April 23, 2020 53
The Women’s War
Colin Grant
The Shadow King
by Maaza Mengiste.
Norton, 428 pp., $26.95
In a black-and-white photo taken in
December 1935, Emperor Haile Se-
lassie of Ethiopia stands at ease in a
smart khaki military uniform and pith
helmet, with a cape draped over his
shoulders. Pensive men brandishing
rifles remain a respectful distance be-
hind him in dry, rough terrain. Selassie
looks as if he could be posing at the end
of a hunt. But he has one foot perched
nonchalantly on an unexploded bomb,
not a lion or leopard.
Hours earlier, Italian warplanes had
bombed Dessie, his new headquarters
250 miles north of the capital, Addis
Ababa. Once the air raid was over,
leaving more than a dozen dead and
many wounded, Selassie ordered his
men to bring a cache of ordnance that
had failed to explode to the grounds
of the abandoned Italian consulate.
Photographers were invited to record
the emperor’s dignified defiance of the
military might of a modern European
power.
In 1896 Ethiopian forces had re-
pulsed Italian invaders at the Battle
of Adwa. Forty years later, the Ital-
ians were more difficult to resist; the
photo was only a bluff. Selassie and his
compatriots would soon be under the
heel of Benito Mussolini, whose ra-
pacity and imperial ambitions had led
to the invasion of Ethiopia two months
earlier. The brutality of the Fascists
would be further demonstrated by
their use of mustard gas not only on
Ethiopian troops but on the civilian
population.
Many nations expressed outrage
but did little to thwart Mussolini’s
assault; more vocal support came
from the African diaspora. Since
Selassie’s coronation as emperor in
1930, the Conquering Lion of Judah
had become, especially for those in
the diaspora, the most revered black
man in the world. Presiding over one
of the two African sovereign nations
not yet colonized by European pow-
ers (the other being Liberia), Selassie
was considered the embodiment and
fulfillment of the biblical prophecy
that “princes shall come out of Egypt;
Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her
hands unto God.” For black people,
the Italo-Ethiopian conflict was un-
equivocally a race war. “The real facts
reveal Mussolini as a barbarian, com-
pared to Haile Selassie,” wrote the
pan-Africanist leader Marcus Gar-
vey as he lamented the grave threat
posed to the “ancient sceptre wielded
for ages by an historic line of black
sovereigns.”
Italy had already shown, in govern-
ing its colony in neighboring Eritrea,
a ruthlessness toward Africans that
was endorsed even by the writer Ferdi-
nando Martini, who, notwithstanding
his later signing of the Manifesto of
Fascist Intellectuals in 1925, was con-
sidered a Tuscan liberal. In 1891, six
years before his appointment as gov-
ernor of Eritrea, Martini was part of
a royal commission charged with over-
seeing an inquest into the excessive use
of whipping and other abuses in the
colony. Martini concluded:
One race must replace the other;
it’s that or nothing... whether we
like it or not, we will have to hunt
[the native] down and encourage
him to disappear, just as had been
done with the Redskins, using all
the methods civilization—which
the native instinctively hates—can
provide: gunfire and a daily dose
of firewater.Eritrea provided a base for the inva-
sion of Ethiopia in October 1935. The
Italians’ early military successes soon
made Ethiopians realize that they were
in a fight to preserve their country.
Selassie issued a desperate conscrip-
tion proclamation:The hour is grave. Each of you
must rise up, take up his arms and
speed to the appeal of the coun-
try for defense. Women, gather
round your chiefs, obey them with
a single heart and thrust back the
invader.... Those who cannot for
weakness or infirmity take an ac-
tive part in this holy struggle must
aid us with their prayers.... Out
into the field. For the Emperor. For
the Fatherland.The Italo-Ethiopian War has often
been overlooked, treated as a sideshow
to the calamitous world war that was to
come. The participation of women in it
has been further eclipsed, and this is
the focus of the Ethiopian-American
writer Maaza Mengiste’s second novel,
The Shadow King.
The novel opens decades later in- Addis Ababa is gripped by rev-
olutionary fervor, with public demon-
strations and students chanting for the
abdication of Haile Selassie. The main
character, Hirut, is a veteran of the war
with a complicated past. Beneath her
neatly braided hair, she hides a long
scar that “puckers at the base of her
neck and trails over her shoulder like
a broken necklace.” It is emblematic
of the violence at the center of The
Shadow King.
Hirut has returned to Addis Ababa
almost forty years after the war, reluc-
tantly answering a plea for a meeting
with Ettore Navarra, a remorseful Ital-
ian photographer who lives and works
in a studio in the capital. The story of
their lives—grievously and inextricably
bound together—is told in flashback to
1935–1941. Ettore had been a soldier
during the Italo-Ethiopian War and
was complicit in making a photographic
record of Hirut’s humiliation as a pris-
oner of war, and of the torture and kill-
ing of myriad captive Ethiopians.
One of Mengiste’s strengths is her
determination to capture not just the
Ethiopian patriots’ mindset but also
the invaders’ point of view, especially
that of Ettore, a flawed and conflicted
character whose Jewish identity
placed him in a vulnerable position
after the introduction of racial laws at
home and abroad. His parents in Italy
will eventually be rounded up during
his tour of duty. Ettore may be weak
and passive, but even so he ought to
be more scandalized by Italy’s ra-
cially inflected violence in Ethiopia,
the delusional glory of its African ad-
venture, and the tragic romance of a
resurrected Roman Empire. Hirut is
certain that Ettore deserves death forhis part in the atrocities that resulted
from that delusion, yet she holds out
the possibility that he may deserve
compassion too.
The Shadow King unfolds over a
series of short, crisp chapters, with
writing that is by turns as succinct and
precise as a military dispatch and as
lyrical as a poem. Her tale also finds
parallels in the biblical story of David
and Goliath. In 1935 Italian regiments
allied with their ascari (mostly Eritrean
colonial troops) could count on the
overwhelming advantage of hundreds
of tanks, heavy artillery, and planes;
the Ethiopians were reliant on just a
handful of planes and tanks, along
with old rifles and spears. In the nov-
el’s first major battle, the Italian com-
mander, Carlo Fucelli, is bemused by
the sight of Ethiopian soldiers armed
with spears and swords and “scaling
his tanks as if they were simply iron
mountains.” But more disturbing on
the smoky battlefield is the “bloom
of white dresses, skirts rippling in the
wind. They are tumbling down the hill
as if gravity were of no consequence....
They are not women, he decides, but
illusions.”
Women weren’t meant to be on the
battlefield. But Mengiste’s fiction is
grounded in the oral histories of war-
riors such as Woizero Alemitu Mekong:Female Patriots like me bandaged
wounds and provided water and
bullets by carrying them on our
backs with a leather thong es-
pecially prepared for carrying,
called an ircot. We would also
inspire and encourage the males
calling, “Where are you retreat-
ing to? Where are you going? Are
you going back to your mother’s
womb?” In addition, we would
throw grenades from a distance
by snatching their fuses with our
teeth, as the men had taught us.*What is the place of women in war? If
war makes a man out of a soldier, what
does it do to female combatants? Like
the soldiers in The Unwomanly Face
of War, by the Belarusian Nobel Prize
winner Svetlana Alexievich, Hirut, in
her youth, is not content with playing
a subservient or supportive part in the
war. She has an old, out-of-date Wu-
jigra, “a bolt-action, 11mm rifle de-
signed to deliver a single lethal shot,”
left to her by her late father, who made
her pledge never to surrender it; she is
a practiced sharpshooter and wants to
turn it on the enemy.
With her heroine, Mengiste is deter-
mined to challenge readers’ expecta-
tions about the gender of the soldier/
warrior just as Alexievich did. There
were female soldiers in centuries past,
Alexievich contends, but their contri-
butions were rarely recognized, not
even by themselves—at least publicly.
She writes of the Soviet female sol-
diers, “Even those who were at the
front say nothing. If they suddenly
begin to remember, they don’t talkMaaza Mengiste*Andrew Hilton, The Ethiopian
Patriots: Forgotten Voices of the Italo-
Abyssinian War 1935– 41 (London:
The History Press, 2007), p. 99.