‘Messiness’: Maaza Mengiste looks with Primo Levi

This chapter starts from Hortense Spillers’s renowned essay, ‘Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an American grammar book’, where she contrasts ‘flesh’ as undifferentiated corporality and ‘body’ as personhood; a difference articulated through the category of race and the history of black enslavement. Her account of the computation of the enslaved resonates with Maaza Mengiste’s description of human destruction caused now in perilous crossings of the Mediterranean by the sea and by bureaucratic indifference. In order to gain some measure of the task faced in expressing and accounting for such destruction, Mengiste turns to Primo Levi and his ongoing commitment to language ‘capable of carrying a terrible and stupefying history’. In remarks delivered at the celebration of Primo Levi’s legacy at the United Nations in 2016, she argues that Levi’s reclaims the human by refusing the anonymity of ‘flesh’ to lay persistent claim to the fact that ‘he is not a number […] not an entry in a ledger with dates’. For Mengiste, the Mediterranean, like the Lager, can be seen in terms of what Spillers calls ‘a locus of confounded identities’.

This chapter draws on Levi and Spillers to read Maaza Mengiste’s novel The Shadow King (2019), a re-writing of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 from the perspective of the women who actively participated in the armed resistance struggle. At the end of the novel, Hirut, the main female character, recites the names of those murdered by chemical weapons deployed by the Italian forces. In addition to revising the gendered discourse of Italian invasion and Ethiopian resistance, Mengiste also revises its visual lexicon through the attentive dissection of its photographic record. Ettore Navarra, the novel’s Italian-Jewish soldier-photographer, who remains in Ethiopia after the collapse of the Italian Empire, is an implicated and conflicted embodiment of colonial entitlement. In her novel, Mengiste does not simply set the historical record straight, but sets out a restorative human grammar through which to articulate Italian colonialism’s ledger of ‘flesh’ and the contemporary lexis of race.