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Sunday, July 22, 2018

Ethiopian explorations in literature

I took a break from my Hugo Awards reading to finish a couple of overdue library books. Usually I stick to fiction during my time off, since I read nonfiction all day for my job, but these were an exception. I've been doing character-backstory research for a game I'm playing/writing at www.Storium.com and needed more of a personal feel than the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Ethiopia could provide. So I turned to my lovely local New Hanover County Public Library and found two books pertaining to Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie. They are "The Wife's Tale: A Personal History" by Aida Edemariam and "The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat" by Ryszard Kapuscinski. They are about as different as two biographies can be that cover the same era in the same country, but they are both fascinating, and the combination of perspectives is illuminating.

Image: Cover of The Wife's TaleThe Wife's Tale (2018) is the story of Yetemegnu, an Ethiopian woman who lived from about 1916 to 2013, from feudalism and monarchy, through fascist invasion and occupation, back to monarchy, through revolutions, and into modern times. A child bride, married to an Orthodox Christian cleric, she was repressed for much of her life, but remained strong and smart. After her husband was imprisoned, she petitioned the emperor for his release, or at least a fair trial, and he agreed to hear the case. But her husband died, and she led her family after that, raising the children, and arguing court cases herself to protect their property, and eventually learning to read.

The memoir is written by her granddaughter, a journalist for The Guardian, who had heard many stories told by and about Yetemegnu. It is intensely personal, including details of beatings by her unjustifiably jealous husband, and many conversations with her relatives, and her dreams and religious experiences. It is also extremely immersive in Yetemegnu's way of life, everything from the expectations placed on her, to the food she cooked for her family and for her husband's many guests, to details of clothing and how the household was run.

Through all these personal details, and watching the rise and fall of Yetemegnu's husband, and what happened to some of her children, a vision of Ethiopian history is also revealed. Strict hierarchical traditionalism is combined with the arbitrariness of courtly and churchly intrigues, punctuated by the Italian occupation and conflicts of when cooperating to survive might turn into collaboration, and then the revolutionary periods affect Yetemegnu's family.

Parts of the memoir are a little hard to get through because of the emotions sparked by what is happening, but it's still a very accessible book, told clearly and plainly. This sometimes strict but always loving woman is worth getting to know, through her granddaughter's words.

The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (1978) is not a personal book, though it contains personal perspectives. It is a compilation of interviews with some of the former members of Haile Selassie's court, after he was deposed and they went into hiding. Kapuscinski, a Polish foreign correspondent who'd reported from Ethiopia before, sought out these eyewitnesses and interwove their descriptions and anecdotes, with occasional explanatory bridges of his own writing, into a coherent narrative of what happened leading up to, during, and immediately after Selassie's ouster in 1974 -- as coherent as you can get when courtiers are explaining everything through the lenses of their own perspectives and agendas, anyway.

I was amazed and appalled to read about how the emperor maintained his power throughout most of his reign, until it melted away. He kept his entire court off-balance all the time, raising the status of some and lowering others' each day during the Hour of Assignments, so that the courtiers and ministers had a hard time trying to maintain any momentum, let alone power bases. He also disapproved of any efforts at reforms made by anyone other than himself; apparently, he alone was to be the dispenser of mercy, justice, and any improvements in the people's lives; he alone was to be their father-figure, their savior. He denied reports of mismanagement and waste by his officials, sometimes elevating them to show that they couldn't possibly be guilty (and he couldn't possibly have made mistakes by appointing them); he and his court decried "troublemakers" whenever complaints arose.

The emperor made ambiguous verbal statements, written down by the Minister of the Pen, so that he could claim any unpopular decisions had been misinterpreted. He was a master of evasion, avoiding capture by the Italians before World War II, and surviving the attempted coup by Mengistu in 1960; when the Army encroached on his power, making arrests in his name, he appeared to accept their decisions; when he was finally officially deposed, he said "If the revolution is good for the people, then I am for the revolution."

The interviewees often speculate about the reasons for their emperor's habits and decisions, but they don't know, because he rarely, if ever, trusted anyone enough to reveal his thinking. Some of the interviewees seem to maintain their adoration of the emperor; others use overtly respectful language that yet seems to be incredibly sarcastic, given the ironic juxtapositions with the events being described.

This book has an incredible way with words. I have no idea how true the 1983 English translation of the Polish book (probably mostly translated from Ethiopian originally) is to what those courtiers actually said, but the phrases are often poetic -- conveying mood and mindset with elegance.

Some examples:
"All the people surrounding the Emperor are just like that--on their knees, and with knives."
"In a poor country, money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud because of your hedge."
"Yes, looking was a provocation, it was blackmail, and everyone was afraid to lift his eyes, afraid that somewhere--in the air, in a corner, behind an arras, in a crack--he would see a shining eye, like a dagger."
"There was such a fear of the precipice in the Palace that everyone tried to hold on to His Majesty, still not knowing that the whole court--though slowly and with dignity--was sliding toward the edge of the cliff."
"And how can anyone justify not having achievements in today's world? Certainly it was possible to invent, to count things twice, to explain, but then troublemakers would immediately stand up and hurl calumnies, and by that time such indecency and perversity had spread that people would rather believe the troublemakers than the Emperor."
"That's it, my friend--His Venerable Majesty wanted to rule over everything. Even if there was a rebellion, he wanted to rule over the rebellion, to command a mutiny, even if it was directed against his own reign."
I do wonder how many of those courtiers surrounding the emperor were out for their own advantage, and how many were just doing the best they could to survive in that court of chaos? It's hard to say, but it's pretty clear that anyone who'd told the emperor he was on the wrong path would have been swept away.

Anyway, I feel lucky that my recreational interests led me to read these two books. The Emperor, despite its specificity of period and place, has some important things to say about autocracy and access to power, and the wise and foolish uses thereof, which are relevant to here and now. The Wife's Tale tells us about a woman whose life was very different from most of ours, but she has a lot to teach anyone about perseverance.

Aside from the life lessons, it's really interesting to steep myself for a little while in another culture. These two books are both great, in very different ways, and I highly recommend them both.

Monday, July 9, 2018

2018 Hugos: Novellas

As I continue my Hugos vote-reading, I come to Novellas! This category has really been growing in accessibility for the past few years, not only in the voter packet but out in the wild. My lovely local library had several of them, and ebooks mean you can find novellas easily by themselves instead of just serialized in magazines or contained as the cornerstone of an anthology, with some short stories to pad out the publication to book length.

Mind you, I've read some "novellas" that just feel like Part One of what should be a book-length book, but the best feel like complete stories, with tighter focus than book-length books but a little more room for exploration than short stories or novelettes.

The nominees for this year's award:

  • All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
  • “And Then There Were (N-One),” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)
  • Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)
  • The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)
  • Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)
  • River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)
"And Then There Were (N-One)" is mildly enjoyable, but I really don't see why it's drawn the accolades it has. The idea of encountering multiple versions of oneself, from various universes where one has made slightly different choices, is not new. I've heard several stories on this theme from Escape Pod and others in the past few years, my favorite being "Send in the Ninjas" by Michelle Anne King on Podcastle. The murder mystery here isn't all that special to me either. However, I'm OK with the open-ended ending, because the premise implies that all choices would be made at the end, spawning new variations of the multiverses.

"Binti: Home" is interesting, and let us find out much more about Binti, her homeland, and her conflicts. However, although "Binti" stood on its own as a first story, B:H really feels like a part-two excerpt from a novel. It posits as a fundamental piece of her origin something that, if it was even hinted at in the first novella, I never caught; moreover, the ending is a cliffhanger. So this isn't at all high on my list of votes.

"The Black Tides of Heaven" is interesting, although I never got emotionally attached to the characters. It's disturbing what happens to some of them, but it feels removed, like an old fairy tale. However, I understand from Paul Weimer's review on Skiffy and Fanty that the twin/sequel to this novella, The Red Threads of Fortune, explores the characters' choices some more, after the events of the first, and deconstructs some elements. I'd like to read that sometime.

"Down Among the Sticks and Bones" is a prequel to the excellent "Every Heart a Doorway," which I think was my top novella vote for 2017, although I might have voted for the amazing "A Taste of Honey" by Kai Ashante Wilson instead. EHAD is about a school for children who've had portal adventures in other worlds and have trouble adjusting when they come back home, and it's great. DAtSaB is about two sisters who were at that school, and their repressed childhoods, and their lives and choices after they go through the portal to a world that's grim in different ways, before coming out. But I already knew how everything would turn out for them, and how they would turn out, so while the prequel is mildly interesting, it lacks impact.

"River of Teeth" is a story with great worldbuilding and interesting characters. I love this alternate world where hippopotami infest the Louisiana bayous, which is a thing that actually almost happened. The people in this world are sharply drawn, if some of them are a little flat, and there's a lot of good action. However, stories where people feel impelled to do something that they know will probably doom them, and don't seem to struggle much against their fate, aren't compelling to me. I was very excited waiting for this to come out, and in fact pre-ordered it, but I haven't gotten around to reading the sequel.

"All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries" is my favorite in this category this year. I have loved Martha Wells' fantasy for a long time (Wheel of the Infinite, The Death of the Necromancer, etc.), so I was excited when I heard she was going to try science fiction, and pre-ordered it. What a debut this is! Murderbot, as the protagonist calls itself (I think the pronoun was "it" IIRC), is a guard cyborg who just wants to be left alone to watch its soap operas, and conceal that it's hacked its control software, but the people it's assigned to protect are attacked, and it has to figure out what's happening and how to save them, and itself. I just adore this story, and have reread it several times. I had been putting off getting the next one in the series, due to my mountainous TBR pile, but I just bought it, to save as a treat for myself (we'll see how long that lasts -- hopefully until after the Hugos voting period, at least) and to encourage one of my favorite authors to keep writing in this genre.