The wife's tale A personal history

Aida Edemariam

Book - 2018

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children. The Wife's Tale is an intimate memoir, both of a life and of a country. In prose steeped in Yetemegnu's distinctive voice and point of view, Aida Edemariam retells her grandmother's stories of a childhood surrounded by proud priests ...and soldiers, of her husband's imprisonment, of her fight for justice - all of it played out against an ancient cycle of festivals and the rhythms of the seasons. She introduces us to a rich cast of characters - emperors and empresses, scholars and nuns, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents. And through these encounters she takes us deep into the landscape and culture of this many-layered, often mis-characterised country - and the heart of one indomitable woman.

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BIOGRAPHY/Yetemegnu Mekonnen
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2nd Floor BIOGRAPHY/Yetemegnu Mekonnen Due Apr 14, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Harper [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Aida Edemariam (author)
Edition
First U.S. edition
Item Description
Originally published in Great Britain in 2018 by Fourth Estate.
Physical Description
xi, 314 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780062136039
9780008191757
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

AIDA EDEMARIAM MAY not have intended the title of her book to recall the Wife of Bath, of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Still, three themes fundamental to that canonical work are also at the capacious, warmly beating heart of "The Wife's Tale," Edemariam's chronicle of her grandmother's life in 20th-century Ethiopia. Chaucer's medieval classic unfolds as a storytelling battle among pilgrims traveling to the shrine of an English archbishop martyred in a church-and-state intrigue. The Wife throws down with a story about a knight who, to escape punishment for rape, embarks on a quest to find out what makes women happiest. (Sovereignty over their husbands, it turns out.) Edemariam's sublimely crafted tribute to her grandmother also involves sparring storytellers, religion (including pilgrimage and churchand-state intrigues) and the happiness and sovereignty of married women. Her book is a personal history because Ethiopia's public dramas and denouements are refracted through the domestic prism of her grandmother Yetemegnu's life. Yetemegnu marries at 8, in the mid-1920s. Her husband - a priest and church administrator - is two decades her senior and as much a father as a husband. He is also an accomplished religious poet, who, as a student reciting his verse in competition with his peers, was singled out for praise. By turns tender and jealously controlling, he beats Yetemegnu with a stick when she ventures outside their home. Once, on her return from a quick errand to a neighbor's, he hurls a machete, missing her by a hairbreadth. He is her master, as Italians were for a time masters of Ethiopia, ruling it with a brutal, repressive hand. Intimate history meets the sweep of imperial history when Yetemegnu finds the courage to resist. With her husband's rod raised above her, she stares him down with a steady, shaming gaze; meanwhile, Ethiopian guerrillas take to the hills to fight the Italians. Yetemegnu survives catastrophes both private and political: her husband's imprisonment, then death; her own plight as a refugee, then as a widow; the Italian invasion with airplanes resembling crosses in the sky; Emperor Haile Selassie's return from exile to exploit his own people; an army coup and the rise of a Marxist dictatorship; mass executions and land seizures; inflation and famine. Timelines in an appendix anchor the reader in these plots, but the book's chronology is more cyclical than linear. The chapters, named after months in the Ethiopian calendar and suffused with an awe for the landscape, direct our attention to the immemorial, recurring rhythms of earth and sky: of rain, sowing and harvest, of weddings, births and funerals. Before her death, as she approaches 100 years old, Yetemegnu asks the author: "What time is it now? What time?" It's an odd question for a woman who doesn't know what year she was born, whose life is demarcated not by clocks or consequential dates but by repeating rituals, including her 10 labors to bring children into the world. Childbirth, marked by thronged women repeating prayers invoking the Virgin Mary, is her life's refrain. At her funeral, priests carrying her coffin stop seven times to recite the seven chapters of the Book of the Praise of Mary, as mourners cry out "Mother of the world," by which they mean Yetemegnu as much as the Virgin. Devotion to Mary has a distinct place in Ethiopian society and its feminine vernacular. Yetemegnu, who makes the pilgrimage to Mary's grave in Jerusalem before dying, pays homage when she names her children: There's Edemariam, or hand of Mary; Teklé-Mariam, or plant of Mary; Zenna-Mariam, or news of Mary. The author draws on this cult of the Virgin to enfold her grandmother in eternal, biblical (rather than geopolitical) time. At the book's close, Edemariam reflects: "Wife, mother - imposed roles, unquestioned and in her time unquestionable; passive in a way, however fully inhabited and lovingly dispatched." Yet the role that Yetemegnu finally inhabits is not that of mother but storyteller. Her tales have been "told and retold for decades, shaped, reshaped - or sometimes, when enough time had passed - cracked open in the telling." In later years, her prowess with language, despite her illiteracy, impresses some as rivaling that of her dead husband, the trained church poet. "The Wife's Tale," which plunges us into her consciousness almost as if no seams existed between the author and her subject, as if Edemariam were channeling her grandmother's spirit, is in a sense the older woman's narrative gambit from beyond the grave. Her story is certainly cracked open in the telling, so assured and so transcendent, it could win Chaucerian contests. GAIUTRA BAHADUR is the author of "Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 20, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

Edemariam's grandmother Yetemegnu married Tsèga 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.--Chanoux, Laura Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Within the first few minutes, the chameleonic Adjoa Andoh quickly grabs listeners' attention with the high-pitched ululating trilling that will repeat throughout the almost ten hours of narration here. Ethiopian Canadian journalist Edemariam couldn't have found a better narrator to embody her late nonagenarian grandmother, through whose long life Edemariam also presents the multilayered history of 20th-century Ethiopia. Married at age eight to a 30-year-old priest with poetic tendencies, Yètèmegn bears witness to almost a century of jarring events, the private and public inextricably linked. The children she bears and those she loses, her husband's rise to power and his imprisonment, her struggle to keep her family's lands, her determination to raise and educate her surviving children dovetail with the tumultuous, often violent decades of Ethiopia's imperial rule, Italy's invasion, famine, coup d'état, dictatorship, and revolution. Where the text occasionally lags with unnecessary detail and disjointed digression, Andoh deftly commands the narration with an authority clearly reflective of Yètèmegn's own storytelling prowess. -VERDICT For cosmopolitan audiences in search of intriguing, historically linked true stories, look to this Wife's Tale both to entertain and enlighten. ["An intriguing depiction of a remarkable life": LJ 3/1/18 review of the Harper hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 Tsga, a 30-year-old "nonentity" of a priest "from the sticks" of neighboring Gojjam before she was 10 years old. Against expectation, however, Tsga 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 Tsga'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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.