Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
by
Maaza Mengiste
(Jonathan Cape)
“My mother used to show me stones like this one… This can’t do anything, it’s too small. But inside a shoe, it can make a grown man stumble.”
Over decades of leadership, Emperor Haile Selassie grows further and further away from his subjects, living in luxury, guarded by lions, as the country grows poorer and his people starve. The drought and associated famine of 1974 only add fuel to the burning rage of a rising socialist opposition among University students and within the military. They are tired and the Emperor’s power is already greatly diminished. While the “Conquering Lion” sits on his throne and presides over an increasingly resentful people, Marxist ideology flourishes beneath his gaze within the ranks of his military. Now an old man, he is easily deposed and killed.
On November 24, 1975, numerous officials of the Emperor’s government are ordered to hand themselves into the military. Those who don’t are dragged from the arms of their wives and leave wailing children and dumbstruck employees behind. Their wrists and ankles are chaffed by ropes tightened around them and Mengiste makes sure the reader hears their whimpers, prayers and how they beseech their jailers to have mercy upon them. God, like the soldiers, remains indifferent. The soldiers line them up, the way they would for hundreds more Ethiopians who dared speak against the socialist dictatorship. Under the orders of Mengistu Haile Mariam, they are shot, their corpses left rotting on the streets in the sun as a warning against resistance.
In this debut, Maaza Mengiste deftly marries history and narrative to produce a novel of palpable aches and yearnings akin to the lives of the people during the early years of The Derg Regime. She uses the social unit of the family as a microcosm of Ethiopia with the occasional involvement of satellite characters to portray a more rounded image of the various states and reactions of different people at the time.
The story starts with Hailu, a popular doctor, operating on a student who has been shot during an ongoing student demonstration against the Emperor. He’s a man grieving his dying wife, Selam. He breaks his promise to her by delaying the inevitable with medication and prayer. Dawit, his wife’s favourite of their children, can’t bring himself to visit Selam and even at her death, can’t look at her body. He is a university student and supports the socialist ideas for an Ethiopia without the Emperor. Yonas, his older, more agreeable brother is a university lecturer, content with his life, for the most part, but carries a secret with his mother that weighs him down. Sera, Yonas’ wife becomes the matriarch in Selam’s absence—holding the family together—and for the early parts of the novel grieves her long-deceased parents and frets over Tizita, her daughter, whom she conceived after multiple miscarriages. Also part of the family are the workers and their children who inhabit the family compound. Mengiste chronicles their lives under the regime and manages to make the reader care for them. Also through this family, one can infer the state of mind of the rest of Ethiopia.
Maaza Mengiste, through family, examines the revolution and its effects. In a limited third-person narrative, the reader experiences numerous individual points of view on socio-political injustice, each unique in their approach and experience of the increasing brutality of the regime.
In one scene, the family is watching a broadcast of famine-stricken countrymen, starving children—skin smeared against bone, mouths hanging open, courted by flies and vultures alike—and their helpless glassy-eyed parents. Yonas too shades tears while Hailu dismisses it all as “more propaganda” and proclaims, “Haile Selassie loves his country.” No way could “The Lion of Judah” allow this to happen. Dawit, on the other hand, is motivated against the Emperor’s government and sides with the ideology of the student revolutionaries. Micky, who witnessed the effects of the famine himself, sides with the Derg and is trapped when it turns violent. Sera, preoccupied with worrying for the family, is passive in the face of the images. In this complex situation, Mengiste asks the question of how people should react in the face of such injustice.
It is important to note that the Derg and student revolutionaries were both in opposition to the Emperor’s impotence in tending to the needs of their starving countrymen. The students pushed for a civilian government which the Derg promised after deposing the Emperor. They eventually turned their back on the student’s type of socialism and the people with violence and oppression. Ethiopians were forced to take a stand in the national conflict.
From the beginning, Dawit is the young disgruntled revolutionary with socialist ideologies blind to any other perspective and enraged by his father, brother and Sera who initially don’t support it. They are more focused on their grief for the dying Selam. Dawit grieves by channelling his attention and energy into the demonstrations, passing out anti-government flyers and joining the resistance. Mickey, the son of the family’s worker and friend to Dawit, ends up on the side of the Derg and an enemy to the rest of the family.
In the first part of the novel, Hailu isn’t opposed to the Emperor. He is content to do his job, grieve his wife and take care of his family. He doesn’t have any revolutionary tendencies. When the revolution takes over, he is presented with a victim of torture and ordered to save her life so she could be tortured some more. He is cornered into choosing a side. His morals as a human and oaths as a doctor are faced with the inhumanity of violence and the consequences of standing against the Derg. His decision is only one of many that Mengiste uses to show how pervasive violence can be and how it affects familial relationships and overall social cohesion.
Mengiste’s greatest strength in this debut is her sensorial descriptions and unencumbered prose that manage, in the minimalist style, to temper the poetics. Scenes of horror and violence are vivid with smells, sounds, and tactile senses. She is unapologetically visual. The city of Addis Ababa is brought to life with its calls to prayer, hooting vehicles stuck in traffic, traders crying their wares, the rattle of gunfire and the shouts of students at demonstrations, bloated corpses in the sun, soldiers patrolling the streets and tank muzzles pointed at passers-by. Descriptions of violence, however, reign supreme.
The communist Derg is brutal with their expectation that Ethiopia will be transformed and made better through their violent assumption of power and maintenance of the regime by rooting out all and any form of resistance. History is contrary to this enchanted view for no “better” transformation is ever achieved. Only an ugly scare in the collective memory of a people. However, Mengiste seems to bare an enchanted view that violence is transformative on an individual level and not national. It changes the everyday lives of the characters and their decisions. Hailu suffers the consequence of his decision to stand against the Derg; Sera wakes from passivity to get involved in the resistance with Dawit who exerts his own form of violence in murder and an assassination attempt; the other family members also get involved as accomplices—if not for political reasons then, like in the case of Yonas, to save those they hold dear. The pervasive nature of violence involves everyone, innocent or not. Mengiste portrays the violence by the resistance (even romanticises it) as necessary and good for national change.
“It was as if, the people breathed, it was as if angels had made them invisible. Nightly, prayers were sent up for Anbessa destroyer of roadblocks, Mekonnen killer of soldiers, and Solomon the wise. The Holy Trinity, some dared to say, unafraid to blaspheme a deity who had long abandoned them.”
She seems to suggest that justifiable violence, for example, that of a people oppressed against the oppressor, is necessary to better a country while the unjustifiable kind brings nothing more than suffering. In this complex study, Mengiste examines how the oppressed make the best oppressors. A vestige of the history of colonial occupation. One need not look too far from this cracked Pearl of ours.
Mengiste tries to stay neutral. The revolutionaries have altruistic and pacifist intentions—they are justified in deposing an incompetent government. She uses Micky’s point of view to show the disenchantment of most youth who found themselves unable to escape being on the side of the Derg—poisoned by a fatal sort of Marxism supported by cold war Cuba and Russia to wage war against Eritrea and Somalia. He says to Sara:
“You people who call yourselves revolutionaries, what do you know about politics… You do what you need to do to feel good about yourselves, then you go home and turn your back on all the ugly details… You turn your back on the rest of us… We’re the ones in the middle of the blood trying to turn the gun away from a brother so it points to a stranger. That’s the war we’re in …”
Maaza Mengiste also shows the role of religion in encouraging some of the inactivity against the regime by many Ethiopians: indeed many of the characters are always praying or referring to the will of God.
“When you are convinced that everything that happens is the will of God, what is there to do but wait until God has mercy? … All the blood you spill, it might not be enough. This is a hungry God we beg for mercy… We all have our own ways and times to die, including our enemies. Don’t rush God’s work.”
It begs the question, reading in the context of Uganda’s political past, of the psychology of an oppressed people toward social injustice. In November 2020, unknown entities, dressed in civilian clothing shot at people at demonstrations; the people’s freedom of speech was stifled for reasons of “national security”; drones disappeared citizens and a minister cited “National Security reasons” for some and was unaware about others; the knowledge of rigged elections was evident in social media videos of ballot boxes being packed with ballot papers. One got a sense of helplessness and exhaustion among many Ugandans. It also begs the question of what would jolt a country divided along philosophic, tribal and socioeconomic lines to action for socio-political change.
Reading this novel and encountering the Emperor’s point of view, and numerous government officials who actually existed, one wonders why Mengiste can’t bring herself to call the devil by its name. She uses a fictional character, Major Guddu, to represent Mengistu Haile Mariam. She brings him to life most clearly in her description of him and his speech at the Revolution Square in 1977 during the Red Terror campaign following a failed assassination attempt on his life. She names a torturer, Girma Kebede, his murder of a pregnant woman, and the specific torture techniques employed in those days. This devil can go by the names of many oppressors—alive and dead—and remain the same thing. Evil. How does your president’s name fair in place of Major Guddu’s?
But the novel is far from perfect. At one level, a reader can describe the characters as shells of what they represent for Ethiopia. Berhane’s storyline represents the torture and indoctrination of children, Dawit shows revolutionary students, Selam shows the drive to action of the passive, etc. It is unclear what sort of doctor Hailu is. The same goes for what Yonas teaches at University or what Dawit studies.
On another level, one can see through the artifice of the flimsily woven relationships between characters and Mengiste’s efforts to make them seem natural. Selam and her death are major motivators for the personality of Dawit, these motivations get blurrier as the novel progresses and are lost. Dawit’s anger against his father and elder brother could be viewed as the tantrums of a teenager blind to reason. His brotherly affection toward Sera skews toward romance suddenly even as his relationship with Lilly is unclear.
With the continued description of violence and horrific scenes, the reader grows more detached from the events in the same way one watches a news report of war for the umpteenth time. Mengiste casts a wide net, not just in the number of characters, and asks the reader to spread their compassion equally. One can’t help but feel stretched thin.