Ethiopian women under fire

Abstract

This study argues that three contemporary texts about Ethiopia, titled The Shadow King, The Wife’s Tale and Daughters of Silence adopt a revisionist approach to foreground the female voice and its growing agency in the context of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935. The study engages with this argument by examining literary representations of women’s roles and experiences of war. The scope of this study includes selected primary texts of postcolonial literature with an emphasis on war, women’s trauma, Ethiopian women’s writing and gendered memory. It begins with an analysis of Maaza Mengiste’s representation of women’s evolving roles during wartime in The Shadow King, theoretically drawing on Florence Stratton’s concepts of inversion and appropriation. This work also analyses how Aida Edemariam blends memoir, creative non-fiction and vicarious writing to reinterpret her grandmother’s history in The Wife’s Tale, demonstrating how non-fiction can defy and manipulate rigid conventions to reclaim women’s narratives. It further examines how silence and trauma manifest on the female body in Rebecca Fisseha’s Daughters of Silence. This thesis uses gender, postcolonial, trauma, feminist and narrative theory as guiding frameworks. I draw on the concepts of African theorists including Oike Machiko’s contentions about why there is a lack of literary criticism of war narratives authored by women. I engage with Pauline Ada Uwakweh’s research about trauma and violence during wartimes, Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay, and Meredith Turshen’s theory about the transformative nature of war, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s research on violence reenactment and inter-generational trauma in post-conflict Africa. This study also draws on Western trauma, feminism and gender theorists. Among them are Irene Visser, whose research focuses on vicarious trauma and writing about war as a secondary victim. I also engage with Philip Dwyer’s studies of the memoir, and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s research on inter-generational trauma. The main question this thesis seeks to answer is: how do the selected texts collectively serve a revisionist purpose, offering new perspectives on women’s untold war histories and their enduring political and social impact on Ethiopia.