The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

To my mother for your love, for everything To my father for never leaving me, even though you are gone & To Marco without whom none of this would have been possible

Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. —ISAIAH 18:1

As if the ground beneath their feet had not been won by some of the greatest fighters Ethiopia had ever known, women named Aster, Nardos, Abebech, Tsedale, Aziza, Hanna, Meaza, Aynadis, Debru, Yodit, Ililta, Abeba, Kidist, Belaynesh, Meskerem, Nunu, Tigist, Tsehai, Beza, Saba, and a woman simply called the cook.

For so long, they have been rising and crumbling in the face of her anger, giving way to the shame that still stuns her into paralysis. She can hear them now telling her what she already knows: The real emperor of this country is on his farm tilling the tiny plot of land next to hers. He has never worn a crown and lives alone and has no enemies. He is a quiet man who once led a nation against a steel beast, and she was his most trusted soldier: the proud guard of the Shadow King.

Simonides reconstructed a collapsed building from memory. He looked at ruins and recognized their former glory. He found a way to resurrect the dead by remembering where they sat. He helped them find a way back to their grieving relatives. He called them to life by calling them by name.

AUTHOR’S NOTE The first stories I heard of the war between fascist Italy and Ethiopia came from my grandfather. His tales focused on the heroic but poorly equipped Ethiopian fighters who struggled against a modern European army. Growing up, I imagined these men, stoic and regal like my grandfather, facing tanks and sophisticated artillery with outdated guns, and winning. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered the story of my great-grandmother, Getey. She was just a girl, married but too young to live with an adult husband. When Emperor Haile Selassie ordered families to send their eldest son to the army, she volunteered to go as the eldest child; her brothers were not old enough.

She enlisted, and went to war. My great-grandmother represents one of the many gaps in European and African history. 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. What I have come to understand is this: The story of war has always been a masculine story, but this was not true for Ethiopia and it has never been that way in any form of struggle. Women have been there, we are here now.