Rambo the Abyssinian

Haji Jaber in this work sought to restore the honor of a woman from Harar who accompanied Arthur Rimbaud in his final years in Ethiopia, without the French poet mentioning his lover in a single word in his many letters to his mother, thus causing her to be erased from history books. Haji grants the Harari woman a name, voice, history, and memory, and thus gives us the chance to see Rimbaud from the perspective of the Ethiopians, as if he is flipping the image, pushing Rimbaud to the margins, and bringing the Ethiopian lover into the story through narrating some of what happened and much of what did not happen. In addition to the truncated love stories and the intertwined timelines of the narrative, the text discusses Harar, the city of coffee and khat, when it was like the African Mecca, forbidden to non-Muslims, and weaves around it tales that tempted travelers from everywhere at a time when the great powers were reshaping the Horn of Africa. The novel Rimbaud the Ethiopian by the writer Haji Jaber