Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

Food becomes scarce, and ration cards are issued for staples like teff, the grain used to bake the spongy bread called injera. Houses and businesses are nationalized, and spies and parasites installed there. Intellectuals and ex-government ministers are rounded up and killed without the formality of a trial. The new military regime, called the Derg, soon proves to be harshly neo-Stalinist. “Only the howls of the dog that scraped its bony ribs against the mud walls outside during feeding time let the emperor know that another day had passed.” Even more boldly, she imagines the emperor’s death – a real-life mystery that has never been resolved. She does so believably – in part because many of his thoughts and feelings would be those of any old man who finds himself confused, helpless, and at the mercy of others. The author shifts fluidly between her characters’ points of view, and she is bold enough to take us into the mind of the emperor himself. One by one, the emperor’s allies are replaced with officers, until one day they simply lead him to a Volkswagen and drive him away. Their solution is a kind of slow-motion coup. A cabal of military officers wants change, but dares not challenge the near-mystical power of the emperor. While the emperor lives a life of medieval pomp in his several palaces, thousands are starving to death in a northern province. Things are bad for Hailu, but they are soon to get much worse. Elsewhere in the hospital, the surgeon’s wife is dying of congestive heart failure. As Hailu knows, his youngest son, Dawit, is also taking part in the protests. Student demonstrations are being suppressed with violence.Īs the novel opens, a middle-aged surgeon named Hailu is removing a police bullet from the back of a student protester. The aging Emperor Haile Selassie, known to some as the Lion of Judah, is losing his grip on power.

It takes its title from a stone lion that looks over the city from atop an obelisk – a monument to those killed in the struggle against Italian aggression.

“Beneath the Lion’s Gaze” begins in the Addis Ababa of 1974. One young woman delicately balanced a baby on her hip as she arranged her neatly stacked rows of cinnamon sticks and berbere on a thin cloth in front of her, the bags of crushed red pepper bright as rubies.” “A blue haze drifted from eucalyptus trees dotting the hillside of Addis Ababa and clung to the horizon like a faint, tender bruise. Though the author left Ethiopia as a small child, she conveys the sharp beauty of the country with authority. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, an ambitious and accomplished first novel by Maaza Mengiste, helps to fill that gap. Yet except for the work of Dinaw Mengestu and Nega Mezlekia, not much Ethiopian literature is available in English. Ethiopia, an independent country for almost 3,000 years, has its own written language and a larger population than any African country other than Nigeria.

Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste