The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History: Winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019

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In other words, Aida locates the past in such a way that seems to converge with her own memory and identity. Yètèmegnu’s husband, Tsèga, is the central force in her life but he is shadowy, at times brutal, at other times tender, a talented but low-status man trying to climb the ecclesiastical pole.

With a housewife’s view of history, Yètèmegnu witnesses first-hand the changes – in the food market, the rental market, in education, and in attitudes – that herald the end of Selassie’s rule in 1974.It was Zora Neale Hurston who stated in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God that the black woman “is the mule of the world”.

The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. Living the cloistered life of a cleric’s wife, Yètèmegnu is forbidden from playing with other children or, after a few short lessons, learning to read. Another exceptional moment is Yetemegnu’s “wayward” experience with the zar, a ritual that can only be captured by one’s own lived experience. Within her small, pastoral world she is treated as a noble; her larder brims with crops from her husband’s peasant-tilled fields. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting.This claustrophobic world is soon punctured by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the exile of Emperor Haile Selassie to Britain. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel. Born into a landowning family in the Gondar region in the north of the then Abyssinian empire, Yètèmegnu boasts distant royal connections. After his restoration in 1941, Yètèmegnu falls back into an enervating cycle of childbirth and illness, the narrative slackening as many years pass with little change.

She describes how her father went to study in Canada and there met his wife (Edemariam’s mother), but she does not dwell on her birth, early life in Ethiopia, or departure. Edemariam, a Guardian journalist, elucidates how the invasion was resisted by some and welcomed by others.While it was Yetemegnu who told the stories to her granddaughter Aida, in the book it is as though their two voices have merged. She takes us from the Italian occupation, to the 1960 coup d’état against Emperor Haile Selassie, to the revolution of 1974 and back again to the ingenuities of the Orthodox church, and to a sensibility of Ethiopian aesthetic. She alludes to a couple of trips back (she now lives in Oxford), but we learn nothing of her possible deracination or her emotional relationship with Ethiopia now.