BY MULUGETA GUDETA
In the olden days, and particularly under the imperial regime, when writers tried to challenge the status quo they used to be sent to remote places as internal exiles. Thus, the famous writer Abe Gubegna was once deported to Mocha a remote and cold place where he led a difficult life in total banishment. Mocha was thus a kind of “Ethiopian Siberia” in the sense that In Russia too, writers were sent to the cold place on earth as punishment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was among the most famous authors who survived after being sentenced to death in Siberia.
Abe Gubegna was such a committed writer that he was not intimidated by the decisions of the censorship and security authorities who persecuted him constantly and fought to his last days against tyranny, censorship and oppression. Sometimes he went on self-exile and preferred to languish in anonymity rather than compromise his professional integrity and his political beliefs. Abe was also known in foreign literary circles and could have gone abroad to seek asylum. Yet, he decided to stay in his country and do his job whatever difficulties he faced.
The old systems of punishments are now gone and dissident African and Ethiopian writers have the choice between staying in their countries and do their work or go into self-exile for their safety. Writers these days are luckier than their older predecessors in the sense they can either go into exile whenever they feel the going is tough or live in relative safety away from poverty and in an environment that is highly conducive for their work. Given the chance and better opportunities for publishing their works at home most if not all African writer would choose to stay at home.
The great Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Tiongo was forced into exile because he was always persecuted at home and arrested several times whenever he decided to go back home. Under the Arap Moi regime, he was arrested at the airport as soon as he arrived to his country with his wife who was beaten and raped by police, according to reports published at that time. His house was searched and his manuscripts stolen or destroyed. He was then told to leave the country and never return lest he could be killed. Ngugi’s fate is one among many African writers faced and are still facing whenever they raise their voices against tyranny and injustice.
When we come to Ethiopian writers, we find two kids of Diaspora writers. The first are those who went into exile in the past for many reasons and published their works there. One example is Nega Mezlekia, who immigrated to Canada and published his first autobiographical book entitled “Notes from the Hyena’s Belly”.
“We children lived like the donkey,” Mezlekia remembers, “careful not to wander off the beaten trail and end up in the hyena’s belly.” His memoir sheds light not only on the violence and disorder that beset his native country, but on the rich spiritual and cultural life of Ethiopia itself. Throughout, he portrays the careful divisions in dress, language, and culture between the Muslims and Christians of the Ethiopian landscape. Mezlekia also explores the struggle between western European interests and communist influences that caused the collapse of Ethiopia’s social and political structureand that forced him, at age 18, to join a guerrilla army. Through droughts, floods, imprisonment, and killing sprees at the hands of military juntas, Mezlekia survived, eventually immigrating to Canada. In Notes from the Hyena’s Belly he bears witness to a time and place that few Westerners have understood.
Others Ethiopian writers in the Diaspora like Dinaw Mengistu who was born in Addis Ababa and went to the US as a child with his immigrant parents. “Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu won critical accolades for his 2006 debut novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Its story chronicles a Washington, D.C., shopkeeper’s struggle to come to terms with his Ethiopian past and current unhappiness in his adopted land, and it features some parallels to the real-life tale of Mengestu’s own family. Critiquing it for the New York Times Book Review, Rob Nixon asserted that the first-time author “has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity…. There’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.”
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo.
His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010.
In its cover page review of All Our Names, the New York Times Book Review said “You can’t turn the pages fast enough, and when you’re done, your first impulse is to go back to the beginning and start over . . . While questions of race, ethnicity, and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu’s fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfullybut never didacticallykindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place, and human connection.”
Among the celebrated Ethiopian writers in English is also Meaza Mengistu who grew up in the United States and became a major Ethiopian writer writing in English. Meaza’s first novel was about the 1974 Revolution in her country that came following the downfall of the imperial regime. Her first novel is entitled “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze” which, according to the New York Times Book review is, “An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters.”
“This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his God for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movementa choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.”
Meaza Mengiste’s second novel is entitled “The Shadow King” and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. “Maaza Mengiste was almost done writing a novel about the Ethiopian women who fought an occupying Italian army in the 1930s when she found out, by chance, that her own great-grandmother had fought in that war.
“I had no idea that I had a woman like that in my family,” she told Nahlah Ayed.
Her great-grandmother “was really one of those that should never have been remembered by history because of the place she was born. And she did this thing that was extraordinary,” said Mengiste.
“It makes me think about the fact that the stories of women [are] told in the spaces of women. They’re told in the kitchens, in the bedrooms, in the places where women gather to talk amongst themselves. And they never make it into the classroom. They don’t make it into textbooks or into libraries.”
There are also lesser known Ethiopian writers in the Diaspora such as Hama Tuma who has published a celebrated anthology of short stories entitled, “The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and other stories (short stories; Heinemann, 1993). His other works include Give Me a Dog’s Life Any Day: African Absurdities II (essays; Trafford Publishing, 2004), African Absurdities: Politically Incorrect Articles (essays; First Publish, 2002), Of Spades and Ethiopians (poetry; Free Ethiopian Press, 1991).
According to Wikipedia Encyclopedia, “Hama Tuma was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Tuma studied Law in Addis Ababa University. He became an advocate for democracy and justice. This has caused him to be banned by three different Ethiopian governments. This situation sharpened his use of satire and he is known as one of Ethiopia›s greatest satirists. He has travelled widely but currently lives in Paris with his wife and daughter. His books have been translated into English, Italian, French, and Hebrew.”
Ethiopian writers in the Diaspora often deal with themes dealing with their country’s past and Ethiopians’ experiences in exile. Given the vastness of Ethiopia’s literary heritages and rich history, what has so far been written is far from covering the various facets of life in Ethiopia as lived by ordinary folks. We can however remain confident that other Diaspora writers will emerge in the future and try to cover what had been overlooked by present day Diaspora writers who have put their country on the map of global literary production and should be highly commended for this.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION 25 DECEMBER 2022
