The Shadow King

In Maaza Mangiste’s second novel, The Shadow King, she writes a historical-fiction based on the second Italo-Ethiopian war, and the efforts of Ethiopian women against the Italians during the war. Through the insight of three different characters: Hirut (a servant), Aster (the wife), and Kidane (the husband), the reader is told of the inner workings of war, and the oppression of women during this time. It has echoes of classic Greek epic poems with its use of a collective chorus speaking for all with one voice, but the deployment of a lack of punctuation in parts of the storytelling made reading this difficult until I became accustomed to it.

Mengiste is a truly gifted novelist, her multilayered writing is on an epic scale, capturing a wide and disparate set of perspectives on the tragedy of war, its repercussions, and its critical role in shifting and changing people. Her unique spotlight on women, all that they are, what they endure, the abuse and rape, and above all their resilience and remarkable strength in the war provides the backbone to this book.. The author looks at both sides in the conflict, giving us an eye opening and thought provoking look at this period of WW2 history in Ethiopia and Italy’s effort to enforce colonial rule. Depicted within the narrative is Selassie’s despair as he prepares for exile, photos with their snapshot description of what occurs and the connections that exist and grow between a orphan, the brave and courageous Hirut, who ends up working as a maid to a military commander, Dejazmach Kidane and his wife, Aster and an Italian Jewish photographer, Ettore Navarro, in the Italian army, a patriot who believes in the war, but forced to question it and himself as the never ending terrors and horrors unfold. For good reason, Hirat is a resentful and unhappy woman, but both she and Aster refuse to accept their role of burying the dead and providing aid to those wounded. Inspired by Hirat, the shadow king is created to raise Ethiopian spirits and fighting efforts. As women become Ethiopia’s warriors, Hirat becomes a prisoner of war under the cruel Italian soldiers, to end up years later reflecting on this period of her life through the medium of photographs. ​​Interestingly though I have to say that weighting down with history and shadow affects the reading experience of the novel. It feels like every scene is weighted down by portent and every paragraph shadowed by metaphor. And the memories and the cast of shadow characters can rather obscure the reader’s understanding of the novel’s present day, adding an additional layer of filters that can rather blur the transparency of the ostensible main narrative.

The heavily poetic writing style that Mengiste chose to use as her medium was a section of the novel that caused me to suffer through the reading. As something that I could have read within a day took me almost a week to get through due to this style of writing. Highly poetic wording is applied to mostly everything, creating an atmosphere that is clearly intended to be rich but which is smothered with its heavy floral perfume.

“She is clothed but she is naked. She is a spectacle but she is invisible. She is a girl who has been split, and what stands here is both flesh and shadow, bone and silhouette, no more than air filled with smoke. And the cook. The cook. The cook.”

Such passages, in isolation, make for perfect pull-quotes. When strung along for 424 pages, this places the focus on the writer’s style and not the story. I believe this story suffers as a result of this writing style, overshadowing the words on the page and stretching the novel out much longer. Personally I think that the story could have had the same effect, the same purpose brought forth to the reader in a much shorter concise way if it were not for the stylistic choice of having it be overly poetic. If it was done this way I think that I most likely would have enjoyed The Shadow King more so than I have so far. 

It is clear that Mengiste is not only focussing on her people’s heroic resistance to the brutal Italian occupation after 1935 (for which, to my knowledge, Italy was never punished).. According to the long closing sentence, her focus was mainly on the position of women in the Ethiopian resistance. Through the duo Hirut-Aster she illustrates how remarkable women also took up arms and ventured into battle. I have not been able to verify her claim that this is based on historical facts, but I assume that more likely than not that this did occur. With both Hirut and Aster she also underlines the dubious nature of the female position: despite their merits, both are clearly subdued by the formidable resistance leader Kidane, also in a sexual way; this Kidane therefore takes on a very ambiguous character. If this novel is meant to honor and showcase the role of women warriors in Ethiopia’s fight for sovereignty (and that is its advertised claim), why do we only get details about Aster, Hirut, and “the cook” (among whom the latter two are only brought to battle as indentured servants and only participate by choice late in the game)? Why give us the names and autobiographies of almost twenty of Kidane’s men but leave Aster’s women nameless, faceless, and mere ciphers? We learn more of Seifu’s wife, Marta, and a whore named Mimi (neither of whom are fighting) than of a third female combatant named Nardos. We see more of a household requisitioned for the front lines than of a community of women marching off to war. This is more of a domestic drama placed before a backdrop of foreign invasion, and that is less interesting to me. I realize this is partly a case of misplaced expectations, but those expectations have been set for anyone who picks up the book. Maaza Mengiste writes a very interesting novel, in a way that I have been exposed to very sparingly, about a subject matter that is rarely in any form of media. The Shadow King is a very different novel that I normally would not have stumbled upon and I’m not upset that I did, the novel had some shining moments but for me it became a long, almost tedious read. I personally would not go running up to everyone I know recommending this book due to that I just did not enjoy it that much and had higher hopes going into the story. The Shadow King is a novel that probably could have the best use in a classroom due to it being a historical-fiction, but due to the story being a topic that is talked about very much it could be difficult to do so. I would rate The Shadow King at 6.5/10, putting it at about the middle of my Booker Shortlist Ratings. To round out the ratings I have The New Wilderness at a 6.0/10, Real Life at a 6.4/10, The Shadow King at 6.5/10, This Mournable Body at 7.4/10( I revised this review after comparing it to the other novels, as it was the first I feel I rated it too harshly), Burnt Sugar at a very solid 8.4/10, andShuggie Bain a very solid 9.0/10