The Shadow King
I have a fascination with random photos and ephemera, even if (especially if?) I have no connection to the people or events documented. Some examples of accounts I follow: @dear.fran, @oldirelandincolour, @oldschoolmoms, @owasowfoundphotos, @savefamilyphotos, @classicmyerspark. What others choose to document or save interests me to no end.
Here's what I thought about while reading The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste: While the small details of someone’s story might mean a lot to the individual, these specifics are almost always either tossed aside into total obliteration or reduced to a quick narrative arc. But, really, it’s the particulars that give us the most “human” story. This Booker-longlisted novel (2020) is Mengiste’s documentation of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War/Italian Invasion immediately before the eruption of WWII. Specifically, she highlights the Ethiopian women who fought. In fact, in her research (which included photographic archival research), she discovered that her own great-grandmother had fought the occupying Italian army. And she gives us the character of Ettore, a Jewish-Italian war photographer, whose photos provide color to an overarching historical narrative. “Every photograph has become a broken oath with himself, a breach in the defenses he set up to ignore what he really is: an archivist of obscenities, a collector of terror, a witness to all that breaks skin and punctures resolve and leaves human beings dead.” The photos bear witness to and convey the truth and what something “really looks like.”
Interviews with Mengiste reveal how important the photographic research really was to her writing, but also how careful she was to understand that while photos can help us understand something beyond the basic narrative, unknowns and particulars will always remain. "I have to see what is there without smoothing out the rough edges of history. It is too easy to put myself into the photograph and reach into the past to settle the pieces into some reassuring order," she said in an interview with the CBC.
Fiction + photography as literary device = a multimedia history lesson?
originally published on instagram