Maaza Mengiste

About Maaza's Work

Maaza Mengiste is a fiction writer depicting the moral and personal harms of political conflict in works that render both the intimate textures of individuals’ lives and the broad sweep of historical events unfolding around them. She grounds her novels in extensive research and inhabits multiple historical and fictional voices, offering complex, sometimes competing, accounts of periods of violence in twentieth-century Ethiopia.

Mengiste’s first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), follows a physician and his two sons during the fall of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise of an oppressive military junta. She mirrors the violence and uncertainty of the period in the protagonists’ conflicting and shifting responses. The father remains committed to a physician’s duty of care even as it endangers him; the older son realizes that political apathy will not keep his wife and young daughter safe; and the younger son’s zeal for overthrowing the emperor is soured by the violence of the new regime. In The Shadow King (2019), Mengiste brings to life the little-known history of women resistance fighters during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941). In a feat of polyphonic storytelling, Mengiste constructs the narrative through a chorus of voices. Among the primary voices are Hirut and Aster, whom Hirut works for, before they both become soldiers and are eventually captured by the Italians. Mengiste depicts the complexity of the war through Aster’s abusive husband, who becomes a rebel leader; a cruel Italian general and his Ethiopian mistress, who is a spy for the rebels; the exiled Emperor Selassie; and Ettore, a Jewish Italian soldier and photographer. Ettore’s haunting photos are integral to the narrative and Hirut’s own understanding of the conflict. They are both a form of violence, as when a photo of Hirut as a vulnerable prisoner is circulated among the soldiers, and critical documentation of the atrocities committed by the Italian invaders. Mengiste refutes historical accounts of the war that cast Ethiopia as helpless against a European power, showing the fortitude, resourcefulness, and heroism of the ordinary men and women who fought to protect their nation.

Mengiste turns to the interwar period in Berlin in her novel in progress, which will contemplate the rise of the Nazis from the perspective of Black Germans, including some who served as models for German Expressionist artists. Through a compelling blend of history, memory, and imagination, Mengiste is revealing new insights into the human costs of political violence.