The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste retrieves the stories of female Ethiopian soldiers fighting against Italian imperialism during the second world war. Frequently overlooked, the resistance in Ethiopia and the contributions of women take center stage here. Brutally so. Be warned, the novel narrates several rape scenes, a gang rape, and an attempted castration. These are all part and parcel of war. As a Salvadoran, war literature like this is particularly seething and really strikes a nerve. While artful, Mengiste doesn’t play down the violence of warfare. The upshot of this is we see how powerful the main women are, how much they overcame, what incredibly difficult decisions they had to make.
The novel follows two women soldiers (Aster and Hirut), Aster’s husband Kidane, a cruel Italian colonel Carlo Fucelli, Fucelli’s Ethiopian sex worker, Haile Selassie, and a Jewish Italian photographer and soldier Ettore Navarro. Navarro’s narrative is especially fraught, as he compromises his ethics following orders as a soldier at the same time as he is coming to terms with his prosecuted Jewish identity in Italy. The novel takes its name from the stand-in king, a literal Haile Selassie lookalike, the Ethiopian military used to inspire citizens to resist after Selassie was forced to flee the country.
Mengiste’s writing is so stunningly poetic that The Shadow King really reminds me of The Iliad. Part of what makes the unbearable traumas Mengiste narrates digestible is the beauty with which she renders it. This is one of the most skilled novels I’ve read in my life. The sort of book that will make an emerging writer question their capabilities with awe.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in historical fiction, war literature, African literature, Ethiopian literature.