A reminder grandparents were people before us
The Wife’s Tale inspired by Aida Edemariam’s grandmother
When Aida Edemariam’s paternal grandmother Yetemegnu was 8 years old, she left her childhood behind, exchanging a world of play for her new role as bride to a priest more than 20 years her senior. The image of the young Ethiopian girl, worried she would wet the bed during her first night in her new home, opens Edemariam’s vividly told biography, The Wife’s Tale.
Over a span of more than a decade, Edemariam would sit with her grandmother and listen to stories of her long, fascinating life. Yetemegnu, who was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar, was witness to the country’s Italian occupation in the 1930s, followed by years of war, famine, revolts and coups. Her personal history was no less tumultuous: Yetemegnu’s husband, who was imprisoned for his suspected involvement in the resistance against the Italians, was a violent man obsessed with perfection. A devout follower of the Virgin Mary, Yetemegnu gave birth to 10 children, several of whom died in devastating ways. “It’s very difficult to have unconditional love but she did and was very present,” Edemariam says, in describing her grandmother. “I don’t mean even remotely that she was childlike because she wasn’t, she was really sharp. She held on to an immediacy in emotion. Everyone responded to it — she was incredibly charismatic, and you felt a very generous sort of love.” Edemariam — who was born in Canada and is now a writer and editor for the Guardian, based out of Oxford, England — kept her recorder running, gathering close to 70 hours of interviews. “I let the conversations go. Incredibly, she could remember specifically what happened in a day and exactly what she dreamt, but if you asked what year it was, it would go nowhere,” says Edemariam, who structured the book around the changing of the seasons and religious feasts, which were more meaningful to Yetemegnu than the calendar.
It took Edemariam a year to transcribe the interviews, with the help of a “very big dictionary.” After signing a book deal, she filled in the story’s gaps with historical research, then transcribed the interviews again to establish chronology, enlisting family members to help with fact-checking. Edemariam’s own presence in the book is deliberately ghostlike, which gives The Wife’s Tale and its poetic language a novelistic flair. “I think places like Ethiopia or Asia or South America get described from a Western viewpoint all the time, and I was really intent on immersing somebody in a place on its own terms,” she says.
In the end, Edemariam says she and Yetemegnu, who died in 2013 at nearly100 years old, grew closer through those many hours shared together. “We forget that our parents and grandparents were people before us and they don’t get listened to too much in terms of their own lives,” Edemariam says. “I hope that she would have liked what I wrote. I showed her an early draft, but it was in English which she didn’t read. But she knew what she told me.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill and Quire.