Kukuwa Ashun
Interview with Maaza Mengiste
Before we met up at the Center for Fiction in downtown Brooklyn, Maaza Mengiste sent me a message: “Go to the second floor and look at the exhibit.” Curiosity led me upstairs to the quiet “Members Only” area, and I passed floor-to-ceiling portraits of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison in the spacious staircase. Upon entry to the second level was the exhibit’s name, Into the Bright Lights, and underneath was a brief byline: Photography Collection by Maaza Mengiste. The sepia-tinted photographs were methodically placed in black-rimmed frames and dispersed around the furnished writer’s room. These images—a pile of bodies from a massacre in Addis Ababa; casual and posed pictures of women and girls from across Ethiopia; Italian and Ethiopian soldiers, including a female Ethiopian soldier—were only a handful selected from Mengiste’s decade-long collection from the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war. These archived photographs played an integral role to the development of her sophomore novel, The Shadow King (W. W. Norton, 2019). When Mengiste arrived, I followed her into a grand meeting room across the hall. We sat down and I couldn’t help but exclaim to my former professor, “It’s like you own this entire floor!” She laughed (with a modest, “It’s only up for a few more days!”), and the afternoon sun behind her beamed onto the expansive wooden table in front of us.
The Shadow King is a beautifully crafted novel that follows the journey of heroic female protagonists whose efforts prove instrumental on the frontlines of this war. During Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, readers are launched into a tumultuous landscape on the brink of collapse. Soon enough, the call to mobilize and fight thrusts the present narrative into action. We are introduced to a household of complex characters who individually grapple with their roles in the war. Inspired to create a narrative that demonstrates authentic depictions of warriors, Mengiste thrusts her female characters forward and allows them to reclaim their courage in the history of war. Submission isn’t an option for any of them: Fifi, the woman who spies on the Italian army; Aster, the wife of the Ethiopian commander, whose words encourage other women to mobilize and follow their men; or Hirut, the orphaned girl whose relentless attitude gives her the strength to be the Shadow King’s royal guard.
This story not only actively pushes back against history, but also pushes against the boundaries of structure. Mengiste gives us multiple POVs as chapters as well as interludes, verses from a collective chorus, descriptions of photographs, and brief historical accounts of secondary characters who are critical to the present-day action. The author’s attention to cadence and language is a lyrical ballad, one that makes us want to run straight into the battlefield with our rifles in hand and join these women as they demand visibility in these typically male-dominated narratives.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the BBC, among other places. Maaza’s fiction and nonfiction examines the individual lives at stake during migration, war, and exile, and considers the intersections of photography, memory, and violence. She was a writer on the documentary projects Girl Rising and The Invisible City: Kakuma.
Mengiste is currently working on her third novel, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020), which features short stories from Ethiopian writers around the world.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I want to start off by talking about Ethiopia as the landscape for your two brilliant novels, but also as the place where your ancestral roots are embedded. How did oral and written modes of storytelling from earlier generations initially pique your interest at a young age?
MAAZA MENGISTE: When I was young, all of Ethiopian history came to me through oral storytelling. I understood the country through the voices of people that I knew. I didn’t read anything about Ethiopia until I was in the United States and was trying to connect my memories of the revolution, which had begun while I was living there. I remembered clearly actual historical events and data.
My family wasn’t telling me anything about what had happened to people we knew during the revolution, they weren’t helping me understand those incidents that I remembered seeing. I grew up hearing stories about the first and second Italo-Ethiopian Wars—those great battles from 1896 and 1935–36—these family stories were readily available, but the revolution . . . nobody wanted to talk about it. It was still ongoing when I came to the United States as a child. It was still fresh, still painful. So I started reading, and through that I was able to fit what I remembered with what was actually happening. But you asked me about my literary influences; I count storytelling and oral history as influences, and those were given to me by my family members. How they told a story, all those stories of the conflict with Italy, the bravery of fighters, the defiance of Ethiopians, all the ways they conveyed specific emotions in their accounts—they instilled a cadence into my head that hasn’t left even as I’m writing.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you remember a particular story from your childhood?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Just a certain way of recreating moments. My father was the best. He could sit at a party and talk about anything. They were funny stories that tended to be humorous takes on things he’d witnessed or things that had happened to him. My mother was the same way. They could always captivate an entire room. That’s how I picked up on pacing and ways of describing characters. My parents were not only verbal, but very animated in the way that they told stories. The vocal inflections, the dramatic pauses. As I grew older and started watching them, paying attention, I’d wonder: how did they just do that? I can’t remember anything in particular, but I remember the essence of what they were saying. My grandparents tended to tell historical stories about when they were younger, imparting life lessons to us, but my parents were hilarious. I realize now that I’m talking, that as my mother has gotten older, she has started telling me more and more about our family history, sharing details that I don’t want to forget.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Really?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Yeah, because it’s not written. This is still oral history.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: So it’s up to you to write it.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Right!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking of family, I really admire how you introduce your readers to these intricate familial relationships, especially within the first twenty pages of your novels. In Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, we get a chance to see how Selam’s family responds to her deteriorating health and the similar but disparate ways they will soon reckon with loss. In The Shadow King, we have Aster and Kidane’s relationship, and we first see their interaction in Hirut’s presence. How important was it to establish and craft these relationships immediately within these opening pages?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Those are pivotal movements in this story because I am less interested in the politics of what’s happening and more interested in the human beings that are part of that fabric. In both of these books, my focus was on how a community of people who do not think the same, who disagree, respond when something else that’s larger than all of them steps into their world. It was really important for me to get their relationships and tensions developed from the very beginning.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It has this sense of urgency because war looms in the shadows.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Right.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It was so beautifully done! In our craft class, you always encouraged us to pay attention to the ways in which we address violence in our own work. I want to toss one of the questions you asked us back to you. When did you notice that you loved pushing boundaries in your own work?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I realized early on, writing about this revolution, that I could hold back on the violence if I wanted to. But I wasn’t sure why I should do that, other than catering to a kind of sensibility that wants to ignore that these things happen. I was writing the first book as the United States was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, as photographs of Abu Ghraib and proof of torture were being disseminated. I asked myself, “Who am I actually protecting?” I wanted to bear witness to what people suffered. I wanted readers to bear witness so they see not just the suffering, which is often what the news headlines show, but to understand the people being subjected to that. To understand they’re complicated, with hopes, dreams, dislikes, and fears. It became important for me to not turn away from that, from them. The same with the second book. People have told me the second book is brutal, and I keep wanting to say, “Actually, I don’t think I went that far.” I really don’t think I did. There’s so much I didn’t do. Apparently, what’s already there feels very visceral to people, and maybe part of it has to do with the fact that there’s sexual abuse depicted. That feels very visceral and immediate because our national and international conversations are about that. I was writing this book way before the #MeToo movement, and I understood, as I was writing it, that sexual abuse is a form of warfare. I wanted to be as honest about that as I could.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your characters often think about how the body is a weapon, especially in the scenes where Kidane is abusing his power over Hirut and Aster. Both characters freeze up, especially in those initial moments.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Yeah.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I thought violence was everywhere, and that you wanted us to imagine and recreate it in our own heads. This was what our class last semester was all about, so I was prepared! From Han Kang to Édouard Louis, I was prepared!
MAAZA MENGISTE: [Laughter] Now you see what I was reading as I was writing this book.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The depiction of violence translated so well into your novels. Do you find yourself pushing boundaries more in your fiction or your nonfiction essays?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Less so in the essays because I haven’t personally encountered a lot of situations I write about in my essays. I want to render the people who experience certain things. For example, I haven’t stepped into an interrogation room, but in my fiction I can. These are imaginative leaps, or they’re from stories told to me by other people. I’m able to move freely in fiction whereas in nonfiction, I may not always have that direct contact.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Some of the characters in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze are in The Shadow King. While you were writing the first book, were you already thinking about how they might resurface in your future work?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Initially, no. But then I started thinking, wait a minute! My character Hailu in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze talks about and remembers the time he spent fighting the war. Why wouldn’t he be fighting with my characters? Why not create that sense of continuum in history? Haile Selassie is a pitiful character in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, and in The Shadow King, he’s someone who deserts his people. He felt more ruthless to me, and this is also depicted in how he treats his daughter, Zenebework. I thought this was an interesting thing to work with.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: When Hailu and Dawit appear in The Shadow King, I literally screamed and marked it down. I wrote it in the margins. I was like, Okay Maaza, you’re playing mind games!
MAAZA MENGISTE: [Laughter] You’re the only one. You’re the first one who’s picked up on that!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I marked all of the places where this happens. I thought it was an intimate conversation for the people who’ve read both books.
MAAZA MENGISTE: That’s right! I didn’t say anything about it because I figured that the people who’ve read the first book would pick up on these instances and they could be in on that with me. Our own private conversation, so to speak.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Exactly! Well, I’m glad we’re having this conversation.
MAAZA MENGISTE: That’s really funny. Good reading!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of these, what I call “Maaza Gems,” that we’ve had the opportunity to hear in our class is that structure is everything. I was completely spellbound by the framework of The Shadow King and the inner workings. From the first page, we’re traveling with Hirut, and soon enough we’re introduced to the chorus of the dead, which reflects Agamemnon.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Right!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I remember you saying how the chorus in your book is pissed, as opposed to Agamemnon, where this chorus of old white men are—
MAAZA MENGISTE: They’re just tired!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Can you talk about how the structure freed you?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I wanted to do something different. I wanted to set a challenge for myself to write in a way that I haven’t necessarily seen in many books, in a way that would let me develop muscles for the third book. I really think structure is much more interesting than story, and I said, “Okay, if I could do anything I wanted, what would I do? What have some writers done that I really admired?” So there’s been Agamemnon, Dǎsa Drndić—a Croatian writer that I’ve mentioned in class before—who wrote Trieste, E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. Those books explode structure in their own way. The story is important, but it’s also the way they write it that informs the story. I wanted to play around with that and also think about the fact that if I’m addressing a hidden part of history, which means I’m acknowledging that history is contested territory, why am I not writing a book that is structurally a series of contestations? So that every person’s history in the book is challenged by something else? No single person contains a full history, and I wanted to see what that structure would look like. I was also looking at musical movements. Aida is the opera that figures in here, and I started to think of my book as an operatic work, where you have these different voices and instruments coming in like a chorus and a refrain. As all of these actors are on stage, something else is telling you, “Hold on, that’s not what’s actually happening.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You let the reader know more than the characters. When Navarra is thinking about the letter that his father sent him, but in reality his father had already cut up previous letters—I screamed. Those were heartbreaking moments, but it’s reality because we’re forced to ask, “Do we know everything?”
MAAZA MENGISTE: Navarra would never know everything.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What was the process behind designating these other brief breaks within the narrative?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I’m trying to think of how I started working on this, structurally how it started falling into place. I think it came in a really drastic revision that I made. I’ve spoken in a couple of other interviews about how I had finished a draft of this book and it was linear, one voice, all third-person. And I said, oh my god, this is terrible.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You said you had a terrible time writing it.
MAAZA MENGISTE: It was the most joyless thing I’ve ever done. But I said, if I’m going to throw this thing away and start again, then I really need to start again, and this needs to be a radical revisioning of the story. Once I started on that, once I switched to present tense, it immediately created a momentum. Everything is happening now. Then, at some point, I was writing and all of a sudden, the chorus came in with this “We.” I remember sitting back and going, “What was that?” I do a lot of writing by hand, and I had literally been transcribing something when this “We” came in. So I moved aside from the computer, went back to my notebook, and started saying “Okay, what is this ‘We’? Who is this choir?” I heard this thing that said, “We are the voices of the dead, and we’re angry.” I thought, “Oh my god, that’s a lot of fun to play with,” and I said, “All right! Take it whenever you want!” That was when this voice began to step in. It happened in increments, but it also happened because I was not afraid to move there as opposed to saying, “You’ve never done this before, and you can’t do it. Who’s done this?” The other draft was so bad. It truly could not get any worse. It could only get better. [Laughter] I said, “Let’s do it. The book is already overdue, everybody’s given up on me, so let me just do it.” And that’s really how it started coming about.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Maaza, you’re fearless. You tossed that first draft?
MAAZA MENGISTE: But that’s how bad it was, Kukuwa. That’s how bad it was. There’s no way it could’ve been salvaged.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You had no files saved of it? Where you could just resurrect it from the dead?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I tried that twice, and every time it was like a clunk of metal in water. There was no way to take it out. I did not use it. There was one scene from the old draft—about two or three pages—that made it to the new one, but that new draft was a complete revisioning. Like spinning it on its head, and that was it. I tell students—I’m sure I’ve told you guys—start again! Start again and don’t worry. If something is not working, move. People are really afraid to do that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I am terrified.
MAAZA MENGISTE: I cannot tell you how many students have come back to me, and the ones who do it say, “My god, this one is so much better.” There’s a freedom you give yourself the minute you know it’s all in your head. Why not just write it out again?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Maybe it’s because we feel so attached to what we’ve constructed from a blank page.
MAAZA MENGISTE: If you’ve done it once, you can do it again, and you can do it better. I guarantee it’ll be better. I keep telling people that, and finally somebody came back and said, “I did it! I wrote it!”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’ll do it one day, Maaza, I promise.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Why not do it for your new story? What have you got to lose? We think of the writing we put down on paper as this hallowed ground that can’t be touched and, if we touch it, it’s a domino effect and everything crumbles. But that’s not the case, that’s not the way imagination works. The minute you decide that you know the story and can try something else, you’ll be surprised at what comes forward.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Okay, Maaza. You’re challenging me. That was a direct call for action.
MAAZA MENGISTE: [Laughter] You should add an addendum to this interview saying, “I did do this, and this is what happened!”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Throughout this novel, there’s this agonizing question (“Who are you? What are you?”) that is directed toward Hirut. First it’s Aster who asks, then it’s Kidane, then it’s Haile Selassie. This escalation was beautiful. I was literally marking down whenever she was asked this question. And one time she replies, while she’s holding Kidane as he’s dying, “I am a soldier. I am Getey’s daughter. They will forget you and remember me.” Did you ever find yourself grappling with consistency or how memory and identity will always come back to the character?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I don’t think so. I think identity, one’s family, and one’s lineage is such an integral part of each of these characters. Hirut constantly identifies herself. “I am Hirut, daughter of Getey and Fasil, born on a blessed day of harvest.” Kidane says the name of all the men who came before him in his family. Aster is well aware of her position in life. The cook, who refuses to give her name, is aware of the power of names. The cook says that you won’t take that from me, you’ve taken everything else, and you don’t get to have my name, too. This idea of naming, and naming being connected to family history, identity, and social class feels very integral to Ethiopia. My last name is my father’s first name. His last name is his father’s first name. So if I know Maaza Mengiste Imru, I know my grandfather’s name and I know my father’s name. That’s just part of who these characters are. There’s Fifi who is also Faven; she’s one thing with one name and something else with her other name. I was really curious about people who, like the cook and Fifi, say, “Screw this structure, I’m going to create my own identity!” As much as I understood the importance of names, I also wanted to play around with that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Then you have Fifi and the cook together, as well. Moving from the cook with Aster to Fifi was quite the transition, but it was a great dynamic between the both of them. Also, in war, death is inevitable and blood begets blood. In an essay you wrote for the anthology New Daughters of Africa, you say, “The end of life involves a journey.” When I read that, I thought about the bodies flying off the edge of a cliff. How difficult was it to depict those scenes when you first put pen to paper?
MAAZA MENGISTE: That was really hard. Knowing it actually happened, knowing I wasn’t making it up, made it harder. I remember hearing these stories a long time ago of the Italians in this location, some distance from Addis Ababa, on this cliff—this is what they did. At some point I went there, and I saw one of those cliffs. I looked down and said, “My god.” It was hard to think about that, but as writers, language saves us as much as it forces us to depict those moments. I could work with myth and the ideas of Dedalus and Icarus because it enabled me to approach that kind of brutality. That act of cruelty was so large that I needed language that could encompass that. That was the language of myth.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It was also the use of photos and photography. MAAZA MENGISTE: Absolutely.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The cook passes out powdered leaves to prisoners. Was that also something you read about?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Yeah, those are hallucinogenic plants that are still used. They have an effect similar to mushrooms, I think. I know it’s usually used by priests. The cook decides the prisoners need something to numb them and take them out of this moment, so she distributes this to them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: And she tells them to say their names as they fly.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Yes.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It was so well done. I was stressed. Knowing that it was trauma, but also truth, written into your novel. Now you are working on your third novel, right?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Yes, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I heard it’s a hybrid novel.
MAAZA MENGISTE: You really did your research!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I came prepared! What do you want readers to wit- ness as you intertwine the themes of war and art?
MAAZA MENGISTE: Moving into it, it’s so early right now. It’s so early. I’m giving myself this freedom to move in whatever direction that is challenging for me. I don’t know what I can say about it, but I think it’s going to be a continuation of these questions I’ve been asking in the first two books about the nature of history, memory, and how what we see is both deceptive and vitally true. That’s it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m going to come back to this interview when you drop your book, and I’m going to say that we heard it first! Now, on to my final comment-slash-question. The Shadow King is going to be in theaters.
MAAZA MENGISTE: Well, let’s see. I hope so!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It’s going to be adapted because no one can deny a female-forward narrative with Ethiopian women warriors! What do you think that journey will be like?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I’m really interested in seeing what unfolds. What’s been really exciting to me is that the producers have come to me and said, “We want to do this as authentically as possible. We are invested in doing it this way.” They don’t want to take shortcuts. They want to do it in a historically accurate way. I’m really pleased with that. It makes me really excited. The fact that it’s female-forward and they’re really invested in using female talents behind the cameras as much as it would be in front of the camera: African, Black talent. I’m looking forward to it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m so excited for you.
MAAZA MENGISTE: I know. Let’s see!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Are you interested in writing the screenplay?
MAAZA MENGISTE: I’ve done it before. I used to work in Hollywood so I know a bit of the process. But clearly I’ve never had a book of mine optioned, and this is exciting for me, too.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: On to new adventures!
MAAZA MENGISTE: Onwards!