Hello and welcome to Big Tent.
Live Events, the live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the humanities cultural programme.
This is one of the founding stones of the future. Stephen, a sportsman centre for the humanities.
My name is Ellika Burma.
I'm a professor of world literature in English in the English faculty at Oxford, and I have a particular interest in African fiction.
So it's a great pleasure for me to chair today's session. The big event.
Big Tent Live Events series brings together researchers and students from across different disciplines in the humanities and more broadly.
We explore some of humanity's important subjects and we ask questions about areas such as the environment,
medical, humanities, history of disease, as well as celebrating storytelling, music, song and identity.
As we're doing today.
We're bringing you this event online while we're all keeping our distance and we hope everyone is feeling safe and well during this pretty tough time.
We look forward to seeing you all again in person really soon.
And we look forward to hosting you at some big tent events as part of the humanities cultural programme.
Everyone is welcome in this big tent and we hope to explore ideas together with you, as we're doing this evening.
We're really grateful for your ongoing support and for your involvement.
All of you out there listening.
And we're very grateful also to the participants who have given their time and words as we've come together here online.
If you the audience would like to put any questions to your speakers during this event tonight,
please pop them in the comments box on the YouTube feed.
We encourage you to submit these as early as possible so that we have time to answer as many as possible in the Q&A at the end.
We'll leave about 20 minutes for Q&A at the end of this hour.
But first, we're going to have a reading from today's featured author, Mausam and Day.
Are we going to have some discussion with our three panellists who I'll introduce in a moment?
And Muslim and guest is featuring today is reading from and talking about her book, The Shadow King.
So it gives me great pleasure now to turn to Marzo minister, our visiting writer.
It's a great honour to to host you on this big tent event.
Mausam and This Day is the author of the novels Beneath the Lion's Gaze,
which was named as one of the 10 best contemporary African books by The Guardian.
And also of today's book, The Shadow King.
The Shadow King is a finalist for the L.A. Times books PRISE.
It's a New York Times notable book of twenty nineteen and one of times must read books of twenty nineteen Moslem and guest.
It is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.
The premiere Yale Punta and Fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Programme,
the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and also the Literate to a house Zürich.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta and many other publications.
It's great to have you here, Mozza. It's wonderful to be here tonight.
We also welcome our three panellists beha new gig s.A.
Professor Richard Reid and Professor CIHI Barnett Selassie joining us from different parts of the world, it's a truly global event.
This I'm going to introduce the three panellists in the order in which they will be responding to Mozambique estás work.
First, then Bill, take a guest, say he was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
and is now studying humanities, as at Kenyon College in the United States.
He's currently on a year abroad studying English literature at Exeter University and along with Koranda, Harris recently interviewed Mozza.
My guest stay for Africa in words. Professor Richard Reid is a historian of modern Africa, focussing on the 19th and 20th centuries.
And he's based here at Oxford University. He has particular interests in the culture and practise of warfare in the modern period.
And for that reason, he is very well suited to speaking to Muslim and guest as novel today.
Professor to hide behind harness, Selassie taught social anthropology,
gender and development studies in universities in Ethiopia, the United States, the U.K. and now Ireland.
She has published on Ethiopian warrior hood and gender issues in Ethiopia.
So a fantastically well suited panel, I think.
So how are we going to do this across the next 20, 25 minutes or so is that I'm now going to invite Marzin a guest day to read from the Shadow King.
Tell us a little bit about it. And then I'm going to turn to the three panellists and ask them to give short responses to that reading,
and then we'll have some discussion before we open up. Thanks, Melissa.
Thanks very much. Thank you, America. It is such a pleasure to be here.
And before I start, I just want to say hello to everyone who is tuning in, including my two little nephews.
There's maybe skipping homeschooling right now to watch this.
So thank you. Look at San Gabriel. I hope you're taking notes.
I'm going to read from from my novel The Shadow King, which is set in in the early in 1935.
It begins with the early days just before Mussolini invades Ethiopia.
And I became interested in this history because I grew up hearing these stories of this war where Ethiopians were not supposed to win,
but somehow they did and defeated this Italian European army.
My research in this led me to women, and it was not an immediate discovery.
It took a few years before I started finding some women who who broke tradition maybe and joined in the army to fight alongside the men.
I became fascinated with this history, and I wanted to imagine in my novel what a story about war would look like if it's told from this
perspective of women and how might a woman remember war and how might she be remembered after the war.
So I had one of my main characters is named, I said, and another character is named.
He wrote, and I'm going to read a section from very early on in the novel When the War Has Broken Out.
The women are following the men cooking, collecting water, doing the things that women traditionally did during warfare in Ethiopia.
But as there has other ideas as well about the role that they could play in this war.
So I am I will leave it at that and I will read this brief section.
US. There is a glorious figure astride her horse, Boonah.
She has loosened her braids and thick strands of hair, fall against her neck and spread like a dark curtain around her sunlit face.
She snaps the animal to a trot across the hip. The crest of the hill.
Her cape fanning around her finger. The golden clasp trapping flints of afternoon light.
Women, she shouts. Sisters, are you listening to me?
Her voice rises into the sky.
A blade slicing through the valley below, startling the women from their tasks, forcing them to lift their heads and turn in her direction.
Sisters. Are you ready for what's to come?
Ethiopia's gifted us Mardie will sing of this day for years of how the women drop their baskets and their jugs,
how they push away their blooms and piles of wool.
They rise to their feet nearly in unison, unaware of their own glory and lift their faces toward us.
There a voice. That they paused long enough to listen to the soft tap of distant gunfire is a detail that the songs will repeat again and again.
The musicians will make of the women's frowns, a forewarning of what's to come.
The singers will use the women's gasps and exclamations as signs of their growing strength.
One as Marie after the next will sing these words as they play their Marcinko.
That first battle cry was already forming in the women's throats, us there knew she just needed a way to usher it out.
The women were ready but did not know it. There were bullets to be made and gunpowder to mix and rifles to load, an enemy's to shoot.
Women, those who can make bullets come to me.
Upstairs, voice carries across the valley before breaking into echoes and scattering into the horizon.
She is one woman. She is many women. She is all the sound that exists in the world.
And I will stop there with that.
I wanted to read this section very briefly because I think my interest as a novelist in this history beyond the personal connexions that I have to it.
I was asking questions about history and what gets remembered and what makes history.
How do certain people and events get remembered and others become forgotten?
What makes collective memory? And how does collective memory then become history?
Who does the telling? And I it I know in history the gaps are inevitable.
And where did the inevitable gaps even in the retelling of this?
As a novelist, I challenged myself to try to move into one of those gaps, which is women.
And everything in this book begins with women and girls.
And I wanted to imagine what history would look like if I told it through a girl and through a woman.
And so I will I will leave it at that and I will let the other panellists respond or ask questions.
Thanks so very much. Massive, incredibly powerful reading this so much there to think about,
including the making of history and song and collective memory and the role of women in war.
So there are a number of threads for us to pick up. And so in that light, I'd like to turn to.
Behind you, behind it guest say. And hear your response.
You've already responded so powerfully to this novel. And we're very keen to to to hear more from you.
Now. Thank you, Ali. And before all, I want to start by saying I'm very humbled and honoured to be part of this panel,
it's interesting that I read from the earlier chapters of the book because I was also
thinking more about the beginning of the book when I was thinking of this panel.
And as much as the book is about one, you know, empowering women,
I think Myers's work is a very wonderful piece of literature that really shows us the individuality of war.
War is a very complex and it's made up of layers of emotions and stories that may not necessarily be told once the war is passed.
But in that specific historical time for in this case from the nineteen thirty five to nineteen forty one,
there are people who have lost their very close, intimate families.
There are people who've managed to fall in love in the midst of war. Is all this complexity that literature, I believe, has the power to lay out.
And you know, in terms of making the characters, the setting and the narrative arc purposefully bringing us closer to this forgotten stories,
which also is what the Asmara is as much as us reading just all this actually do.
They are the histories that usually are not in the textbooks because they are very Manute and they are very personal.
And I would like to mention another piece of a para three lines from Chapter eight, which is on page 18,
where a key Danny and Hero Kid and his wife have this interesting conversation because
Gadhafi's wife has found the rifle that he has been hiding in the household and kidney sayes.
When you hear it insists that Guidone gives birth a gun, you you go.
The says Haloti a key dances. I need this gun.
We're going to war and we need all the weapons we can get. These Italians have many more than we do.
It's very interesting for me because, you know,
this is this is a very clever characterisation and setup that already tells us how even though neither Hirut nor Kidney nor his wife,
in fact, everybody in the household do not want Ethiopia to be colonised.
He does not want to let go that rifle because that rifle is a symbol of her attachment to her deceased family.
And that's that is her entry way to the memories of her father.
So it's very fascinating how without agreement or without romanticising the novel Marza bring us closer to this pixels of a big picture.
We call it, you know, struggle to independence. Thank you.
Thank thanks so much. Behind you. I'm going to take a grab bag of responses first before asking Mozza to respond to that.
I'm going to draw in the responses from the other two panellists is that it came up.
So I'd like to turn to Richard Richard Reid now. Thanks very much.
Behind you. That was. I love the thing about pixels. I agree that very sharp focus on specificities.
Richard. Yeah. Thank you for that.
Absolutely wonderful. Why you referred.
My first response is really envy. I used to think that archaeologists have all the fun.
I decided that novelists have more fun than that. But I am just coming back to your reference to inevitable gaps.
And I think that this is really what what works of the imagination, but rooted in serious research.
Do and's writers like you are able to go to places that historians have failed to do.
Or in some cases, you have to tread and's.
I'm very struck in particular by your focus on on the role of women in the study of war in Africa and indeed, in fact the study of war everywhere.
I think we can safely say it's a very Obejas centric affair. It's usually written by Men Forum, and there are some notable exceptions unfroze.
Sure. Historians working on more Africa that do have methodological challenges.
It is often difficult to find the kind of source material that enable us to reconstruct women's experiences in war, even in relatively modern war.
That aside of the 19th century. So a work like this, we the mix makes an enormous contribution, I think, to our understanding of.
With experience of of conflict, which just says is is very complex.
Time is short and I have so many other responses I could offer, but I would just say one more thing,
and that is that your focus on the thirty five thirty six inflation is is is so valuable.
This is a war about which we still do not understand a great deal.
Well, we certainly we understand the politics of the context,
and that's usually understood in terms of time, colonialism and indeed in international relations.
Abyssinian crisis becomes a little blip on the way to Europe's world war.
But it's wonderful to have this kind of granular insight into an Ethiopian experience and not one that's kind of dominated by Europeans.
Thanks very much, Richard. I'd not like to bring in also Ed to hide behind his Selassie.
So the hive coming in from Ireland. Thank you.
I'm honoured to be invited to this pundits. And thank you very much, Mizar, for bringing in this wonderful topic and turnover.
I have been. I grew up in the 50s and 60s when all the talk was about persistence.
I grew up with a resistance history. I grew up with my mother and grandmother, all of them in the resistance.
And that evoked the gun as part of a very important decision to put this woman because the gun traditionally Ethiopia was access to your land.
You have a gun. You fight at the battle field and you have access to your gun.
That's a very important, critical point. And that it's as much thinks this gun.
This was a very important military leader takes this gun from this little girl.
You know what happened when the war was declared? Titus Lessie said no woman is to come to the battlefield.
Europeans have told him that women are not the guns of battlefield. Ethiopian traditionally thought no women were fighters.
So he said, no, no woman has the guns about the. Give your guns to the men because we're short of guns.
That's a beautiful metaphor you created. That is the gun.
And that does my thinking with a gun. I enjoyed that one.
But then the mobilisation, the mobilisation was it was the beat of drums and everybody was up in arms.
They were really men rebelled in 1935, brought their guns, suits them and the highest less.
You have to calm them down in the provinces so they can choose a better because a woman's they have the drumbeats and the mobilisation.
They all cancel about it because they knew that. If they don't fight, they lost their lands.
Their access to land was at stake. So that's very important.
So traditionally, men and women were fighters he evokes.
That's the truth. That beautiful point in history when women were said, don't go to the battlefield,
that is beautifully brought in and the back and then the mobilisation,
the moving to the battlefield became a little bit disoriented where the women were relegated in the novel.
That is true. Didn't could send nurses because women were warriors and the wounded were looked after by their own colleagues.
Men and women were looked after in the bush.
They were taken away, hidden away and shifted in the population that has mobilised the population that does not mobilise, looked after the wounded.
That was how the guerrilla was set up and they were able to fight.
But you then have to simplify it. You couldn't go into all that debate.
We set that a wonderful story. What also got a little bit disorienting with the rivalry for this month between Usted and Hild.
Wow. I said it demoness, you managed that then, was it, or the rivalry?
Men and women like to be two countries on notice of this leader because they would be given rewards of guns or fighters of land, et cetera, et cetera.
And that rivalry was expressed in the ways that was kind of enjoyable to ordinary reader who doesn't know anything about legislative history.
So that's as that's as they call it. But I thought, OK, that I would raise that and put up that that we men and women, Rivaldo, were never fixed.
The actual warriors themselves were actually very disciplined.
And I respect the men and women. They did get married because they fell in love and got married.
That was it. And you also pointed out in your book that it was wonderful. So that is brought out nicely.
But the whole metaphore of this small community of warriors up in their Simen mountains, resisting the Taliban advance, sneaking behind the lines.
Oh, that's as beautiful as where we defeated the surprises as a felon.
Now, for Manderson's, the lethal activities done on the bodies of this italia's wisdom is no, it's expositional.
But this war is coming up. It's coming in large numbers.
You just see one month expects the war that doesn't so beautifully put will place.
I didn't. You have done a wonderful way of portraying not just the mobilisation and the move to the battlefields,
the much the battlefield, but also the background to the actual guerrilla warfare.
You've portrayed it beautifully. I think I liked that the Getty had to be presented that way.
What is it? Thanks. I think it was unnecessary.
Thank you. Thanks. Thanks so much, sir. Hi.
A number of different pathways to pursue that.
I do very much agree with you about the very interesting metaphore of the women warriors.
But it's time to turn to you, Mother, and and to hear your responses.
We've got a lot better about pixelation the wonderful pixelation of your work and the building of an historical record,
especially where women's voices and women's contribution has often been overlooked.
And then also this question from CIHI is experience of the continuing involvement of the women in that time.
Yeah, I think. And thank you to Hanno and and Richard and doctors.
High, the your responses have been really wonderful.
I you know, I think what's interesting to me, if we take and maybe if we think about what Berhanu started with,
which was talking about the Widger grabbed the gun, which is also what talk with the doctors I was referring to, that you if you have that gun,
that means you can fight and you will fight and you can protect your land and protect yourself.
And I I thought of that gun as a as a metaphor for and for hero.
It's also the last thing that her father gave her before he died.
So it contains so many other things. And I, I have been curious throughout my research and reading in the archives, doctors are high.
You and I both know Sandrone thrilled to see who was my advisor in Italy when I was doing this research.
And, you know, I was it was not until the late 90s that the archives in Rome of the fascist period were found.
They were in a basement of the library in an unmarked box. They were not catalogued.
So if you can imagine. And then it went how many decades before this?
And I come along and I'm in Rome in 2010 trying to find more of this information and talking to people.
But the women were not the first things that I came across.
It was, of course, the stories of the stories that the Italians saved.
The stories that the Italians told them.
Even in the stories that I heard from my family members,
it was not until I was writing this book and I was nearly done that I discovered my great
grandmother had fought for her gun and went to mobilise exactly like you were saying.
But that was not a history that was written down.
That was something that was told to me after the book was almost done.
And I had not heard that story until then. And so I you know, I became very curious about this this gap maybe.
Richard, you were also talking about the gap between what's history and what storytelling and where do they merge.
And I started looking once I realised that there's something else happening here.
What what else can I do? And these are where the photographs that I use in the book became very important to me as another device of documentation.
But also, I always I felt that the photographs that Italians took always captured within the frame something much more than they intended.
They didn't understand what they were looking at half the time when they when they snapped the camera.
So I began to reimagine photographs as another way of talking about war.
And I can leave that. Can can we possibly pick up on some of those challenges between stories that face us in
the gap between storytelling on the one hand and history making on on the other moms?
I was very struck by this gesture that you made. You know this because this sort of gap in kind of filling filling that in with story, with memory.
I was also very struck in your reading where you talked about the chants and the gasps of the women, the sounds that they make in war,
feeding into the oral narrative, the kind of, you know, the the kinds of stories that people in the community would be telling in the future.
I wondered if the panel wound to pick up on on that really big question about the relationship between storytelling and history.
I think that, you know, what the novel does and this novel in particular is is so vividly fill in that gap.
So maybe we can pick up on on some of the things that really struck us about about the actual storytelling here behind you.
And I know this is something that that you've thought about. Thank you.
Again, this is this is also something that came up in the interview with Marza, and one of the things she underlined is that I called her own words.
History itself is not linear. It has different narratives colliding, intersecting and joining in which lives cups.
And I would like to suggest two ways of thinking this,
because there's these two words I always liked from my chemistry class called malleability and ductility.
Malleable is how something a material change under pressure, but WQ is how it goes into a thin sheet or becomes a wire.
And I think the war itself, as portrayed in the Borg or as I have heard it growing up, was a lot of pressure on Ethiopia.
It was a sudden pressure. They were not equipped for it. It was more than they can hold.
So there was, of course, a lot of rearrangement within the communities that had to be made like a sink, like a material would fall under a pressure.
So the story of the shadow king, basically, if we look at the form itself that it begins from 1935 and suddenly shifts to nineteen seventy four,
and then he also comes back again, but also the chorus and the photos are embedded in between.
We can see that things are the shape is changing because the history had this the way we remember it or the way it happened was not as linear,
was not as precise as we may say. Oh Julius, Ethiopians defeated a tax.
But then the problem is that when the history was told, it was deputised into a single wire, which is it was a male champion tail.
So someone like me who grew up in there now, who was born in late nineteen hundreds or grew up in the early 2000s,
have not heard even a single vaine history class saying, OK, women were part of the war.
The fathers he went was there were women who were to whisper or kind of infiltrates the camps and bring out stories from the Italians.
So there is definitely sort of a mistake that has been done in telling the story.
It's not a full picture. And I think my eyes as work is very intentional in beginning the story with Harold and ending it with her in the 1974,
because we started with the with the people who lacked from the history, we learnt the history with a pixellated way.
And then we come back to the people who deserve this story back again. Thank you.
Thanks, honey. Richard, how about from your perspective as a as a historian on that question?
Yeah, it's it's a it's a huge it's a huge issue.
I mean, history. History of discipline, this is there is is a very big church.
It's all sorts of. People who are poor see all sorts of different methodologies and regard history in various ways.
Historians often use storytelling as a source for actual history.
And I think we need to kind of maybe revisits that relationship.
And this is partly true in the African context. And I think I think I certainly have been guilty of it in the past where you whereby
you don't necessarily recognise a story as something necessarily of value in itself.
You see it as as a piece of evidence which contributes to the writing of history, which is something much pure,
a much bigger and much more comprehensive and unjust to kind of piggyback on on something four hundred is just alluded to in war,
especially at distinction is is blurred.
In fact, in the end, you could see the people write histories of war and unteach war in a kind of comprehensive ways in ways that make sense.
And of course, this is the problem is that history is an attempt to impose order on the chaos of the past, but in war.
The people who are called up in wars, all all that is true is story.
Storytelling is the only thing that matters.
Later on, historians will say, you know, we understand the diplomatic reasons why Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in October 1935.
We know the impact, not least last Thursday. Wrong, not losing so much,
so much is lost in the writing and in the construction of of of of medical histories that certainly increasingly
I would encourage people to go back to the idea that everything begins and everything ends in storytelling.
And, you know, that's easier be more easily done in certain fields than in others.
But I think in in studies of our understanding of war.
We need to we need to get to grips with the fact that in many ways,
the big history historians aspire under our age to do is in a sense often a red herring to the people who were actually involved,
who were caught up in violence. I'm talking myself out of a job.
Let's say hi, would you.
Would you chime in with that? Those those real challenges of history writing.
And that way in which story is kind of this is where it begins and ends, really history.
All that is true. That's what you see after nineteen forty one in Ethiopia.
It was necessary to emphasise that this Nazi and the resistance fighters were men who defended their country.
And now new army is needed. A new civilisation, morality is needed, and therefore it's not really important.
Look about that. It's Liston's period. Or women in war are symbolised by women in the army or or on the battlefield better.
Well, you know what? We grew up in all girls schools because all good schools were organised to make us like these little girls.
We got all these books on their heads walking straight. We have to be really like you in Victoria.
We we men under orders had to be forgotten.
They left behind. And we had to discover its reasons afterwards.
What was going on was the women, because for me,
there was so much discontinuity between what my mother and her mother and my other parents were talking about and what we were being.
Thought to think about lessons in the schools. What is this about?
They were running around in the fields fighting battles and where she had to make cakes and cookies in orphans, which we didn't have in the home.
Cakes. Well, God is no sugar. What a pity. The Europeans are eating what is sugar wood.
That's literally. There was a disconnection between what we were being meant to be were being taught to become and what was in the historical.
But it was deliberately buried, deliberately buried by the drive for modernity, so-called modernity.
And if anything in history started to be taught in the university already in the late 60s.
It was not taught at all because there is something always if you bend civilisation,
then you have to learn about the rest of the world and discipline. So the gap can be created deliberately.
We for for purposes of a push that was driven by government.
And so. And also then there were, of course, the unwise celebrations of the resistance.
Some points in that instance that back against the ending of the liberation movement and
the liberation war of the coming back of fighters unless it'll have to be celebrated.
So occasionally you'd hear radio programmes that if you programme and you start to wonder, what is this?
So as researchers, it was quite a challenge for some of us,
was that this woman even to graduate from basically depressed because women are not allowed into this department stuff.
But anyway, after that, the really deepened.
So I'm not surprised that Mizer had to come across deep in the late 1990s and think this
was way back in this early 70s that we started to what's going on in his European history?
Not so far. Only three books were written by duping squatters of the media by a few days of the ancient history and of the modern history.
Up until recently. And those who passed in the resistance were not free enough to write about their resistance,
Wolf, because they would be seen to be to be shoring up pilots as they ran away.
But. And they had to stay there and fight and shoring him up if they would.
That was censorship when what kind of books were published?
The gaps were that deliberately banned on this warfare.
So that established doctors.
I heard you said something really interesting about this, the fact that, you know,
this history growing up of women who fought in the health of the mother.
And you knew it from your aunts, grandparents, your grandparents.
And it has made me think since this book has been published and I started talking about my own discovery of my great grandmother's role,
which was very late in this book process. My mother knew that history.
Her sisters knew the history. The women know it.
And so it makes me think that this this the history of women in war.
Is often retold in the spaces of women. It doesn't necessarily progress into the other dominant spaces.
Men talk about politics at a party or they talk, you know, in the classrooms like you're talking about.
If we were to go in the kitchen or in the sitting room where women are gathered, that's where that history existed.
And I had no idea about that. But what you're saying confirms to me that this is this is where a lot of that is.
Yes. I mean, I come in. Let me show it to her and then we'll move to where I am.
Yeah. When I was interviewing the kids, Kiddish began the most famous obesity.
Just infighters, she said. I said to her, Could you tell me what other women were working with you and how did you get to so and so that her boss?
So I said, But if you want me to get King, do you want me to get King?
Not want to talk about just this. I was interviewing her for the good old women.
Get a look. I asked for me and my parents and my grandparents.
I don't know if I should be bringing this in, but I grew up in a household where my father was put in a good prison and under house arrest.
So all the talk from all our relatives was one.
Plus they had more present the cause for this unless it was really good heat on everything they had to say and do.
So all this talk is just that then I grew up is that.
That's what I'm saying. I grew up. Is that then when in these schools, in the universities,
we should be when teaching Ethiopian history begun, then we reinforce the research to find out.
And the women space was not the only one that I had a list of 3000 guerrilla fighters.
Of those, only 300 were women's names, not because they didn't they weren't there because needed.
I think association was scared of one of them said to me, we're scared of them.
They were scared of the emperor thinking the names of the women. So that that was done to the creation.
Thank you. Thanks very much, Signe. Thanks, Martha. And and also to Richard in behind you.
I mean, there's a lot more that we could say. And indeed, we're now going to bring in questions from the audience.
There are a number of questions that have already come in. And what I might do is two groups, some of them.
So there are two questions here on this topic of writing fiction and writing history and how we recover hidden histories,
which, you know, we've been touching on all of us. So here's the first question on this topic.
I'm interested in your writing process in writing a story that aims to recover hidden histories.
How much did you lean in to your imagination and how much did you rely on research?
And then there's this related question, which is also true, Richard, actually.
It's Demarzo Richardson to High. How much of your own experiences did you involve in your publications?
So, Marza, over to you. Oh, interesting question.
The history and my research gave me a framework. So to move in to move into the world of nineteen thirty five to nineteen forty one,
I did not know much about it except the stories that I heard in my family and the stories that I heard were mainly anecdotal,
brief things that my talk about one battle or two battles.
But this war lasted for five years. The occupation lasted for five years, six years.
What happened on a daily basis.
And this is where I needed to research in order to then imagine the daily life for each of my characters and begin to think about the conflict.
So the richer research gave me that framing. But the one thing I wanted to do, which was where my imagination came in,
was to take that research that I had this world and beat and pivot it so that I'm looking at it from the perspective of women and girls.
And so if the book begins with Heated in 1974 and then it goes to HITO to nineteen thirty five, she's won the thread.
But every single character in that book is introduced through their relationship
to a girl or to a woman even kidnapped when he's we see him with Uster.
So that was the imagination coming in.
And in terms of my personal experience, I.
I had the stories growing up, but they were not enough to write a book.
It was my own interest in this that kept me going. And I'll leave it at that.
Very, very briefly, do either Richardo, it's a high want to chip in about this or do you think that.
Do you do you do. Do you have anything further to say about that?
I would just say very, very quickly that I think it's the historians are all products of of of experience and on their own,
their own emotional state, in a sense. And I think when I started out, I thought that you could separate the two.
And you could simply riots who history with, like been in yourself.
And that I no longer believe that.
Possibly. Maybe that's just edge. But certainly my more recent work is entirely based on experience.
And I think we need some grace, a lot more. Thank you.
Thank you, Richard. Shall we move on to the next question or do would you like to come in?
Hi. That's OK. Just to say yes, my experience of my own family.
But it's very sad and that I. I'm not going to turn to a rather different question, which is as follows.
Martha, Italian imperialism is a controversial topic in Italy.
I know the novel hasn't yet been translated into Italian, but I wonder if you've had any responses to it from Italian readers or Italian audiences?
I have. Well, when the book won the Plenty, the Premier League, Ponty, the Bridge Prise,
I went to Rome to accept the prise and Sandro Trilled Sea was at the ceremony.
My adviser, my mentor. And when the judges spoke, they were a group of Italian judges and they talked about the difficulty that this war represents,
the difficulty of this in talking about the war, that it's an uncomfortable history for Italians.
The interesting thing that they said that I found really striking was every single one of them said that they.
Recognised. Someone in their family, in my portrayal of the Colonel Charlie, which was one of the crueller characters in the book.
The book has not come out yet. It will be released in Italy next next spring.
But even in that ceremony, there was a man who stood up.
And it was just not in agreement with what we're doing here.
He had he did not necessarily think that this history was that bad.
So that was just, I think, a sense of what might happen.
Italy has moved to the far right. You know, more and more in these last few years.
It'll be interesting to see the reception.
But what I do know very quickly, just speaking to friends of mine in Italy who have family members who had been part of that war.
What they have told me again and again is when they go and ask them about this war,
about Ethiopia, they they've told me it's it's a wall in our family.
No one wants to talk about this. So I think it is still uncomfortable.
And we'll see what happens.
Speaking into another silence there, not only the silence of unspoken history, but also the silence of censored memory in a way, isn't it?
It could be today. Go. Go ahead, honey.
Okay. Thank you. I because I think it raises a very interesting point about the mixing of language, which is very prevalent in in the Shadow King.
And because when especially he's talking about the storytelling. Who tells the story accurately?
Done it. Do we tell the story accurately in Italian? Do we tell Itanium in Amharic or do we talk it in English?
Or do we tell it together? And I think there's a very interesting point later in the book where it story speaks with Dr. Haley when this goes.
He's speaking in healthy Italian slow Horak, as if they were both aware that language will never throw it the distance between them.
But I think it's very clever that this mar's I've included this in the later chapter
of the book because she is treading the distance by mentioning it this way,
actually.
The gap is being filled and we know that there is a lot of Italian, English and Amharic words casually or purposefully embedded in the novel.
And that's, I think, a very great step in to saying, OK,
let's tell the story collectively and let's appreciate that Italians were Italian was spoken during the occupation, not just Amharic.
So I think that's another significant aspect of the storytelling.
Yeah, the languages through which the war is narrated. Yeah, very much so.
I'm going to turn to another question just in the interests of time.
This is this is an exciting possibility that this question is, is turning on Mars.
We've heard that your brilliant book may become a movie. Can you speak to this?
Are you able to tell us a bit about that? It is being made into a movie.
I'm excited about it. I, I, you know, it's just really at the beginning stages.
I know everybody is wondering who's going to get cast in what roles.
And, you know, I have no idea.
Please don't ask me. At the end of this, I was excited as everyone.
I'm waiting to see what happens. I'm very interested in seeing how many voices, the photographs, the chorus.
I'm interested to see how that translates. And I'll see who they pick for the actors.
Yeah. So I'm I'm curious and excited just like everyone else.
That sounds really enticing. Moving back to the to the story itself.
There's a question here about one of the characters, Marza.
How did you feel about the character of Kitani? Who is the antihero in the book?
Wow. You know, I think he that was put in a difficult situation.
He was born into a world that had certain expectations of him and he fulfilled them very well.
Every every role he he was willing to sacrifice his life for Ethiopia.
And at the same time, he was going to take what he wanted in the process, regardless of what he wrote or ask.
There might might have thought or might have wanted.
There is one moment in the book where I have him imagine what he might have been like if he was not born into the family he was born into.
With all the pressures that that came with. So I.
I find him an interesting and complicated character. Antihero might be a good word.
I don't know if there's any real hero in the book because they're all flawed in so many ways.
But I'm one of the questions that I asked in this book as well as the first book is What Makes a Hero?
And what makes a heroic act when it's done by someone who maybe is not so nice?
So Kidane is was an interesting vehicle for that.
Thanks very much, Marza. This is a question that's probably sort of moving to Ward's closing point.
We might have time for one more. I'm not sure that this is more a question about the writing process itself.
And about how you write. Is it a particular environment that you create to work in music that you listen to to get you in the mood?
I'm reading this is a bit of a lockdown question, you know. But take it, as you will of I listen to music.
I listen to a lot of music while I was writing the book, and it depended sometimes on the scenes that I was working on.
I had a lot of Ethiopian music that I was listening to.
Things like the songs, the old songs, the shillelagh.
I was listening to those things. I was listening to anything with some kind of a beat.
If I'm writing the battle scene. So that's that's what I would do.
I wrote this book in many different places, so it wasn't necessarily an environment I could just put on my headphones or block the world out.
I'm a desk with enough. Sometimes I didn't have a desk.
I could just put my computer on my lap.
But in terms of my writing process, I tend to write by hand first, and that slows my brain and forces me to think.
And I started that process with this book, not the first book.
And it's been really helpful. Thanks, Martha.
And actually, on that question of music. One of the questions is, and this may be a good way to to move to your clothes, then.
Do you have any of the titles to recommend of the songs that the as Morrie's saying, you know.
Gosh, there is one. Doctors.
Hi, you might even know who sings, and now I can't think of it all of a sudden, but fun to.
Do you remember? And I found that the old song on YouTube once.
32 minute xiri to. I think it's too.
It's an old old singer, but I'm sorry, I don't remember. But I.
Some of the songs are available online. I mean, I just I would sometimes look them up.
Oh. My God, the fascists made recordings of battle songs.
And when I was in Rome, I went to the discotheque, had this battle and there were albums of songs.
Speaking of what what we lose when we don't save it.
But they were recording all of these things. And I found a lot of the songs and I had a C.D. made.
They're amazing. They were amazing. These are the songs that soldiers would sing to to get.
To get them ready to face battle. They were rhythmic and driving.
And then. And then they would go and go after the enemy.
So I had those that I would listen to. Thanks.
Thanks so much, mother. That's a lovely, evocative moment.
I mean, these songs that were recorded by the Italian fascists that then became inspirational for you to write your counter history, your novel.
That's that's marvellous. That's really great.
Thank you so much. I think it is probably time to two to round.
We had just up to the hour, I think.
So I would like to say thank you very, very much to our panellists to behind you, again, say to Richard Reid and to say hi behind us, Selassie.
A very, very big thank you to Muslim and gay stay novelist today who has been telling us about this
incredibly interesting work that reclaims the history of women warriors in Ethiopia in the 1930s,
the shadow king. Lots of exciting developments there.
Possible film in the offing.
So we look forward to hearing more about that and following the success of this wonderful book that you've shared with us today.
Thanks so much, Moslem and stay.
I would also like to say a special thank you to the North East Africa Forum in the African Studies Centre, which has supported the event today.
Thank you so much. Thank you. To the The Torch and Humanities team for supporting this event and for facilitating it.
Thank you to the audience for watching and for all these great questions.
I'm sorry that it wasn't possible to squeeze in all of them. I'm just looking at the final few that came in there.
Great. But I'm sorry. Time was up.
And I'd like to invite people who are interested to join Torch for our next big event live, which is Thursday, the 21st of May.
Put that in your diaries where we're going to be meeting the multi award winning artist Jamelia, who will be exploring themes related to music.
Again, song performance and what it means to be an artist in lockdown.
So how great is that? So thanks very much for joining us today.
Thanks so much to Moslem and. And I hope you be able to come back soon, everyone.
Goodbye.