Mihret Sibhat Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Mihret Sibhat talks about how her childhood in Ethiopia during the socialist dictatorship influenced her debut novel The History of a Difficult Child.

Most of The History of a Difficult Child is narrated by a young child, and at points, a baby. How did you find this remarkable voice, and what was it like to inhabit the perspective of a child?

When a book is narrated by an adult, we don't often think about how much credit their younger self deserves for the wisdom being imparted, unless their childhood is an important part of the story. Even then, the child is in the background, a passive character being shown to us through the retrospective gaze of the adult. The History of a Difficult Child is an experiment in the reverse: not only does the child command the microphone, everyone else—her older versions, her community, God, the radio, the surveillance state, etc.—is at her service.

As a girl child, Selam is a vulnerable member of her community, so letting her tell her own story was the just thing to do. I also wanted a story with a sense of urgency—for the child to grow up on the page, with little distance between readers and her pains and triumphs. There was the interestingness factor too: children are endlessly fascinating.

Inhabiting the child's world for so long turned into a therapeutic exercise in the end; it gave me permission to grieve. I had never...