Novel
Defiance
Abe Gubegna · 1975
Synopsis
In 1937, in occupied Addis Ababa, an old fitawrari is arrested, and his family experiences the occupier's dungeons along with him. General Angelo, who holds his fate in his hands, agrees to release him on one condition: that his daughter Aster become his concubine. Around the house, the city is divided between those who serve the Italians and those who join the patriots in the hills, while the atrocities of the Fascists follow one upon another.
Context
The book appeared in 1975 in Addis Ababa, from Oxford University Press. The manuscript had been examined for that publisher's Three Crowns series, which kept it only for the domestic market: it was therefore not distributed outside the country. It is the second of the two books its author wrote in English, after a play of 1964, the first that an Ethiopian had written in that language; it takes up material already treated in Amharic. Its author was returning from the international writing programme of the University of Iowa, where he had spent the year 1973.
Who it is for
A novel in English, not translated into French. The fitawrari is a military title of the old nobility, and Italy occupied the country from 1936 to 1941.
Prizes and reception
It is through this book that its author is read outside Ethiopia, and postcolonial studies have taken it as an object of study.