Rewriting History as a Chorus

Natasha Ginwala: The title of our conversation is There Is No Poetry in This Place. Right now, “this place” is Berlin for you. In the past it has been Italy, it has been Ethiopia and the entanglements between these places. In a piece featured in   Guernica, you write on approaching revolutionary history as an outsider and your travel to Cuba. I would be interested to hear more on this approach as well as the role of poetry as a way to draw from mnemonic streams especially as you have been mentored by Breyten Breytenbach; and the role of poetry that draws from mnemonic streams that belong to family but also to strangers.

Maaza Mengiste: I was in the middle of writing my first book, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), when I travelled to Havana, Cuba because I didn’t know if I would be able to describe with any real accuracy what it meant to live within a communist dictatorship. One of the most profound moments happened when I was sitting in a cafe one afternoon. A man came up to my table and asked me whether I was from Ethiopia. He told me that his father had been one of the soldiers sent by Fidel Castro into Ethiopia in the 1970s. (1) His father fought in three wars in Africa: in Mozambique, Angola and then Ethiopia. The man said: “Three wars – do you know what my father got when he came back? A black and white television.” There was just so much bitterness, so much pain in that. I could see the generations affected by war. And then the man said to me: “Our blood is in your soil. We will always be connected. You are my family.” I never forgot that. The way that these small words, small moments, can illuminate national history: to me, this is what poetry does.

I was inspired by Breyten Breytenbach, a South African poet, who was my professor at that time. I had long talks with Breyten, who had been imprisoned and on death row in South Africa for his anti-apartheid activities. We talked a lot about history, writing history and the role of fiction. Pretty early on in my writing I told him that I wasn’t quite sure if I was capable of writing about revolution or war. It [the war] was a national tragedy; it was a catastrophe. How could I put into fiction something that deserves to remain true? How could I honour the dead by writing fiction as opposed to a historical book or a political science book? Breyten told me something that I will never forget: “Fiction is the way and you’re the one to do this. Fiction tells a truth that history cannot.” Fiction tells us what it felt like for the individuals; fiction can give us stories that we may have never been able to hear otherwise.

Ginwala: Your encounter with the man in Cuba illuminates how asynchronous temporalities can skip generations. This also happens when we sense the evocation of acoustics and sonic presence within your second novel, The Shadow King (2019). There is this echo or resonance of pasts that is embedded in the present. I’m thinking of this particular phrase from the novel: “The final battle cry was already forming in the women’s throats” but also of the role of Haile Selassie’s (2) gramophone and his insistence on listening as a way to forget.

Mengiste: I wanted to write this book like a musical composition. I was inspired by a tradition central across East Africa: passing memory down through a song. For example, the Azmari in Ethiopia sing about what happens in different villages and about certain moments in a battle or a war. Homer does something similar in the Iliad. But the Greeks did not invent this. It has been a part of cultures across the world – in Ethiopia, across Africa – for millennia. I wanted to work with that rhythm of music and see if there was a way that I could create a novel that felt like an extended song with different voices coming in and with each of those voices doing something differently. Part of the reason that I also wanted to create a structure with different voices was because I wanted different perspectives of history to take place in the book. I think we often imagine history as linear: A happened, then B happened, then C happened. It’s not the case, though – A happened. B, C and D happened at the same time, depending on who you are and where you’re standing. History is not a straight line; history is a prism; history is a series of different voices and narratives. There’s usually the approved narrative, but that approved version of history is never complete, and it was always going to leave out voices. It’s always going to leave out the people whom history thought were not worthy of being remembered, or being listened to. I wanted to create a novel that made these different voices speak, even if they disagreed with each other. So I thought about creating something similar to music, to a chorus with different voices coming in.

Ginwala: Parts of your novel are made up along the way of writing it of course. The entanglement of myth and fact, particularly within the tempo of wartime, the prismatic role of history, moments of revolutionary ferment that we are seeing in so many parts of the world consecutively and simultaneously right now: they are accessed in your writing in a way that the photograph, too, performs a range of roles. Sometimes, photographs function as a haunting keepsake and sometimes, they function as a refrain that brings to the surface the virulence of imperial violence – a virulence that is a continuum and non-linear.

Mengiste: Photographs were one of the first ways that I started to understand the real catastrophes that happen in war and in particular the war of 1935 (3). Benito Mussolini wanted to create a narrative of East Africans that would justify the violence that he knew would occur in that war. Before the invasion he sent photojournalists across the country, across the region, to create a narrative of Africans as “primitive, barbaric, uncivilised, stupid, weak, cowardly” in every way; so that the Italian public would begin to believe that East Africans, Ethiopians, really needed the civilising of the Italians. That in fact, the invasion was an act of benevolence and an act of goodness. I still haven’t been able to look at some of the photographs. With the help of pamphlets, men who came from poor villages from the South were recruited into the military in Italy. They were mostly uneducated men, young men who had never left their home except to go to the market. These really poor villages had much more in common with parts of Ethiopia than Rome. The men were told that the war would be fast and easy, but the war was brutal. Those soldiers who could afford it took their cameras with them and sometimes their photographs would be made into postcards. Those who could not afford cameras would often trade a cigarette for a photograph or a postcard.

Ginwala: There’s much to draw from your relationship to looking and “looking relations” as author and activist bell hooks would put it. You’re also a photographer, and I’d love to know what is your relationship to the lens? What is the rhythm of that relationship?

Mengiste: I picked up the camera many years ago on a trip to Ethiopia. I was going to see my grandfather, who was very sick, and I wanted a memory of him. I paused photographing for many years, partly because all my equipment got stolen. About ten years later, when I started thinking about writing The Shadow King I decided to get a camera that Ettore (4) would have used, which would have been a camera from the 1930s. That way I could really begin to understand what it was like photographing back then: the pace of it, the rhythm of it. I couldn’t load the camera correctly half the time, and it forced me to slow down and to have patience. It forced me to think about what I saw in the frame, the light, the shadows – everything that I would need to make an image. I have been photographing in black and white film since then. It’s a way to step outside of words for me and to still think of a story that’s within a frame. Taking away colour forces me to look at lines; to look at shapes; to look at form; and to look at the way that those lines and shapes, light and darkness can create a completely different story than what’s actually there. I tend to take a lot of rolls of film and sometimes I don’t develop them for years. It feels very much like writing a book where you have the shape of things, but it’s only later that you can gather the pieces and see what it really is so that it moves outside of time. It’s not a holiday photograph; two years later, it’s something else.

Ginwala: I really love what you said about the purposeful belatedness in the arrival of the image and what it has to do with the timing of writing as well. When you mentioned lines and shapes, I have to think beyond the human presence as well. What one also reads in the novels is your relationship to landscapes. These are landscapes that you have travelled through, but they are also sometimes landscapes that you’ve seen in photographs. There is still such a vitality to the way that rivers and boulders and winds are howling through a cave or a dusty land. I’m curious to hear a bit about the figuration of landscape within your novels.

Mengiste: I never thought about that until now. Part of it goes back to what Raúl, the Cuban man, said to me in the cafe in Havana: the ground contains so much history. My family thinks I’m crazy sometimes because I’m in parts of Addis Ababa where I just know something happened. All I want to do is kneel on that ground for a minute and touch it because I feel like I can touch something or the people underneath. When people ask me where I’m from, I will always say: “Where I’m from is where the bones of my family are. That’s where I am.” The ground is alive in a way, it speaks. We know when a place moves us. We remember something or know that someone else has been there. It’s something that surpasses any kind of geography. It’s not the earth itself, but it exists. In the book, I wanted the landscape to come alive with those histories of men and women, to rise up from the ground. On one of the last trips I made to Ethiopia before I had to send my book to the editor, I looked at some of the areas where the battles took place and I travelled to some of the villages. I also spoke to some of the people who lived there. At least twice, they told me about caves that had remained untouched and still contained the bones of the people who died there. The villagers have kept them the way they were because they understand the sacredness of what’s there and that ground still speaks. It’s one of the things I was trying to convey without being so obvious about it: the ground contains much more than we imagine.

Ginwala: The role of women revolutionaries in your writing is something that interests me a lot – women who are part of your matrilineal kin who navigate a living ethics of resistance, collision and abandonment. The beginning of the poem   Equality by Maya Angelou came to my mind.

Mengiste: Initially, I did not know that women fought in this war when I was writing the book. I thought that the story that I was going to tell was the story that I had often heard: a story about the men in my family. In the course of my research I stumbled upon a photograph of a woman in uniform standing next to a horse. It was one of the first clues for me that women fought in the war. I went back and started looking through some of my old research and found an article from the New York Times from November 1935. It was about a Woman General picking up a gun and leading the rest of her husband’s army into battle (I think her husband was shot). When I wrote The Shadow King I assumed that there were maybe 1.000 women fighters across the country, but a scholar recently told me that there were several thousands. Even my imagination did not do them justice in terms of numbers. Women have always been involved in liberation movements; in anti-colonial movements; in revolutions; in wars, but they get written out of history. They get put to the side as the alternative history but not central to it. Histories are not treated equally. Each time that a woman is raised out of obscurity, we think it’s the first one or the only one. And yet there were so many.

Ginwala: For the exhibition  YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at the Gropius Bau we have been working with several artists who are individually or collectively engaged with practices of healing, but who are also considering the impossibility of healing in many circumstances and especially within certain institutionalised infrastructures of care. You’ve written about looking at a cartography of the disappeared as part of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg. You’ve said: “When you’re dealing with the disappeared, grief never fully forms nor meets its end in healing.” I’d love for you to elaborate on that thought.

Mengiste: Because of my memories from the revolution in Ethiopia and conversations I’ve had with friends from Argentina, from Iran, from so many different countries, I’ve been thinking about what happens when a body disappears. What happens when someone is disappeared? Why do regimes do this? What is the power in removing a body from its place of mourning or from its place of remembrance? I think it’s because regimes understand that if you remove a body, then what you have done is strip a group of people from the ability to heal; from the ability to move from grief to anger to healing, and perhaps back to righteous anger. They intend for us to forget, intend for us to be so afraid that we keep quiet and then the person really does disappear. So if you disappear a body, you leave a group of people stranded in this state of fear and mourning. It can last for generations. When you can’t move past the grief there is no other vocabulary. There is nothing else. I’ve been thinking a lot about what we do in place of that. I wish I had the answer, but it is something that I am personally still working through. The ability to speak about it is maybe one of the most rebellious acts that we can make against injustice. Speaking is often the most difficult thing. To fill that space with a voice that says: “I remember and this is who used to be here” becomes an act of resistance against silence. I think the only thing to do is to begin to speak. That’s the tool that we have. Not long ago, I asked my relative to talk about one of my three uncles who had been disappeared. Instead of speaking, she stood up and began to sing a song. I understood that I just had to listen. Maybe later, when she’s strong enough, I can ask something else about my uncle. Sometimes the answer will come in different and surprising ways.

Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, named a Best Book of 2019 by New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books. Maaza Mengiste is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, DAAD, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and the Fulbright Scholar Program, among others.

Natasha Ginwala co-curated the exhibition  YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal and is an Associate Curator at Large at the Gropius Bau. She has curated survey exhibitions of Bani Abidi, Akinbode Akinbiyi and Zanele Muholi as well as the multi-chapter exhibition and research project  Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Michelangelo Corsaro). Her co-directorship of the Gwangju Biennale in 2021 with Defne Ayas focused on an active turn towards matriarchal approaches and augmented intelligence for restitution of ancestral knowledge and legacies of resistance.

Endnotes

1 During the cold war, Cuba militarily intervened in countries to support independence fights and newly formed governments.
2 Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 and the eponymous king in The Shadow King.
3 The Second Italo-Ethiopian War, an armed conflict that resulted in Ethiopia’s subjection to Italian rule, took place between 1935–36.
4 A figure in The Shadow King who is an Italian photographer.