Product Description
In this elegant account, Aida Edemariam has sketched her grandmother’s life in an Ethiopia that shifted, within 50 years, from monarchy to Marxist dictatorship. We first meet Yètèmegnu in the years before the Italian invasion in 1935, as a child of nine betrothed to a cleric more than two decades her senior. It is with a deft, subtle touch that Edemariam portrays both the contemporary celebration of the event and the deeper tragedy of it.
Born into a landowning family in the Gondar region in the north of the then Abyssinian empire, Yètèmegnu boasts distant royal connections. Within her small, pastoral world she is treated as a noble; her larder brims with crops from her husband’s peasant-tilled fields.
It is a world marked by fasting days and high holidays, of sowing and harvesting, of givers and takers – of beauty and suffering. The peasants are forced to hand over up to 75% of their harvest in various taxes, rents and tithes. Edemariam’s gaze travels from the “silver spears” of eucalyptus leaves to “wobble-humped zebus” and goats “plotting delinquency”. The craggy highlands appear as real as any human character; even Ethiopia’s ubiquitous mules are described with real sympathy.
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