Why did you decide to write about women at war?
The idea came when I was already well into writing the book. I was doing some more research and I
stumbled upon it. The book that I was writing was about men fighting in the war and women working in the
background—taking care of the wounded, all the things that women traditionally do. But at some point, I
stumbled upon a small article in The New York Times. It was about a woman who picked up the gun
of her husband when he fell in battle and who led 2,000 of his men into that battle.
I was completely taken aback. Number one, I had never heard of this. But number two, the fact that she
could just pick up his rifle and carry on meant that she had been fighting next to him all along. She
wasn’t running from the back. And the rest of his men followed her. I thought, Who is this? How did this
happen? I started focusing my research on women. And I started finding them.
It changed the book completely. The history—everything that I knew—was basically revised because I
realized women were enlisting. They were fighting. They were always there. But I had not noticed because
they were barely written about and it wasn’t something I knew to look for.
Your research was broad in that you didn’t focus solely on women in Ethiopia. Were there any universal
threads?
Svetlana Alexievich wrote a book called The Unwomanly Face of War. It’s a
series of interviews
with women who were on the front lines in World War II. Reading her was pivotal. It showed me that there
were universal experiences of women in war: What those women talked about. The sexism. The horrors of
war. The camaraderie that might develop, or the very standard friendships, the relationships that would
form. What happens when women leave the front and return back home? How do they deal with their
memories? All of these things were in that book, and it was helping me to understand the experiences of
women in Ethiopia.
And I said, Well, what else is there? How far back could I go here? I realized there were women
fighting in different conflicts—from around 400-something BC might have been the first recorded woman.
More recently, in the eighteenth century, there were the women in the army of the kingdom of Dahomey,
which has become a popular reference after the movie Black Panther. There’s the Spanish Civil
War—a woman named Gerda Taro, who was a photographer, was killed on the front line. She was
photographing female fighters. In Italy, there were large numbers of women who were absolutely pivotal
in the movement against the Nazis and against fascism. We have the women’s army that fought against
ISIS.
We’ve seen these women, but we think it’s something unusual. And then they get pushed to the background
as we continue to talk about war. We don’t place them in the forefront. I find that an interesting
phenomenon.
Every liberation movement has involved women. We can look at suffrage, the abolitionists, Black Lives
Matter, the uprising happening around the world, even Greta Thunberg fighting to preserve the earth.
Women are there. It’s always been like that. This is not a new phenomenon. But I think they’re getting
noticed and recognized and spoken of as integral to these movements. And
that is really wonderful to see.
How did your trips to Italy inform the story and your thinking?
I go to Italy often, and I was talking to Italian friends of mine, asking about their relatives’
memories of the war with Ethiopia. Almost every Italian has some connection to it, so I was getting some
personal stories. But the one thing that kept coming back to me regularly was: “We don’t talk about this
war in my family. We don’t talk about Ethiopia. My uncle, my grandfather, my father came back and never
wanted to mention the country and what happened.” Which let me know that there was much more to research
and investigate.
The Shadow King has a photographic quality, and one of the main characters, Ettore, is a
photographer. Why is that medium significant to you?
I make photographs. I use film cameras. The cameras are old, obviously. I love it. I like the process
of it. The way it slows everything down. It slows my thinking. It makes me think about what I’m framing.
What kind of narrative I’m creating when I look through the viewfinder.
I also knew that Mussolini was working with photographs and images in creating a narrative of African
people and women. There were photographs of Ethiopian women that were passed around as part of the
recruitment for men into the military to fight the war. And the general idea was that this is going to
be a really easy war, and you get the land and you get the women. I wanted to incorporate the images
into this because this was also a war of images.
You wrote a book about war that’s full of beauty. Did you ever feel hesitant about the balance?
When I when I was thinking of this book, initially, I was thinking of it in terms of the stories I
heard from my family: “Yes, of course, there was a war, but we won, and everyone was brave, and everyone
was filled with patriotism and love of country. And that’s how we won the war.” No one talked about the
humiliations of war. No one talked about the way that any conflict—domestic or international, personal
or political—tends to tear you up internally if it’s brutal enough. I didn’t confront that until I was
doing my research and I realized, Whoa, this is really bad. No one had told me how brutal it was.
I had a choice to make: Do I take a step back and not confront this? Maybe make it more aesthetically
pleasing? Or do I step into it and really develop that aspect of fighting? And I wanted to step into it
because this is what happens when countries, when different entities, get into battle. But I wanted not
just to reflect the larger moments of conflict but also to look at the way those encounters influence
how people behave intimately with one another because we carry all that stuff back home.
And the domestic acts of violence that take place in intimate spaces between people who are intimately
connected to each other—that’s a war also. We have seen in the Me Too movement the recognition that
these are battles still being fought by women and girls everywhere.
The characters in this novel are human and complex. Aster, for example, might be considered unlikeable
by readers at the beginning, but it’s difficult not to feel differently about her as you get to know
her. How did you shape her in this way?
Human beings are complicated. All of us are made of many different experiences, many different fears,
many different wounds. Aster, in my mind, is no different. She is a combination of all the scars and all
her fears that she’s carried forward into this adult life that she’s made for herself. She’s tough. But
I wondered if that toughness was, as it is for a lot of people, camouflage for something else. A deep
wound, a memory. I wanted to investigate that, and I wanted to get to the core of that. And I found it.
I started thinking about her marriage with Kidane and how it would have happened back in that time. That
was my clue into her character.
Tell us about the surprising thing you learned about your great grandmother.
I was going on a last-minute research trip, and my mom always liked to go with me on the trips. It was
fun for her. We did this ten-day road trip in Ethiopia with my cousin who is a tour guide—talking about
the book, locations, characters, all these things. But it wasn’t until we got back and I mentioned
another picture that I had found of a woman soldier that my mom said to me, “Well, what about your great
grandmother?”
And I about fell out of my chair. What? All these years, I have been making sure that I wasn’t making
anything up, making sure I had research. And yet here was the woman who was in my own family.
When the mobilization call came for the oldest in the family to enlist in Ethiopia, my great
grandmother’s father wanted to give his gun to her husband. She was in an arranged marriage, but she was
too young to live with an adult man as his wife. And her father said, “Give him the gun. He represents
our family.” She didn’t like him, and she didn’t want him to have the gun. She wanted to be the one to
represent the family. She sued her father. I can’t imagine what that conversation was like. She pled her
case to the village judges. And she won, and she took his gun and went to war.
I did not know this until the book was almost done.
You worked on this book for about a decade, and you read a lot during that time. What writers
influenced you?
I was reading writers who were doing different things with structure and with their novels. There are a
few writers I have loved. One of them is E.L. Doctorow, who wrote The Book of Daniel and
Ragtime. They were magnificent books for me that had the energy that I
wanted or that I hoped
to take lessons from. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon has that intensity
that I wanted to
emulate. There’s a German writer named Jenny Erpenbeck who wrote a book called Visitation. The
ideas in that book—it’s a slim book, but the concepts are complicated and it’s like your mind is blown
open when you read certain pages.
What else should we read?
A really interesting collection by Claire Messud called Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write. It’s an
autobiography in essays, and she talks about books, writers that she
loves, art that she’s looked at. It’s a generous expression of what’s possible in life when you engage
with the imagination in different ways.
If anyone is looking for a book that is connected to part of the history that I write about, there’s an
Italian Somali writer named Igiaba Scego, and she has a book called Adua, which was translated
into English. It’s wonderful. She also wrote Beyond Babylon.