The Conscript. Gebreyesus Hailu

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>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.

      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.)

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