Booker Prize: Maaza Mengiste on The Shadow King

i newspaper, February 2020

The research took years. Maaza Mengiste even learnt Italian to help her plot The Shadow King, a remarkable tale of how Ethiopia repelled the Italian invasion in 1935.

“It was an epic David vs Goliath story. And then I scrapped it. There was something not quite right,” she says, laughing – which she can afford to do now that the novel has finally been published.

The dramatic change of heart came about, in part, because Mengiste found a New York Times article from 1935, which explained how an Ethiopian woman had picked up her husband’s gun after he fell in battle, and continued to lead his men. “That was a story right there,” says the 45 year-old Ethiopian-American.

“I then started discovering photographs, and realising there were all these women who had joined the front lines. Until then, my female characters were in the background.”

‘I wasn’t going to tiptoe into this. If it was going to be bad, it would be tremendously bad’

Mengiste’s discovery transformed what would become the follow-up to her 2010 novel, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze, which also explored the fractured story of 20th-century Ethiopia.

She kept hearing stories about the war from her family, so she went back to Ethiopia to have a look at some of the battlefields with her mother.

“The book was nearly done, and my mother knew how hard it had been for me to find these stories of women,” she says.

“And then, out of nowhere, she told me that my own great-grandmother had been enlisted to fight on the front lines, too.

“I can’t tell you how much of an infuriating moment that was. My brain couldn’t grapple with what she had said, I couldn’t grasp it. I sat there in silence before asking her to repeat herself. I mean, this was a woman I had met before she died – and she’d gone with her father’s gun to enlist.”

Mengiste explains that there are differing stories about how much her great-grandmother actually did, since she would have been very young at the time, all of which feeds into The Shadow King, a wonderful account of African women at war.

Opening in a domestic setting with orphaned maid, Hirut, the novel is an intimate portrait of human beings going about their daily lives with tensions and hardships, memories and love, which broadens out into an epic war narrative when emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile after leading resistance to the Italians.

Hirut disguises a peasant as the emperor – the titular Shadow King – and becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms.

Stylistically, Mengiste channelled the brave attitude of her subjects. A Greek-style chorus pops up, while there are fragmentary descriptions of photographs.

“I told myself to write as fearlessly as I could,” she says. “To push myself beyond the safety nets. I wasn’t going to tiptoe into this. If it was going to be a bad book, it would be tremendously bad.”

Why take those literary risks, though, when you have such a strong narrative?

“Well, this war was also about these characters taking these incredible leaps,” she says.

“There’s no way the Ethiopians should have won, yet somehow they did. That space of the unimaginable becoming imaginable was a space I wanted to work in as a writer.”

After nine years, Mengiste sent off the draft. “I braced myself, then I got a note from my editor: ‘This book is tremendous’. I started crying.”

The Shadow King is ambitious but effortless to read. For all the harrowing scenes, it feels hopeful and lyrical.

“If there is one thing I hope people understand about The Shadow King, it is that it’s about the mercies we offer and accept from one another,” says Mengiste.

“That’s the way we survive emotionally after the devastation of any kind of conflict, whether domestic or military. To me, that’s what it means to be human.”

The Shadow King is published by Canongate, at £16.99. Buy from Waterstones now