Maaza Mengiste’s second novel, The Shadow King , recounts a tumultuous war in Ethiopian history that took the country by surprise, pit loca...
Maaza Mengiste’s second novel, The Shadow King, recounts a tumultuous war in Ethiopian history that took the country by surprise, pit locals against one another, and left them scarred for decades to come. Narrating the story is an invisible, omniscient chorus of women, inspired by Mengiste’s own great-grandmother. They alternate between singing, mourning, and rallying the troops into action, never allowing the reader a moment of silence. The result is a visceral story of violence, loyalty and forgiveness.
It’s no surprise that war stories are dominated by men. It’s not unexpected, either, that the women are left behind to continue their legacies. In The Shadow King, too, soldiers and singers appear to be divided by gender. But Mengiste inverts this paradigm in the early pages, and sustains it over the next four hundred. She hinges the entire book on a young slave girl named Hirut, who is neither young nor a slave by the end. And it is through her transformation – jagged, brutal, and ultimately, awesome – that the reader witnesses a country’s worth of change.
A millennial story needs superheroes
First, the facts: in 1935, Italy went to war against Ethiopia in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, having been defeated forty years earlier. Emperor Haile Selassie commandeered his...
