She Didn’t Know How to Read, but Her Stories Captured History

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/books/review/aida-edemariam-wifes-tale.html

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THE WIFE’S TALE A Personal History By Aida Edemariam 317 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

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 church-and-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.