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Maaza Mengiste

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Fiction gives me the right to do it.

Maaza Mengiste (born 1974) is an Ethiopian-American author.

Quotes

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  • Maybe we have to allow our discomfort as another consequence of the violence depicted. Our shared confusion and disgust can bind us to those who are suffering, rather than draw us away from them. They too have had to witness. To deny our own human reactions makes it easier to deny the humanity of those who are photographed. Though we cannot change what has happened, we can alter the symbolism attached to the images. Photographs can be more than a reminder of cruelty and the inevitable aftermath of war. There are narratives unfolding right now in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo that can be rewritten. We have the ability to strip away what we’re supposed to see – just another African victim – and gaze upon what we should: a human being. But first, we have to look.
  • It seems that every new writer with any remote connection to the continent of Africa, either willingly or unwillingly, has first to wrestle with this question of identity before talking about what should matter most: their book...we should focus on the ability of the story to immerse us so fully in the world that has been constructed, that it feels a bit like home.
  • who is to judge what makes a "real African"? It is almost impossible to apply a single identity to an entire racial or ethnic group, much less to an entire continent. As individuals, we are each comprised of a series of contradictions. We are not neatly constructed sets of qualities. At our best, we should defy simple categorisation. It is living with difficult choices and easy accommodations that makes us human and, if we're lucky, keeps us interesting. It is from within contradictory existences that some of our greatest works of literature have been born.

Shadow King (2019)

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  • She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones.
  • Here is the truth he wants to ignore: that what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave.
  • What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.
  • The routine dulls the terror.
  • We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction.
  • Make living your act of defiance. Record it all.
  • Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?
  • My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.
  • He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish.
  • She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside.
  • What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.
  • These aren't the days to pretend you're only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We're more than this.
  • She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever.

from interviews/conversations

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  • in many ways, Ethiopia is an oral culture., I spent a lot of time listening to stories and histories told around dinner tables or in the sitting room. The stories my grandfather would tell were often about the Italo-Ethiopian wars, both the first and the second, and also life lessons. Those stories of my grandfather's really informed how I viewed-history, how I viewed Ethiopia; what it meant to be Ethiopian. Those were my books, the stories that I learned. When I think back to the stories that I would hear, especially when my parents would tell stories, that cadence in which they told them, and the momentum they had while telling it, that's something I am always trying to emulate in my writing. So I count them as an influence as much as anything that I've read.
    • in The Writer's Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager (2020)
  • It was not until a revolution tore my country apart that I began to understand how war could render decent people unrecognisable. Only when I had felt real terror did I begin to comprehend the many ways that conflict can devour us without spilling a drop of blood. (2020)
  • Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy.
  • Some of my favorite writers are those who break form. I wanted to see if I could do that under their tutelage. I’m really proud of being able to combine the stories of the Ethiopians and the Italians, to force questions about both of them, about loyalty, about racism, about being subjugated by the very people who should be protecting you. These were the questions I wanted to bring forward.
  • I write fiction that revolves around archival research and historical events. What I search for in documented history: what happened, is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out. I go back to something Breyten Breytenbach once told me, that fiction tells a truth that history cannot. I lean into fictive truths.
  • What is war? You send soldiers out and, although nobody wants to say it, you know a certain number will be killed, and you hope there will be fewer than the casualties on the other side. War is dealing with human beings as objects. (2017)
  • part of what I’ve realized with this [second] book is that creativity is always about running against and into yourself. In every way. (2017)
  • Fiction gives me the right to do it. It's not an autobiography. I did have the right to tell this story. My position is that you write from the place that you are, and it's not a detriment, and it's not something that undermines any kind of authenticity. I had to understand very early on that I'm writing this book as an American, with very, very strong ties to Ethiopia—and a deep love, my family is there—but ultimately, I am writing it with an American way of looking at things. That doesn't mean that the story is not authentic. Or then you have to question what "authentic" means…
    • On the questions of authenticity regarding her novel The Shadow King, in Maaza Mengiste, "Interview: Maaza Mengiste", Post45 (October 17, 2014)

in World Literature Today (2014)

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  • I think fiction gives us a door into what is actually happening around us. There are those who don’t trust fiction, they will read history or biography, but they don’t understand that those forms of narrative are also constructed.
  • I think what writing should be at its essence is a creative expression, it should be informed by the needs of the story, by the dictates of your characters…I feel like I can write any character I want—an African, a European, a writer can do anything, it just has to feel true to the story.
  • What is profound about fiction is that it creates a place where we can imagine the possible futures of these kinds of movements. Those are the kinds of questions we have to ask as writers.
  • There is no war that does not impact the lives of children, so children and what happens to them in migration or conflict are important to me, and we generally don’t hear enough about it. And it’s difficult because they don’t know yet how to express their perspectives very well, so I’m interested in that, how their vocabulary doesn’t yet capture what they are seeing and feeling. As a writer, that becomes an interesting vehicle through which to tell a story.
  • The thing that is exciting about any project or any book is that you have to push yourself, you have to push beyond what makes you comfortable.

Quotes about Maaza Mengiste

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  • Recently the things that I’ve enjoyed reading are writers from Africa, like Maaza Mengiste, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. These are people who are doing brilliantly well I think, and in both of those cases, they’ve just published their second novels. So very early in their writing careers.
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