Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer.
She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist.
It was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more.
The Shadow King, called “a brilliant novel…compulsively readable” by Salman Rushdie
About the author
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CHARACTERS:
Hirut
Kidane
Aster
Colonel Fucelli
Ettore Navratra
Mimim
Haile Selassie
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Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King opens with a woman, Hirut, sitting on the floor of a train station in the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa, holding an old metal box.
"It has taken almost forty years of another life to begin to remember who she had once been."
While the novel begins and ends at the train station in 1974, the vast majority of the book takes place in the 1930s, just before and during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
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Hirut is a servant, living in a room that "is less than a box, it is an airless hole enclosed in mud and straw and dung."
Kidane is fond of Hirut, resents her, jealous of the attention the girl receives from Kidane.
The dynamic doesn't change too much when the Italians invade Ethiopia, and Kidane starts to recruit an army to defend his home country.
Kidane, Aster and Hirut are forced to abandon the property, with Kidane leading his troops and Aster and Hirut following behind, tasked with taking care of wounded soldiers.
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Hirut realizes. "There is no way out except through battle. There is no other choice but to be a soldier, to take her [rifle], point it at the enemy, and hope for the mercy of her own death."
Kidane eventually agrees to let her serve as the guard for a "shadow king," a peasant who pretends to be Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in order to rally the dispirited soldiers.
Fucelli orders the construction of a prison that's essentially a temporary home for captured Ethiopian soldiers; Navarra is given the job of photographing the prisoners as they're thrown off a cliff to their deaths.
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Hirut and Navarra eventually cross paths during the war, which leads to their emotional reunion at the book's end.
Hirut is unforgettable; the girl is resilient but not superhuman, vulnerable but determined not to think of herself as a victim.
"She is Hirut, daughter of Fasil and Getey, feared guard of the Shadow King," Mengiste writes, "and she is no longer afraid of what men can do to women like her."
Navarra, whom Mengiste depicts as tragic and deeply flawed — he's a man who likes to think of himself as decent at heart, but perhaps realizes that he's a slave to his own moral cowardice.
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Female Abyssinian warriors.
It's a brave, stunning call for the world to remember all who we've lost to senseless violence: "She can hear the dead growing louder: We must be heard. We must be remembered. We must be known. We will not rest until we have been mourned."