer in the Ethiopian army, so the household will inevitably be involved in the coming war.
The king of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, flees Addis Ababa for England, and the novel periodically visits him in exile. He does not cut an impressive figure: tortured by his own dispassionate decision to send his beloved daughter back to her cruel husband, and her subsequent death; fixated on Italian opera and especially Aida, in which the Ethiopian princess dies; detached; remote; self-absorbed.
“We’ve never fought a war without our leader”, says one of Kidane’s lieutenants. That’s when Hirut notices that Minim, the traveling musician, bears a startling resemblance to Selassie. Thus enters the eponymous Shadow King, trained to walk and behave like a ruler, appearing on a horse in battles, exhorting the Ethiopians to fight in the belief that their king has reappeared and is leading them against the ferenj forces. Kidane, short of warriors, appoints a guard of women, led by Hirut, for this shadow king.
Mengestu balances the novel by reporting from the ‘other side’ as well. Two Italians feature prominently: commander Fucelli, the one truly brutal, mad, vicious man in this novel; and the Italian photographer Ettore, who under threat of having his Jewish origins exposed, hearing snippets about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Italy, squashes his discomfort and takes photographs of the Ethiopian dead, dying and captured. Eventually he even photographs the prisoners as they are thrown off a cliff. Ettore and Hirut develop an uneasy connection, and the novel starts and ends with their meeting at a railway station, forty years later.
It is a men’s war, according to the men, and they are firm in restricting the women to support roles in this patriarchal, feudal Ethiopian society. “Dress up like a soldier all you want, but it doesn’t change anything. You’ll follow my orders”, says Kidane as he refuses Aster’s plea to let her fight. “I won’t hurt you”, Kidane says, as he is raping HIrut, the daughter of his childhood friend. And yet, from determination or circumstance, the women end up participating, fighting, and taken prisoner.
Mengestu spends as much time on their battle against their internal oppressors as on their battle against the outside invaders. Subjugated though they may be, this is not a novel of victimhood: the women are strong, fierce, intense, and distinctive even in their worst moments.
Class, more than sisterhood, drives the behaviour of the women to each other. The cook begs for freedom and the money to leave, but is denied.
Aster takes the cook’s hands, her voice softens. Things have changed, the war’s coming. Everyone’s mobilizing and you have no money, you’ve got nothing but me. Aster stares at her. She takes a breath. I need you.
Years ago, the cook tried to help Aster escape from her forced marriage:
They dragged the cook by her hair down the dirt road. […] The cook did not understand that when two are in the wrong, it is sometimes only one that gets punished. […] Even terrified as she was, Aster could have stood between them and stopped her father, but she did not.
It is impossible not to be stirred by the vision of the Shadow King surrounded by his Amazon-like women warriors in the final battle, even as the reader is sadly conscious that the Ethiopians are fighting with ancient rifles and spears against a fighting force which has bombers, mustard gas, and tanks.
There is much more to unpack in this multifaceted novel: the power of names and oral storytelling; the ledger of the dead maintained by the Ethiopian spy Fifi; the ascari Eritrean force fighting for the Italians. This is a powerful book that would benefit from a more informed reviewer. It invites a second reading.
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