Maaza Mengiste &
Nadifa Mohamed
In a rare coincidence, two young women authors who originate from the Horn of Africa wrote critically acclaimed debut novels in the same year. Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze recreates the 1970 revolution in Ethiopia, which ended the monarchy of the Haile Selassie and installed the particularly brutal Derg regime. Through the intersecting voices of a prominent doctor Hailu in Addis Ababa, his son Dawit, who is experiencing a political coming-of-age, a deluded and fading Emperor Selassie and the innocent paperboy Behrane amongst others, the novel offers an emotional and unsparing account of a violent chapter in Ethiopian history. Mengiste’s work is particularly commendable for having broken the silence surrounding this time, allowing thus for reconciliation and healing for a population in which these memories remain intensely vivid.
Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy travels even further back in time, to 1930s Eastern Africa, when precise national borders for countries such as Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and Djibouti were yet to be defined. Inspired by her father’s life, Mohamed’s novel follows the epic journey of an endearing young boy, Jama, who yearns to connect with his roots while to struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis. The novel opens across the Gulf of Aden, in the coastal city of Aden in Yemen. Jama soon embarks on a journey across breathtaking landscapes in Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, Djibouti and others. The trip soon turns macabre as he encounters first-hand the barbarism of Italian colonialism and is inadvertently thrust onto World War II’s far-flung African battlefields, a situation in which the region’s native inhabitants paid the heaviest price. Mohamed’s work is a rare glimpse into an epoch that has been heavily depicted through the European perspective, but almost never from an African one.
Both Mohamed and Mengiste’s works won many of 2010’s most prominent awards and represent that extraordinary and uncommon (though gradually growing) group – the African woman writer. Apart from the obvious obstacles of gender discrimination, this group is doubly burdened with the impossible task of writing about Africa, a space where imperial ideologies, Afro-pessimism and racism collide all too frequently. As is often the case, African women writers often end up spending far too much time defending their continent and cultures against these malignant tendencies. Warscapes editor Bhakti Shringarpure entered into a gmail-chat with Mengiste in New York and Mohamed in London to explore these questions, and to speak about their work and how their novels have been received. What emerges is a surprising and poignant conversation ranging from insights into the special case of Italian colonialism, frustrating expectations placed upon African writers, the difficulties of writing about violence and, finally, men with the power to turn into hyenas…
