Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood (review)

Most modern Ethiopian writers and authors have customarily published in Amharic, the African-Semitic language that is the national tongue and lingua franca of Ethiopia. A few have published in Tigrinya, the sister-language of Amharic, and now the official language (alongside Arabic) or Eritrea. Very few have published in English, and certainly in comparison with other African countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, etc. Amharic and Tigrinya are very "challenging" tongues, as all éthiopisants will readily attest. Consequently, Ethiopia is little known to the outside world. The present novel, an autobiography of an Ethiopian émigré's boyhood and maturity, the European-type Bildungsroman, is, then, most welcome. The work is divided into three sections ("books")—sunrise, clouds, and storm—and "a brief epilogue." Acknowledgments (too brief, see below) and a map conclude the work. The first "book," which traces the author's birth (1958) to the first stirrings of the Ethiopian Revolution (1972), is the shortest of the three, and consists of a chain of lyrical vignettes of the life, lore, and customs of the author's native Jijiga, the last major Ethiopian town before the Somalia border. Often the tone and style wax poetical, and this first "book" often reads like a true pastoral idyll. The other two "books," however, in rather sharp contrast, are longer and more detailed, dealing with the Revolution and its aftermath (ca. 1972-84, ff. to 1991), and are necessarily more subdued, sober, and somber in tone and texture, as the somewhat "innocent" child-adolescent is rudely forced to very quickly become a mature young adult directly involved first in student protests and demonstrations, and later in guerilla warfare. One notes, for example, key words in the various sections' titles: devil, exorcist, fall, thrust, besiege, retire, alien, darkness, snowfall, enfeebled, eclipse. Although very "black," these "books" too often adopt an aesthetic mode that provides a quite effective foil and counterfoil to the harsh realities of the author's situation and that of his homeland-nation Ethiopia.

A recurring motif in the work is that of the hyena. As the author writes, hyenas are "the most common, notorious predators in Ethiopia" (24). Children are taught that if they disobey their parents and elders, they will fall prey to the hyenas and "end up in the hyena's belly" (7), whence the title of the autobiographical memoir. The metaphor is clear enough in its application first to Jijiga, "which destroyed its young" (5), and later to all Ethiopia. Indeed, the keyword hyena appears in all "books" of the memoir (esp. 35-39, 51, 115, 221) and acts as a unifying element for the whole. The technique is similar to the jackal theme that the author used in his earlier, first novel, The God Who Begat a Jackal. This second novel, however, is more mature and polished, and the editors at Picador (St. Martin's Press) deserve more than the rather perfunctory thanks noted at the end of the memoir (why not, at the least, at the beginning?). Indeed, a great deal of editing is clearly implied in the flowing limpid, idiomatic, and generally vivid and at times even gripping and witty English. One error in translation was noted: "bronze and gold" (41) should be "wax and gold," a key concept in Ethiopian rhetoric and culture, as noted in the anthropologist Donald Levin's now-classic work by the same name (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972). Some Ethiopian spellings in English also seem, at the least, "idiosyncratic." One notes kinae (40-41), much more commonly kine or gine. Also, the ubiquitous error in the late Emperor's name. He himself wrote it Sellassie (double-l, double-s).

The novel was a New York Times Book Review editor's choice and the winner of the Governor General's Award. These memoirs of an Ethiopian boyhood offer the interested reader a picture of Ethiopia "from the inside out" in...