In her essay “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie proposed that while one story can feed stereotypes, multiple narratives help us see ourselves and other people more clearly.
In the luminous novel “The Shadow King,” Maaza Mengiste offers a corollary. The single story you impose upon someone else is a stereotype because it is without nuance. But the single story you know about yourself, if you know it deeply enough, is every story.
Hirut, the heroine of Mengiste novel, knows her story. It is symbolized by the antique rifle called the Wujigra that was handed down to her from her father. (“Wujigra” was what Ethiopians heard when French arms dealers said “fusil Gras,” or Gras gun, after 19th century rifle designer Basile Gras.) Hirut’s father had helped Ethiopia defeat Italian forces in the 1890s, one of the first decisive African victories over a European army. Hirut treasures her family’s history, mulling its details in her mind as she might finger a talisman, until she understands every contour, every setback, every victory, every foremother’s name.
Mengiste opens “The Shadow King” in 1974, the beginning of the end for Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. The story does not move ahead to the toppling and death of the emperor and to the decades of divisive unrest that followed and reverberate to this day. Instead, Mengiste takes readers back to the 1930s, when Ethiopian peasants such as Hirut and its ruling classes united to resist another Italian attempt, a generation after the late 19th century conflict, to colonize Ethiopia. Hirut adds her own exploits on the battlefield to the family story begun with the Wujigra rifle. She also survives capture by Italians who see her as sub-human.
Adichie’s ideas about how stories shape our view of the world came to mind again and again as I read “The Shadow King,” a work of historical fiction set in Mengiste’s homeland of Ethiopia. Mengiste constructs a rich and layered story for Hirut, making the character real for readers who may know little of Ethiopia’s history and people.
In the opening scenes of “The Shadow King,” Hirut watches students from the upper classes march against the emperor. Among them are young women who take little notice of Hirut, “an aging woman in her long drab dress, as if they did not know those who came before them. As if this were the first time a woman carried a gun. As if the ground beneath their feet had not been won by some of the greatest fighters Ethiopia had ever known. Women named Aster, Nardosa, 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.”
The scene is reminiscent of a passage in the “The Danger of a Single Story,” the essay, in which Adichie admits to having been like those youthful Ethiopian revolutionaries, seeing only one facet of someone not of her class. Adichie, the daughter of a professor and a university administrator, grew up in a Nigerian college town. Her family had live-in domestic help, including a house boy named Fide. “The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor,” Adichie writes. Then, on a visit to Fide’s village, Adichie meets his mother, who shows off a beautiful basket that another of her sons had made.
”I was startled,” Adichie writes. “It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”
Years after that visit to the village, Adichie enrolled at an American university. Her American roommate was startled that Adichie spoke English, listened to Mariah Carey and knew how to use a stove.
“She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me,” Adichie writes in her essay. “Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.”
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete,” Adichie writes. “They make one story become the only story.”
In “The Shadow King,” Mengiste’s heroine Hirut is captured during Italy’s second attempt to conquer Ethiopia. Among her guards in a prisoner of war camp is a young Italian soldier named Ettore, who is Jewish. Ettore’s father saw his own history of being stereotyped and persecuted as a burden, and failed to give his son the gift that Hirut’s father gave her with the Wujigra rifle. Ettore is so estranged from his father that he looks to the camp’s sadistic commandant, symbol of an anti-Semitic government, as a paternal figure. Ettore imagines himself in love with Hirut, but his is a stunted imagination. The richly storied Hirut is beyond him and beyond his understanding, though he believes her to be his prisoner. In one scene, he shows her a photograph of his parents.
“She looks down at the picture, then at him, then she grips her hands together and stares at the photo again. He feels the tension in her, how she coils into herself, so he points at his father and decides to confess in Italian the most truthful thing he can, because she will never understand: This is how I hold my father still. This is how I stare at him without having to answer his questions. Ettore wants to add in Amharic: My parents could be dead. They might not be dead. But he is stopped short by vocabulary, by the conditional tense, by that way of speaking that shifts everything into the hypothetical, into an imagined existence that could or could not be true. Everything is possible at once. I could die. He could be dead. She might have died. We might die together.
“She knows that he is pointing to his dead father and asking her to feel pity for him. He is repeating the words in order to make her react, as if it is so simple. As if dying were not ordinary, as if a dead father were something only he has suffered in this world. She thinks of Beniam and Dawi and Tariku, and all those that this ferenj has helped to kill and leave orphaned and make childless. She thinks of her father and her mother and the Wujigra and Aster curled like a child inside a prison. She thinks of Kidane and those ways she would still be whole if only this war hadn’t started. If only these ferenj invaders hadn’t come. And as she counts the many ways so much has died and been split and been ruptured because of Italians like him, Hirut feels the fury rising in her, the taste so sour in her mouth that she is certain he will know how much she wants to reach through the barbed-wire fence and steal his rifle and point it at his arrogant and dulled heart. Innateinna abate motewal, she whispers. My mother and father have died. She drops her head and has to blink away the tears. She stiffens to calm herself. She wraps her arms around her knees to shove the anger back inside of her until she can become immobile again: a soldier on guard, watching for a signal from her army.”
Ettore’s fellow invading soldiers celebrate him as a gifted photographer. He sees only the surface of things, the light and shadow in a print. The Italians don’t bother to consider that their invasion and ambitions have inspired righteous anger. They see the Ethiopians as standing in the way, not as fellow human beings capable of complex emotions.
Again, the Nigerian writer Adichie is helpful. In her essay, Adichie quotes the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti: “If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and start with ‘secondly.’ Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story ….”
“Africa is a continent full of catastrophes,” Adichie continues. “There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.”
Adichie recalls that the first books she read were English children’s stories whose characters were white and blue-eyed. It wasn’t until she was older that she discovered and was inspired by the work of Nigerians such as Chinua Achebe and Guineans such as Camara Laye and realized “that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form pony tails, could also exist in literature.”
Writers Mengiste and Adichie, each a novelist as well as an essayist, are as masterful as Homer, Tolstoy or Hugo at drawing nuanced characters against the violence of sweeping historical events. Adichie has explored Nigeria’s wars as Mengiste has explored Ethiopia’s. They tell their singular, universal stories with grace and confidence.
In Mengiste’s “The Shadow King”, Hirut repeatedly brings empathy to her encounters with others, seeing them clearly even when they do not fully understand themselves. Her empathy stems from knowing her own story. In an elegiac passage toward the end of “The Shadow King”, the emperor himself leans on the strength that Hirut draws from her knowledge of self:
“I’ll walk you home, she says. I’ll protect you from those outside, Your Majesty. I’ll be your guard. She takes his hand and grips it tight. She watches as he extends his other hand beside him, grasping air and time.
“And as the door closes behind them, Hirut stands tall and repeats the names of those who came before her, of those who fell as she rose to her feet in choking fumes and continued to run, and she lets memory lie across her shoulders like a cape while she salutes the Shadow Kings, every single one, and raises her Wujigra, a brave and fearsome soldier once more. Then Hirut and the emperor walk to the palace together.”