Novel
Mezghebe: Would You Say He Was Mad?
Abidu do tibluwo
Beyene Haile · 1965
Synopsis
A police captain, a relative of Mezghebe, questions him about a crime he has committed and which the narrative withholds for a long time, and first reminds him of his childhood in Adi Grat and the bond that united him with his sister Kidisti. Mezghebe then takes up the story, then Kidisti, who tells of her brother to friends during a journey from Italy to Eritrea, then other relatives. A painter in love with abstraction, he devotes all his time to an art that irritates his family, his friends and those around him, and each wonders whether he should be called mad.
Context
The author wrote the book at eighteen, in 1959, and published it only at twenty-three: the BnF holds an eighty-page edition, printed in Asmara. Tigrinya novelists were then writing mostly against colonial oppression, and his subject, art and the imagination that heal, found neither readers nor critics. He waited nearly forty years before publishing a second novel, welcomed as a new voice, while the first was enjoying a revival and was in its third printing. An English translation by Huriy Ghirmai appeared in London in 2013.
Who it is for
In Tigrinya, or in English since 2013, with no French version. The narrative passes from one narrator to another and constantly goes back in time; the reader has to piece the fragments together.
Prizes and reception
Ghirmai Negash sees in it a turning point of the Tigrinya novel, with a syntax close to Joyce; Mussie Tsehaye Mirach, a lecturer at Adi-Keih, regards it in 2025 as the founding text of Eritrean modernism.
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