This book came to my attention at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, during one of the 14 events I took part in as the festival’s Literary Explorer in Residence this year. The event in question was called the International Bookshelf. It involved me discussing trends in world-literature publishing with European Literature Network founder Rosie Goldsmith and translator extraordinaire Daniel Hahn (whose recent book If This Be Magic is a fascinating exploration of how Shakespeare has been translated around the world).
We each shared some of our favourite reads of the past year. Jeyamohan, Bachtyar Ali and Hanna Komar’s books were some of mine. Julia Franck’s Worlds Apart, translated by Imogen Taylor, Nino Haratischwili’s The Lack of Light, translated by Ruth Martin and Charlotte Collins, and Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The Villain’s Dance, translated by Roland Glasser, were some of Rosie’s.
The Ethiopian classic Oromay by Baalu Girma, translated from the Amharic by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu, was one of Daniel’s.
Published during the 1980s, soon after the events it depicts, Oromay follows Tsegaye, a journalist and senior figure in Ethiopia’s Ministry of Information who is tasked with relaying the regime’s attempts ‘to fix the Eritrean problem’ to the public. The government’s solution to defusing ‘the sectarian time bombs the colonialists planted’, which see Ethiopia and Eritrea locked in a bloody feud over sovereignty to this day, is to launch the Red Star Campaign – a military onslaught inside Eritrea to subdue ‘insurgents’ and unify the territory. It claims this will take only three months.
Leaving his beautiful fiancée Roman behind in Addis Ababa, Tsegaye heads to Asmara. There he encounters the equally beautiful Fiammetta, along with a mass of old feuds and raw wounds that complicate, challenge and ultimately rewrite the story he believes about himself and the story he is trying to tell his compatriots.
The tone of this novel is wonderfully engaging. Written largely in the first person (with occasional, wistful interjections from a voice that calls itself ‘the author’), Tsegaye’s narrative is direct and often very funny. Girma has an eye for the ridiculous, drawing secondary characters in memorable terms – one official ‘has a small face and a bald patch on his head that makes him look like a squash’. Another is so cutting and angular in his approach that ‘even his Afro, though thinning, has sharp edges.’ Tsegaye is similarly open about many of his limitations and not above poking fun at himself.
There are also passages of great beauty, particularly the descriptions of Asmara. There, when dusk settles, ‘the sun, like a shy Eritrean bride in all her braided glory, goes to hide under the horizon, setting it aglow with twilight rays.’
These depictions flirt with exoticization. But in case we begin to wonder whether Girma may have fallen victim to some of Tsegaye’s propaganda, and be seeing Eritrea through the same reductive, objectifying lens that seems to inform the Derg regime’s decisions, the author leaves us in no doubt as to his subtle grasp of the mechanics of language. When Tsegaye briefs his colleagues on the vocabulary they should use in their propaganda, Girma shows us both the limits of his protagonist’s understanding of what he is dealing with and his own, humane and far-reaching grasp of the way people work:
‘So fix your bayonets and charge! I am referring, of course, to the tools of our trade, our pens and pencils. I should be more careful. We need to refrain from using violent words like kill, stab, beat, charge. As you know, the situation here in Eritrea is complex. Every family in Asmara has someone – a husband or wife, a brother or sister, an aunt or uncle – who fled into the bush. Our propaganda should not lump everyone together.’
When we believe we are being most empathetic and insightful, Girma shows us, we may in fact be at our most callous and blind.
Girma’s ‘war of bandwidths and frequencies’, and his consideration of the role of storytelling in winning battles, is only one of the aspects of this novel that make it feel uncannily relevant to now. Another is the consideration of leadership and what it takes to bring people with you. The novel features a number of charismatic strongmen, most notably the party’s Chairman, whose eloquence cements his hold over his subordinates.
But it is another kind of leader who ultimately commands Tsegaye’s greatest loyalty and respect. Colonel Wolday, whom Tsegaye accompanies to the front on the perilous mission to capture Peak 1702, defies orders to stay with his soldiers in the face of defeat. His fate is the most poignant of all the disasters depicted in the novel, easily comparable in its power to the death of El Sordo in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
It is in Wolday’s company that Tsegaye learns the meaning of the words he threw around so casually in his briefing. With this comes some astonishing insights into the psychology of conflict and the mental and emotional impact of combat:
‘After two weeks of unremitting devastation and hellish noise, you get used to it. You might even miss it. You don’t know why you feel that way – it’s crazy to miss an inferno. It’s one group of humans with clenched teeth determined to eliminate another group of humans, like beasts. It disgusts you, sickens you, and you hate yourself. Why did God make you part of such a vicious species?
[…]
‘When you came face-to-face with death, how did it feel? Were you heroic, bravely fighting on, or were you a coward, trying to hide? You gained some knowledge, learned new facts about yourself. What you discovered is that you’re not quite the person you thought you were. The image you had of yourself all these years – of your strengths, your softer side, what made you tick – you just found out that it is a myth, a lie. It disgusts you, sickens you, and you hate yourself.’
These reflections are particularly striking when considered alongside the work of Alemseged Tesfai, the celebrated Eritrean author who has depicted the same conflict in his fiction, drawing on his experience fighting with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. As I write in Relearning to Read (and have also explored in a review of his translation of Tesfaye Gebreab’s The Nurenebi File on this blog), his work features similar humour, humanity and unflinching insight into the personal horrors conflict exposes. Reading the fiction of two such towering talents, who share such facility for unravelling their characters’ fears, hopes and shame, but write from opposite sides of the battle lines brings home the claims made repeatedly throughout Oromay that this is a clash of brothers, a conflict made all the crueller by the many things its warring factions share.
The knowledge of Girma’s fate adds another layer to this. Oromay (the word means ‘done, finished, the end, it’s over’ in Amharic, as Tsegaye explains) was banned for six months after its publication. Then, on Valentine’s Day 1984, Baalu Girma disappeared, believed murdered by the Derg regime as revenge for his exposing depiction of it in this novel.
In light of this, the occasional interjections of the authorial voice in the narrative feel particularly poignant.
‘Do you remember me? If not, that’s fine.
‘In the beginning was the word, the word was the author, and the author was the word.
‘Tsegaye is asleep now, but his story continues.
‘Life does not stay still – it’s always moving, weaving together one existence with another to make its web.’
Yes, Baalu Girma. We remember you. Your work continues to reach new readers and speaks now beyond its moment, weaving its wisdom and insight into many other webs.
Oromay by Baalu Girma, translated from the Amharic by Oromay by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (MacLehose Press, 2026)