Make living your act of defiance. Record it all. - Maaza Mengiste

in many ways, Ethiopia is an oral culture., I spent a lot of time listening to stories and histories told around dinner tables or in the sitting room. The stories my grandfather would tell were often about the Italo-Ethiopian wars, both the first and the second, and also life lessons. Those stories of my grandfather's really informed how I viewed-history, how I viewed Ethiopia; what it meant to be Ethiopian. Those were my books, the stories that I learned. When I think back to the stories that I would hear, especially when my parents would tell stories, that cadence in which they told them, and the momentum they had while telling it, that's something I am always trying to emulate in my writing. So I count them as an influence as much as anything that I've read.

Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy.

He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish.