54 The New York Review
about the ‘women’s’ war but about the
‘men’s.’” Mengiste has written of her
intention to illuminate lives that “have
remained no more than errant lines in
faded documents.”
Even before the arrival of the Ital-
ians, Hirut’s life has been made mis-
erable by the daily humiliations she
endures as a servant in the house-
hold of her guardians, Kidane and
Aster. Under Ethiopia’s feudal soci-
ety, Hirut, who is “unbroken by ser-
vitude and orders,” lives nonetheless
at the mercy of her master and mis-
tress’s caprice. Aster is threatened
by Hirut’s beauty, particularly by her
husband’s thinly veiled infatuation
with the servant. Early on, in one of
the many brutal moments in the book
that will cause readers to wince, Aster
grabs a whip and unleashes her fury on
Hirut.
If there’s one note that characterizes
The Shadow King, it is indignation; the
novel burns with shame and dishonor.
Yet Hirut harbors no dark ideas of re-
venge. At some level she recognizes
that Aster is equally damaged by the
pathological chauvinism and con-
straints of Ethiopian society. When,
soon after the assault with the whip,
her mistress—dressed in jodhpurs, che-
mise, and an old, prized leather cloak
of Kidane’s father (to the irritation of
her husband)—answers the call to war
and attempts to rouse other women to
do the same, Hirut sees her intention:
to invest in a recognized uniform of au-
thority, to mimic men.
But a uniform, even a military one,
offers no guarantee of protection. In-
evitably, Hirut will not escape her mas-
ter’s lust. Even when she follows her
guardians into war, there is no respite
from the offenses she must endure, in-
cluding being raped by Kidane, now
her military commander. Hirut is at
war on two fronts—against the Italian
occupying army and a society in which
men such as Kidane can transgress
with impunity, notwithstanding his
regret, which leaves him feeling “the
ache of a heart making room for new
guilt.”
At the back of The Shadow King,
Mengiste includes a fading picture of
an Ethiopian teenager who bears a
likeness to the imagined Hirut. The
novelist is something of an archivist
of old photos, postcards, memos, and
other artifacts from the period she is
writing about; when she began the
novel, she was inspired by the portraits
of a handful of women. Long descrip-
tions of photos are a recurring trope
in the book. Mengiste first conjures
the image (shadows, highlights, tone,
setting) and then builds an impression
of the character in that photo, depict-
ing what will be lost when the subject
ages:
There is Yasin, without the scar he
will get near his eye. There is Es-
kinder, still with supple, unburnt
skin. Next to them is Seifu and his
son, Tariku. Seifu is turned away
slightly, still defiant without a hint
of the sorrow that will come.Mengiste proves a careful navigator
of the horrors of the past, bringing the
reader close to the limits of what can
be borne. It’s uncanny because at times
the novel can feel as if a photographer’s
filter has been placed in front of it. As
Italian soldiers prepare to shove two el-
derly Ethiopian priests off a cliff, she
writes:They are lined up side by side,
legs bound together, between the
tall boulders... the vulture pads
down the field then launches off
the edge to wait below.... [Ettore]
obeys Fucelli’s orders and staggers
towards those old priests and pho-
tographs their final flight.There’s a certain distancing that mir-
rors the protective veil that Ettore
gains from being behind the lens when
he is forced to place his expertise in
the service of Fucelli. The commander,
whose cruelty in Libya earned him the
title the “butcher of Benghazi” (he is a
proxy for Marshal Graziani, the brutal
commander of the southern front of It-
aly’s occupying force), is the most sin-
gularly vile character in the book, an
unremitting villain whose death cannot
come soon enough.
Ettore accepts that he has become
“an archivist of obscenities” and a
“collector of terror,” tasked with com-
piling an album of the dead. But his
gruesome documentation is also an act
of filial devotion. In letters, his father
has instructed Ettore to bear witness to
his compatriots’ barbarism: “Do not let
these people forget what they have be-
come. Do not let them turn away from
their own reflections.”
Mengiste’s first novel, Beneath the
Lion’s Gaze, centered on the fallout
from the 1974 Ethiopian revolution.
Like that book, The Shadow King has
its roots in family history. Her fictional
heroine Hirut has similarities with
Mengiste’s great-grandmother Getey,
whose story also involved a treasured
rifle. In 1935 Getey sued her father
over her right to enlist in the army. Se-
lassie had ordered each family to send
their eldest son to join the army. But as
Getey’s father had no son, he gave the
weapon to her husband, his son-in-law,
to act as the family’s representative.
Getey, as the eldest child, considered
it hers; she won the case and went to
war armed with the rifle. It’s a remark-
able coincidence, for, as Mengiste has
written, “I had no idea when I sent my
fictional Hirut to war that my great-
grandmother, Getey, preceded her:
flesh and bone, blood and pride, paving
the path for my imagination.” The novel
is suffused with personal histories (real
lives and their fictional approxima-
tions) woven into an intoxicating tale
of grievance and glory, a meeting of the
private and political writ large particu-
larly in the emperor.Mengiste portrays Haile Selassie ten-
derly; he’s a forlorn figure grieving his
daughter Zenebwork, dead for a year,
ostensibly from the complications of
childbirth. He resists turning his head
lest out of the corner of his eye he catch
sight of her in her wedding dress. His
Majesty is renowned for his strategic
thinking and his ability to compart-
mentalize information, but he can gain
no purchase on Mussolini. His son-in-
law Gugsa has betrayed him to the Ital-
ians, and Selassie struggles to “train
himself to withstand disorientation and
stay calm until the world melds itself
back together.”
In a darkened room, deferential,
whispering aides bring him out-of-
date newsreels of the Italian advance.The emperor is largely silent and aloof,
paralyzed with indecision, fiddling
with the needle of his gramophone
as the Italian forces encroach, ob-
sessively playing Verdi’s Aida, which
he thinks surely holds the key to un-
derstanding the accelerating tragedy.
Mengiste’s description of the emper-
or’s febrile mental state as he prepares
to flee his kingdom is among the most
poignant passages of the book: “It is
there, in a place no human hand can
reach that he feels himself fading
away, rubbed out in increments by his
enemies. It is a disappearance that be-
gins like this: with forgetfulness and
boxes.”
Sometimes historical novelists suffer
from a nervous tendency to flag their
research, leading to a separation, es-
pecially in tone, between the factual
and fictional. But everything in The
Shadow King, whether invented or not,
seems plausible. Mengiste’s boldest
conceit explains the title of her novel.
When Selassie escapes to Europe, his
troops are demoralized. Something
must be done to strengthen their re-
solve. Kidane discovers a peasant who
could be a doppelgänger of the em-
peror. Once kitted out in royal cloth-
ing and given training in manners and
bearing, the peasant can be passed off
as Selassie and the rumor spread of the
emperor’s return. The peasant will be
guarded by Hirut, and in the absence
of the real Selassie, he will serve as a
shadow king.
When Hirut and Aster are later cap-
tured by the Italians, they are spared
execution but stripped, degraded, and
forced to pose for photographs, which
will be made into postcards to be dis-
tributed as propaganda throughout the
land. Ettore, in his obedience to the
command to photograph them, can
only hope “to feel [Hirut’s] disdain
and let it roll over him while hoping
to feel its ebb and the gradual push
of something else kinder, gentler, and
forgiving.”
Forgiveness may not be possible, but
the novel slowly and effectively explores
how Hirut tamps down her emotions;
to forgive her own cowardice in battle,
blocking out the memory of a com-
rade’s scream for help, “she will force
herself... to go back and erase that mo-
ment when someone named Hirut got
up and left a dying boy named Beniam,
and ran.” Increasingly Hirut takes
possession of her own way of seeing
and interpreting the world around her.
Whether her molestation and abuse are
at the hands of the prison guards or her
own Ethiopian commander, she learns
to be in her body but out of it, too. To-
ward the novel’s end, finding herself on
the battlefield with her Wujigra rifle,
Hirut does not just have the enemy in
mind when she contemplates squeezing
the trigger:She has done this many times be-
fore in her dreams: She has swung
her rifle from her back and aimed
and shot at Kidane. She has buried
a single bullet into his chest then
bent down to make sure he was
dead. She has killed him many
times, day after day, night after
night, while walking and sleep-
ing and eating and caring for the
wounded. She has trained her-
self to brace for the blunt force of
discharge. She has carved a sin-
gle line into the barrel for a new
enemy down.In 1936 Italian regiments entered
Addis Ababa; in 1941 they were de-
feated. The final battles in which the
tide turns toward Ethiopian victories
are righteous and exhilarating. Five
years after Selassie fled Ethiopia, he
returns from exile to lead his troops,
like the Spanish legend of the res-
urrected El Cid (whose corpse was
encased in body armor strapped to
his horse), terrifying the enemy into
submission:Haile Selassie sweeps into view on
a sunlit horse, the jewels braided
into the animal’s mane flashing
like a thousand eyes... a spirit so-
lidified into human form... a cho-
rus of women’s voices whipping at
his back like a thick, royal cape.This historical novel characterizes the
past not as a faithful reproduction, a
fact subjected to a photographic fix-
ative, but rather as a negative that de-
velops over the book’s course so that
some lasting and vivid truths emerge,
perhaps only hinted at in the beginning
but unassailable by the end.
Though divided into three acts
(Invasion, Resistance, Returns) and
framed by a flashback from one period
of crisis (the 1974 Ethiopian revolu-
tion) to another (the 1935–1941 Italian
occupation), the book is seeded with
a series of unconventional breaks in
structure: in the sections called “Cho-
rus” an otherworldly chorus of gos-
siping Ethiopian women make vatic
pronouncements about the unfolding
tragedy, in particular as it relates to
Hirut and Aster, that are by turns wise,
sympathetic, and unsparingly critical;
there are also brief, punctuating pas-
sages identified by the title “Photo”
in which startling images, especially
of executions, are presented with the
temporary but unsettling force of a
blinding flash; and “Interlude” marks
the moments when the shadowy figure
of Selassie, whose storyline is mostly
distinct from the main narrative, drifts
in and out of the book. Toward the end,
the novel turns from the gritty realism
of the ravages of war to the magical and
mystical when characters from Aida
who have haunted Selassie step out, as
it were, from the long-playing record
to show him a way to escape the psy-
chological trauma and physical dangers
posed to his rule by the 1974 revolts on
the streets of Addis Ababa.
Told in a more conventional and fa-
miliar way, The Shadow King could
have been a catalog of gore, of unre-
mitting depravity. But Mengiste takes
a more humane route. When Kidane,
the tormentor, master, and rapist of
Hirut but also her inspirational com-
mander, lies mortally wounded in
the final, decisive battle against the
Italians, her attempts to comfort him
are all the more poignant for her
ambivalence:They are two figures floating in a
dark river, one holding the other on
her lap, bending to cradle him and
whisper into his ear.... Then she
lifts her face to the sky as Kidane
tries to reach for her face to draw
her near or push her away, Hirut
stares down at the dying man, her
eyes narrowing. I am a soldier, she
says. I am Getey’s daughter. They
will forget you and remember me.
She clears her throat, wipes her
cheeks, and says it again as Kidane