Beneath the lions gaze pdf download

Beneath the lion's gaze : Maaza Mengiste : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

O f the many great traumas of 20th-century Ethiopia — invasion by Mussolini, war with Eritrea, with Sudan, with Somalia, famine after famine, two violent regime changes — arguably the greatest was the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie in , and the replacement of hundreds of years of imperial rule with a totalitarian Marxist state. Perhaps that's why Maaza Mengiste, whose family fled when she was four, and who lost three uncles in the revolution, can't quite bring herself to name the man who presides over the devastation charted in her first novel. The emperor keeps his name, but Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam becomes Major Guddu — an interesting choice for anyone who speaks Amharic. Mengiste tells her story through one family — a doctor, Hailu, his two sons Dawit and Yonas, their partners and friends and domestic staff — and, confidently, economically, makes the reader care for them. Partly this is because she has made the wise decision not to step back too much, explaining factions, ideologies, geopolitics, but instead steps in: this is a book anchored to the body, vivid with smells and fears and violations. It begins on an operating table, where Hailu is trying to patch up a young protester shot by the emperor's police; later, after the emperor has fallen, a teenager will be brought to him, so badly tortured that he risks his life to help her; a major strand of plot involves Dawit collecting the dead bodies abandoned each night on the roadsides, for the hyenas to eat.