all that's worthy
on memory, history, and storytelling
“Teferi, all we have is what we remember. All that’s worthy of life is worthy of remembrance.”
—Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King.
In the fourth grade I read Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief for the first time, and when I had finished it—though I didn’t yet have the language for this—my ideas about what fiction was, and what it can do, had transformed. The 2005 novel tells the story of Liesel, a young German girl orphaned in the years leading to World War II. Her foster father teaches her to read, and when the family begins hiding a Jewish man in their basement, books and writing cleave them all together through the horrors of wartime life and Nazi persecution.
Zusak’s prose is all sound and rhythm, and the characters of The Book Thief are achingly human; as I read, their pain and joy seemed so close to mine. I had found a model for what I wanted to accomplish, lyrically and emotionally, in craft and story, with my own writing. I also caught an interest in World War II that would follow me into college.
In my sophomore year, I declared a major in history, and before that, I took a course on World War II in Europe. Ever since, the War has appeared again and again in my studies, no matter the time and place. I learned how the aftermath of the War set the stage for the Zionist settlement of Palestine, how it shaped Japanese society in the wake of the atomic bombs. At the same time, I was devouring all the stories about WWII I could find—Catch 22, Inglorious Basterds, Unbroken, The Imitation Game. Since reading The Book Thief at age 9, I have been continually struck by the war’s staggering violence, its grand politics—how its stories span all the extremes of the human experience.
Yet as I looked deeper, I realized how many parts of the war escape popular accounts—the theatres unstudied, stories untold. As a historian and as a writer, I’m always excited to find these untold stories. So, I was delighted to pick up Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, which is set during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.
In the history books, the story would begin like this:
By the end of 1935, the preludes to World War II were still only churning in the West. The Nazi government had passed the Nuremberg Laws, institutionalizing anti-Semitism in Germany, and the United States passed the Neutrality Act, an embargo on belligerent countries. War was in the air, lines were being drawn, and the West stood with its breath held, scrambling for last-ditch solutions that would stave off the impending calamity.
But for Ethiopians, calamity had already arrived. That October, Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, invaded Ethiopia. At the time, the country was ruled by Haile Selassie, who led the resistance for less than a year before fleeing into exile the following May. Ethiopians faced war and then Axis occupation until the spring of 1941, when Selassie returned to the capital of Addis Ababa.
The Shadow King begins this story differently. The year is 1974, and Hirut, an old Ethiopian woman, sits in a train station in Addis Ababa. She is waiting to meet Ettore, a Jewish Italian soldier who served as a photographer in the invading army. Hirut carries a box that contains photographs she will deliver to him.
With this stage set, Mengiste begins the story in earnest, jumping back forty years to 1935, the eve of the Italian invasion. Hirut, a young girl recently orphaned like Liesel, has inherited a rifle from her father. But this gun is soon repossessed by her guardian and family friend, Kidane, to support the war effort. Working as a servant for Kidane and his wife Aster, Hirut suffers Kidane’s advances and Aster’s jealousy. When Kidane joins Haile Selassie in the resistance, Aster—discontent with being left behind—gathers up the women in the surrounding village to join the fight. Hirut is soon to follow. Over the course of the novel, Hirut the servant becomes a soldier, a guard to a Selassie impersonator, a prisoner of war, and a survivor.
The Shadow King is an expansive novel in scope and depth, as it is told from a multitude of perspectives—Hirut, Aster, Kidane, Ettore, a peasant musician, an Italian colonel, and even Haile Selassie himself. Mengiste explores these perspectives through an omniscient narrator, one with several tricks up their sleeve. With small interludes narrated by a chorus, descriptions of photographs, shifts in geography and time, the narrator wields a wide lens. Their perspective is thus intensely inquisitive and far-reaching. It seeks to explore as many aspects of the conflict and its people as possible.
The chameleonic narrator also allows for many dimensions and perspectives on a single character. This is especially true for Aster, who is cruel to Hirut at some times while forgiving at others; she’s also revealed to have been given as a child bride to Kidane. We see Aster the abuser, Aster the abused—but soon Aster the warrior, as well, leading her women toward battle. Through these roles, her character becomes more nuanced and multifaceted, and therefore more human and genuine. Through Aster’s portrayal, Mengiste shows the impact of point of view on a person’s identity. How we understand that person depends on who is portraying them.
In my time at university, I’ve learned this is also the case in history. Some may see this discipline as an objective recording of facts, but it is in fact much more complex. History is compiled by humans, who tell stories about the past with as much imagination as they weave myths and tales. Historian E. H. Carr wrote that historians must cultivate a “necessary ignorance,” because the realm of available facts is so wide—a seemingly endless amount of evidence, interviews, documents, and photographs. First, they must ask: What evidence from this endless pool is worth listening to? Examining? Analyzing? Then: What facts are worth sharing in the limited space of a documentary, a lecture, a book? According to Carr, then, a historian’s job “is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording?”
In constructing history, historians must omit some facts while emphasizing others. They must find relationships and causation. Thus, like fiction writers, they create plot, narrative—they write stories. Also like fiction writers, they must be cognizant of their language, which shapes how a person or event is understood. How might an “invasion” be different from a “settlement”? An “uprising” from a “riot”?
Thus, the act of writing history is inherently subjective. Every person's environment affects how they process the world. Culture, family, education, their personal experiences and the stories they have been told—all these shape perspective, and this influences an individual’s storytelling on any subject, from a funny anecdote from last Tuesday to World War II. As Carr writes, “The historian, before he begins to write history, is the product of history.”
Some may see this as a tragedy—that subjectivity obscures a greater, more objective truth. In his 1920 poem “Gerontion,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “Think now / History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.” But in more recent decades, historians such as Carr have grappled with subjectivity with more acquiescence—even welcoming it with open arms.
When I read Carr in a history class, his ideas rang true for me. Subjectivity is a natural and integral part of the human experience, and to try to circumvent it is futile. But I also realize the problems it presents.
As the old adage goes, history is written by the victors—a dominant voice, a group that gets to tell its stories the loudest. Because of this, history is often incomplete. This is why we have popular representations of World War II that eliminate the women, the poor, the people of color, and the countries on the periphery of the Ally-Axis nexus. We are reading too many of the same stories, by people of too similar backgrounds.
The Shadow King is a part of the solution to this problem. Mengiste embraces the subjectivity of her characters’ perspectives, but paints a broader truth by exploring as many of these perspectives as possible. Moreover, she broadens the way we understand World War II by adding to the anthology of stories we tell about it. She complicates popular narratives—that Europe is the only theatre of consequence in World War II, or that wars are fought only by men, and women serve as the pawns, aides, and victims.
To counter such fictions, The Shadow King provides new stories—ones just as subjective yet just as truthful to those they represent. Mengiste tells the many tales, shows the many lenses through which we may look at the past and experience it for ourselves. She accomplishes what poet and journalist Adriana Ramírez writes is the responsibility of writers—“adding to the larger body of human stories, offering a myriad of interpretive possibilities, showing the follies of histories and paths we’ve avoided.”
As a scholar and a storyteller, a historian and a writer, I’ve learned that these two crafts are not so different. Both capture something of the human experience and deliver it to an audience. Both are acts of conservation and representation, and both are inextricably linked to memory. Even the author of the most fantastical stories, with demons or elves or spaceships, draws from their own experiences and infuses them into their tales. In seeking to represent the world as we see it, we are thus all historians and storytellers of our own lives, and the lives of those we remember.
But fiction accomplishes something that history cannot. While history, for all its subjectivity, is bound by evidence deemed “valid”—numbers, photographs, written records—fiction can explore the unconfirmed. It can speculate and postulate on what we lack evidence for. The documentation on Ethiopians during the war is sparse, preserved through photos like that of Ettore’s and oral histories, all subject to interpretations and false memory. We may never truly know what a girl like Hirut felt during the war.
Mengiste understands this. In an interview with PEN, she writes: “What happened is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out.” In The Shadow King, we see the duality of fiction and history working together. Mengiste eschews the popular (equally “true”) story of World War II—that the Allies toppled Hitler, and America dropped the atomic bomb. Instead, she digs deeper for what has been hidden. The Italians arrived in Ethiopia in 1935. Female Ethiopians joined the fight. Italians brutalized Ethiopians in POW camps.
Then, she goes even further—to communicate emotional truths. Fiction, because of its imaginative capabilities, has the freedom to be evocative and visceral in its language; to capture the feeling of a place or the happiness of a single person. It thus creates a different kind of truth, and a different kind of history.
How would it have felt for someone like Hirut, a servant girl in Ethiopia during the war, to be beaten by her foster mother? To have joined that foster mother in a fight that seemed well beyond her, yet was still paramount to her continued existence? In exploring questions like these, Mengiste links what is unfamiliar to us—Hirut, her country and culture and time—to what is familiar—the emotions that she felt, and that we feel in our own lives.
Since reading The Shadow King, I’ve revisited questions I’ve faced many times during my education as a writer and historian—Why are fiction and history important to us? Why must we be careful with the words we use, the stories we tell?
For one, what is unreal to us may be real to another—and just as effective as a physical violence or loving gesture. In The Shadow King, Aster is spurred into action, into her role as warrior, when she misinterprets a newspaper photograph. Kidane and Hirut use Minim, the false-Selassie, the Shadow King, to inspire Ethiopians to continue fighting after the real emperor has fled. Throughout the novel, a change in perspective, a change in story, causes the characters to make change in their own lives, and the lives of others.
Perhaps no one understands this better than Hirut. Once, while Aster beats her, Hirut thinks of singing. “When she creates songs,” the narrator says, “she can change a happening, reverse its course of action and alter meaning, even make it forgotten.” Hirut understands that the truth is pliable, subjective—that “it is belief that makes a thing so.”
Secondly, stories are forms of memorialization and thus, they pass judgments of worth on their subjects. In the same way that historians evaluate what facts they will consider and present, writers choose what memories to keep and what to throw away. What to capture in fiction and give to their audience; and what to let fade away unpreserved. By telling a story, we bestow its subjects with immortality, as Haile Selassie’s father “found a way to resurrect the dead by remembering where they sat … He called them to life by calling them by name.” In this way, we designate significance and worth. We say, “This deserves to outlive itself.” And in writing The Shadow King, Mengiste declares: These people’s lives, those of the poor and the Black and the female, deserve to be told just as richly and deeply as that of any powerful white man.
Finally, history—including our stories, our myths—tells us who we are and what we’ve done. They expose what we value, and what we’d rather not think about. They inform how we understand, and therefore how we act, towards others—especially the unfamiliar. Just as in The Book Thief, Liesel befriends a persecuted Jewish man through his writing—and just as we empathize with the characters in The Shadow King, despite how distant from our lives they may seem.
This is perhaps the greatest power of the story. It allows for empathy and connection to the unknown. Only with empathy can we treat others with kindness and justice; and only with empathy can we forge relationships strong enough to face an increasingly violent, polarized world.
Just as Hirut, Aster, and their fellow characters are shaped by the stories they hear and tell, so are we. In books like The Shadow King, we find stories more diverse, more comprehensive, and more generous. By reading and writing this way, Adriana Ramírez argues, we can “arrive at better versions of ourselves.”
Who are we but the stories we’ve heard and told? And how can we share stories that bring more justice and equity to the world—and empathy within ourselves?
works referenced
This piece was written first in the fall of 2019, revised in 2020, and published now, in February 2021.