By Jay Fox
Brooklyn,
NY, USA
The
historical novel is a difficult endeavor for any writer, but it can be
especially difficult when you base your novel during a time of crisis. Books
that simultaneously describe the best of times and the worst of times can be
heavy-handed, they can get bogged down in the historical minutiae of the era,
and the characters can become devices that simply advance a plot coinciding
with the most monumental of the period’s events.
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| Jay Fox |
The
latter difficulty ends up being the most common pitfall that even the greatest
writers fall prey to, and the world of literature has no shortage of characters
that are either paragons of an ideal, irredeemable tyrants, or manifestations
of an overarching Fate that is not so much tragic as it is brutally
predictable. (Even the great work alluded to above, Charles Dickens’ A Tale
of Two Cities, produced the savagely one-dimensional Madame Defarge.) This
is not to say that such characters ruin books. In fact, such characters can be
extremely enjoyable, as was the case with the aforementioned psycho knitter.
However, a cast made up entirely of metaphors can become tedious very quickly.
Fortunately,
Maaza Mengiste’s debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, does not fall in
this camp.
Her
novel begins during the early days of the Ethiopian Civil War (1974-1991)
before jumping ahead to 1977, a time when the Derg—the military junta that took
control of the nation following a popular revolution against Emperor Haile
Selassie—had better established itself as the sole source of institutionalized
power in the country and unleashed a “red terror” against its enemies.
This
was not a figurative terror. As historian Yves Santamaria relays in The
Black Book of Communism:
Derg
leader Mengistu Halie Mariam sent a clear message while giving a public speech
in 1977 when he “broke open three flasks of what was supposed to be blood,
which represented imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism.”
The
bloodletting was not limited to political opponents and legitimate enemies of
the regime. One month after the flask spectacle, the Swedish General Secretary
of the Save the Children Fund described how grisly the scene in Addis Ababa had
become as wild hyenas tore at the bodies of children littering the streets:
“You can see the heaped-up bodies of murdered children, most of them aged
eleven to thirteen, lying in the gutter, as you drive out of Addis Ababa.”
According
to Mengiste's note following the novel, it is unclear how many were ultimately
killed during the reign of the Derg. However, “Some reports based on Amnesty
International estimates say the death toll could be in the hundreds of
thousands.”
This
sense of impending violence looms over the book without ever suggesting that
the Derg's revolutionary violence is anything more than a vicious power grab.
It is granted no grand mythological or transformative purpose like the terror
of the French Revolution in Anatole France's 1912 novel, The Gods Will Have
Blood. There are no pretensions for Mengiste's characters; the violence is
a blunt instrument of oppression.
For
example, France's novel opens with his protagonist, Évariste Gamelin, walking
past a church (a symbol of the obliterated ancien régime) that has been
repurposed by the Republic. Of the structure, he says, “On its classical
facade, decorated with inverted corbels and ornamental capitals, battered by
weather and mutilated by man, the symbols of religion had been smashed with
hammers and above the door was inscribed in black letters the slogan of the
Republic: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – or Death.’”
Conversely,
Mengiste's novel opens to a more visceral scene: “A thin blue vein pulsed in
the collecting pool of blood where a bullet had lodged deep in the boy's back.
Hailu was sweating under the heat from the bright operating room lights.... He
looked back at his scalpel, the shimmering blood and torn tissues, and tried to
imagine the fervor that had led this boy to believe he was stronger than
Emperor Haile Selassie's highly trained police.”
This
passage informs the reader immediately that this is not a book about clashing
ideologies. This is a book about the reality of violence, one that does not shy
away from the pain and the suffering that it causes. Mengiste does not make the
violence within the book abstract or part of some kind of misguided
purification ritual. She examines the very real consequences of a revolution,
one that tests the bonds of Hailu, the doctor from the above passage, and his
two sons, Dawit and Yonas.
From
the beginning, it is clear that Dawit, though the younger brother, is a born
leader. He is determined, courageous, and possessed by a clear sense of right
and wrong. Despite this perspicuity, he is still young at the beginning of the
novel. He lacks sound judgment. It is not until later, once the novel jumps
from 1974 to 1977, that his impetuous nature subsides, and he becomes renown
throughout Addis Ababa for his exploits against the Derg.
Yonas,
conversely, embodies the kind of intellectual laziness of the postcolonial
middle class that Frantz Fanon decried in his seminal work on revolutionary
theory, The Wretched of the Earth. While he does not support the Derg,
he is possessed by the universal bourgeois mentality that seems to value
complacency over everything else. It is not until his father—who, like Yonas,
is normally opposed to rocking the boat—is arrested and taken to a Soviet-style
prison (where Mengiste fashions scenes on par with Darkness at Noon,
We, or 1984) that he begins to see his inaction as a form of
complicity.
The
novel also hinges upon the stressed friendship of Dawit and Mickey—brothers “in
all but blood.” Except for Dawit's girlfriend Lily, who seems to be constructed
almost entirely out of Marxist-Leninist bumper stickers, Mickey is the only
primary character who sides with the Derg. This is the source of the tension
between the two.
However,
Mickey's support for the regime is lukewarm and he remains conflicted even as
he climbs its ranks and commits atrocities in its name. He is merely an
opportunist who is too weak to adhere to any strong conviction, whether it be
vengeance against the landowners who exploited his peasant father until he died
in the fields or the intoxication of power. While Mickey's mother, Habte, seems
to relish the fact that the rich are getting their just desserts, Mickey tells
himself and others that he is just following orders. He is too weak to do
otherwise.
He
is not alone. Just about every character who supports the Derg, except for the
person who interrogates Hailu while he is in prison (the Colonel), seems to be
someone who would be able to say the same. Though they are in control, their
power comes from a place of weakness. Consequently, I couldn't help but feel as
though Mengiste's novel is as much a historical novel about the Ethiopian
revolution as much as it is a meditation on the famous words of the philosopher
John Stuart Mill: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that
good men should look on and do nothing.”
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