The Conscript. Gebreyesus Hailu
>The
Conscript
A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War
by
Gebreyesus Hailu
Translated from the Tigrinya
by
Ghirmai Negash
Introduction by Laura Chrisman
Ohio University Press • Athens
Translator’s Note
This is the first complete translation of The Conscript into English or any other language. Since 1995, when I first read the novel, I have had a strong desire to translate it as a tribute to celebrate the vitality of African-language literature(s). More than a celebratory gesture, however, my decision to make the novel available in translation was inspired by my wish to share this extraordinary story of human suffering and moral courage with my family members, friends, and colleagues in African and world literature studies, who encouraged me on several occasions to translate the book.
The Conscript is a magnificently complex novel both in its thematic concerns and in its form. Equally fascinating is the life of its author, Gebreyesus Hailu, who was born in a small village in Eritrea in the early twentieth century and who rose to become a prominent literary and public voice. This is not the place to enter into a long discussion of the book or to provide an extended biography of the novelist. I will content myself here with offering a few remarks about the themes and language of the novel; a brief profile of its author; some reflections about how the novel, set on the boundary of modernity and tradition, both engages with and revisits ritualized oral versions of the history of conscription in Eritrea; and my own engagement with the text as a translator. My hope is that the information provided will enhance the reader’s appreciation of the novel. I begin by offering a short description of the author.
Gebreyesus Hailu was born in 1906 in Afelba, in the southern region of Eritrea.1 At an early age he learned to read and write. He attended San Michele School in Segeneyti and in 1923 began his education at the Catholic Seminary of Keren. In 1924, he began his studies at the Ethiopian College in the Vatican, where he earned his licenza ginnasiale in 1927, finishing the program in three years rather than in the standard five. Hailu proceeded to earn advanced degrees in philosophy and theology, and in 1937 obtained his doctoral degree in theology, writing his dissertation in Latin. On his return to Eritrea, Hailu became an influential figure in the cultural and intellectual life of Eritrea during the Italian colonial period, and in both Eritrea and Ethiopia in the post-Italian era. He was the vicar general of the Catholic Church in Eritrea and played several important roles in the Ethiopian government—including cultural attaché at the Ethiopian Embassy in Rome, member of the national academy of language, and advisor to the Ministry of Information of the Ethiopian government—until his retirement in 1974. He died in 1993.
Acclaimed by its Eritrean readers as eloquent and thought provoking, this classic Tigrinya novel by Hailu was written in 1927 and published in 1950. Although fiction and nonfiction prose in the Eritrean language predate it, The Conscript is the first novel in the literary history of Eritrea and one of the earliest novels written in an African language. The book depicts, with irony and controlled anger, the staggering experiences of the Eritrean ascari, soldiers conscripted by the Italian colonial army to fight in Libya against the nationalist Libyan forces fighting for their freedom from Italy’s colonial rule. As Laura Chrisman insightfully notes in her introduction to this edition, Hailu, anticipating such midcentury thinkers as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, paints a devastating portrait of Italian colonialism. Some of the most poignant passages of the novel involve the awakening of the novel’s hero to his ironic predicament of being both under colonial rule and the instrument of suppressing the colonized Libyans.
The novel’s expressive language is just as distinct as its thematic quality. Particularly moving are the descriptions of Libya. Those passages awe the reader with mesmerizing images, both disturbing and tender, of the Libyan landscape, with its vast desert sands, oases, horsemen, foot soldiers, and wartime brutalities. (As the reader will find, it is uncanny how these images connect with the satellite images that were brought to the homes of millions of viewers around the globe in 2011, during the country’s uprising against its former leader, Colonel Gaddafi.)
A further essential aspect of the novel’s interest is its engagement with oral tradition. As Harold Scheub once noted, reflecting the conclusion of many Africanist scholars, “There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art, from interacting oral genres to such literary productions as the novel and poetry.”2 In The Conscript, this “unbroken continuity” is best manifested in Hailu’s use of language and the method he has appropriated to structure his narrative. The language is poetic; it is figurative, allegorical, and rich with proverbs. Hailu also makes effective use of (oral) poetry, which, imitating one of its several functions in Tigrinya oral tradition, he repeatedly adopts in the novel to punctuate a crisis or a transformation that the novel’s hero is undergoing. At the sentence level, too, Hailu’s language makes repeated use of the poetic devices of repetition and parallelism. All of these features are associated, primarily though not exclusively, with the art of oral tradition. Additionally, whereas the novel’s story progresses linearly in time, Hailu’s narrative proceeds by a traditional recursive technique of telling, which, subsequently, enables Hailu to structure the novel circularly. In fact, because the language of repetition and parallelism and the circular structure of the novel are so intertwined, the narrative structure of The Conscript echoes (or flows from) the poetic language of repetition and parallelism.
Hailu’s engagement with oral tradition is also clear in the thematic content of the book. Whereas The Conscript, as a novel, is part of a modernist genre in the literary history of the Tigrinya language, the story it tells, the images and memory it evokes, and the songs it reproduces are deeply embedded in the oral tradition, and therefore in the collective consciousness, of the people of Eritrea. Such stories, even today, are passed on as part of the oral tradition from generation to generation in different versions and renderings. Even though the Libyan war described in the novel took place a century or so ago, many families in Eritrea tell stories of fathers or grandfathers or other relatives who were conscripted into the Italian military campaign in Libya. There are also similar stories of conscription that relate to colonial Italy’s aggression toward Ethiopia from 1935 to 1941. Italy used Eritrean conscripts over an extended period of time to serve in different geographical spaces. There were thus two generations of conscripts. The first generation was sent to fight in Libya and Somalia from roughly 1910 to 1930; a second generation fought later in Ethiopia.3 The number of Eritreans who served in the Libyan and Ethiopian campaigns was strikingly high, relative to the Eritrean population of about 600,000 in 1935.4 Uoldelul Chelati writes that although, “in fact, often those [conscript] battalions were not composed exclusively of Eritreans but included soldiers from neighboring countries, particularly Ethiopia and Sudan,” the estimations are that “approximately 130,000 Eritreans served in the Italian colonial army between the years 1890 and 1935 with an apex of roughly 60,000 during the campaign invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.”5 During my childhood and adult life in Eritrea, I heard many stories about both generations of conscripts, stories sometimes told by the veterans themselves. My father told stories about his experience as a conscript in Italy’s campaign against Ethiopia (in 1935–41), where he ended up as a prisoner of war after the Italians surrendered to the British in Gondar, Ethiopia. Further back in time, my grandmother also told stories about her brother and his friends, who had undergone traumatic war experience in the earlier Libyan war.
Despite their essential historical and cultural importance, however, the oral versions of conscription that have circulated in the Eritrean culture tend to highlight certain features of the conscription history while glossing over other important aspects of the experience. The Conscript complicates those stories, evoking a historical and cultural memory that