The Thirteenth Sun

Dianachew Worku

This text, written in English and first published in 1973 by Heinemann, is one of the neglected classics of the African Anglophone canon. At the time the novel was published Worku was already the author of a number of plays, a novel and poetry, all written in Amharic (the main language of Ethiopia). This novel’s title refers ironically to the billboard advertisements that invite passengers to “Fly Ethiopian Airlines” for “Thirteen Months of Sunshine” (2).

The title is also a first indication of the kind of baffled love the chief protagonist, an educated young Ethiopian named Goytom, feels for his father, his beautiful and illegitimate half-sister and his country. One gets the impression that this is likely to be the kind of feeling the author himself has for his land, for the text combines beautifully delicate and lavish evocations of the mountainous landscape of Ethiopia with sharply sardonic descriptions of a set of characters who are both allegorically representative national “types” and realistically portrayed members of this diverse society.

From the first page, Worku establishes the somewhat bizarre quality that characterises his portrayal of Ethiopians throughout the novel. The text employs the ancient device of the quest - here, for healing, of an aged aristocrat, the dying nobleman Fitawrary Woldu. Mostly “the Fitawrary” (as even his son refers to him) is unkindly and unattractively portrayed; he seems to have obtained most of his wealth by marriage to Goytom’s mother and is shown to have been a cruel landlord, an inadequate parent and an unfaithful, selfish husband (Goytom in his first, sneering reference to his father calls him “the ladies’ man of his time” - 2). But the novel opens when the old man is too weak even to walk in pilgrimage to the saint’s (Abbo’s) mountain-top shrine where he believes he will be healed, as he is carried there in the litter which will become his bier when they bring his corpse down after the unsuccessful quest. At an allegorical level, Worku is suggesting both that his society is in mortal straits and that it will not find healing in the old ways - dithering between elaborate Christian ritualism and peasant-style superstition, or old and corrupt (but powerfully entrenched) privileges and youthful (but weakly ineffectual) reformist dreams.

Early in the novel we see that Goytom’s feeling for his father is close to hatred, although this resentment is closely entwined with his sense that his father is a person much more “embedded” in the land than himself:

You began to think, listening to him, that he must be a wizard, and master of these remote cliffs, ranges of hills, buttresses and the table mountain - that he it was who originally planted the church in this killing ruggedness, and wantonly dotted the hills with those rotten hovels - that it was he who had poisoned men’s brains with complacency - that it was he who devoured their hearts with stagnancy and decadence - that it was he who was responsible for this deadly existence. Yes, it came to you that it must be he who was begging all along the road; he who was hovering like a crow, or he who appeared at the cross-roads as a lean old jackal; he who splashed the mud on that woman, he … he … he … (8-9).

Close to the church at the volcanic mountain-top, the family group is obliged to take lodgings in an unsavoury peasant’s hut and to share it with a sick woman as well as with the peasant family. The Fitawrary loses hope in priestly remedies and accepts the ministrations of “the conjure-woman”, who is the domineering wife of the brutal peasant in whose hut they stay. Clearly, there is no actual chance of the dying man’s recovery, but as his formerly neglected, soft-hearted daughter knows, he is terribly afraid of death. Speaking to her in the throes of pain and weakness, the Fitawrary first brags about his money and possessions, “and then, as if from a reservoir of his energy, words start pouring forth [from him] … Words throbbing with yearning and wrath” (64). Yet all he leaves this daughter is the gold cross, smeared with sheep’s dung, that he wore round his neck.

Goytom laments what to him seems to have been the old man’s wasted existence - “a man who has never loved for love’s sake, who hasn’t worked for work’s sake, a man who hasn’t fought for humanity, who has [only] stood for … land, wealth, title, patriotism and that sort of rubbish” (77). Yet the reader learns that the “patriotism” was dearly proved, on the battlefield, in the old days of combat against Italian colonialism - and that bravery in that war was the honourable source of at least some of the Fitawrary’s prosperity. So that when the old man, reduced to physical ignominy, at last expires, the son’s deathbed forgiveness of his father seems not only a family reconciliation, but hints allegorically at the need for the radical young not to reject utterly the whole Ethiopian past - “For the first time in my life, I realized he was my father, after all”, says Goytom (164).

The ancient Ethiopian churches are world famous. Worku vividly evokes the beautiful setting of the shrine to which the family pilgrimage has journeyed: “At one of [the] edges [of the ‘large mirror’ of the volcanic lake], the grassy wooded hills reached up to lofty, clayey slopes; revealing, at the very top, amidst a grove of large koso and wanza trees, the primrose-hued, circular church of Abbo, surmounted by a fanciful cross” (16). But the life quality of those who have arrived to celebrate the saint’s birthday (probably seen from Goytom’s rather jaundiced perspective) is rather less lovely:

Pilgrims had already gathered by the lakeside. A collection of lovers, gallants, profiteers, state embezzlers who had drunk away their consciences and forgotten the tradition of their fathers, of people of the basest scum, drunkards, thieves, prostitutes, hawkers of every kind of rotten provisions, and ragged, hungry and destitute peasants - these human beings, on each of whose faces were written laziness, slovenliness, weariness, boredom, disenchantment, hate and crime, were here to be cured of their various ailments and to pray that God save them from the current famine, disease and social problems (34).

Nor is the priest’s sermon indicative of a healthily tolerant perspective, evoking the pit of hellfire awaiting “those who had sexual relationships with Muslims, Gallas, Negroes and black Jews”, transgressions equated (it seems) with the misdeeds “of those who had sexual relationships with a horse, a donkey and a camel” (26). Most of the descriptions of human speech and conduct function at this robust, often vulgar level, with much attention paid to bodily functions and needs of the more squalid kind - contrasted often with evocations of the ethereal beauty of the scenery, and of (especially) the Fitawrary’s daughter Woynitu - lovely in appearance and compassionate in her feelings. Her half-brother has tenderly passionate feelings for her - although he realises their probably incestuous nature. Goytom is not there to protect her, however, when the peasant exploits her timid trustfulness to rape her - a crime she is unable to report to her ailing father or her slender half-brother, who would stand no chance against the fierce and powerfully built peasant.

By accident, but with symbolic appropriateness, the Fitawrary later shoots the peasant dead. It is the old man’s own final act, and whomever or whatever he may believe himself to have killed, he dies as a warrior, and in triumph, with the cry “I’ve got my enemy! … At last!” (163). Woynitu, who had dreamed of becoming a hostess for Ethiopian Air Lines - an occupation that would probably soon have destroyed her innocence - has lost her virginity to the greedy, cunning, but robustly vital peasant and may be pregnant with his child. Along with the sense of the violation of her delicacy, however, the reader gets the impression that her gently compassionate nature may carry her through her ordeal. Allegorically, the probable pregnancy may in its promise of new life balance the presence of the stinking corpse of the Fitawrary which they are forced to carry ritually downhill from the shrine - the terrible yet absurd scene on which the novel ends.

Woynitu’s future may echo her own (single) mother’s life as a desperately poor bar owner. In the end, such a life may nevertheless be preferable to - or at least no worse than - the tawdry dreams her half-brother had for her in the future he envisaged for “beautiful Woynitu”. She, as Goytom imagined, would “help her mother - her country. She [would, he imagined] make the big men spend lots and lots of money on her … And then she [would] introduce [him] to one of those big men” (30). Such a “dream” is, or would have been, more exploitative than their father’s neglect of her in all but the one year in which he knew her. Of course the quoted words expose her half-bother’s ambitious greed, perhaps even more harmful to Woynitu’s welfare than the peasant’s sudden lust, imposed on her in the act of rape.

Goytom at least has the grace to recognise that he is a politically ineffectual “oddling” despite his grandiose hopes of “sav[ing] Ethiopia” (114). And he recognises his own hypocrisy: “before filth I hold my nose … before injustice I hold my peace” (114), he acknowledges. His sense of Ethiopian society full of “complacency”, “stagnancy” and “decadence” (8-9) may be valid, but it is a judgement distinctly applicable to himself.

I conclude my quotations from the text with an earlier, darkly lyrical passage in which Goytom muses about his country:

Beautiful Ethiopia - with her peaks and cliffs and escarpments piled helter-skelter on the high tablelands and railroads criss-crossing all over them. With donkeys and mules. With patriotism. And with medals, medals, medals - for smoking, for burning, for living, for killing and for dying. And all her children shouting their war cries. Among her giant ranges. Among the isolated mountains of weird and fantastic shapes. Undecorated defenders. And her women grinding grain on the flat stones. On the hard black stones from the mountains. And the paths along the bottom of the gigantic crack of her face leading to her chieftains with their little brown or white or black dogs romping from one stiff attendant to the other with wagging tails. From one retainer with a spear to another with a gun. Wagging their tails. Begging manna from Heaven.

Waiting for the sacrificial sheep (42).

The one person who perhaps herself is that “sacrificial sheep”, instead of passively waiting for it, is probably Woynitu - violated, but delicately courageous.

Worku’s fine and complex novel amply deserves rediscovery and rereading.

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