Aida Edemariam’s subtle and beautiful prose
lifts what is already an extraordinary tale to another level. (Review by
Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Family memoirs are a popular genre, and
Aida Edemariam’s story of her grandmother, Yetemegnu, is particularly
fascinating, partly through the manner of the telling. Edemariam is a senior
writer on Britain’s Guardian newspaper, and her subtle and beautiful prose
lifts what is already an extraordinary tale to another level.
Yetemegnu was born in 1916 in Ethiopia,
then an independent empire and remote from a modernising, and colonising,
world. At the age of eight, she was married to a man – a poet-priest in the
Ethiopian church - more than two decades her senior, something that was an
obviously terrifying experience for a small child. To a 21st Century
sensibility, his treatment of her, at first more as a strict parent than a
husband and later as a domineering and occasionally brutal patriarch is
horrific, but nonetheless it bred in her a fierce loyalty, even while she was
growing to be a strong woman in her own right.
Ethiopia in the last century was a
catastrophic place to be. Initially, Yetemegnu’s husband Tsega was successful,
rising through the ranks of the priesthood while the family grew. He was well
connected, attending the coronation of Haile Selassie, but he had enemies. And
then came the Italian occupation and the emperor’s exile, with the country
becoming a battleground between Italy and Britain during the Second World War. With
Haile Selassie’s return, Tsega was made a judge, but as the country descended
into chaos and civil strife, he was arrested and imprisoned.
Edemarian describes her grandmother’s
dauntless struggle to get justice for her husband while encouraging her growing
brood of children to grab the opportunities for modern education that were
beginning to be offered. When her eldest son, studying to be a doctor in Canada,
met and married a Canadian, she welcomed her new, foreign, daughter-in-law. She
coped with the revolution, the nationalisation of land which saw her income
slashed, the civil war and devastating famine of the 1980s. Illiterate, she
learned to read in late middle age. As the blurb puts it, an indomitable woman
indeed.
Yetemegnu lived through extraordinary times
in her country, and her granddaughter’s vivid prose combines the personal story
of one woman, the fascinating culture of which she was a part and the broader
historical sweep of a turbulent century. The
Wife’s Tale is published by 4th Estate - ISBN 978 0 00 819175 7 - Margaret
von Klemperer
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