The Conscript. Gebreyesus Hailu
In The Conscript, Hailu provides a counterpoint to correct local Eritrean perceptions that either celebrate the conscripts as heroes or dismiss them as dupes. In creating Tuquabo, the central hero of the novel, who rebels against colonialism, he tells the untold story of those conscripts who resisted Italian colonialism but were forced to fight. Though Hailu creates a dissident central character to expose the evils of European colonialism on the African continent, his concurrent acknowledgement of an African native complicity—very clearly articulated in the novel—shows the tragic reality in which the colonized found themselves under colonialism. Ultimately, it is this deep understanding and analysis of the evils of colonialism—that is, the abuse and misuse of the colonized—that makes The Conscript distinct and important in the world of African literature. By the same token, it is the unapologetic ethical audacity to speak the truth to colonial power that defines Hailu’s genius as one of the earliest literary voices of African literature.6
As a last remark, let me also say a few words about the translation process. The project has been on my mind for a long time. Although I had worked on the project in fits and starts in previous years, this translation was completed during an intense work period of eight weeks in the winter months of November–December 2010. Working on the first translation draft of The Conscript (and the many subsequent revisions) has been as exciting as it has been intricate. I have spent many hours blissfully thinking, translating, revising, and editing the text. Beyond the pleasure that is associated with finding the “right” words, expressions, and syntax, all of which are crucial to render meaning from one language to another, translation has also helped me better understand how Hailu’s text is held together by linguistic subtleties, both verbal and structural, and by a parodying voice, a voice prevalent throughout the text and also one that Hailu articulates early on in the book when he speaks in the preface of an “ironic contrast.” In this translation, my effort has been to truthfully render the form, meaning, and voice of the Tigrinya original in the English text. My hope is that this translation does justice to Hailu’s extraordinary work, as it reaches now an English-reading audience, more than half a century since its first publication in Tigrinya.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the unconditional love and support of my family throughout the translation process. My heartfelt thanks also go to my friends and colleagues Steve Howard, Geri Lipschultz, Alemseged Tesfai, and Charles Cantalupo, and to my research assistant, Elizabeth Story, who read and gave me valuable feedback on the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to the members of the editorial staff at Ohio University Press for championing the manuscript and for their caring and enthusiastic production of the book. This book would never have become what it is without the editorial guidance of Gill Berchowitz, who gave me both time to work on it and deadlines to work against.
Of course, all mistakes and errors of judgment in this translation are mine.
This book is dedicated to my mother, Wahed, who always saw the wisdom in all, and my father, Negash, who saw the humor in everything.
Ghirmai Negash
June 2012
1 This section about Gebreyesus Hailu is taken almost verbatim from the biographical entries provided in “Gabra Yasus Haylu,” Encyclopedia Aethiopica (2005), 630–31; and Abba Agostinos-Tedla, La Lingua Abbisina (Asmara: Edizioni “Adveniat Regnum Tuum,” 1994), xii. See also Hailu’s preface to the novel, in which he speaks about his journey to Italy.
2 Harold Scheub, “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature,” African Studies Review 28, no. 2/3 (1985): 1.
3 For a fuller historical account of the different periods of conscription of Eritreans in the Italian colonial army, see Uoldelul Chelati Drar, “From Warriors to Urban Dwellers: Ascari and the Military Factor in the Urban Development of Colonial Eritrea,” Cahiers d’études africaines 175 (2004): 533–74; and Zemhret Yohannes, Italiyawi Megza’ati ab Ertra: 1882–1941 (Asmara: Hdri, 2010), 373–76.
4 4. Drar, “From Warriors to Urban Dwellers,” 549.
5 Ibid.
6 6. Parts of this section have appeared in my essay “Gebreyesus Hailu,” in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Introduction
Laura Chrisman
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was, until recently, widely regarded as the first major African novel, with supporting roles given to other 1950s African works by Camera Laye, Mongo Beti, Amos Tutuola, and Ferdinand Oyono. The canonization of Achebe’s 1958 Nigerian work, written in English and published by the London publisher Heinemann, had many serious consequences. One was the neat association of aesthetic with state processes. The publication of Achebe’s novel during Nigeria’s emerging independence from British rule reinforced a view that African literature only properly came into being with postcolonial sovereignty. Canonization of Achebe’s novel also sanctioned European languages as the unquestioned medium of African literature. Over the last fifteen years, however, scholars have begun major revision of African literary history. The assumption that African fiction properly began in the postwar era of decolonization has given way to a far less tidy, but far more historically accurate, understanding that in Africa, as in other parts of the European imperial world, colonized writers were engaged in producing important and original fiction long before their countries succeeded in the struggle for self-determination. Things Fall Apart is increasingly treated now as inaugurating the institutionalization of African literature within the Euro-American metropole, rather than inaugurating the literary field itself.
Scholars, and publishers, are energetically pursuing the archival expansion that this new literary history mandates. For instance, they are discovering and reprinting African texts from the nineteenth century, such as Joseph Walter’s Guanya Pau and the anonymous Marita, or the Folly of Love. Accompanying the growth of archive is the growth of conceptual and theoretical enquiry. In different ways, anti- and post-colonial thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Homi K. Bhabha earlier fueled critical assumptions that imperialism, as an ideological/discursive domain, exercised nearly total control over the cognitive horizons of colonized elites, writers, and intellectuals. This has given way to new analysis that accords both more agency to colonized subjects and more diversity to their cultural, political, and identity formations. Recognizing that these developed not only through the metropolitan-imperial axis but also through horizontal flows to other colonized and racially subordinated populations, scholars are reevaluating the nature of transnationalism itself. At the same time, scholars are now reconsidering the spaces within the colony; in particular, they are giving fresh scrutiny to the ideological and material relationships between early African writing practices and European missions.
If African literary studies are rapidly expanding their historical and conceptual understanding, the pace of linguistic expansion in the field has been comparatively slow, despite Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s ongoing and powerful argument, over the last thirty years, for authors and critics to prioritize writing in African vernacular languages. Anglophone and Francophone African literatures continue to dominate scholarly attention, at least within the metropole. However, there is growing institutional recognition of the Lusophone and Hispanophone literatures of Angola, Mozambique, and Equatorial Guinea (and, to some extent, the Afrikaans literature of South Africa). Outside of dedicated translators and specialists, however, African language literatures remain largely overlooked as the major cultural expressions that they are.
For these reasons this publication of The Conscript, Hailu’s major Tigrinya novel, is most timely. Its translation into English helps to reverse the continuing Europhone