Aida Edemariam's Blog
December 30, 2017
Telling the wife's tale
I began listening to my grandmother properly — and with a tape-recorder — twenty years ago, when she was already in her late 70s (she died when she was about 97). I loved listening to her: her use of language was so musical, and apt, and vivid. She would have recognised Chaucer, I sometimes thought, her speech had a similar earthiness, a poetic, sophisticated seeming-simplicity that arose partly from character, partly from the rich and very old religious and social background in which everyone around her shared. And partly because she did not learn to read until she was in her 60s, and everything was from memory – stories and jokes and dreams told and retold, in an oral culture that prized the ability to do this in the most skilful way possible. Eventually I had about 50 hours of tape, in Amharic.
I knew from the start that a standard biography could not do justice to her life, and spirit, and especially her voice — I wanted to translate not just the facts of her experience, but the tone in which it was told, the world that it evoked. I remembered literary experiments like Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje’s evocation of the life of New Orleans jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, or Hilary Mantel’s Tudor books — the utter physicality of them, the way we could almost see and taste and smell what they saw and tasted and smelled — and they began to show me a way in which it might be possible to attempt this. I went to Gondar, looking for all the houses she had lived in, even though the early ones stood only in memory, and most people who remembered had died. I traveled to the village outside Gondar where her first daughter was born, and the village where she had lived in exile under the Italians. I retraced her steps, through Gondar, through Addis Ababa, to the places she lived in, and through the grounds of Haile Selassie’s palace. And I kept talking to her, all the time, listening, watching. What I really wanted to do was to try to let her tell her story in her own words, a woman’s view of a transformative century (Ethiopia, like Britain, has always tended to tell its history through its famous men) — and to immerse the reader in a confident, self-sufficient world.
I knew from the start that a standard biography could not do justice to her life, and spirit, and especially her voice — I wanted to translate not just the facts of her experience, but the tone in which it was told, the world that it evoked. I remembered literary experiments like Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje’s evocation of the life of New Orleans jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, or Hilary Mantel’s Tudor books — the utter physicality of them, the way we could almost see and taste and smell what they saw and tasted and smelled — and they began to show me a way in which it might be possible to attempt this. I went to Gondar, looking for all the houses she had lived in, even though the early ones stood only in memory, and most people who remembered had died. I traveled to the village outside Gondar where her first daughter was born, and the village where she had lived in exile under the Italians. I retraced her steps, through Gondar, through Addis Ababa, to the places she lived in, and through the grounds of Haile Selassie’s palace. And I kept talking to her, all the time, listening, watching. What I really wanted to do was to try to let her tell her story in her own words, a woman’s view of a transformative century (Ethiopia, like Britain, has always tended to tell its history through its famous men) — and to immerse the reader in a confident, self-sufficient world.
