Ethiopian Novelist Unveils Hidden Story of Women During War

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Africa-Press-Ethiopia

WASHINGTON – When novelist Maaza Mengiste began researching the Ethiopian resistance to the 1935 invasion by Italian forces, she came across photographs of women dressed in military attire with rifles slung over their shoulders. As she organized them by date and location, she began to build a picture of the conflict she never learned about in school.

“These women decided to join in the front lines,” Maaza told VOA. “I had never heard that story. And this is what really inspired me to continue this, because if I didn’t know it, and if a lot of other Ethiopians weren’t speaking about it, this means maybe that nobody really had been paying attention to this.”

As Maaza kept digging, she found photographs of Ethiopian girls taken as mementos by Italian soldiers. Some photos were used to entice men to join the conflict. Others were much darker and showed the horror of war.

“Those photographs showed the extent of that brutality,” she said. “And those were photographs not taken by journalists. They were taken by soldiers for fun, and they were passed around as jokes and as postcards to send home. And that was the side of war also that I wanted to show.”

The research inspired her novel “The Shadow King.” It tells the story of Hirut, an orphaned and mistreated girl who becomes the personal guard for a person pretending to be the exiled King Haile Selassie. The novel, her second, has won international acclaim and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

“It’s a book that works for many different people in many different ways,” Kamila Shamsie, an award-winning Pakistani novelist, said in a video trailer promoting Maaza’s book (Kamila Shamsie on Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King). “Maaza is doing things with history that hadn’t been done before. She’s putting women into that story in a way that’s really compelling. It’s very intelligently structured. It’s beautifully written.”

Maaza was shortlisted alongside Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was arrested for participating in anti-government protests against corruption during the time of her nomination. Dangarembga’s recent novel, “This Mournable Body,” looks at the everyday struggles of Zimbabweans.

Maaza’s book revisits part of forgotten history, said Lee Child, an author of 24 novels and among the judges for the 2020 Booker Prize.

“The story is important, really, the opening shots of the Second World War, but rarely told before. And the whole is wrapped in gorgeous lyrical prose at the highest quality,” Child said in a video discussing the novel. “Its place on the shortlist merely confirms its status as one of the great novels of the year.”

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