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language: Tigrinya (English tr. Ghirmai Negash)
country: Eritrea
year: 1950
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 5.12.25
He put down his gun beside him, knelt down before his parents, and asked: “My mother and father bless me, for I do not know what my fate will be in Tripoli.”
so begins Gebreyesus Hailu’s The Conscript — subtitled in this edition A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War — an early work of Eritrean fiction (written ca. 1927, published 1950), translated from Tigrinya by Ghirmai Negash. it is a short book, only 57 pages, that manages to be both broad in scope and brisk in pace: even when the narrator is going on extended tangents about anti-Arab stereotypes in colonial Eritrea, it never feels dense.
the novel follows — notionally, anyway — a young man named Tuquabo who, attracted by talk of military virtues and pushed by gendered expectations (“The youth were singing, ‘He is a woman who refuses to go to Libya’”), joins the Italian colonial army as an askari to fight in the Italo-Turkish War. of course he regrets this decision, both because of the hardships of war and, crucially, because he begins to come into a political consciousness as a colonized subject: faced with the Bedouin fighters resisting the Italian conquest of their homeland, Tuquabo comes to see that the only people who will benefit from this war are the Italians.
I say it notionally follows Tuquabo because it does so fairly distantly, and it is clear that Tuquabo is serving not as a main character, as such, but rather as an exemplary character: his situation is common to many Eritrean soldiers enlisted in or conscripted by the Italian army. while initially the narration seems to be in third person, as Tuquabo sets out the narrator begins to occasionally speak in first person, as well. he is never personally present in the scene, but it is clear that the narrator, too, fought in this war (though in fact Hailu was born in 1906 and is writing based not on his own experience but rather on firsthand accounts he heard from veterans). this double perspective lets the narrator invoke personal experience of, for example, the heat of desert sands, while also remaining distanced from the specifics of Tuquabo’s experience and being able to speak sociologically of the broader conditions of Eritrea, Libya, and colonized Africa writ large.
veteran Lleu’s review readers will know that I abhor the “informative” mood, but in this case I think it’s warranted, because the narration is so consistently presented as, precisely, informative. the narrator is attempting to convey the experience of the askari in Libya to an audience he assumes will not have the frame of reference to fully understand either the chaos of a battlefield where three conflicting orders of battle — as it were — are operative or the horror of conscripted troops delirious with thirst in an unfamiliar desert landscape, abandoned as expendable by their colonial officers.
the book covers a great deal of ground, from its initial, brief portrait of life in rural Eritrea under Italian rule to its account of the disorienting sea journey from Massawa to Derna and the askari’s initial impressions of Libya. here the tone is sociological, as the book reflects on inter-African prejudices — the Sudanese inhabitants of Port Sudan who see the askari as essentially slaves; the Eritrean askari who see themselves as superior to the Black Sudanese; the askari’s anti-Muslim prejudices, reinforced by the Italians’ promotion of anti-Arab stereotypes (which the novel interrogates, though it does not altogether abandon them); and conversely the Arabs’ disdain for these foreign soldiers who are fighting Europeans’ wars. while the novel’s unnamed narrator is clearly Eritrean and sympathetic to its Eritrean protagonists, he is also critical of the ways Eritreans/Ethiopians (grouped together as Habesha), Sudanese, and Arabs are divided from each other: the novel is unequivocal that the real enemies are the Italians and other colonizers, and the narrator laments — rather ahistorically — that the Eritreans did not resist the Italian occupation.
I was struck, though, by the novel’s treatment of war: it is clear that this particular war is unjust — that the Bedouin of Libya are right to fight to defend their home, and the askari are wrong to be there fighting the Italians’ battles. at times, though, it sounds as though the problem is not that nobody should be attempting to invade and occupy someone else’s land but rather that it is the Italians and not the Eritreans — or the Habesha more broadly — who are benefiting from the war:
In the end, those [Arabs] who had horses fled to safety and those who didn’t were either killed or captured. And so it ended with full victory for the Habesha. No, I am wrong. It was for the Italians.
which is a little bit unsettling, and undermines, to an extent, the novel’s anticolonial politics.
nonetheless, it is an engaging, quick, and overall enjoyable read, both aesthetically interesting in its mix of narrative styles (it also incorporates some poetry) and historically interesting as the first Eritrean novel and as an early African-language novel.
moods: informative, polemic, reflective, sad