Throughout the novel, Mengiste argues for the act of recording memory in any form so the past may never be forgotten. In one scene where Ethiopian prisoners have been brought to the Italian prison to be pushed off a cliff and murdered, the cook—a character known only by that—emboldens them on their way to their deaths:
“But tell me who you are, she says. Tell me slowly and repeat it three times, and I will make sure you are known. I will make of you a remembrance worthy of this fall. Say your name to me now. Say your name as you are photographed… Do not let them forget who they have killed.”
She records their names and after the war makes these known. This is exactly what Mengiste does in writing the novel.
Ettore is told, in a letter from his father:
“…bear witness to what is happening. Make living your act of defiance. Record it all. Do it relentlessly… This is why I gave you your first camera. Do not let these people forget what they have become. Do not let them turn away from their own reflections—”
This novel isn’t unlike her debut, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. It is a hybrid made by deftly crossing history with narrative at the genetic level to bring to life those “Ethiopian women who fought alongside men, who even today have remained no more than errant lines in faded documents.” The Shadow King starts and ends where Beneath The Lion’s Gaze begins—in 1974, on the eve of the fall of the Ethiopian monarch and rise of the Derg regime.
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