Trials of Hope (የተስፋ ፈተና)(Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Fremantle)

Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes’s Trials of Hope is a hybrid memoir in poetry and prose that feels less like a linear life story than a lived cosmology. Winner of the 2024 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, the book showcases the life of a young boy turned academic against the backdrop of a radically transforming Ethiopia, as he moves from life under the Derg dictatorship and the Ethiopian civil war to moving to Australia. Framed by Indigenous Ethiopian philosophy, the book moves concurrently in Amharic and English through “wind, fire and water” (with soil approaching) as both life stages and narrative elements, inviting the reader to see personhood as inseparable from landscape and spirit. The early sections offer prose filled with bright childhood freedom in the town of Lalibela, a community where work, play and belonging are mutually sustaining and where the author’s identity is forged outside colonial frames. As the memoir progresses, Woldeyes charts the violence of “native colonialism” enacted through schooling, development and conservation – systems that punish language, displace families and rename harm as “progress”. Woldeyes’s account of university life amid the rise of civil tensions speaks to the dissonance between institutional and community revolution, giving the collection its sharpest edges. The epilogue is both devastating and resolute; the pen, here, is both wound and remedy. For those who resonated with Cameroonian poet Joyce Ashuntantang’s A Basket of Flaming Ashes, Trials of Hope is a fierce, generous book that insists hope is not naivety but duty.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Raveena Grover is a writer, photographer and creative director. Raveena’s art focuses on creating and exploring the beauty, strength and realities of experiences of people of colour as Panjabi woman. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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