The Shadow King

Ettore serves the narrative as a deuteragonist and as a foil to Hirut. Hirut begins the narrative as an enslaved child, and she defies this role to assert her selfhood and become a respected soldier. Meanwhile, Ettore is a soldier who finds himself enslaved and questions who he has become. Both characters value their fathers’ advice and suffer separation from their parents. Though Fucelli leverages Ettore’s Jewish ancestry against him, Ettore is complicit in Fucelli’s atrocities. Though he kills no one, his recording of the atrocities in film becomes an act of violence. His tragic fall comes when, after complying with Fucelli’s plot to humiliate Aster and Hirut by staging them for pornographic photos, he must still report to Italian authorities. By complying with orders to violate Hirut and whip Ibrahim, the ascari leader, he forfeits any claim to the status of a bystander and must face the consequences of his actions.

Mengiste characterizes Ettore through the contrast between his actions and his deepest convictions, which come through in memories of his father’s advice. She links him to the camera, which he uses as both a shield and a gun: The camera is a means to distance himself from the violence around him and keep himself under Fucelli’s protection, but it is also the mode by which he commits violence.

Fucelli is the primary antagonist. Though a fictional character, Fucelli is an amalgam of military commanders during the war representing the worst of colonial violence. Fucelli acts with impunity as a frontier leader of a Fascist cause. Mengiste uses his escalating atrocities and hypocrisies to characterize the man, exposing the insincerity of his professed ideals, Fascist or otherwise. It is not Fascism that makes Fucelli monstrous, he is simply selfish, has visions of grandeur, and is willing to climb ranks and use people no matter the cost. Though Mengiste humanizes Fucelli by emphasizing that he acts to impress his distant and cold father, she does not excuse his depravity.

Neither his father nor fascist ideology account for atrocities like throwing prisoners to their deaths. Fucelli aligns himself with fascism out of opportunism rather than belief. He allows himself the services of Fifi, a spy serving as his Ethiopian courtesan, and protects the talented Ettore though he is Jewish and thus deemed a threat to the Italian state. He oversteps when he hangs Seifu’s son, Tariku, leading to a fierce vendetta with Kidane’s army. Fucelli falters in his conviction only when Kidane sends Seifu to assassinate Fucelli. The humiliation and emasculation of his near castration remove any remaining moral scruples he had, and he abandons the idea of a prison in favor of executing Ethiopian captives by tossing them off the cliffs. In the end, though he runs to meet the oncoming Shadow Emperor in a brave charge, he will be remembered as a butcher, not a hero.

As a secondary antagonist, Kidane serves as a mirror to Fucelli. Kidane occupies what might be the role of the protagonist or hero. He is the leader of an Ethiopian army in the Second Italo-Ethiopian war, but rather than cast him as hero, Mengiste uses Kidane to expose the relationships between colonial war and destruction and sexual violence. Both rely on similar power dynamics and ideologies of racism and misogyny. Whereas Fucelli represents the violation of colonialism on Ethiopian sovereignty, Kidane embodies the violation of bodily sovereignty through the sexual violence he uses against Hirut.

As with Fucelli, Mengiste relies on escalating acts of sexual violence to characterize Kidane. What begins as advice from his father to rape Aster on their wedding night becomes the tool by which Kidane asserts his own masculinity and competence when the pressures of the war leave him doubting his abilities. Like Fucelli, who commits atrocities and distributes pornographic images of Hirut and Aster to support a narrative of colonial dominance, Kidane uses sexual violence against Hirut to assert his own dominance and virility. When Hirut, who is simply exhausted from the pressures of her duties, yawns in his face during a nightly assault, he is emasculated, his methods and stories exposed as a lie. However, by allowing Aster and Hirut to become soldiers and serve the Shadow Emperor, Kidane seeks atonement by allowing a new story to grow of female empowerment. Like Fucelli, he perishes in the battle that overturns the prison. Their deaths represent the possibility of liberation from both misogyny and colonialism.

Aster serves as a mirror to Hirut and a composite representation of the women who led and fought in the Italo-Ethiopian wars. Though to Hirut she is a cruel enslaver, she also serves as a model for the strength women find in mutual solidarity. Aster’s character arc highlights the intersectionality of class and gender in power movements.

Though Hirut is the protagonist, Aster comes the closest to traditional depictions of the epic hero. Mengiste relies on the language of the epic and the association of Aster with light and brightness to characterize her even when she is committing terrible acts. Through the contrast between Aster and Hirut, Mengiste shows that regardless of class all women faced sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination. Though Hirut sees Aster as free and thus privileged, Mengiste uses the elevated vantage point of the Chorus to examine the ways even upper-class women face sexual violence and get used as political pawns. Aster sees in the war both a threat and an equalizing opportunity for women, and though she believes that her lifelong privilege gives her a right to lead, she is also right to recognize that the war is no time to stand on old social divisions. In this, Aster is heroic. By the end of the novel, the distinctions that separate Aster and Hirut dissolve. Both victimized by Kidane and Fucelli, they resist, escape, and become symbols for the entire resistance.