When the Tears Ran Dry: Reading Baalu Girma’s Oromay
Some novels survive because they are beautiful. Others survive because they know something people would rather forget.
Baalu Girma’s Oromay belongs to the second kind.
I first encountered the story through the voice of Fekadu Teklemariam, whose narration carried Oromay into the Ethiopian imagination through radio. There is something almost appropriate about that. Before the novel travelled into English, before international reviewers began calling it an Ethiopian classic, it was already a voice heard in homes, remembered by listeners, passed from one generation to another.
And perhaps Oromay was always meant to be heard.
Because this is not only a book about a war.
It is about what people do when they are frightened, ambitious, in love, compromised, lonely, or simply trying to survive.
“Oromay”
The title itself is a clue.
Oromay is associated with the Italian oramai: by now, already, at this point and in the novel’s context, the sense of it is over; it is too late.
That makes the word almost a character.
By now.
Already.
Too late.
The novel was published in Amharic in 1983, during the Derg regime, and takes us into the Red Star Campaign, the military operation launched against Eritrean insurgents.
But Baalu Girma does not begin with a history lesson.
He gives us Tsegaye Hailemaryam.
A journalist.
A government propagandist.
A man whose job is to make reality look better than it is.
Tsegaye arrives in Asmara in December 1981 as head of propaganda for the Red Star Campaign. Around him are government officials, soldiers, spies, double agents and journalists, moving through cafés and streets where nobody seems quite certain who is listening to whom.
His assignment is simple:
Tell the story of victory.
The problem is that he begins to see the truth.
And the truth is never as cooperative as propaganda.
Then Fiammetta Appears
Into this political machinery comes Fiammetta Gilay.
She is one of the reasons Oromay refuses to remain merely a political novel.
Fiammetta is beautiful, intelligent, mysterious and unpredictable. Tsegaye is drawn to her even though he has a fiancée, Roman, waiting for him in Addis Ababa.
Roman and Fiammetta could easily have become the familiar figures of a love triangle.
But Baalu gives the triangle another dimension.
Roman is the promise.
Fiammetta is the temptation.
Addis is home.
Asmara is discovery.
Tsegaye is caught between them.
And that is where the human being inside the political novel emerges.
He is not a hero in the clean sense.
He is vain.
He wants to be admired.
He wants women to desire him.
He wants to succeed professionally.
He wants to remain loyal.
He wants to believe he is a good man.
And he wants, perhaps most of all, to avoid discovering what his work is actually doing.
That contradiction makes him believable.
People rarely become compromised because they wake up one morning and decide to become monsters.
Usually, they compromise themselves one small decision at a time.
Tsegaye is interesting because he is not outside the machine.
He is part of it.
Asmara Is More Than a Setting
Baalu Girma understood atmosphere.
Tsegaye arrives as an official. He begins to experience it as a city.
Asmara is cafés, Italian architecture, conversations, beautiful women, government offices, rumours and danger.
The Red Sea coast and Massawa bring another dimension: heat, distance and the feeling that the romantic world Tsegaye has entered is surrounded by a much larger violence.
Then comes the military front.
The story moves from flirtation and political theatre toward Peak 1702 and the fighting around Afabet, where Tsegaye’s position as an observer becomes impossible to maintain.
He has to see.
And once you have seen, you cannot easily return to writing the official version.
That is where the novel becomes an anti-war story.
Kirkus called the new translation “an exemplary anti-war novel.” Other critics have described it as a political thriller, a love story and a work of reportage-like realism.
The Spectator compared its strands to Le Carré, Fleming and Hemingway.
The comparisons are useful — but they should not obscure what makes Oromay distinctly Ethiopian.
Its deepest subject is not espionage.
It is power.
And what power does to ordinary human beings.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Baalu Girma knew the world he was describing.
He had worked as a journalist and as a senior official in the Ministry of Information. He understood propaganda because he had worked inside the system that produced it. Oromay turned that knowledge into fiction.
The novel was banned almost immediately after publication.
Copies were confiscated.
But readers kept circulating it.
Then Baalu Girma was dismissed.
In 1984, he disappeared.
He was never found.
He is widely believed to have been abducted and killed because of the novel, although the precise circumstances of his disappearance remain unresolved.
That history inevitably changes the way we read the book.
It is difficult to separate the author from the danger of the story.
And yet Oromay should not be reduced to the tragedy of its author.
That would be another way of silencing the novel.
Because the book itself is alive.
Funny.
Sexy.
Sarcastic.
Political.
Sometimes cynical.
Sometimes surprisingly tender.
That mixture is part of its power.
And This Is Where Fekadu’s Voice Returns
For Ethiopians, Oromay has another history.
It was not only a book.
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It was something heard.
The Ethiopian literary radio tradition gave novels a second life, and Fekadu Teklemariam became one of the voices associated with that tradition. A surviving recording identifies his narration of Oromay on Sheger FM.
So I imagine the novel differently.
I imagine Fekadu’s voice carrying Tsegaye through Asmara.
Roman waiting in Addis.
Fiammetta entering the story.
The jokes.
The jealousy.
The propaganda.
The war.
The silence after the laughter.
Even the አባቴ ይሙት ደደብ ነህ
That is the strange journey of Oromay: from page, to voice, to memory, and now back into print for a global audience.
Was It Ever Translated?
Yes.
And this matters.
An independent complete English translation by John Cunningham appeared in 2021. The Anglo-Ethiopian Society discussed it that year as the first complete English translation, published independently.
Then came the major international edition in 2025, translated by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu and published by Soho Press/MacLehose Press.
The new translation has been widely praised for making the novel accessible without flattening its humour and energy. The publisher’s collection of reviews includes comparisons to Orwell and Huxley, Casablanca, Le Carré and Hemingway.
And that is important.
Because Oromay is not a forgotten African curiosity being “discovered” for the first time.
It has been read, remembered and loved in Ethiopia for decades.
What is new is the audience.
Now the rest of the world can enter.
What Has Changed Since 1983?
Almost everything.
And strangely, not enough.
The Derg is history.
The Red Star Campaign is history.
Baalu Girma is gone.
But the questions of Oromay are still with us.
Who controls the narrative?
What happens when journalism becomes propaganda?
How much truth can a person sacrifice before he becomes part of the lie?
Can love survive when politics enters the room?
And how much of ourselves do we surrender simply because everyone around us tells us that what is happening is normal?
These questions no longer belong only to 1983.
They belong to the age of social media, political spin, manipulated images, competing versions of reality and information moving faster than anyone can verify it.
The technology changed.
Human nature did not.
And Then Comes the Poem
Perhaps that is why the poem shared by Fekadu Teklemariam feels like such a haunting way to return to Baalu Girma.
It begins:
እንባ እንባ ይለኛል
ይተናነቀኛል
Tears, tears come to me.
Then:
እንባ ከየት አባቱ!
ደርቋል ከረጢቱ
But where would the tears come from?
The bag has dried up.
Then laughter.
And finally:
ሥቃ እያለቀሰች
መከረኛ ነፍሴ።
A miserable soul, crying while it laughs.
I think that is where Oromay finally meets us.
Not in the battlefield.
Not in the government office.
Not even in Fiammetta’s embrace.
But in that contradiction inside a human being who has suffered too much to know whether to laugh or cry.
Tsegaye wants love and freedom while serving a system that denies both.
Roman wants certainty.
Fiammetta wants something more complicated than certainty.
Baalu wants to tell the truth.
The regime wants a story.
And Fekadu’s voice carries the story forward.
Maybe that is what Oromay ultimately means.
By now.
Already.
Too late.
But not too late for the story.
The author disappeared.
The regime disappeared.
The war became history.
The voices changed.
The language changed.
And still, somewhere, Fekadu’s voice remains.
A man tells a story.
A country remembers.
And a book that was supposed to be silenced keeps speaking.
That may be Baalu Girma’s greatest victory.
Author’s Note
I came to Oromay through Fekadu Teklemariam’s narration and found myself going backward from the voice, to the characters, to Asmara, to Baalu Girma, and finally to the history behind the fiction.
This is not intended as a definitive academic reading of Oromay. It is a personal literary encounter with a novel that sits at the intersection of Ethiopian history, Amharic literature, journalism, love, war and memory.
The poem at the end is reproduced from the version shared with me and is presented here as attributed to Baalu Girma; I have deliberately avoided calling it his “last poem” because I could not independently establish that claim from a sufficiently authoritative primary source.
Sources & Further Reading
- 2025 English edition: Oromay, translated by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu — Soho Press / Penguin Random House
- UK edition: MacLehose Press / Hachette UK
- 2021 John Cunningham translation: Anglo-Ethiopian Society book-club record
- Translator David DeGusta’s background and reviews: David DeGusta — Oromay
- The Guardian review: The Guardian — Oromay by Baalu Girma
- The Spectator review: The Spectator — Rebellion and Repression
- 2021 English edition bibliographic record: Google Books — John Cunningham translation
