The Shadow King

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.