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Tower in the Sky. By Hiwot Teffera. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press, 2012. Pp. 437; photographs. Paper.
This book belongs to a newly emerging genre of memoir that relives the trauma of Ethiopia's 1974 revolution and the era of the Derg (1974-1991). The era included both the initial blush of optimism on the downfall of the imperial government of Haile Sellassie I, but also the nightmare of the Red Terror that rent Ethiopia's social and political fabric in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We now have a growing body of fiction on that experience, but also autobiographical writing that more closely chronicles the first-person, subjective experiences of individuals who found their way to the diaspora or who stayed to live their lives anew and now reflect on their own emotions of fear, the exhilaration about new times, or ambivalence about violent change.
Tower in the Sky is the memoir of the author, an urban, middle class young woman who reached her adolescence in the early years of the revolution, joined the optimistic activism of the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party (EPRP), and then joined many of her...