| dc.description |
It is an undeniable fact that in East Africa and the Horn of Africa — Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan — have been blacklisted by global communities such as the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the African Union (AU) as unstable nations because of continued civil wars, coups, violence, genocide, drought and famine that have resulted in the migration of people with their property. However, this state of instability, apart from suggesting the ‘failure’ of the post-colonial nation, it impliedly calls for ways on how to re-construct the ‘so called’ failed or unstable nations in order to resettle the displaced souls. Reading Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze from a post-colonial perspective, this paper explores how the narrative uses a family-nation metaphor to enter socio-cultural, economic and political spaces in order to interrogate the disintegration of the nation and, using family as a microcosm of the nation, proposes ways of re-building the bygone fragmented nation of Ethiopia. In illuminating how Mengiste joins other African women writers who assume authority in commenting ‘the state’ of the post-colonial nation , I try to argue that Mengiste’s narrative suggests the institution of the family as a central pillar towards re-construction of nations wrecked by wars. |
|