Nagasti was not born the day I sat down to write. She was not the result of plot planning, a literary exercise or a technical decision by a writer looking for a heroine. In the deepest sense, she was there long before I had chapters, a plot, or a name for the book.
She lives in the conversations I absorbed in my childhood, in my mother’s stories that were absorbed in me almost without me knowing, in the silences between sentences, and in the gaze of women who knew how to carry an entire world on their shoulders without making the pain a headline.
I always knew that if I wrote my first book, she would be at the center of it. Not as a character meant to “represent” a community, nor as a flat symbol of a strong woman, but as one woman, private, complex, vulnerable, stubborn and complete, through whom the story must be told.
Nagasti was born from my mother, but she is not a copy of her. She carries something of her spirit, her nobility, her pains and her way of dealing with life. And at the same time, she was also born from other women in the community; From women I’ve seen, from women I’ve heard about, and from women who didn’t get someone to write their name.
In this sense, Nagasti is both a single woman and a collective woman. A literary figure, but one in which many will be able to recognize something from themselves, from their mothers, from their grandmothers, or from the women who supported entire families without calling it leadership.
The choice of the name Nagasti, which means my queen, is not accidental. This is my mother’s original name, so choosing it was an act of personal loyalty. But the Nagasti of the book is not a queen in the external sense. She doesn’t have a crown, she doesn’t have a palace, and she doesn’t have a world that is quick to recognize her position.
Her kingdom is different. This is inner nobility. The way a woman carries her broken bones without losing her spine. The way she continues to walk even when life forces her to say goodbye, to lose, to be silent, to believe, to be angry, to miss and to choose again.
It was important to me that Nagasti not only be “strong”. This word, standing alone, can turn women into characters who are not allowed to break. Nagasti is strong, but she is also weak. She believes, but also hurts. She is stubborn, but also vulnerable. She carries within her mothers, wisdom of life, restrained anger and deep longing for the girls she lost.
This is a woman who faced severe losses at a very young age, with pain that could have collapsed her world, and yet she carried on. Not because it was not broken, but because even after the break something alive remained in it. Something that refused to go away.
The heroine of the story, Nagasti, is deeply rooted in the world of Beta Israel: in the Jewish villages in Ethiopia, in life before the Aliyah, in faith, in relationships, in female strength, in pain, in scars and in silence. But from the first moment I wanted the readers to meet her as a whole woman: a woman with a body, memory, desire, loss, faith, anger, longing and a voice that wants to be heard.
I wanted her to be seen as a woman who bears the question of what happens when fate and choice collide. A woman who lives in the tension between faith and pain. A woman who learns what a voice is in a world that teaches her to be silent. A woman who moves between the dictates of society and her inner truth.
Nagasti’s questions grow out of a very specific place, but they don’t just stay there. They are questions of many women: how do you continue after a loss? How do we stay true to ourselves within a home, family, community and tradition? Where is the line between acceptance and self-renunciation? And how does a woman find her voice when she has learned for years to protect herself precisely through silence?
There are moments in writing when a character ceases to be an idea and begins to breathe. For me, one of those moments revolved around Nagasti’s transition from her childhood home to her new life after her marriage.
This is a moment of threshold. A moment when a young woman separates from the world she knows and enters another house, another family, other rules, other looks. She does not leave behind only a geographical place. She leaves a version of herself.
I wanted to understand what happens to a woman inside at a moment like this. What happens to her body, to her silence, to the way she suddenly realizes that her life does not belong to her alone. What happens when she has to relearn her place in the world, not through big words, but through looks, roles, expectations and unwritten boundaries.
It was there that Nagasti began to become clear to me. Not as a heroine moving within a plot, but as a woman crossing a threshold. And every woman who has crossed a threshold in her life – wedding, birth, loss, migration, separation, change or a new beginning – knows that a threshold is not just a transition from one place to another. It is a moment when you need to understand who you will be on the other side.
One of Nagasti’s deepest conflicts is the tension between silence and voice. Not simple silence, not simple voice.
In her world, silence can be a tool of survival. A way to maintain dignity. A way not to aggravate pain. A way to protect something fragile. But that silence can also imprison. It can alienate a woman from herself, turn pain into a thing that has no language, and make her live a whole life with her truth remaining inside.
Nagasti also moves between fate and choice. There are things that are imposed on her by the force of time, society, family and circumstances. But in all these she has moments of choice. Sometimes very small, almost invisible. Still, these are the moments when a woman begins to regain ownership of her life.
It also ranges between faith and pain. To me, this is one of the most human places in her character. Faith does not erase pain. Sometimes she lives next to him. Sometimes she struggles with it. Sometimes she leans on him. Nagasti does not believe because life was easy for her. She believes in a life that has often confronted her with abysses.
Many times the story of the Beta Israel community is told through the drama of the journey to Israel: the road, Sudan, the danger, the persecutions, the heroism. This is an important and defining story, but it is not the whole story.
Before the journey there was life.
There were Jewish villages in Ethiopia. There were houses. There were women. There were relationships, loves, jealousy, wisdom, pain, births, losses, faith, silence and deep community resilience. There were women who lived their whole lives without asking for recognition, without being written about, and without anyone putting them in the center of the stage.
Nagasti is my key to this door. Through her I could enter the world before the immigration not as a historical explanation, but as real life. Through her eyes, her body, her pain, her choices and the way she keeps walking, you can see a whole world that has remained too long on the sidelines of the story.
When I write it, I’m not just writing a novel. I keep a promise: to restore depth to a story that has been told too many times from the outside. To give space to women who were not always heard, but without them no story would last.
The heroine of the story, Nagasti, refused to remain transparent. Not in the sense that she shouts to be seen, but in a deeper sense: her very existence as a complete, complex character with an inner world is a refusal to remain on the margins.
She is not just a mother. is not just a wife. is not just a member of the community. Is not just a woman who has been through pain. She is a woman with memory, desire, faith, anger, longing, nobility and a wound. A woman who cannot be reduced to one role or one story.
And that, in my eyes, is the strength of the literary. He can take a seemingly “marginal” character within a big story, and show that she is a whole world in herself. He can restore a face, body and voice to women that history has not always known how to see.
Nagasti reminds each of us to ask: What inside me is bigger than the story they told about me? What voice is waiting to break out of the protected silence I adopted for myself? And women in my family carried a whole world without me knowing to ask them in time?
In the end, Nagasti was born from my memory, but she doesn’t just stay there. She is a literary character, but she was born from the deepest truth I know: women carry the world.
I invite the readers to meet her between the pages of the book not only to read about “history”, but also to meet something of themselves. You are the woman who has been too silent. You are the one who lost and moved on. You are the one who carried pain without calling it by name. You are the one who learned to be strong, but still asks for a place to be whole.
Nagasti reminds us that our scars are not just signs of pain. They are also a living testimony of what survived. They remind us of the women in our family, the untold stories, and the voice that maybe it’s time to give it back its rightful place.
Because Nagasti is one character. But there are many women behind her. Women who carried an entire world, even when no one asked them to tell how they did it.
This article is a gateway to the world of “A scarred stone” – a novel about women, roots, memory and the courage to take a place.
Lecturer, writer and strategic consultant for identity-based leadership. Accompanying organizations, managers and communities in a process that transforms identity, roots and life experience from a source of concealment or friction - to a source of presence, belonging, leadership and impact.
צמיחה אמיתית לא נולדת מחיקוי, אלא מהאומץ לפגוש את עצמך - ולהביא לעולם את האני שלך באמת
אני מזמינה אותך ליצור איתי קשר
Fentay Maharat-Alamu's debut novel returns to the world of the women of the House of Israel in Ethiopia - to roots, memory, scars and female strength. Leave details to receive first updates on the release of the book, pre-purchase, premium edition and launch events.
