The Shadow King
“She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones,” begins The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste’s epic novel about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The story is framed by the protagonist, Hirut, in the 1970s. She is meeting up with an Italian solider, Ettore, a Jewish photographer. But we don’t stay long in the 70s, before we go back to the 1930s.
The story mainly follows Hirut, a young orphan who works as a maid in the household of Kidane, a solider in the Ethiopian army, and his wife, Aster. Kidane and Aster knew Hirut’s parents, and took her in to work for them. Soon, Italy invades, and Kidane begins recruiting men to fight. Aster and Hirut want to fight alongside him — but are assigned to care for the wounded. When Hirut pushes back, Kidane sexually assaults her. Eventually, Hirut and Aster end up serving as guards for the “shadow king” — a man who looks nearly identical to Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, who was living in exile in England. By having a fake emperor, who the troops believe is real, it rallies their spirits.
But we don’t just follow Hirut — her narrative interweaves with Ettore (the Jewish Italian photographer), an Italian colonel, Carlo Fucelli, and others.
Mengiste writes in LitHub that she wanted to tell this story, because she wanted a women’s story of war. So many war stories are so masculine — and she wanted to change that. “ What would it mean to tell a war story with a woman’s voice, with her sense of war, with her notions of what it means to be a soldier? I went back to the photographs in my collection and began to isolate those that specifically depicted women. I glanced away from the male photographer, drew the girls and women around me, and bent towards them to listen.”
Mengiste’s own great-grandmother, Getey, served as a solider in the war on the frontlines.
She continues, “Fact: Women enter into struggle, whether political or personal, well aware of the bodies in which they exist. We recognize our strengths even as we are reminded of the ways we can be made vulnerable. We know that the other battlefield on which another kind of war is fought is the one bordered by our own skin. No uniform or alliance can completely erase the threat of sexual assault and exploitation that wants to make us both trophy and contested territory.”
War for women is a much different lived experience than war for men —and Mengiste dives into that. Into the lives of female soldiers, of what they were (are) risking as they fought.
Rating: ★★★★★
Get it here: https://amzn.to/2MziUwV
