In this work, Haji Jaber seeks to restore respect for a Harari woman who accompanied Arthur Rimbaud in his last years in Abyssinia, without the French poet mentioning his mistress in a single word in his many letters to his mother, and thus falling from the history books.
Hajji gives the Harari a name, a voice, a history, and a memory, and thus gives us an opportunity to see Rimbaud from the Abyssinian point of view, as if by doing so he reverses the picture, relegating Rambo to the margins and bringing the Abyssinian mistress to the body of the story by narrating some of what happened and a lot of what did not happen.
In addition to the truncated love stories and the chronological paths of the story, the text deals with Harar, the city of coffee and qat when it was like an African Mecca, forbidden to non-Muslims to enter, and weaves around it the tales that lured travelers from everywhere at a time when the great powers were reshaping the Horn of Africa.
