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WORK TITLE: The Wife’s Tale
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Oxford
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Studied at Oxford University and the University of Toronto.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. National Post, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, deputy review and books editor; Guardian, London, England, senior feature writer and editor.
AWARDS:Jerwood Award, Royal Society of Literature, for a nonfiction work in progress.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist. She grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Edemariam served as the deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post before becoming a senior feature writer and editor at the London Guardian.
Edemariam published the memoir The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History in 2018. The account, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award for a nonfiction work in progress, draws from more the seventy hours of interviews and conversations with Yetemegnu, Edemariam’s grandmother, in Amharic language. Edemariam presents Yetemegnu’s life and her own personal interactions as a child and later as an adult among the backdrop of Ethiopia’s troubled history. Yetemegnu was born into a well-to-do family in Gondar in 1916 but was already married off to a priest by the age of ten. A year later, her husband became chief priest of Gondar under Empress Zewditu and increased the family fortunes significantly under the subsequent reign of Emperor Haile Selassie. She became a mother in her early teens and had given birth to six children by the time Italy invaded the country. After Selassie returned from exile, though, her husband was charged with crimes against the emperor and later died, leaving Yetemegnu a widow with nine children and greatly diminished wealth. As her children matured, they moved abroad seeking better opportunities as Ethiopia succumbed to civil war. Edemariam weaves in her own time spent with Yetemegnu as well in this account.
In an interview in the Globe and Mail, Edemariam talked with Cliff Lee about the importance and significance of focusing on a single family in her book. She admitted that “history is lived by ordinary people in just as much vividness and sometimes more, particularly in times of turmoil than it is by the great supposed main actors in it. I spoke to Edmund de Waal about writing a family memoir, and he mentioned a lot of things that went through my mind. Because, yes, ‘Who cares?’ But if you pay enough attention to the particularities, then you can make somebody live on the page. He said it’s almost a test of writing if you can take somebody that nobody knows about and make the reader care.”
Writing in the New Yorker, Susannah Kemple observed that “the book elegantly collapses the distance between the vast and the intimate.” In a review in New Statesman, Lucy Hughes-Hallett commented that “this book is far more than a memoir of a beloved relative. It is an account of a complex culture as it moved, in one lifetime, from the medieval to the modern. It notes the gains–the end of slavery, literacy, the telephone –but it is infused with a reverence for the old ways, for the young men dedicating themselves to God and poetry, for the stone-built houses raised by co-operation within the community, for the songs and dances and the subtle, fragrant food.” Reviewing the memoir in Spectator, Michela Wrong recalled: “I found myself flicking backwards and forwards between main text and glossary for translations of Amharic words for various types of pots and shawls, honorary titles and foodstuffs. This made for a cumbersome read, which is a shame, as the power of Aida Endemariam’s writing is precisely its ability to reach across the gaping chasm formed by time, alien tradition and unfamiliar mores, connecting up our common humanity.”
A contributor to the Economist reasoned that “to read Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale is to savour the life of her grandmother, Yetemegnu. It is a life scented with ginger and garlic, cardamom and basil, which spans emperors, revolutions, invasion, conquest and liberation. Rather than cataloguing Ethiopia’s turbulent modern history, Ms Edemariam stitches together the fragmentary memories and experiences of a single woman.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found the memoir to be “flawed but richly evocative.” The same reviewer stated: “At times profoundly lyrical and other times fractured and difficult to follow, Edemariam’s book offers a glimpse into a singularly fascinating culture and history.” Booklist contributor Laura Chanoux suggested that “readers will appreciate Edemariam’s work … for its personal look at an eventful century in Ethiopia.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Edemariam, Aida, The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History, Knopf Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2018, Laura Chanoux, review of The Wife’s Tale, p. 22.
Economist, March 24, 2018, review of The Wife’s Tale, p. 76.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 19, 2018, Cliff Lee, “Journalist Aida Edemariam: ‘History Is Lived by Ordinary People in Just as Much Vividness.’”
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of The Wife’s Tale.
New Statesman, February 9, 2018, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, review of The Wife’s Tale, p. 44.
New Yorker, April 23, 2018, Susannah Kemple, review of The Wife’s Tale, p. 77.
Spectator, February 17, 2018, Michela Wrong, review of The Wife’s Tale, p. 36.
Aida Edemariam
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Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London.[1] She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post,[2] and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford.[1]
Biography
Edemariam was born to an Ethiopian father and a Canadian mother. She grew up in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. She studied English literature at Oxford University and the University of Toronto.[3]
In 2014 her then forthcoming memoir, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History[4] – the story of Edemariam's Ethiopian grandmother, Yetemegnu[5] – was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for a non-fiction work in progress.[6][1]
Informed by the author's 70 hours of interviews and conversations in Amharic with Yetemegnu,[7] The Wife's Tale received favourable critical on its publication in February 2018 by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins,[8][9] with the reviewer for The Times finding it "enriching",[10] and Lucy Hughes-Hallett writing in the New Statesman: "To read The Wife's Tale is not just to hear about times past and (for a western reader) far away, but to be transported into them."[11] Nilanjana Roy in The Financial Times described it as an "outstanding and unusual memoir" in which Edemariam traces a century of Ethiopian history through the life of her nonagenarian grandmother.[12]
Journalist Aida Edemariam: ‘History is lived by ordinary people in just as much vividness’
CLIFF LEE
PUBLISHED APRIL 19, 2018
UPDATED APRIL 19, 2018
Open this photo in gallery
Aida Edemariam.
“I love listening to her.”
For many years, on and off, Ethiopian-Canadian journalist Aida Edemariam would record the incredible stories told by her grandmother, Yetemegnu, whose life in Ethiopia covered nearly a century in which she saw – against a personal backdrop of parenthood, widowhood and political strife – a country transformed by invasion, occupation, revolution and civil war. Edemariam would put together a book proposal in the early part of this decade. The result of years of transcribing, researching and transcribing again, is The Wife’s Tale (Knopf Canada), a book lovingly and deeply imbued with Yetemegnu’s voice. Now based in Britain, Edemariam recently spoke to The Globe and Mail on a visit to Toronto.
All in all, how long was the translation process for the book?
Very time consuming. I had about 50 to 60 hours of tape in Amharic. I spent an amazing amount of time with the Amharic dictionary. I speak Amharic, but she spoke a very rich Amharic. There were many proverbs and references to church. It took about a year. There was a lot I knew, or thought I knew, because I lived there, but she lived in a different time. She was born a century ago and there was huge change in that century. So I had to get a sense of that, and once I had done that, I then went back and listened to all of it and translated all of it again. And I heard loads of resonances and dissonances the second time around. But yes, it was quite detailed and time consuming.
Open this photo in gallery
Why did you choose to tell your grandmother’s story as a memoir?
I didn’t really think of it as a memoir when I wrote it, I thought of it as a biography. You may or may not think there’s a difference there, but in some sense, there is a little bit of distance in the story. Because really, it’s not about me. I do appear a couple of times but it’s basically about her and I’ve very deliberately taken myself out of it. … Are you asking why I didn’t write a fiction?
Not a fiction. But you’ve crafted an incredible literary tale, where someone else might have taken a more literal approach to a family history.
I mean, it’s a very literary place, you know. She didn’t read or write, and didn’t read until she was in her 60s. But it’s a very literary place. Her husband was a priest and poet. It’s a place where your skill with language is prized, your skill with pun and hidden meaning is prized over making jewellery or singing.
But I couldn’t write a standard biography because I didn’t know half the dates. I could have literally spent decades chasing dates and I thought that was a waste of time. So you kind of become led by story and led by the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of religious festivals and the life cycle of Mary, the young girl who married an older man. When you think in those terms, you can use those resonances and just set them going and they give a richness to what you’ve written.
I don’t mean this to sound so blunt, but what’s so important about one’s own family’s story?
One thing is: Why not? And two: History is lived by ordinary people in just as much vividness and sometimes more, particularly in times of turmoil than it is by the great supposed main actors in it. I spoke to Edmund de Waal about writing a family memoir, and he mentioned a lot of things that went through my mind. Because, yes, “Who cares?” But if you pay enough attention to the particularities, then you can make somebody live on the page. He said it’s almost a test of writing if you can take somebody that nobody knows about and make the reader care.
The sure answer is there’s no particular reason for people to care, but hopefully I’ve persuaded them to care.
Since you’ve been promoting the book, do you find people are knowledgeable about Ethiopian history and culture?
No! (Laughs.) In England, people tend to think about the 1980s summit and Bob Geldof. And I’m very keen that that is not the only way in which Ethiopia is seen. Even the assumption of famine and dryness – the back of my English edition has an incredibly green landscape, the country was agriculturally very rich. But I didn’t write a guidebook. All of that stuff is important but in some way incidental as well.
The audiobook version must be rich in details from your tapes.
It was beautifully recorded by an actor named Adjoa Andoh. We spent a lot of time in the recording studio working out Amharic words – I didn’t quite realize how many there were in it. And I provided clips of my grandmother singing and talking. It was very cool, and also strange, to listen to a story that has long been in your head, in a different language and to hear a brilliant actor read it with an amazing voice.
I read recently about your father’s passing. My condolences. I get the sense that he was a great help in bringing the book together.
Yes, that makes it difficult to launch this because he was such a part of producing it. My father and some of her other children, but especially my father, was there for some of the interviewing. And he was there for some of the stories when he was a child, so he often thought of asking things that wouldn’t occur to me. He shared his memories and he was incredibly patient. He never complained. He came with me on some trips and it’s not necessarily straightforward to organize a horseback trip in the middle of his mother’s funeral, which was beyond the call of duty. He was incredibly supportive. All of my family were.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Briefly Noted
Susannah Kemple
The New Yorker. 94.10 (Apr. 23, 2018): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
The Wife's Tale, by Aida Edemariam (Harper). Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie bursts to life in this impressionistic family history. Yetemegnu, the author's grandmother, is married at the age of eight to a powerful priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Her days soon fill with wifely duties: she bears her first child at fourteen, cooks, hosts holy feasts. Edemariam anchors the book in these mundane rhythms, setting them against a vividly realized landscape. Political turmoil sweeps in like a dream: Yetemegnu is outside among the "pale gold domes of teff" when the Italians invade her village, in 1936; in 1974, when Selassie is deposed, she's watching the sky for portents. The book elegantly collapses the distance between the vast and the intimate, showing how history reaches even the most sheltered.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kemple, Susannah. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 77. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535820617/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6ac3d5d. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535820617
Empire of warriors
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
New Statesman. 147.5405 (Feb. 9, 2018): p44+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Wife's Tale: A Personal History
Aida Edemariam
4th Estate, 352pp, 16.99 [pounds sterling]
When Aida Edemariam was a tiny child in Ethiopia, her grandmother shoved her and a cousin into a cupboard and stood protectively in front of it while the children crouched "among soft white dresses that smelled of incense and wood smoke and limes". The country was at war, a tornado was roaring outside, and among the sheets of corrugated iron, hurtling "like dark leaves of paper through the tarnished sky", were volleys of machine-gun bullets. Panicky teenaged soldiers were trying to kill "the devil in the wind".
Lethal modern weaponry juxtaposed with ancient superstition, the fragrance of luxuries the first Ethiopian Christians would have enjoyed, harsh weather, a narrative full of sensuous detail and poetic imagery --the vignette, one of scores of comparable ones, encapsulates the character of this remarkable book. It tells the life story of that grandmother, Yetemegnu. The narrative begins in 1916 with her wedding, when she was eight years old. When the groom came to fetch her from her family's house in the once-imperial city of Gondar, disease was killing people in the marketplace. While she sat silent in the hut where, if she'd been a little older, the marriage would have been consummated, on the other side of the compound the guests feasted on food that had taken months to prepare. There was dancing, and ululations, and a minstrel "tossed rhymes like spears into the crowd". Only when the festivities ended, days later, did Yetemegnu lift her veil and see the man she'd married, and murmur astonished to the groomsman: "When I have children they're going to look like that!'
She had nine children, five of whom predeceased her. That husband, Tsega, was a lowly priest when they married but, although a curse laid upon him by his father prevented him from writing, he was master of the oral art of qine (sacred poetry). He went to Addis Ababa. After two years, he was invited to one of the empress's banquets. She noticed he was fasting and, approving, invited him to speak. He declaimed his poem of praise. It found favour. "What can I do for you?" said the empress. He asked for Gondar's venerable church of Ba'ata (destroyed by Islamists in the 1880s) and the wherewithal to rebuild it. "Of course," said the empress. She awarded him an embroidered tunic, a gold-trimmed cape, mules loaded with Maria Theresa silver, and the title of aleqa (leader of the church). With the suddenness of magical transformation, Yetemegnu, still barely in her teens, found herself the wife of a "big man".
He beat her. That was normal. He didn't allow her to leave the house. When she asked permission to spend a night at a neighbour woman's, the metal buckle of the belt with which he thrashed her narrowly missed her eye. Jealous, he hated to see her dance with the other women, despite her exceptional grace. It was only once she had children that she realised how lonely she had been previously. They had slaves. That was normal, too. The slaves carried water up from the river. But Yetemegnu herself prepared the food, spending most of every day in the dark kitchen-hut making bread and piquant sauces so that when her husband came home, bringing however many guests he wished, she would be ready to serve them. She wouldn't sit with them, but if Tsega was pleased he might give her a mouthful from his plate.
That's how it was for nearly a quarter of a century. But then Tsega's power and position were gone, as suddenly as they had come. He had annoyed someone (probably when he suggested that the church's tithes should be used to pay the priests). Imprisoned in Gondar, he told Yetemegnu that she, who had barely left their house for three decades, must go to Addis Ababa to petition the emperor on his behalf. And so she did. She could not save her husband's life. He died, perhaps poisoned. But for three years she persisted, waiting outside the courts, or in the anterooms of palaces, trying to clear his name, reclaim their property and provide for their children.
In the last aim, only, she succeeded, but at a terrible cost to herself. Haile Selassie was setting up schools to create a native elite. At last Yetemegnu had an audience with him: he decreed that all her children should be educated. One by one they left her--temporarily to go to boarding schools, but more permanently to enter a modernity into which she could not follow them. When her eldest son, Edemariam, returned to Ethiopia after five years of medical training in Canada, she came to the airport at the head of a great crowd that walked behind his taxi all the way back into town, singing and ululating. The festivities to welcome him lasted eight days. Lines of priests danced the ceremonial dance. Minstrels sang. Sheep were killed and eaten. But though Edemariam was polite, his mother could see that "something within him was sitting away from the hubbub, staring".
Aida Edemariam is the daughter of that doctor and his Canadian wife (conventionally, Ethiopian children take their father's first name). The couple moved to work in Addis Ababa, so the child, Aida, knew her grandmother. She was even able to introduce Yetemegnu, who was in her nineties and close to death, to her own daughter. But this book is far more than a memoir of a beloved relative. It is an account of a complex culture as it moved, in one lifetime, from the medieval to the modern. It notes the gains--the end of slavery, literacy, the telephone --but it is infused with a reverence for the old ways, for the young men dedicating themselves to God and poetry, for the stone-built houses raised by co-operation within the community, for the songs and dances and the subtle, fragrant food.
Yetemegnu's husband was present at Haile Selassie's coronation in 1930, listening to the priests chanting for seven days and seven nights, watching the deacons "dancing as David danced in the temple of Jerusalem--sistra clashing, drums beating, bare feet stepping, serious and joyful". The best-known account in English of this ceremony is Wilfred Thesiger's. To Thesiger, the mounted warriors circling in their finery seemed like Homeric heroes. Sympathetic as he was to Ethiopian culture, he could not but see it through the lens of European literature. Aida Edemariam, viewing the country's past century through her grandmother's eyes, brings us a more nuanced view, informed by a real knowledge of the mentality of those warriors wheeling and yelling in the sun. She respects the past, but she doesn't sentimentalise it. She has terrible events to describe, particularly during Mengistu's Red Terror, but she also notes that the eucalyptus trees, which make the countryside beautiful and provide so much wood for burning and for building, were introduced by the emperor, Menelik, in Yetemegnu's parents' time. Not every novelty is deplorable.
She talked to Yetemegnu and noted her stories. She interviewed her father and his siblings. A lot of what is in this beautifully written book, though, is the product of her own sympathetic imagination. It doesn't just relate the facts of Yetemegnu's life, but reconstructs her state of mind. It describes a rural culture: its chapters are named for the months of the Amharic calendar, beginning with the spring-like Meskerem and ending in winter. Religion shapes the characters' lives, so the book is laced throughout with prayers, and passages from the Ethiopian Legends of Our Lady Mary. Dreams are recorded as assiduously as actual events. Zars --disembodied spirits--and spells are treated, not with credulity, but with respect. To read The Wife's Tale is not just to hear about times past and (for a western reader) far away, but to be transported into them.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's most recent book is "Peculiar Ground" (4th Estate)
Caption: Girl, interrupted: Yetemegnu, the author's grandmother, who married aged eight
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. "Empire of warriors." New Statesman, 9 Feb. 2018, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357754/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=71c428f1. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357754
Pleading with the emperor
Michela Wrong
Spectator. 336.9886 (Feb. 17, 2018): p36+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Wife's Tale: A Personal History
by Aida Edemariam
4th Estate, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 320
Yetemegn was barely eight years old when her parents married her off to a man in his thirties. Before she could become a spouse, he first had to raise her. Her education involved beatings when she left the house, even if it was only to borrow shallots from a neighbour. At 14, she gave birth for the first time. Successive pregnancies came like waves. Some of the children died or succumbed to diseases for which the only known treatment was prayer; most survived. She was a grandmother by her early thirties.
In Ethiopia, it's a story that ranks as utterly banal. Millions of women have lived it and millions will continue to do so, development programmes and government policy papers notwithstanding. But this book is a wonderful example of how, in the right hands--in this case those of Yetemegn's granddaughter, Aida Edemariam, a strong, poetic writer--a seemingly ordinary life opens up to reveal the extraordinary richness at its heart.
By the time she died at 98, Yetemegn had lived through Italy's Fascist invasion, Haile Selassie's flight, the second world war and the emperor's subsequent reinstatement, a first failed military coup, the takeover of the Derg, the horrors of the Red Terror, famine, and the eventual seizure of power by a group of long-haired rebels from the north who installed Ethiopia's current government.
As a woman, her powerlessness was always a given, and in The Wife's Tale Ethiopia's turbulent history is viewed from the perspective of someone enduring, rather than moulding it. Edemariam focuses instead on the elements that immediately affect a mother and wife: the rhythm of the seasons and their harvest of grains and spices, the secrets of making strong beer and preparing fish, constant sharp observation of the natural world, a homemaker's pride in the endless procession of meals coming from her kitchen. Above all, every experience is filtered through the cycles and rituals of an Orthodox Christian faith which offers spiritual solace to the poor and marginalised while rigidly propping up a royal court and ecclesiastical hierarchy that keeps them in their place.
But like every matriarch of her ilk, Yetemegn was no doormat. When her husband, an ambitious, politically savvy churchman who had risen to prominence in the town of Gondar, was jailed after a falling out with rivals, she headed for Addis Ababa to plead for the emperor's personal intercession, the only way of achieving justice:
She was part of a flow now, all tending toward the same point:
ministers and sub-ministers and sub-sub-ministers who knew that
basic self-preservation required them to bow to the emperor and for
the emperor to see them bow, and for their colleagues to see the
emperor see them bow.
The process took years--she was widowed in the interim--and the author's depiction of a crowd of desperate petitioners, papers a-flutter, clustering around Haile Selassie's limousine in the hope that he will open the window just wide enough to take a few written pleas is a reminder of why Ethiopia in the 1970s was ripe for violent, Marxist revolution.
By the end of the book, so thoroughly immersed have we become in a medieval universe of church incantations, gruelling mule trips, spirit visitations, bare-foot bandits and public hangings, that the mention of cars, planes, telephones and even, at one point, a radio, comes as a shock.
I have a few quibbles. When balancing the need for accessibility with her desire for cultural authenticity, the author has leaned towards the latter, a choice which could lose her some Western readers. I ignored the 15-page chronology at the end of the book on the grounds that if the events concerned weren't part of her grandmother's itinerary, I didn't need to know them. But I found myself flicking backwards and forwards between main text and glossary for translations of Amharic words for various types of pots and shawls, honorary titles and foodstuffs. This made for a cumbersome read, which is a shame, as the power of Aida Endemariam's writing is precisely its ability to reach across the gaping chasm formed by time, alien tradition and unfamiliar mores, connecting up our common humanity.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wrong, Michela. "Pleading with the emperor." Spectator, 17 Feb. 2018, p. 36+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538713213/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bb85817. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538713213
The scent of a life; An Ethiopian memoir
The Economist. 426.9084 (Mar. 24, 2018): p76(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Haile Selassie, before the fall
A HOME-COOKED Ethiopian meal is a sensual journey, which extends beyond the warm flavours of ginger and cardamom that spice the languidly served stews. There is also the tactile joy of tearing and rolling injera, a spongy and bubbly flat bread, before using it to mop up sauces. Best of all is the whiff of green coffee beans roasted in a cast-iron skillet, which is carried around the table to give each guest a full measure of its aroma.
To read Aida Edemariam's "The Wife's Tale" is to savour the life of her grandmother, Yetemegnu. It is a life scented with ginger and garlic, cardamom and basil, which spans emperors, revolutions, invasion, conquest and liberation. Rather than cataloguing Ethiopia's turbulent modern history, Ms Edemariam stitches together the fragmentary memories and experiences of a single woman.
As is the paradox of memory, some of the oldest are the most vivid. Yetemegnu is married, aged just eight, to Tsega, a religious student more than 20 years older than her; she remembers the calls of children playing outside, and wishing she was with them. After the ceremony, at the start of two weeks of feasting, when someone starts to beat a drum, the sound is quickly silenced. Yetemegnu aches to dance, but her mother says that would attract the evil eye. "She would always remember that no one danced at her wedding," Ms Edemariam writes. "And for the rest of her life she would try to make up for it."
During Yetemegnu's first years of marriage she is not altogether a child, but also not an adult. Bossed about by servants who refuse to play with her, she watches out of the windows as donkeys, slaves and nuns walk past. Her education, such as it is, consists of being taught to sing the alphabet, psalms and set texts by a blind teacher. He advises Tsega that his wife should not be allowed to read, because she is too quick to learn and quotes the Bible in her own defence. So the lessons stop, and the physical abuse begins.
Tsega--who later rose to high office in the church--first beats her when she runs to a neighbour to borrow a pot. After his anger passes he soothes her, comforting her in her grief after her mother dies by promising to be a mother to her himself. By 14 she, too, has a child.
As she endures pregnancies and labours perfumed by incense, Ethiopia changes around her. In 1930 Haile Selassie becomes emperor. Five years later he flees the Italian invaders. Yetemegnu is swept along by her husband and household as they move to the mountains and back to the cities, seeking sanctuary. Her tale is filled with sadness and loss. "When were you happy?" the author once asked her grandmother. "I'm never happy, came the answer…All of my life is painted in tears."
Yet hers is also a life of fortitude and freedom. With motherhood and maturity, Yetemegnu grows in confidence. At about 20 she is preparing to visit a neighbour when Tsega tells her to stay. This time, after the beating, she gathers her children and leaves. She returns only after a deputation of village elders convinces her that he will not hurt her again. When, some time later, he raises a stick against her, she stares him in the eye until he lowers his arm. For all the violence in her marriage, it also contains love, courage and fealty. When Tsega is arrested and unjustly jailed, Yetemegnu petitions first the governor and then the emperor. After his death in prison, she mourns him as the man who had plaited her hair when she was a child: "my husband, who raised me".
Decades later, after the fall of the emperor, while retrieving banknotes she had hidden in the pages of a child's book, she looks down at the letters and suddenly words leap out at her. A woman who until then could only painstakingly scratch out her name finds sentences unfolding. As for the child who was not allowed to dance at her own marriage ceremony? Attending the wedding of two of her brothers, she sees a circle of women clapping their hands. She joins it, hands on hips, shoulders down, and dances, faster and faster, until she can barely move.
The Wife's Tale: A Personal History.
By Aida Edemariam.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The scent of a life; An Ethiopian memoir." The Economist, 24 Mar. 2018, p. 76(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531887034/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fb75761e. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531887034
Edemariam, Aida: THE WIFE'S TALE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Edemariam, Aida THE WIFE'S TALE Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 3, 20 ISBN: 978-0-06-213603-9
A Guardian journalist tells the story of her Ethiopian grandmother's remarkable life.
In this ambitious, elegantly descriptive, but occasionally disjointed narrative, Edemariam interweaves the story of her grandmother Yetemegnu's eventful life with the tumultuous history of Ethiopia. Yetemegnu was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar in 1916. Born into a well-respected family, she was married off to TsA?ga, a 30-year-old "nonentity" of a priest "from the sticks" of neighboring Gojjam before she was 10 years old. Against expectation, however, TsA?ga proved his worth to Yetemegnu's family by petitioning for, and earning, the position of chief priest of Gondar from the Ethiopian empress at the time, Zewditu, a year after his marriage. Edemariam's grandmother saw her husband's fortunes rise with the coming of a new ruler, the Emperor Haile Selassie, as she entered motherhood in her early teens. By the time she had given birth to her sixth child and buried a son, Italy had invaded Ethiopia and declared war on its former "ally in the Horn of Africa," Britain. After Italy left and Selassie returned from exile, Yetemegnu witnessed her husband's fall from political grace, his imprisonment for supposed "plots against the emperor," and his death shortly after his release. The newly widowed mother of nine fought to successfully convince the emperor to restore her land that TsA?ga's enemies had stripped from her family while stubbornly refusing to remarry. Yetemegnu then watched her children begin lives in lands as far away as Canada while Ethiopia descended into a long and bitter civil war. At times profoundly lyrical and other times fractured and difficult to follow, Edemariam's book offers a glimpse into a singularly fascinating culture and history as it celebrates the courage, resilience, and grace of an extraordinary woman.
A flawed but richly evocative tale of family and international history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Edemariam, Aida: THE WIFE'S TALE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1d4690c9. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461421
The Wife's Tale: A Personal History
Laura Chanoux
Booklist. 114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Full Text:
The Wife's Tale: A Personal History. By Aida Edemariam. Mar. 2018. 336p. Harper, $26.99 (9780062136039). 818.
Edemariams grandmother Yetemegnu married Tsega Teshale, a poet-priest, at age eight. As Yetemegnu grew to adulthood, she learned her role as the lady of the house in Gondor, Ethiopia, and raised her children. During her lifetime, she experienced crises and changes in Ethiopia, including the Italian invasion and occupation during WWII, Allied bombing that forced her family to flee, revolution, and famine. Along with the national tumult, Yetemegnu lived through personal joys and many tragedies, including the death of children and her husband's imprisonment. She petitioned the emperor to clear her husband's name and regain land that had been seized by other priests. Her determination inspired one of her children to study law. Edemariam, a journalist who works in the UK and North America, paints a rich portrait of her grandmother's full life, telling Yetemegnu's stories through lyrical prose interspersed with poetry, prayers, and legends. Readers will appreciate Edemariam's work--part memoir, part history--for its personal look at an eventful century in Ethiopia.--Laura Chanoux
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chanoux, Laura. "The Wife's Tale: A Personal History." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 22. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771782/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a03d5fb9. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771782