Aida Edemariam Meet the Author


Aida Edemariam

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One of the people seem to be

targeted in that particular attack!

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Now it's time for Meet The Author.

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Aida Edemariam has written

an unusual biography -

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a rich and engrossing story

of a woman of whom none

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of her readers will ever have heard.

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The Wife's Tale is the story

of her own grandmother,

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born 100 years ago, and a picture

of her country, Ethiopia.

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It reads beautifully,

as if it's told in her voice,

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a book that will take you gently

and unforgettably

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into another world.

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Welcome.

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What was the quality of this story,

the potential in this story,

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that convinced you that people

who had never known your grandmother

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and have never been to Ethiopia

would want to read it?

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It was listening to her,

it was listening to her language,

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her words, her stories.

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I kind of knew that they would

translate quite well into English

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and that they would work.

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You spoke to her and recorded

her over a long period.

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I mean, not continuously,

but you heard her talking.

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And what's striking

about the book is that,

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although it's narrated by you,

it's told by you, the rhythms

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and cadences of her language,

the poetry of her language,

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the simple poetry of normal day

speech, really comes through,

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and that's what's alluring about it.

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And that's really

what convinced you?

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Yes, it really did.

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There are a couple of things.

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One of them is it's

an oral tradition.

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She didn't read until

she was in her 60s.

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In an oral tradition, stories

are remembered and told again.

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In Ethiopia, the effect

and the skill with which you tell

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a story is really important.

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The other thing that's obvious

to anyone who approaches

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the book is, of course,

that it's set in a country which has

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gone through huge convulsions

in the century of the life that

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you mentioned -

she died five years ago.

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Let's just go through

that because the world

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that she grew up in -

there was going to be a fascist

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invasion, there were going to be

various political upheavals,

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the Haile Selassie years

that we all remember, and,

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I suppose, to the current generation

at home, the famines

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in the Horn of Africa,

which have been such a crisis.

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So it was always going

to be a troubled life.

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Yes, but there's always pockets

of joy and, for her, dancing.

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And you tell stories and you find

little pockets where you can

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chat and enjoy things.

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In a way, it's a story

of perseverance and survival.

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It is, and those big things happen

to ordinary people, and history's

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lived by ordinary people.

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And I guess that's one of the things

I was trying to get across.

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You talk about the fact

that your grandmother didn't learn

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to read until she was in her 60s.

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Can you really imagine

what life was like for her

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when she was a teenager,

when she was in her 20s?

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Do you find it easy to picture?

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It took a while.

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I had maybe 60 hours of tape.

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I listened, and then I went away

and read lots in the British Library

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and read accounts of daily life,

and then I went back

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and listened again.

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When you've got that lairing,

you can start imagine just the sort

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the sort of warp and weft of it.

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Because it's quite clear, in the way

she must have talked to you,

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that the descriptive richness

of it was considerable -

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I mean, the plants,

the animals, the sky and so on.

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She was like that.

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The way she described

cooking, for example,

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it was incredibly detailed.

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So there's a sort of party that

happened every year, it was massive,

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and it took up a lot of her life.

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So the drama would be

in describing how you make meat.

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That was where it was located

and therefore I had to try

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and recreate that somehow.

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And, also, the shocks to daily life

that came about from political

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events that were sometimes

really very distant.

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They are distant, but they always

have ripples, and sometimes

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quite unexpected ripples.

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And, I guess, that was kind

of what I was trying to catch,

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it was one of the things that,

you know, she might be distant but,

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another moment, she'd be very close,

like very close to the Emperor -

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trying to petition him, for example.

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So you are talking about a world

that we can only know

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in our imaginations.

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And yet, what you've been able

to do, from these conversations,

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I think, is to create something

which is very real.

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I mean, you can smell the food.

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I grew up there.

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Your father's Ethiopian,

your mother is Canadian.

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With the food, the food continued.

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In rural Ethiopia, the life

is not that different,

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necessarily, that it was,

you know, 100 years ago,

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1,000 years ago, even.

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It was almost an excuse to go back

to my childhood and get the feel

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and smell and touch of things.

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People will come to conclusions

about your grandmother

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as they read the book,

but what's your assessment of how

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she felt about her youth

and about the circumstances

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of her growing up?

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Because it seems that she

was a person of great

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calm and few regrets.

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Is that fair?

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I think, when stuff happens

to you so early, and when it

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happens across the culture,

there is an acceptance of it

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and an unquestioning of it.

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So any questions came much later.

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I think she regretted not having

been able to read and some

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of the opportunities that she might

have had, but she would also say,

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well, that was the way it was.

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It's very, very touching when,

at the end, you come

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to her death and, more

to the point, her burial.

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It was obviously a very

moving experience for you.

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It was.

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I'd never been to a funeral

of somebody I knew before,

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apart from anything else.

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It's very visceral.

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And I think Irish culture does

something similar where grieving

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is very much allowed and expected,

but there are systems.

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She was buried by the church

into which she was married.

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And there's a procession,

and the priests are

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in their full regalia.

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And the whole town,

basically, sees her pass.

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One of the things, finally, that

I think is striking about the book -

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you've kept yourself out

of it almost entirely.

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Why?

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It wasn't about me.

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It's about somebody

who is very different to me.

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And, I think, you can

show your working, as it were,

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but then you just get in the way.

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And if I had put myself

into it more, I would have

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been explaining it.

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And I just wanted it to exist

absolutely on its own terms

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and to come off the page

on its own terms.

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That's an interesting answer.

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And, because of your conversations,

you felt you could render it

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faithfully as it were,

without your intervention.

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I hope so, yes.

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Aida Edemariam, author

of The Wife's Tale,

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thank you very much.

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Thank you.

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