But with a vividly cinematic narrative, the author takes us through Yetemegnu’s recurring trance as if she felt and sensed the zar through her own imagination of Ethiopian myths and ancestral spirits. Tsega was born in Gojjam where he had gone to church school and where he had learnt the poetry of Ge’ez. Again, it was as if Aida was telling me the story of my own mother, who was also a child when she was first brought to my father’s house as his wife. Edemariam’s gaze travels from the “silver spears” of eucalyptus leaves to “wobble-humped zebus” and goats “plotting delinquency”. In this elegant account, Aida Edemariam has sketched her grandmother’s life in an Ethiopia that shifted, within 50 years, from feudal monarchy to Marxist dictatorship.

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. Yetemegnu, subject of Aida Edemariam’s memoir, who lived through the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s. We enter an ancient-seeming world of royal courts, courtiers, and the mania of an absolute monarchy that holds everything – from legal appeals to school places to office jobs – within its palm. 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. Despite an often anguished and violent marriage, Yetemegnu fights to clear Tsega’s name when he is arrested for his involvement with the Gojjamé, a resistance group mobilised against Italian occupation whose members were later seen as agitators by the emperor.Edemariam’s narrative often expands to cover the bigger picture – Italian occupation in the 1930s, resistance, liberation, political coups, revolts and famine – before contracting back to Yetemegnu’s life. By situating her grandmother as a central agent, Aida Edemariam tells a story that transcends the authority of the official archive, and its assumption to singular and credible knowledge. 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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs.

While she hints at a great and deep affinity with her grandmother, she lays down her boundaries firmly.Edemariam takes the facts of Yètèmegnu’s life – her illiteracy, her isolation, her submission to her husband and to Selassie – and goes beyond them.

Another exceptional moment is Yetemegnu’s “wayward” experience with the zar, a ritual that can only be captured by one’s own lived experience. In Edemariam’s case, it is the life of Yetemegnu, who was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar and died five years ago at the grand age of 97 (or thereabouts: the timeline in the book explains that formal birth certificates weren’t used in Ethiopia in the early 20th century). Along this magnificent and winding journey are many lives and relationships; Yetemegnu’s mother, husband, aunts and uncles, reveal their aspirations and desires. The biography is interspersed with prayers to the Virgin Mary and it is clear that in Edemariam’s eyes her grandmother is a kind of mother goddess, giving life to her garden, her animals, her children, her neighbours. We first meet Yètèmegnu in the years before the Italian invasion in 1935, as a child of nine betrothed to a cleric more than two decades her senior.And yet as Yetemegnu expressed the frequent violence that her often kind and loving husband precariously inflicts she also conveyed her aspirations and her rebellious stance that she continually conceived.