Africa-Press-Ethiopia<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese women decided to join in the front lines,\u201d Maaza told VOA. \u201cI had never heard that story. And this is what really inspired me to continue this, because if I didn\u2019t know it, and if a lot of other Ethiopians weren\u2019t speaking about it, this means maybe that nobody really had been paying attention to this.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose photographs showed the extent of that brutality,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The research inspired her novel \u201cThe Shadow King.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a book that works for many different people in many different ways,\u201d Kamila Shamsie, an award-winning Pakistani novelist, said in a video trailer promoting Maaza\u2019s book (Kamila Shamsie on Maaza Mengiste\u2019s The Shadow King). \u201cMaaza is doing things with history that hadn\u2019t been done before. She\u2019s putting women into that story in a way that\u2019s really compelling. It\u2019s very intelligently structured. It\u2019s beautifully written.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s recent novel, \u201cThis Mournable Body,\u201d looks at the everyday struggles of Zimbabweans.<\/p>\n
Maaza\u2019s book revisits part of forgotten history, said Lee Child, an author of 24 novels and among the judges for the 2020 Booker Prize.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d\u00a0Child said in a video discussing the novel. \u201cIts place on the shortlist merely confirms its status as one of the great novels of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":2198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[241],"class_list":["post-2197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-culture-and-art","tag-africa-press-ethiopia"],"yoast_head":"\n