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Beneath the Lion’s Gaze

Maaza Mengiste Beneath the Lion's Gaze
W. W. Norton & Company 1/11/2010

Maaza Mengiste writes into a growing literary genre; these voices from the 'children of revolution' as they replace the narratives of those who sought independence. In her searing first novel, Ms Mengiste recounts the experiences of the 1974 Ethiopian revolution with memories crisp and scabs still unhealed and festering. She fearlessly examines the ways in which society turns on one another, cleaving families into fragmented shells that seem irredeemably lost.

With astonishing passion and grace, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells the story of Dr. Hailu and his two sons; one a professor of history, the other, a student. The father and his sons epitomize the tensions of the time: a society ruled tenuously by a toothless monarch, sharply divided between a comfortable upper class and a disgruntled populace. Professor Yonas, the elder brother, supports the status quo, while Dawit, a rebellious university student, organizes demonstrations against the Emperor. This schism is the seed of their discord, and the events of the nightmarish revolution pit the two brothers against each other, forcing them to examine their roles. When the father is imprisoned, then tortured for the death of a patient in his care, the brothers are further estranged, each blaming the other for both their own, and their father’s, demise.

The consequences of revolution are numerous, and often do not heal, long after the blood has been mopped and the dead buried. The emotional toll it takes on a society remains a pathology that cannot simply be healed with time. We must scrutinize it and find the role each of us played in the revolution and its aftermath. In this novel, which is nuanced in its language as well as historical interpretation, Ms. Mengiste chooses not to give a history lesson. Rather, she examines the nature of integrity, loyalty, betrayal and heritage. As such, this book tells a human story, and transcends Eritreans and Ethiopians as its primary audience.

For the Ethiopian and Eritrean community—indeed for any of us in the Diaspora—we yearn to read something about ourselves. Unfortunately it is often written with well intentioned but ultimately patronizing voices from the West, who, have neither the feel for the culture, language nor history; gloss over the facts, and place undue importance on a mythologized history. It is therefore welcome to find an author who tells our story with an unblinking eye and unsympathetic truth. We can be, she tells us, the instruments of our own destruction and our salvation. Ms. Mengiste writes with scorching commentaries on all who were swept by the revolution.

The novel is penetrating, elegant and paced with dignified meter. As she recounts the Red Terror, when hundreds of thousands were ruthlessly killed by Colonel Mengistu and the Derg, she often intentionally obscures the relationship between pronoun and antecedent, forcing us to go back and read the sentences and paragraph again. In this emotionally charged book, we are lured into reading it twice as we go, probing the wounds, as surely as she has.

“Beneath the Lion’s Gaze” is a great novel that should not be qualified as “first”. Moreover, it is a book that demands to be read in a single sitting.

Ms. Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa a few years before the revolution that overthrew Haile Selassie and left a year or two after the revolution as the reign of terror was beginning. Maaza Mengiste graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, she was named “New Literary Idol” by New York Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Ninth Letter, and 42opus, has been translated and published into German and Romanian for Lettre International, and can be found in the Seal Press anthology Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time. A recipient of fellowships from the Prague Summer Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the prestigious Yaddo, she currently lives in New York.