Book review

The Wife's Tale: A Personal History by Aida Edemariam

The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

by Aida Edemariam

2018

The author’s biography notes she was once a student of the University of Toronto. She also attended Oxford. I was at U of T with her, mid-1990s. We had some classes together, studying English literature. Which means I am only two degrees of separation away from the subject of this deeply intriguing “personal history,” a biography of sorts of the author’s grandmother.

Good Reads provides a basic plot summary:

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.

So, what we have here is the life story of a girl-child-turned-wife-turned-mother-turned-widow and the cultural-historical context of the murderous twentieth century and the confrontation of various cultures inside-and-outside Ethiopia, modernization, technological revolution, colonization, Capitalism, Socialism, and Christianity of this form and that. The consequences of the quest for power on the communities that are the locus of its conflicts. The struggle to lead an individual life bending and swaying and sometimes breaking on the storms of historical influence.

I don’t mean to make it sound complicated, but it is quite dense. Where the story begins, the influences appear nearly medieval. Then there are tanks and bombers and electric lights and invading armies. There are broad ranging families and networks of women and cultural rules and norms about what it means to be a wife. There is domestic violence, which is tolerated even as it is condemned. There are children upon children and evacuations and negotiations to survive. Not all succeed.

Towards the end of the book, the author and her daughter appear, and suddenly you realize how far you have come with the protagonist. What a journey she has been on, what trials she has experienced and witnessed. As a literary production, this book is a marvel. What a wealth of details, gathered through interviews and research. The Wife’s Tale is a unique journey through the twentieth century, revealing layers upon layers of the creation of an identity, the persistence of a soul.

It’s marvelous, richly detailed, and understated. It is a life, well-lived and complicated. The author does well not to attempt a simple summary or conclusion. There is only is, Lenny Bruce said. That’s as true in Ethiopia as anywhere else.