Haddis Alemayehu’s Vision of the Old World: Literary Realism and the Tragedy of History in the Amharic Novel Fikir iske Mekabir

Abstract

Haddis Alemayehu’s classic novel ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር (Fikir iske Mekabir, Love until Death, 1958 Ethiopian Calendar, 1965/6 Gregorian Calendar), is lauded by critics as a pioneering realist and modern novel in the Amharic literary tradition. My aim in this article is to scrutinize this take by examining the novel’s narrative temporalities and modes through a dialectical lens. This leads me to argue that the novel’s realism is marked by contradiction and fluidity. Specifically, the emergence of realism in Fikir iske Mekabir is accompanied by its breakdown while the realist narrative mode is accompanied by the traditional narrative modes of epic and hagiography (or, gedl). This hitherto unexamined textual and intertextual quality of Haddis’s novel reveals new insights into its thematic content regarding modernity, tradition, and social reproduction under the old Ethiopian order.