An interview with Maaza Mengiste

“The stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that families pass down to each other about the people who have been lost or the indignities they have suffered as a result of conflict, those stories can help shape a reality that says we know what can be lost, let’s try to do everything that we can to avoid war,” says Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Maaza is a Fullbright Scholar and professor in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation program at Queens College.

Nina Subin/ http://ninasubin.com/

Why do you write?

Writing sprung from my love for reading. As a child, when I’d read, I’d completely lose myself in those worlds. This developed a love of literature for me, my imagination brought me into the world of words. The next step was to see if I could write. I also felt that there were stories I hadn’t yet read about Ethiopia, which I wanted to read. This was also part of my motivation to write.

All your stories are about war. Have you made a deliberate choice to write about war?

I don’t know if it’s a choice as much as a natural inclination. Partly, it’s what I was constantly surrounded by. I was in Ethiopia when the revolution started, so right from the beginning, my childhood memories involved that aspect. War has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. Thinking about conflict      also means thinking about love, thinking about what people try to save or who they risk everything to save, it raises questions of what survives, and how people hold on to their dignity, their hopes and dreams. War helps us think about all these things. For a Writer, it’s very interesting territory because when you’re writing about war, you’re writing about characters with very high stakes, and it crystalizes questions about moral ethics, about survival, and what we do to maintain peace. 

Is there a role for storytelling to raise awareness and motivate readers to take action to address the causes and consequences of war?

The stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that families pass down to each other about the people who have been lost or the other indignities that happen as a result of conflict, those stories can help shape a reality that says we know what can be lost, let’s try to do everything that we can to avoid war. I think these stories are imperative. When you have a country or you have communities that don’t have those narratives, that don’t speak of what was lost, that have no reckoning with the past, I think you have communities and countries that are less afraid to begin wars. So, I think that storytelling, the oral histories that have been passed on across Africa, have shaped our resistance to any more pain. We need to speak about these stories and this needs to happen in the West too as the West tends to ignore what’s lost when it enacts war.

What aspects of storytelling would you highlight that would help us to achieve this?

A part of telling stories about war is really telling stories about peace, telling stories about life, about human beings, who they are, what they’re like. We learn to see people who are different from us as human beings that have as much to lose as we would       if we were in the same situations, forced to survive. I don’t think that these stories have to focus on conflict; they can focus on what exists so we can begin to understand what could be lost if we were forced into war.

What is The Shadow King about?

The Shadow King is set in 1935 during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. It focuses on the women who fought at the front lines with men for the Ethiopian Army during this time. I also tell the story from the Italian side because I was very interested in what the colonial enterprise looked like from the side of the Europeans. What do they think of Africans? How do they navigate and negotiate and make peace with what they’re doing there? It’s told from the battle lines with a particular focus on female soldiers.

War is individualized, but in humanitarian work, we communicate about the people affected in masses. Tell me about the individual characters in the book, about their own stories.

When we think of groups of people, when we think of the issues that confront them, we tend to think about them as singular entities, collective masses of people without understanding the individual lives that are really at stake. I wanted to break apart this war and start looking at individual people; what was Fucelli - the Colonel in the Italian Army - like? That was a question that I wanted to deal with. We can talk about the colonialist or colonialism, but who were these individuals that were there, and what motivated them, what guided them besides hatred, which sometimes is a little too simple. What else guided them to even decide to join a military or an expedition? What was it like at home before they did this? How is it that their background, which is separate from anything African, has an influence on how they treat Africans? I was curious about those aspects of the interior world.

Ettore, a soldier, Jewish Italian, who brought his camera to the war, what did he leave behind, who does he miss, what advice is he being given, who does he listen to, does he have any choices, is he frightened of Africans, is he frightened of a female soldier, frightened of Ethiopians? I wanted to really look at these questions.

Hirut, a maid who eventually becomes a soldier in the Ethiopian Army. Italians thought that Africans could not really think conceptually and lacked all imagination. The only things in their lives are about survival. They don’t have dreams or creative talent. I wondered if I put Etorre and Hirut together in the same place, how would that racist thinking conflict, what would happen if he saw her, and suddenly could say, this is someone who actually has a brain, and can think. Hirut has no concept what Europeans are like. She thinks that they’re nothing but beasts, nothing but cruel animals with no real human emotion. I wanted to look at what happens when two people who have very different ideas of what the other is like might begin to recognize something in the other. You can only do that when you      stop      thinking about the collective and think of the individual.

There is this strong focus in the book on women, women as warriors. What was the role of Ethiopian women in this war?

You know, there’s the traditional role, which      was the only role I knew      at first, women were there to be the caretakers. They’d cook the food, collect the water, take care of the wounded, bury the dead, follow the Army to do those things. It was through research that I found out that women enlisted to be part of the military and fought in the frontlines. When I discovered this, it completely changed the story. I had their traditional roles which is what I had heard about, but I didn’t know this other side. Next to this, one thing that people don’t speak about enough is the sexual violence that the Italians perpetuated on East Africans. This is a history that no one really talks about in Ethiopia. You just see the children who are of mixed race, you know, in the next generation and no one talks about how that happened. It’s one thing that I felt I needed to address because we know that sexual assault and rape is a weapon in war. When it was happening in 1935, no one spoke about it.

The level of sexual violence is harrowing; in fact, all the main female characters,  experience sexual violence by people they know. The scale of Gender Based Violence during war is staggering.

It was something I was aware of, but it wasn’t until I started to focus on individuals that I really had to address this on an individual level. I always understood that rape and sexual violence is a weapon of war, but I had to ask, what does it look like in the life of one individual or two? How does it change Hirut for example or the other women in the book that are assaulted? I had to look at that, and that’s when the impact of it really became powerful for me. We can speak about rape and sexual violence in terms of percentages, which is what I was doing, but when I had to look at one life, and how that life was changed as a result, how every decision or every step in that one life was impacted by that, my understanding became more profound. Now, if we multiply that by the many women and girls (and boys and men though we speak less about that) who have experienced this, you realize how many other decisions boil down to those moments of intimate terror that happened.

Another aspect I would like to ask you about is this aspect you write about, how women in violent situations relate to each other.

When women exist in a world that is so violently patriarchal, and patriarchy is violence, when women exist in that world, rather than think about ways to overthrow it, it’s sometimes easier and faster to accept it. They try to get some of the power that’s within that system. Women are not bonding together against the male violence. They fight each other to get closer to that level of power. We see it with Aster and the way she treats Hirut. There’s a very clear sense of class. Even though Aster herself is a woman in a system run by men, she has Hirut to treat less than her, to show that she too has power within this system. This is one of the things I wanted to convey. Within these systems, women try to gain power, but it’s often at the expense of other women, and these divisions can happen by ethnicity or by class or social understanding. Sometimes women think that if you can place yourself as close as possible to the big man it gives you power over other people. If the man who is assaulting you has a social standing that is very high, you’re lucky because you have some of that power through that contact. They don’t recognize this as real violence; they don’t think themselves as worthy enough to be thought of as someone who has rights and does not deserve that assault.

The characters are very resilient, strong, dignified. It’s not that they’re afraid, but they transcend their fears. You don’t portray them as victims. Why was this so important to the book?

This is partly to move that narrative outside of just victimhood. It’s possible to be resilient and vulnerable. It’s possible to be strong and still feel pain. We tend to position people as either survivors or victims or always resilient. I think this has the potential to dehumanize the person because no one is completely a victim or a hundred percent resilient. The question is, how do we recognize every human being as an individual who is both vulnerable and strong? No one should be forced to be resilient. No one should be forced to do that because that speaks to a survival against abuse, and no one should be forced to do that in life. This also speaks to a series of deprivations, but how do we recognize people’s vulnerabilities and strengths, and begin to work with that as opposed to swinging between victimhood and resilience.

Memory is another theme in the book. Why is this important in the book?

The idea of naming has always been important to me. I think it comes from being an immigrant. Coming here to the USA, if you have a name that doesn’t sound Western, you’re immediately confronted with the difference between you and the world that you live in. I became very much aware of who I was by my  name in the United States. In Ethiopia and many cultures across Africa and the world, I understood that our names are a connection to family, which is a connection to a community of people, which is also a connection to a region of the country. My name, for example, might connect to one specific region, my father’s. I wanted to show some of that inheritance through a name, through the names in the book. When my characters say their names, they’re not only saying their names, but they’re speaking about a history that the Italians wanted to ignore. They’re speaking of a history that the West has said doesn’t exist, that never existed. This was important to me because the Italians didn’t fully recognize all the people they killed, they never gave them names, they didn’t even put the numbers down. There were more people killed than they named or listed. I wanted to use the book to compensate for some of that.

Love. There were so many moments of love in the book. Several acts of kindness. War has this ability to bring the best and worst out of humanity.

No one would have been able to survive the war on their own. To some degree, people needed to come together. Even if someone like the Cook didn’t want a return of the old system and may have wanted to free herself from the way Ethiopia existed, she understood that she wouldn’t have survived without Fifi’s help, for example.  At the same time, there were people who depended on her for their individual survival. This war required the efforts of communities. Not everyone was united, but there were people that were willing to help their neighbors out. I wanted to show this through the Cook. People needed each other during the war. They were fighting for something that was greater than what somebody might say Ethiopia is, something akin to neighborly, sisterly, brotherly love. It was something about understanding that the next human being next to you might suffer and you didn’t want that.

What is the one thing that you’d like the readers of The Shadow King  to take away from the book?

How each of us are carriers of history. During this pandemic we’ve been living through a historical moment and the one thing that I’ve understood is that everybody’s perspective of this moment counts. I hope that there are people out there recording their stories in journals, in diaries, in personal notes they have for themselves. I hope people keep a personal written record of this moment so that when we look back at this history, the way I had to look back at 1935, this’ll be a history told from a collective of many different voices.

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