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Beneath the Lion’s Gaze

Maaza Mengiste

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London 2010

Reviewed by Ghelawdewos Araia, Ph.D.

February 1, 2010

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a novel that successfully blends fiction and nonfiction in depicting the circumstances surrounding the Ethiopian revolution of the 1970s. Though the author depends on several historical and political accounts written by Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians alike, she has creatively dramatized many pertinent and complex sequences of events, including cultural and social themes, which altogether make her novel an impressive fictional work. Moreover, the author, like many Ethiopians, has the desire to and insistence upon telling the Ethiopian experience, but she was not simply telling the tale. In fact, in very elegant English reinforced by metaphors, she ventures at discovering, recognizing, identifying, and meaningfully interpreting the puzzle pieces of the Ethiopian revolution. And despite the many cruel encounters and testimonies documented throughout the text, the book is mature in scope and style and has this impulse to enlighten, entertain, and teach the reader.

There is no doubt that the title of the book is embedded in the illustration of Martyr’s Square on page 16: “In the square was an obelisk, a stone lion gazed proudly across the city, defiant. Four imposing tanks rested at each corner of the intersection. Two soldiers paced, their gazes lifting from their shoes…”. Thus we have the lion’s gaze, and to be sure for a critic who emphasizes close readings of texts, the word ‘gaze’ has been repeated twenty nine times throughout the book. I don’t think this was a Freudian slip on the part of the author; she has deliberately cloned the word as a constant reminder of the title and as a connecting fabric between the chapters.

Despite the arguments extended by Formalism and New Criticism to avoid the biography and intention of the author, I am rather tempted to drop a note on Maaza Mengiste. She was a child of the revolution. When the Revolution broke out in 1974, Maaza was only a toddler and by the time her personality was formed she left Ethiopia and barely understood, let alone experience, the mass upheaval and its consequence. But, by writing this novel, she was transported back in time, collected the necessary data that served her as important glue to her novel, and by doing so she was reborn into the revolution that she never witnessed. That is the power of fiction and that is the significance of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.

The main actors in the book are Dr. Hailu and his two sons, professor Yonas and Dawit; Selam, the wife of Hailu; Sara, the wife of Yonas; Tizita, the daughter of Yonas and Sara; Lily, the girlfriend of Dawit; Mickey, a friend of Dawit who would become a cadre of the Derg (the military government); other characters also include Mamma Seble; Melaku the shopkeeper; Shiferaw, the Kebele (district) chief; Berhane and Robel, children of the revolution; Mekonnen (nome de guerre of Dawit); Solomon, Seyoum, and Anbessa (lion), who were clandestine revolutionaries.

Some of the characters like Endalkachew Mekonnen, Aklilu Habtewold, and Haile Selassie are real; others like Hailu, Yonas, and Dawit are fictional; and yet others like Guddu (Mengistu Hailemariam), Mekonnen, Solomon, and Seyoum are real and fictitious at the same time. In fact, the latter three, to whom the book is dedicated to, are uncles of the author. The name Guddu is appropriately given to the henchman Mengistu Hailemariam and it is most likely borrowed from Gudit (Yodit), an ancient Ethiopian queen who was vicious, cruel, and destructive.

Hailu’s wife Selam was in a vegetative state and dying as was Ethiopia in the 1970s and beyond, but in the case of the latter there were these relentless students “who demanded action to address the country’s poverty and the lack of progress.” (p. 6) The students were at the forefront but during the 1974 revolutionary fervor every sector of the larger Ethiopian society, including the soldiers, arose. These soldiers wanted “to make sure a new Ethiopia could rise up from under the heavy weight of an aging, decaying monarch.” (p. 32)

Once the military took over state power and the Derg consolidated, however, the political direction was clearly against the wish and expectation of the Ethiopian people in general and the militant students of yesteryear who are now compelled to operate underground. Thus, revolutionaries like Solomon began to recruit other militants in earnest. Solomon tells Dawit to talk to his friends: Lily, Meron, Markos, Teodros, Zinash, Anketse, Tiruneh, Gebrai, Habtamu, and Getachew. (p. 39)

Meanwhile Dawit engages Yonas in binary opposition of verbal discourse with respect to peasant rights, and his father on the cause of famine. While Hailu thinks “drought and some officials, and not the whole government” are to be blamed for the famine, Dawit squarely blames Haile Selassie and his government for the famine. The Derg that usurped power soon learned the language of the revolution and it too blamed the emperor and high-level officials for the famine and Ethiopian backwardness. In its formative period the Derg created some illusion among Ethiopians for its bloodless revolution but it will soon plunge Ethiopia into a bloodletting inferno.

The first victims were the sixty officials who were slaughtered by Derg soldiers and to the bewilderment and chagrin of Dawit one of the perpetrators was Mickey, his childhood friend. The Bolshevik style massacre had been ideologically transmitted to the men in uniform in Ethiopia and Mickey happens to be one of them.

Following the massacre, curfews were declared and thousands of people were arbitrarily arrested. Hundreds would disappear without trace and thousands would be shot and killed and their bodies displayed in public squares. The Derg became the curse for Ethiopia out of whose womb it emanated. The anguish of Ethiopians is expressed in Sara’s introspective prayer: “You. You have cursed this womb and torn yours out. Mixed my blood with premature ash. You have heard my bitter cries and sat silent to my prayers. You have made me into nothing but the mother of one, the daughter of none, a woman carrying twin monuments of grief. Leave me alone. Let me be as I am. I ask for no more.” (p. 96)

Book One of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze gives essential meaning to the 1974 upsurge and the subsequent death of the emperor. Book Two covers the Derg and “anarchists” (EPRP) confrontations; the parroting of left ideology by the Derg; Dawit and Yonas’ chat on Ethiopian politics; Shiferaw, the Kebele head and the terrorizing of the community; Dawit the idealist and Mickey the indoctrinated cadre; the human heart metaphor; and the dark clouds hovering over Ethiopia.

What makes Beneath the Lion’s Gaze interesting is its use of metaphors as powerful literary tools as in Sara’s prayer, for instance, and the human heart metaphor as lucidly and cogently explained by the author: “The human heart, Hailu knew, can stop for many reasons. It is fragile, hollow muscle the size of a fist, shaped like a cone, divided into four chambers separated by a wall. Each chamber has a valve, each valve has a set of flaps as delicate as frail as wings. They open and close, open and close, steady and organized, fluttering against currents of blood. The heart is merely a hand that has closed around empty space, contracting and expanding. What keeps a heart going is the constant, unending acting of being pushed, and the relentless, anticipated response of pushing back. Pressure is the life force.” (p. 165)

The metaphoric heart is very much like Nommo, the vital force in African art; the inner dynamic without which all art would become meaningless. However, for Hailu, “a change in the heart can stall a beat, it can flood the arteries with too much blood and violently throw its owner into pain.” Dr. Hailu insinuates that a slow and steady progress in societal change is preferable than a revolutionary undertaking. But the human heart for Maaza does not simply connote a dry function; it actually denotes the attribution of change, life, vitality, and transformation as well as death for Ethiopia. By commingling the prayer and heart pulsating metaphors, thus, the author craftily blends real and imaginary events (series of anecdotes) and make them endure in powerful language. This is consummate artistry!

Book Three begins with the summons of Hailu by Derg authorities. He too would become a victim; he would be tortured and dehumanized and his family members would fall “into a virtual of silent protest and unspoken tensions,” except for Dawit of course. The unspoken embodiment would not deter Dawit. On the contrary, his openly declared determination and devotion to the struggle was unremitting. Though Dawit was at times naïve and childish, in terms of tenacity and temerity he is the antidote of Yonas, a more pragmatic and calculating persona. Time and again, the dialectical tension between involvement and detachment respectively characterized the political stances of Dawit and Yonas. Eventually, Sara, the wife of Yonas would secretly commit herself in retrieving dead bodies along with her brother-in-law under the guise of nightfall. Yonas too would gravitate to their orbit following his father’s arrest and after he stumbled into a dead body, the corpse of the little boy Berhane that he knew and compassionately carries it home. True to Sara’s assertion, the revolution was “turning everything upside down.”

The revolution indeed turned everything upside down. The so-called Red Terror terrorized the people; mass arrests and murders became normal and mothers like Sofia don’t know to which God to pray to. Dawit, Sara, and Melaku closed ranks and “some nights they’d found torn slips of paper with the victims name, hidden in pockets or clutched in tight fists. Simple gestures of rebellion by those who refused to have their lives extinguished in anonymity.” (p. 240)

Book Four begins with the Derg’s slogan of terror, “revolutionary motherland or death.” Indeed, “a wail shattered the sky, startled sparrows out of trees. A low mournful cry clipped into guttural sobs. Sofia pounded her chest, face upturned to wilting stars, her remaining son curled at her side, wrapped around her legs. Her grief knew no refuge, found no shelter.” (p. 264)

Sofia in fact represents the millions of Ethiopian mothers who lost their children. During the Derg, the biggest loser was the Ethiopian mother. The Ethiopian mothers’ grief was poetically expressed by the author and this kind of extrapolation and rendering must remind the reader that there is no fundamental difference between prose and poetry in traditional African societies.

At long last Dr. Hailu was released but following his physical and psychological torture, he was virtually robbed of his soul. He “had the appearance of a man dragging death with him through life – a Lazarus damned.” (p. 271). Hailu and thousands of other Ethiopians who had gone through the same ordeal had become corpses that walk, living dead, and ghostly figures. Now, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze brings the silent ghosts of the past into the living rooms of Ethiopians. The Book has the power to anticipate a historically posterior moment!

Almaz, the nurse who assisted Dr. Hailu at the Black Lion Hospital “had been dragged out of bed soon after Hailu’s arrest and executed in front of her daughter.” (p. 280) The Derg butchers have committed such crimes unparalleled in history in their seventeen-year reign of terror. The Derg era was indeed without historical precedent in the perpetration of crime against humanity; it was more lethal and ominous!

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a vibrant and sophisticated synthesis of the Ethiopian revolution, substantiated by a well-synchronized knowledge of the ancien regime, the military government, and the clandestine combatants. The book successfully encapsulates the subtle nature of the Ethiopian conventional mold of thinking and the radical ideology of the fighting forces. In reading the book, I was torn apart between elation and depression; elation for the bright dramatization of real events during the revolution, and depression because I was compelled to revisit the seemingly endless nightmares that engulfed Ethiopia during the Derg rule.

At the same time, however, there is ironic relief in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, because it serves as the repository of hopes and aspirations. The encounter between Dawit (Mekonnen) and the monk (pp. 292-93) is a living testimony to optimism and the bright future of Ethiopia: “My child, Ethiopia, stand up and fight against this new beast that has descended on our country. I will pray for you nothing but blessings, for eyes that see in the night and legs that carry you far and fast, for a life long and peaceful, for children who will not rest until our country is free again.” This perhaps is the denouement of the Book.

Maaza Mengiste has masterfully delineated the foundation of a new political history of Ethiopia in fiction. On top of its richness in image, tone, diction, paradox, symbol, metaphor, characterization, and narrative technique, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is destined to inform the present readers by systematically recapturing the Ethiopian political landscape of the 1970s and beyond. It is reminiscence par excellence. The Book’s contribution to Ethiopia’s cultural regeneration and literary renaissance is quite apparent, and I recommend it very highly.