The Shadow King, by Maaza Mengiste.

W.W. Norton & Company, 448 pp.  

By Rayyan Al-Shawaf

In Maaza Mengiste’s recent novel, The Shadow King, which is now set to become a film, the eponymous character is a stand-in for Emperor Haile Selassie. The latter has fled Ethiopia (at the time known to many in the West as Abyssinia) in the wake of a military collapse brought about by fascist Italy’s 1935 invasion. The Shadow King’s task is to fool his people into believing that he is Selassie – and in the process convince them to join the guerrilla army purportedly under his command. He will roam the Ethiopian countryside, attempting to imbue the inhabitants of one village after another with the conviction that their legendary emperor has not decamped for London, as the news reports claim, but is in fact personally leading the campaign against the ferenji aggressors. This exhilarating ruse was not devised by the Shadow King, an unassuming rural musician with a strong resemblance to Selassie and an understandable reluctance to impersonate him, but by a rebel leader named Kidane. And if it is to succeed, Kidane, for whom luck and manpower are in equally short supply, will need a lot of help.

Enter the women. They will guard the pretend-emperor and shore up Kidane’s guerrilla force. From the perspective of Carlo Fucelli, a colonel in the Italian army, all this makes for an unexpected and even terrifying spectacle. “And then there he is: the ghostly figure of that runaway emperor, a spirit solidified into human form: Haile Selassie, charging down at them on a vivid white horse, a chorus of women’s voices whipping at his back like a thick, royal cape.”

It is no coincidence that two women, Hirut and Aster, emerge as the most important characters in The Shadow King, which is the second novel by Ethiopian-American Mengiste (her first, also set in Ethiopia, was Beneath the Lion’s Gaze). After all, in an “Author’s Note” preceding the actual tale, Mengiste writes, “The Shadow King tells the story of those Ethiopian women who fought alongside men, who even today have remained no more than errant lines in faded documents.” Aster and Hirut are two such women. And, as it happens, their war cries are very much part of the aforementioned “chorus of women’s voices” accompanying the Shadow King’s every march into battle. 

That said, the author ensures that her omniscient narrator periodically delves into the lives of rebel leader Kidane (to whom Aster is married), self-exiled Emperor Selassie, Colonel Fucelli, and Jewish Italian army photographer Ettore Navarra, who begins to feel more ill at ease in his uniform as he hears of anti-Semitic legislation back in Italy. In fact, it is the lead-up to an encounter between Ettore and Hirut, who first come into contact during the war, that frames the story; while most of The Shadow King takes place in the second half of the ’30s as the likes of Kidane organize resistance to the Italians, Mengiste sets its beginning and end in 1974, during a fateful period of civil and military dissatisfaction with the long-running reign of Selassie, who was restored to power in 1941. 

During the war, Aster, Hirut, and many other women clamor for battlefield and even combat – as opposed to support – roles. “Shouldn’t we be doing something too? Or is this only your country?” an indignant Aster asks husband Kidane. At the same time, Aster and Hirut endure both psychological and physical abuse at the hands of Kidane. And the two grapple with the fierce resentment they harbor toward each other. Aster is jealous of Hirut, who is still a minor, and bullies her. Why? Because Kidane, who brought Hirut into their household as a servant after she was orphaned, now lusts after the girl.  

When it comes to the women’s request to fight alongside the men, Kidane demurs time and again, citing the rigors involved. Circumstances end up forcing him to relent, and the women acquit themselves admirably in several robust military engagements before Aster and Hirut are taken prisoner. During their captivity, Colonel Fucelli and other Italian officers frequently force them “to undress or put on a uniform or salute in their abesha chemise” in order to be photographed by a conflicted Ettore. With one eye on life’s ironies and the other on men’s hypocrisies, Mengiste reveals that, battlefield experiences aside, the humiliating and violent treatment Aster and Hirut endure at the hands of their Italian captors and their African ascari allies matches that meted out to them earlier by the manipulative and violent Kidane.

At play in The Shadow King, then, are two motifs: a paean to Ethiopia’s real-life yet unsung female soldiers, and a laying bare of the abuses some of these women and girls suffered at the hands of their male spouses and comrades. Both motifs are informed by feminism, yet one proves a lot more involving than the other. In battle scenes, Mengiste lionizes Ethiopian soldiers, especially the women, at great length and in florid prose. Over and above giving her material a dated feel, this approach blurs the line between, on one hand, recognizing that the fight against the Italians is a necessity foisted upon the Ethiopians, and, on the other, viewing war as some sort of glorious crucible in which are forged men and women of valor and heroism. At the same time, the author reveals that the bane of Aster and Hirut’s existence is none other than a fellow Ethiopian, decidedly alpha male rebel commander Kidane. This adds complexity and a measure of sophistication to her character portrayals.

For the most part, the two themes – immortalization of the Ethiopian women who took up arms, and unflinching examination of the brutality some were subjected to by Ethiopian men – coexist uneasily. Yet, in one respect, they complement each other. Mengiste, deepening the Kidane-as-male-obstacle-and-tormentor motif, pointedly has Hirut fantasize about killing him when she pulls the trigger on an Italian soldier with whom she comes face-to-face in battle. And when the author insinuates that the qualities that make one a good soldier might in certain instances also make one a bad man, this proves subversive precisely because so much of her tale is taken up with exalting Ethiopian soldiers.

One night, Kidane tries to rape Hirut. Because he overpowers her physically, she adopts a rather unorthodox means of resistance. It works. The result is more than a feeling of relief on her part. In stymieing her now flustered aggressor, Hirut realizes something about Kidane, something quite damning. “It has been there all along, waiting for her discovery: all that he has ever wanted from her is a fight, another battle he can win.”

June 5, 2020

Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Malta. His debut novel, When All Else Fails, was published by Interlink Books last year.