When Emperor Haile Selassie is forced into exile in England, the people continue to fight. The brutality of the invaders only serves to encourage peasants, merchants, women and children alike, to join the patriots in their guerrilla tactics. When an unseemly peasant and musician is raised from nothing to becoming the epitome of their exiled emperor, the people are invigorated. They appear like phantoms in the dark and burn Italian offices, assassinate officers, attack convoys, destroy railway and telephone lines, and become pictures of innocence when morning comes.
The Italians are frustrated and kill Ethiopians indiscriminately by pushing them off a cliff. But not before their picture is taken as a record of Italy’s imperial expansion.
In Mengiste’s hands, the reader realises that the battles go beyond those fought on the plains, hills and in the valleys of Ethiopia. On both sides of the conflict, characters are face internal battles.
Ettore Navarra, a soldier and photographer, struggles with his own family history and is made impotent in the face of his moral cowardice as he continues to commit atrocities and to take pictures for a country bent on exterminating Jews like him.
For Aster and Hirut, “…grief cradles at the breast of cruelty, and it hungers for more…” This and the trauma of years of abuse at the hands of men forms their struggle. They use strength, drawn from these experiences, to make warriors of themselves and other women, to direct the men’s attacks, to fight alongside them and succeed where they fail.
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