Non-Human Agency and Ecological Resistance in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King

Abstract

In The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste presents war as more than a conflict between human beings. Set against Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, the novel represents land, weather, rivers, stones, plants, and animals as active participants in resistance and survival. Using qualitative textual analysis and Halliday's transitivity framework, this study examines how grammatical choices shape this relationship between humans and the environment. Fifteen representative clauses were purposively selected from passages where environmental entities interact with human characters during conflict, survival, or resistance, ensuring coverage across process types and environmental categories. The analysis shows that non-human entities frequently occupy grammatical positions usually associated with human participants, functioning as Actors and Sensers rather than passive elements of the setting. Across the selected clauses, a consistent pattern emerges: the Ethiopian landscape becomes an active force in resistance rather than a mere backdrop. This also complicates conventional understandings of colonial violence, which becomes not just domination of human bodies but an attempt to reduce land from Actor to object, from living relation to extractable resource. By bringing ecolinguistic analysis into dialogue with postcolonial literary studies, the study shows how grammar itself participates in meaning-making about human survival, more-than-human participation, and freedom from colonial control.