Magical Realism in The God Who Begat a Jackal

Abstract

Neka Mezlekia‟s The God Who Begat a Jackal tells us the familiar story of a love affair between an Aristocrat‟s daughter and a lowly commoner in feudal Ethiopia. It is also about religious wars and rebellions against feudal exploitation. The striking parallels between his novel and Haddis Alemayehu‟s Fiqir Eske Meqabir suggest a significant influence by the latter on the former‟s author. While characterizing his novel as part fable
and part history, the author also acknowledges the influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of Latin America‟s best known masters of magical realism and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. One finds some interesting parallels between the marvellous elements of this novel and those in Marquez‟s classic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Indeed, Nega creates an exotic fictional world in which the magical and the ordinary are intermingled, often for a melodramatic effect. Nega‟s novel is the first major work by an Ethiopian writer to try to use magical realism. The aim of this article 1 is to examine the narrative strategies employed in the depiction of the magical. In so doing, the article attempts to identify the significant attributes of some of the major magical elements and their functions, including their thematic implications.