Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
♪♪Music♪♪
Welcome to Current Conversations I'm RC Davis Undiano.
Our guest today is the acclaimed novelist Maaza Mengiste she has
received high praise for her first novel Beneath the Lion's
Gaze and we're so happy to have her on the show today.
Maaza welcome.
Good to have you here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Could you take us back to a moment where in your mind you
became a writer?
Maybe a moment where you sort of committed yourself to begin that
writing journey throughout your life.
That's a...
I was in Los Angeles I was living in LA at the time trying
to figure out what I was going to do with my life.
I was in a job that I hated.
How old were you?
Now you really asking tough questions?
[Laughter].
I was...
let's see it was probably 2002 I was thirty-one maybe thirty-one
thirty-two.
And I was in a job that I thought was going to be a dream
job, and it ended up being completely the opposite I didn't
know what I would do with my life at that point I just had a
sense that I wanted to write.
But I hadn't I didn't have an active writing life I wasn't one
of those people writing short stories sending them off I had
not done a short story before.
Um but I had this thought of a book about the revolution in
Ethiopia because it affected and impacted my life and so many
people I knew.
But it felt like such a huge and unwieldy topic but one day it
was a Sunday and I remember sitting by the window, and the
sun was coming in that sunny LA weather, and I opened up the LA
Times and opened to a page that featured an article that was
about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the
military junta in Argentina.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the dirty wars.
But what the journalist had done with this history that was very
similar to the revolution in Ethiopia in terms of violence.
He decided to focus on the students that were impacted the
classmates that were left from all these other high school or
college students that had disappeared or were killed.
And also the mothers of those students and he had photographs
of these women holding up holding up their own photographs
of their son or daughter who had disappeared or had been killed.
And looking at that I saw Ethiopian's because I knew that
Ethiopians we had mothers holding up those same
photographs of their own disappeared or killed sons and
daughters.
We had those class pictures where you could X out how many
people were no longer alive.
We had those classmates that now could continue to talk as
survivors of what happened and what this journalist had done
that I thought was for me a moment of an epiphany.
He had taken this historical event and narrowed it down to
human beings to human lives.
So you really discovered your desire to write and your topic
your subject all at the same time.
Kind of yeah.
I mean I knew I wanted to write about revolution, but how do you
do that?
And you do it through the people impacted.
Now had there been somebody maybe before that when you were
a lot younger who sort of drew you towards writing a role model
or was there a writer that you particularly loved, and you were
always going back to that writer.
Is there anything like that back there for you?
Well you know from...
I'll go even further than my reading life and say that in
Ethiopia and Nigeria where I lived, and Kenya also where I
lived um my parents are probably some of the most charismatic and
energetic story tellers I have ever ever encountered.
My dad's the life of the party uh when he starts talking the
entire party just gravitates, and even my friends will come
sit around him, and they start they die laughing even to this
day if um he's there he steals the show.
And my mother is the same way um so I grew up listening to ways
to tell a story I'm not a good story teller like them um
verbally but I think I picked up on how stories can be
entertaining.
Did you...
once you realized that you wanted to write, and it was
going to be about Ethiopia did you ever?
Did you fight that at all?
Or were there other topics that you tried to write about and
just ended up back in the same place?
Needing to write about Ethiopia.
I think I did...
yes.
One of the things I thought I would do um I used to live in
Michigan and I used to live in Detroit, and I was really
involved in the art scene in Detroit, so my friends were dj's
they were Jazz musicians, they were visual artists they were
photographers, and thought well I don't know enough about a
revolution but maybe I can write about a jazz band.
So I would follow my friends who were jazz musicians and sit in
on their rehearsals.
I did a short film about jazz musicians and I thought that
actually was going to do and the story about Ethiopia kept coming
up.
It had to be told.
It wouldn't leave me alone at all.
You there's such a strong tradition of writers writing in
exile for one reason or another they're someplace else than
their own country, and then they reclaim it a little bit.
Do you think that writer yourself as a writer in exile?
I...
No, you know why I feel like I'm an American as much as anything
else.
That I am not in exile from Ethiopia.
I've made this country my home as much as anything else, and
English is mine now.
I claimed it when I was young, and I took it I kind of took it
over and made it work for me.
Um I don't feel that sense of being somewhere where I'm not
quite comfortable looking somewhere else.
Would you ever think of writing in Amharic the language of
Ethiopia?
No, I left before I was learning to write efficiently in that and
so really English has been the language that I learned in and
read.
How are writers regarded in Ethiopia?
How have your parents how did they respond to this choice you
made?
Well now they're okay.
[laughter].
Now they're okay with it, but when I was first starting out to
be um I hope they never see this show because now they're going
to find out everything.
But um when I was went into college my intent was pre-med
because every Ethiopian parent wants their child to be a
doctor.
That's that's the thing.
That's the top of the line...
that's the top so from the age of five my parents at a dinner
party would say what do you want to be tell them what you want to
be.
And I would say a doctor.
So that's what I grew up with.
And um I went into school and realized oh I really love to
read I can actually do this.
Whereas I know if I take chemistry next semester I will
probably flunk out.
So you were trying to do the premed thing.
Well...I was trying...
it just wasn't wasn't you...
it just was not going to...
it was not going to work um, but I didn't know what to do because
I knew that my family had made so many sacrifices for me to go
to school, and for me to be in college that if I decided at
that point to kind of go against what they had lived their whole
life to working for uh it was going to be devastating to them.
That's a lot of pressure...
It's a lot of pressure on me so what I did um when it was time
to declare my major very quietly without saying anything to them
um I signed up to be a political science major so that when they
called me and asked me what I was studying without lying to
them I could say oh well you know some kind of science and it
worked for a while.
They didn't question anything.
But then I didn't like Poly-Sci at all.
And I said oh what am I going to do?
And I just decided to just switch my major uh do English,
and that's probably one of the biggest fights I've ever had.
Well how are writers regarded in Ethiopia?
Are they professionals or?
Not at all.
Writers are considered the bottom of the totem pole maybe
singers are right down there.
[Laughter].
We're right at the bottom.
Um it's just not it it's not respected its...
So this was a shock to them.
Well it was a complete shock.
My father said, but you know English why do you take it and
my mother um they were could you just try law couldn't you be a
lawyer?
We they would settle for that, but it was really um they were
uncomfortable with the whole thing until they finally saw the
book you know but that was years in coming so they they were just
quietly uncomfortable about the whole thing.
How do they respond now because your I think it's fair to say on
the cutting edge of what's happening in the world of
writing.
And your book is read around the world, and every body's waiting
for your next book and you're a success do they focus on that
does that really come across to them at this point?
They're really happy now.
They're really happy because they my mother um lost some
family members during the revolution and it's something
she doesn't talk about very much.
But the book has given us an excuse to sit down and begin to
unearth some of that um and so I'm I'm still learning about all
of this as I'm going through, but it's that way it's been for
her kind of a relief kind of painful.
But they've been proud.
Are you saying that there was a lot of sort of hidden trauma
that came out of the late seventies in Ethiopia and people
are still trying to maybe connect with that material and
understand it?
Yes, it's still coming out it hasn't it hasn't fully come out.
I've the a lot of students Ethiopian American students um
young people who were born here from those parents who were
college age and had to flee Ethiopia during the revolution
who had children here those children have contacted me or
come to my readings, and they've told me that they still can't
speak to their parents about what happened.
Their parents still refuse to say anything, but now that
they've read the book they I think um one student wrote me
and said now at least I know the questions to ask my dad or
questions to ask my mom.
Maybe a little bit of an emotional map where it's not so
terribly overwhelming for people once they've read your book
about that period.
Yes, I had another interesting experience with an older
gentleman who came, and he bought my book he had read it,
and he came to my reading and he said everything your character
Dawit did I did exactly.
And he said now I am going to give this book to my son, so
they finally understand their father.
Wow.
And it was really I get those types of stories.
Now did that happen in Ethiopia or in the US?
Here.
Okay but he was Ethiopian?
Yes.
So uh your novel Beneath the Lion's Gaze came out in 2010 uh
its much acclaimed people love it around the world.
Uh why did you focus on this period of the late seventies for
this book?
It was what I remembered.
It was um they weren't necessarily the earliest
memories that I had the earliest memories were of Ethiopia when I
think of Ethiopia have all been centered on family.
On birthday parties on visits to friends on picnics things like
that um this was these were probably the most vivid memories
that I had that were things I couldn't quite figure out.
What did it mean that soldiers broke into our house?
What did it mean that people were afraid to talk at the
dinner table?
What did it mean that we go to a dinner party, and there are
soldiers stationed on street corners?
So this is a period in the late seventies after its Haile
Selassie's reign, and there's been a revolution, but the
government itself is now the derg is that how you say it?
Yes.
In the late seventies.
Yes.
There's sort of a new oppression coming from the military that
took over.
Yes, and it it at first students high school students these these
educated elite in many ways felt that there was hope even with
the military possibly being on their side um that there was
hope to make change, but the ideals of the revolution were
coopted by the military and those people who were
revolutionary um started to be labeled counter revolutionary by
the government and that began this really blood shedding
period of the military trying stamp out opposition.
And it lasts what about six years?
Well the you know the dictator Mengistu did not leave till 91.
Okay.
But the bloodiest periods of that revolution called the red
terror were somewhere either through seventy-six
seventy-seven um to seventy-eight those were the
horrible years.
Would you read us the first couple of paragraphs of the book
just to give us a sense of it a flavor...
Sure.
Of what it is.
Sure.
A thin blue vein pulsed in the collecting pool of blood where a
bullet had lodged deep into the boys back.
Hailu was sweating under the heat from the bright operating
room lights.
There was pressure behind his eyes.
He leaned his head to one side, and a nurse's ready hand wiped
sweat from his brow.
He looked back and his scalpel, the shimmering blood and torn
tissues, and tried to imagine the fervor that had led this boy
to believe he was stronger than Emperor Haile Selassie's highly
trained police.
This boy had come in shivering and soaked in his own blood, in
the latest American-style jeans with wide legs, and now he
wasn't moving.
His mother's screams hadn't stopped.
Hailu could still hear her just beyond those doors, standing in
the hallway.
More doors led outside to an ongoing struggle between
students and police.
Soon, more injured students would fill the emergency rooms
and this work would begin all over again.
How old was this boy?
Wow thank you that's very nice.
Thank you.
Um how did you pick the main character for this?
Hailu, he's a doctor uh he has a family uh somebody uh successful
maybe a little affluent.
Yes, at first I was going to uh the main character there was a
rotating cast of main characters initially I had a little girl
because that was something I could relate to.
Then I had [inaudible] whose the mother of the little girl.
And I had Dawit who became the counter the revolutionary.
But Hailu was always in the background.
Always standing there and the more scenes I wrote the more I
kept gravitating to how does a doctor deal with the physical
consequences of revolution of conflict?
How does a doctor deal with the moral obligation to heal in a
time of war?
And I I just I started moving towards him more and more and in
terms of um middle class I think by America's standards the
family probably would be not middle class at all.
But by Ethiopian standards he he was, and it was kind of a life I
knew being not rich but not at a poverty level but being
comfortable.
From an Ethiopian perspective, it must be shocking to see what
happens to this doctor because I was thinking about your comment
a few moments ago that doctors are at the top of the ladder in
that culture so if this family is vulnerable during this period
to this inhumanities torture and so on that's got to be really
shocking.
Yes, I think for Hailu believed he felt that being a doctor
having delivered the babies of these men who were going to
arrest him um might have given him so type of um uh immunity...
immunity thank you.
It might have given him some immunity, and he finds out that
just like everyone else he's completely stripped of humanity
and this type of situation.
You depict some rough scenes there's torture, and other
things in this book was it difficult to decide how much of
that to put in?
Because I know you wanted a kind of forceful rendering of what
really happened in this period how did you?
How was that dealing with the torture?
Uuhhh at first I wasn't I didn't plan I didn't write the book
planning on putting anything like that in it there.
I just I think my main intent in here is to tell what happened.
To tell what happened to these characters and I initially had
written several drafts of the book without these scenes, and
then I looked back at it, and I said if I tell what happened I
have really have to be honest as much as I can and do if I know
this happened then I need to render it in some way.
Um and also when I was writing this book my country meaning
America was in a war with Iraq and was in a war with
Afghanistan and the news that I was seeing on TV and hearing on
the radios was very much what I was what was happening in
Ethiopia what happened in prisons and how could I look
away from this when it was being confronted in daily life with it
continuing on.
I noticed to that there's a real maybe the word is compassion for
your characters.
Sometimes even bad people we see them trying to communicate and
you never turn anybody into a monster.
And some people somebody could argue maybe would be deserve to
be presented in a very negative way, but you don't do that at
all.
Was that of interest to you that sort of generation of a kind of
compassion in general for the characters all of the characters
caught in this very difficult time and difficult
circumstances?
You know I was really influenced by a 1960s speech by Albert Camu
um that's titled Create Dangerously, and in there he
speaks about the role of the writer in in condemning or
justifying certain political figures or political acts or
moments of evil or good, and he makes a comment that I found
really profound that the role of the writer is to write without
judgment that we are to sit at the feet of both good and evil
and simply write.
And I um it made a difference because I may have my own
opinions about some of these people involved in the
revolution um the really evil people, but my job as a writer
is to seek understanding rather than condemnation.
I think that really works wonderfully in this book, and
there's a I think a kind of message that readers are not
going to miss.
Your compassionate towards the characters and I think the
comment maybe then is that it's compassion that kind of opened
up some really ugly things in the book it's a lack of
compassion to begin with.
If that can go back in place, then people can sort of
re-humanize reset as moral beings.
And yeah well what happens when a country is in civil war or
when conflict is so close to home you realize that you have
family members that are on both sides of this of this war of
conflict what do how do you negotiate that?
And I think we it's happening everywhere around the world, and
it happened in Ethiopia and, so my interest is not in condemning
but understanding how I could sit across the table from
someone who was part of this regime that that affected so
many of my family members and sit at a wedding, and there's
someone right there.
And that happens all the time.
What if somebody said to you that they understood all of
that, and it was very effective for them, and they, therefore,
saw this book as a kind of social activism.
In the sense that your trying to reinstitute a sense of
compassion about a very difficult period where maybe
sometimes compassion was was what was lacking.
Would you be would you accept that that sort of label as
social activist or is that too far away from what a writer
does?
Yeah I feel like I wanted to tell I wanted to tell a story
that would help me understand the world at that moment that I
remembered.
In terms of social activism its its I get weary about that
because what it seems to imply is an act of resistance against
something.
There's...
it's a fight against something, but what happens when that thing
is no longer there?
Then who are you?
How do you define yourself if you're constantly writing in
resistance um and for me the point is to write and if it's in
the name of compassion that's I'll take that.
So if you're not centered within your own humanity.
Absolutely.
You're sort of lost anyways your...
absolutely...depending on an outside force to define your
position.
Yeah and I'd like to say it's a love in the purest sense of the
word, and if you don't have that as a writer um you will be
swimming in kind of lost in waters.
You're talking about treating these characters and looking at
these characters through a lens of love.
Yeah yeah.
Perfect segway over to Girl Rising.
How did you get involved in this movie?
This is a project that uh launched this movie in March of
2013, and it's still being seen around the country.
How did you get involved in it?
You know it was I got an email one day I happened to be I was
living in Rome at the time and this email popped up from
Richard the director saying hey I've been trying to track you
down and um would you be interested in this project that
targets girls education and you would be one of the writers that
we'd like to go to different countries and pair girls with
women from their own country and we have several issues um but
forced early marriage is one of them in Ethiopia any interest
and at first I said you know I lived in LA so I know how
projects come and go and I wasn't sure if it would happen
or not.
I was interested in doing something um, but I was also
wary about the charity, charity in Ethiopia and I don't want to
participate in anything that depicts Ethiopia as another
begging hand um because those are not the people that I have
seen or known or met.
Um but I spoke with Richard some more and the producer and really
thought about it, and it was a fantastic project and I loved
their approach of selecting...
They were interested in girls who were already making changes
in their life who were already braved a system and bucked
tradition.
And they wanted to feature them not as a helping hand but people
young girls who were doing what some adults might be frightened
to do.
So the idea was to tell the story of tell girls initially I
think they did nine.
Yes.
And then have a writer from the country of each girl tell her
story and then really I guess there's a larger point about
empowerment of people generally through getting an education for
girls.
That's really the yeah...
And I really growing up and being one of the first women in
my family maybe the first one to graduate college um I am the
first.
It was something I truly believed in, and my mother
didn't have that opportunity I um I understood finally an adult
why she pushed education so much for me.
Why she was adamant that was the priority no matter anything else
I did.
Um and it makes sense now understanding that history in
Ethiopia.
They do such a good job.
I've seen this film of course uh they look at hunger and disease,
violence, and uh there's some discussion of human trafficking
and so on and so forth.
And I guess the idea is that instead of feeling helpless if
you can just be part of one girl getting educated you really
address all of those problems.
There's a kind of solution really in the education of
women.
Yes I think and helping, helping one girl affects a generation it
affects her children it affects the women she's in contact with
the young girls she's in contact with in her family in her
village in her school and I saw that ripple effect with Azmera.
Azmera?
How did choose the girls that you worked with?
Um the crew uh for 10X10 had gone to Ethiopia and interviewed
I don't know how many young girls who had all in there who
had all said no to early marriage and sent me five of
those that they thought were the best four or five, and then I
was told to pick one.
Um, and it was probably one of the hardest parts of this
project trying to figure that out.
And now I know in hind sight that they had in their minds
they had apparently placed bets on who I might pick, and they
had their own favorite but um I surprised them all and picked
one that they never would have thought, and that was Azmera.
Why why would they not pick her?
Why would they not think of her?
For the director and the producer I think she was a
nightmare because she can't speak she's so shy.
She couldn't look in the camera she could she was I could barely
hear her voice sometimes and if you asked her a question she
would turn away and smile and duck her head and you know
that's not what a producer wants that's not what a director
wants.
But a writer I said um there's something how could she say no?
If she can say no there's a story there because these other
girls who were some younger than her were amazing they were forth
right they were they had negotiated with their parents
they were going to take their parents to court they had set a
deal with their parents they had all these.
They had done these things um and were very happy talking
about it on screen, but not her and I picked her.
[Laughter].
And there was um I sent an email telling the directors and the
producers my decision and there was a moment of silence on email
and then they finally came back and said well that's not who we
would have chosen, but it's great and when we went back...
when I went now at that point to visit Azmera and her family
there was a story there that none of us had expected, and it
was amazing.
The story is beautiful, and she's beautiful.
Have you had contact with her since then?
Um I have kept in touch with her through world vision who is in
that area.
And I know she's in school.
She is actively studying doing work her mother encourages her
and what's happening is that you see I now I have good faith that
her cousin she had a small cousin a girl she's going to go
to school.
And so you see that a new kind of tradition start.
Maaza we are out of time I wish we had two hours...
oh wow that was [Laughter].
It zipped by way too quickly.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
And sharing your work with us.
Thank you RC it's been a pleasure.
That's all for today's show I'm so glad that you could join us
this discussion with Maaza Mengiste we'll see you next time
thank you for watching.
♪♪Music♪♪