Maaza Mengiste: ‘We’ve become a very visual society. How many photographs can we take?’
Interview
Maaza Mengiste: ‘The language of war is always masculine’
The Ethiopian-born novelist on her book about the female fightback against Mussolini’s invasion of her homeland, why Instagram blurs the vision, and the lure of Moby-Dick
Alex Preston Saturday 18 January 2020
Maaza Mengiste’s second novel, The Shadow King, is a reimagination of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Told from a range of perspectives, it focuses on the experience of the Ethiopian women who played a vital role in winning the war, as well as that of the Italian soldiers and the exiled king, Haile Selassie. Mengiste was born in Ethiopia in 1974, but her family fled the Ethiopian revolution when she was a child (a history she explored in her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze). She lives in New York and spoke to us from Zanzibar.
Gail Collins outlines the growth of African literature, from the 18th century to modern times.
15 April 2021
In 1761, a small child, Phillis Wheatley (as renamed by the family she worked for) was captured and taken from her home in West Africa to Boston in the US. Fortunately, she landed in the arms of a benevolent family who taught her to read and write but they would have been totally unaware that this would lead her to become the first African to have work published in the UK and US with her collection of poetry – Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral – in 1773.
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste review – remembering Ethiopia’s female soldiers
Set during Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, this absorbing novel spotlights the African women who went to war
ALEX CLARK SATURDAY 18 JANUARY 2020
T
he eponymous king in Maaza Mengiste’s second novel does not feature until a good halfway through the narrative, and then in appropriately shadowy fashion. He is Minim, a “soft-spoken man with the strange name that means Nothing”, one of those who has answered the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s call to arms provoked by the Italian invasion of the country in 1935. But Minim has an unexpectedly propitious quality; a close resemblance to Selassie, now in exile in Bath, that can be used to reinvigorate popular confidence that the European colonialists can be defeated. Dressed in a makeshift uniform and sitting on horseback with a red umbrella across his saddle, Minim has only to appear in the hills so recently dominated by Italian troops to strengthen his subjects. As he is instructed by the comrade who has helped to hatch the plan: “To be in the presence of our emperor is to stand before the sun. You must respect his power to give you life and burn you alive.”
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah review – living through colonialism
This compelling novel focuses on those enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century
Maaza Mengiste Wed 30 Sep 2020 07.30 BST
U
ntil recently, most conversations about the European colonial presence in Africa have excluded Germany. Established in the late 19th century, the German empire on the continent included colonies in present-day Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, parts of Tanzania and Kenya, and eventually claimed the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. German colonial rule was brutal, as colonial enterprises were; in an arena known for its oppression and violence, it is Germany that perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century in the 1904 extermination campaign to quell the Herero and Nama uprising in Namibia. Across the continent in East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, Germany’s military tactics were equally deadly. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s sprawling yet intimate new novelAfterlivesis set against the backdrop of these atrocities. Unfolding in what was then Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, it opens with a gentle and unassuming sentence: “Khalifa was twenty-six years old when he met the merchant Amur Biashara.”
Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith and Tsitsi Dangarembga completed landmark series, Martin Amis turned to autofiction and Elena Ferrante returned to Naples – plus a host of brilliant debuts
Justine Jordan
Sat 28 Nov 2020 09.00 GMT
As the first lockdown descended in March, sales of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s La Pestesoared, but there were uncanny echoes of Covid-19 to be found in this year’s novels too.
Maggie O’Farrell’s tender, heartbreaking Hamnet (Tinder), which went on to win the Women’s prize, illuminates life and love in the shadow of death four centuries ago. Focused on Anne Hathaway rather than her playwright husband , it channels the family’s grief for son Hamnet, lost to the plague, with a timeless power. From public information slogans to individual fears, Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (Picador), set in a Dublin maternity hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic, shows how little our responses have changed. Don DeLillo completed The Silence (Picador) just before the coronavirus hit; but this slim, austere vision of what it’s like to be in a room as screens go dark and disaster unfolds outside chimes with current fears.
Unfolding disaster was the theme of novels that spoke explicitly to the present moment, too: Jenny Offill’s Weather (Granta) assembles shards of anecdote and aphorism into a glittering mosaic that faces up to Trump’s America and climate collapse with wit, heart and moments of sheer terror. Naomi Booth’s Exit Management (Dead Ink) expertly dramatises the crisis in housing, jobs and community. Sarah Moss’s menacing Summerwater (Picador) is set over one rainy day in a Scottish holiday park: catastrophe lurks in the near future as we dip into the minds of various daydreaming, dissatisfied holidaymakers, in a sharp investigation into the meaning of community and otherness. Also deeply attuned to the anxieties of both Brexit and our long, slow post-industrial collapse is M John Harrison’s masterly The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (Gollancz). An unsettling and multilayered narrative foregrounding two lost souls in a haunted, unheimlich England who don’t know how lost they are, it took the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction.
Summer (Hamish Hamilton) completed Ali Smith’s rapid-response Seasonal quartet: four novels written over four years that have encompassed Brexit, climate change, corporate takeover and the refugee crisis along with the bracing consolations of art and nature. Reuniting characters from previous volumes and juxtaposing second world war internment with today’s migrant detention centres, Summer brought a much needed note of hope and resilience to the finale of a landmark series that explores how we live in and out of time.
This year saw the final volume, too, of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which has conjured a vanished age to such extraordinarily vivid life and cast profound insights about power, ambition and fate on to the present one. The Mirror & the Light (4th Estate) had to end on the executioner’s scaffold, but the reader is suspended in the unfolding present moment until the axe falls.
Another trilogy was completed in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body (Faber); written three decades on from her classic Nervous Conditions, it is a brutal, intimate reckoning with the psychological trauma of colonialism. Also shortlisted for the Booker, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (Canongate) is a beautifully crafted account of the female soldiers resisting Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and their own oppression in Ethiopian society. Lyrical, furious and meticulously researched, it is a necessary act of historical reclamation.
Marilynne Robinson turned her Gilead trilogy into a quartet with Jack (Virago), a romance across the race divide in segregated mid-century America which explores the redeeming, transcendent power of love and faith. Brit Bennett also anatomised racism in The Vanishing Half (Dialogue), a stunning family saga about passing for white and the hollowness of the American dream that won her comparisons to Toni Morrison.
There were historical escapes from David Mitchell, in 1960s muso epic Utopia Avenue(Sceptre), and Jonathan Coe, with a bittersweet visit to one of Billy Wilder’s last film sets in Mr Wilder and Me (Viking). Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham (Doubleday) spun wistful alternative history, imagining what the world might have looked like if Hillary hadn’t married Bill, while Martin Amis drew on his own history forInside Story(Cape), a baggy but fascinating autofiction combining cameos from Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens with tips on prose writing.
Andrew O’Hagan’s poignant Mayflies(Faber) explores the way all our lives recede too quickly into history, with a joyous nostalgiafest of young Scots chasing music and girls on a wild weekend in the 80s segueing into sober mid-life realisations and difficult decisions decades later. A brilliant portrayal of male friendship, it’s also the perfect gift for middle-aged alternative music fans.
The year began with an impressively assured debut from US author Kiley Reid; Such a Fun Age (Bloomsbury) is a razor-sharp take on white fragility and millennial uncertainty, beginning when a black nanny is accused of kidnapping her white charge. Also witty and fresh, Naoise Dolan’s deliciously dry Exciting Times(W&N) sees cynical Irish twentysomething Ava unsettled by genuine emotion while teaching in Hong Kong.
Two semi-autobiographical Scottish debuts from Picador showcased essential new voices: Douglas Stuart took the Booker prize for his moving, devastating Shuggie Bain, the tale of a boy’s desperate love for his alcoholic mother in the deprived, post-industrial 80s; while Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team, set among teenage gangs in Lanarkshire, updated Trainspotting for a new generation.
Other notable first novels included Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez (Dialogue), a fearless coming-of-age story about racial and sexual identity and masculinity focused on a young, black gay man who flees his Jehovah’s Witness community to become a sex worker. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton) coolly explores a toxic mother-daughter relationship in middle-class India, while Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (Daunt) weighs contradictory urges towards solitude and intimacy. The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams (William Heinemann), which continues the lexicographical playfulness of her short stories, is a singularly charming jeu d’esprit about two people a century apart doing the difficult, essential work of defining words and defining themselves.
In translated fiction, Elena Ferrante returned to her emotional heartland, the psyche of the teenage girl, in (Europa, translated byAnn Goldstein). As Giovanna tackles parental hypocrisy, self-disgust and the disconnect between upper- and lower-class Naples, the novel builds into what feels like a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Originally conceived as a true crime story, Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Fitzcarraldo, translated by Sophie Hughes) is a savage, unstoppable chronicle of misogyny and murder in a small Mexican village. Another rawly compelling novel won the International Booker: young Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (Faber, translated by Michele Hutchison) focuses on a girl in a deeply religious family that is falling apart in the wake of her brother’s death.
Daniel Kehlmann’s darkly funny Tyll (Riverrun, translated by Ross Benjamin), a picaresque journey through early 17th-century Europe, follows the progress of a folkloric jester figure from village to court against the bloody backdrop of the thirty years’ war. In Samanta Schweblin’s fiendishly readable Little Eyes(Oneworld, translated by Megan McDowell), the new must-have tech gadget allows users to leapfrog into the lives of strangers – a sharp idea that became even more pertinent with the isolation and atomisation of lockdown. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (Pushkin, translated by Adrian Nathan West), a “nonfiction novel” focused on the exceptional minds looking into the dark heart of maths and science in the 20th century, traces revelatory connections between discovery and destruction.
Some of the most exciting short stories of the year were to be found in Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Animal (Daunt), with its fiercely sculpted sentences and unnervingly off-kilter scenarios. Cathy Sweeney’s Modern Times (W&N) has a comically surreal energy and verve, while in Reality and Other Stories (Faber) John Lanchester structures a collection of ghost stories around the most dangerous, intrusive, unknowable force in our lives – technology.
Two striking books unfolded in the fertile space between story collection and novel. In poet Frances Leviston’s The Voice in My Ear (Cape), 10 different protagonists, all called Claire, contend with the demands of the world and their difficult mothers; the stories glance off each other to build into a cubist portrait of contemporary womanhood. Maria Reva’s Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Virago), meanwhile, uses interlinked tales centred around a crumbling apartment block in Ukraine to convey the absurdity of post-Soviet life.
Finally, two novels that were a long time coming. From the 18th century to the 21st, Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock (Cape) explores violence against women in three subtly linked time periods: a blazingly angry, darkly witty tour de force, Wyld’s third novel is bleak but bracing, and as ever, beautifully written.
Sixteen years after her bestselling debut Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke returned with Piranesi (Bloomsbury), the story of a man trapped in a many-halled House with an Ocean surging within it, his only companion a mysterious Other. Written out of long illness, but published into a world in which every reader was struggling with confinement and thrown on their inner resources, Clarke’s fantastical parable of solitude, imagination, ambition and contentment is a spectacular piece of fiction, and the perfect reading accompaniment to a year like no other.
Stuart may have won but here’s what you need to know about the other shortliste novels
Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain may have been declared the 2020 victor but there’s still a whole list of other excellent reads
The winner of 2020’s Booker Prize has been revealed as Douglas Stuart with Shuggie Bain. Never heard of him? Don’t panic. In fact, it’s hardly surprising if this year’s Booker shortlisted names don’t ring any bells as four of the six novels are debuts, and none of the authors are English.
Storyline: We are in Pune, India, and Antara’s mother, Tara, who was always difficult, is becoming forgetful. As we delve into her past — her breakup with Antara’s father and going to live in an ashram with a small child in tow — we come to understand the effects of her neglectful parenting on Antara, and why Antara is powerless to exact revenge.
Author vital stats: Doshi, 38, lives in Dubai, grew up in New Jersey and has an MA from UCL in History of Art. This is her debut novel.
What to say: Doshi’s inspiration for the ashram scenes came from her own family members, of whom many were followers of cult guru, Osho Rajneesh.
What not so say: It’s hard to warm to any of the characters.
Any good? I loved the combination of spite and sensuality, and she really nails the love-hate, mother-daughter vibe.
Storyline: Bea has left the toxically polluted City with husband Glen and ailing daughter Agnes to live in the unspoilt Wilderness, so that Agnes can recover. Together with twenty other volunteers they must learn to survive without impacting on nature, but things fall apart, obviously.
Author vital stats: A debut novel from Brooklyn-based Cook, 44, who has won awards for her short story collection, Man V. Nature.
What to say: No surprise that it’s been snapped up by Warner Bros TV for a series.
What not to say: How come the women still have tampons after years of living in the wild?
Any good? Preposterous! It’s a Hunger Games-style saga masquerading as a worthy climate change novel, but strangely and compulsively readable.
Storyline: Little Shuggie grows up poor on a Glasgow estate in the Eighties, knowing he’s “different” from other boys. He has a charismatic but alcoholic mother and an abusive, philandering father, but must eventually learn that his mum will never “get better”, however hard he tries to help her.
Author vital stats: A largely autobiographical debut. Glasgow-born Stuart, 44, used to design menswear for Calvin Klein, and lives in New York.
What to say: The lows of alcoholism have rarely been better described.
What not to say: Stuart writes that his characters are “sat at” rather than “sitting at” which is commonplace, but still crass.
Storyline: An ambitious feminist take on the masculine war novel, opens with recently-orphaned Hirut going to work as a maid for Kidane and Aster and eventually joining an army of woman soldiers, led by the feisty Aster, to fight for an absent Haile Selassie against the Italians.
Author vital stats: A second novel. Mengiste, 46, was born in Addis Ababa, left aged four with her family, studied as a Fulbright Scholar in Italy and then creative writing at NYU.
What to say: It is fiction, but was inspired by Mengiste’s great-grandmother.
What not to say: All those windy, bloated sentences and use of the present tense are exhausting.
Any good? Disappointing. There’s a great story in there somewhere, but it was uphill work to uncover it.
Storyline: The conclusion to this semi-autobiographical trilogy, begun in 1988, is set in Harare at the end of the Nineties. Tambu is now middle-aged, living in a hostel and down on her luck, having quit her job as an advertising copywriter. We follow her attempting to improve her life, seizing on any opportunities that come her way.
Author’s vital stats: Zimbabwean Dangarembga, 61, is a playwright and film maker. She was arrested earlier this year for protesting in support of the Movement for Democratic Change.
What to say: English PEN and others are campaigning to have the charges against her dropped.
What not to say: Narrating in the second person present tense is annoying.
Any good? With its underwhelming storyline and difficult prose style, I’m afraid I struggled to finish it.
Storyline: Wallace is a black, gay biochemist from Alabama studying nematodes at a Midwestern university, where all his peers are white. His sense of displacement and insecurity is exacerbated by the fact his father died recently and he was abused as a child.
Author vital stats: An autobiographical debut. Alabama-born, former biochemist Taylor, 31, is a staff writer for Literary Hub, and attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
What to say: Can you believe he wrote the book in only five weeks?
What not to say: How raw and visceral. Apparently Taylor hates his work being described thus.
Any good? I couldn’t get past the tone of resentment, which is both a strength, but also ultimately the book’s weakness.