BookBrowse Reviews The History of a Difficult Child by Mihret Sibhat

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A charming, confident child comes of age in a small Ethiopian town, in an environment of political upheaval, religious fervor, and ostracization.

Mihret Sibhat's debut novel, The History of a Difficult Child, takes place in a small, unnamed town in southwestern Ethiopia, in which everybody lives in a state of constant unease or fear. It's ten years after Ethiopia's socialist revolution, and any act, benign or not—leaving a flag tangled up, or listening to the radio for news about Ethiopia's famine and war against guerilla groups—might be deemed counterrevolutionary and reportable by one's peers to local government, leading to arrest or worse. The Asmelashes—a former landowning family who lost their compound and servants in the revolution but are far from destitute—are disliked and ostracized in the town. This is especially true for Degitu, the matriarch, who is simultaneously mythologized for being good at everything she tries, resented but admired for her toughness, and pitied for her mysterious, painful illness. As such, the family is wary of their gossiping neighbors and corrupt local officials. On her way to the hospital for another fruitless consultation, Degitu picks up a newspaper and reads the letters from readers; they "leave her feeling alarmed at how closely people seem to be watching one another."

It is in this environment that Selam Asmelash, the novel's titular protagonist, is born and grows up—but her charming, spritely narrative voice prevents the atmosphere from being overly serious. Selam is just a baby when she starts narrating her family's life, albeit a particularly observant and braggadocious one. She has some grasp of the political climate from listening to the radio, and she's a fly on the wall to adult conversations and family secrets, but she doesn't understand the gravity of what she hears, and she's easily distracted—she's a child, after all. She sees her older brother Ezra kissing Teshager, a tenant staying at their house, but doesn't know what kissing is, or why two men would only do it in secret; she overhears her mother arguing with her father about familial responsibility, but is more concerned with Degitu's delicious breast milk: "I'm biting and sucking… There's a party inside my mouth," she thinks as Degitu storms out angrily. She swings from one emotional extreme to the other, on one page cursing her five siblings, her cousin, and her neighborhood bully Kamila ("I ask myself why, despite so many changes in the world, I remain surrounded by such demons") and two pages later bursting with joy: "I love my sister and my brother and even my other sister and my other brothers and my father. I love everybody."

Most of The History of a Difficult Child takes place between ages zero and nine, and we follow along as Selam learns to walk and talk (concerningly late) and read and write (impressively early)—and as she figures out the confusing, seemingly arbitrary rules of adulthood and her own family. At Teshager's behest, and partly to pray for baby Selam's health, Degitu converts from Catholicism to Pentecostal Protestantism, ostracizing herself even more among the other townspeople. Selam's father and siblings resist initially, but in their grief after Degitu's death, they, too, embrace the new faith, completely changing their behavior and punishing a perplexed Selam for not conforming. "I don't understand how my family hates the government for always telling us what to do but loves Jesus Christ who's also saying don't sing this, don't wear this, don't love people like Beza's boyfriend," she thinks to herself.

The History of a Difficult Child reminded me, in its more meandering, plotless sections, of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, also about a curious, prodigious girl who can seem, by virtue of her defamiliarizing naiveté, almost alien, trying to navigate a society in which people often don't say what they mean and to learn the appropriate rules of engagement. Sibhat's novel also has a vaguely vignette-like structure, with short, comic sections that build into satisfying narrative arcs, such as Selam's hapless attempts to make friends with the neighborhood kids—buying them all candy to bribe them, pleasuring boys as a reward for playing soccer with her. "I see that tickling the dangling meat between a boy's legs is a forbidden game. I am never leaving my house again," she thinks, exasperated at yet another rule that everyone but her seems to know. Sibhat draws a parallel between Ethiopia's dictatorship, adolescence, and Selam's family's new religion: one is always living in both hope of love and fear of punishment. "Unpredictability is the source of their power," she thinks of Kamila and her friends, who throw stones at her but sometimes let her play with them. And when she accidentally loses a poster of the Chairman, a potentially serious crime, she thinks, "I am supposed to be afraid all the time… the clearest sign of knowledge and the best path to safety is to always be afraid."

But Selam can't stay afraid; her default nature is to love, to forgive and forget, to take risks, and of course to crack jokes. Only in the book's emotional climax, in which Selam experiences a tragic loss, is there little to no humor, no lightness—only attempts at communicating grief, all the more moving for their childlike bluntness. The question of freedom, and why adults so often relinquish theirs, subtly animates the book: Selam doesn't understand why people answer to a master when they don't have to. By the end of the book, she's approached an explanation: "That's one downside of limitless freedom no one but God would tell you about: you can't even help the people you love when they need you if you're regularly undermining your credibility." To witness Selam mature over 400 pages, and to catch glimpses of a vast, complex world that extends beyond her perceptions, is a real pleasure. Her siblings groan at her constant chatter—"this child is worse than the radio; we should get her a power button," they say—but to a reader, she's pure entertainment.

This review first ran in the August 23, 2023 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.