Stuck Between Two Worlds: A Writers' Fest Preview

Toward the end of Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the book's narrator, an Ethiopian immigrant who has been living in the United States for nearly 20 years, encapsulates the bleak, unmoored nature of his life in the U.S. with an aphorism: "A man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone."

Mengestu, who is appearing twice at this year's Vancouver's Writers Fest, is very familiar with such bifurcations: his plots tend to be split, concurrently laying out narratives set in different cities and countries or at least at different times. And his characters are all much like Beautiful Things' narrator: displaced men and women who, for reasons both external and self-imposed, can't find comfort in their new societies but also remain detached from their original homes.

The son of Ethiopians, Mengestu immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was two years old. With his new novel, All Our Names, he has taken a bold new step in exploring his African heritage. While Beautiful Things and How to Read the Air, Mengestu's second novel, were both set in the U.S. -- albeit with Africa firmly on the mind of its characters -- half of All Our Names takes place in 1970s Uganda, following two revolutionaries living in the corrupt aftermath of the country's independence. The book's other half is set shortly after those events, in the American Midwest, where one of the revolutionaries finds refuge and falls in love with the social worker charged with caring for him.

All Our Names is a book about transformations, and while it reflects political and social upheavals that occur on a national scale, Mengestu grounds these elements in the individual changes borne by his characters. Likewise, while All Our Names is very much a book about our contemporary relationship to the past -- our ability to learn from it, to move past it, to stop repeating its mistakes -- we experience it through the characters, through their struggles to choose between a past they're attached to and a profound desire they carry for reinvention. In a book that warns about the dangers of ideology, Mengestu's political ideas emerge naturally, not didactically, a tactic that makes All Our Names at once enlightening and engrossing.

The Tyee spoke to Mengestu on the phone last week about his book, its politics, his personal history, and how his work as journalist for Granta, Rolling Stone, and others has influenced his fiction.

There are two settings in All Our Names: Uganda a few years after independence, and the Midwest U.S. a few years after the height of the civil rights movement. What drew you to juxtapose these two times and places?

"Initially, I actually didn't have that in mind. I thought the entire story would be set in Uganda. But inevitably I'm drawn to these bifurcated narratives... The genesis of the novel was to try to capture this particular moment of optimism in postcolonial Africa, and the more I began to write that, the more I realized that there was a natural companion to that, which was what was happening in the U.S. in the post civil rights era. Just as in 1962 Uganda becomes independent, in 1963 you have the March on Washington -- these two liberation movements took place across two continents. At the same time, the frustration that followed the initial optimism and euphoria seemed to also echo one another."

There is some skepticism in the book towards anyone who promises change, or any political or social revolutions. Is that something that the story led you to, or is that something you were feeling while writing the novel?

"There's definitely some skepticism, but it's also more that the rhetoric of revolution and the rhetoric of change can be so easily manipulated. And that people, especially politicians, often times use that rhetoric to seduce a population. It seems so compelling and so sincere, but at the same time you see how that same rhetoric is often quickly distorted or manipulated to serve someone's private needs.

"The characters, they begin as optimists. And that optimism slowly drains from them as they begin to realize that what seems like a revolution quickly becomes a political movement that's there to serve the needs of one man. That is all too common still today.

It brings to mind in the U.S, especially in the last six years or so, Occupy and Obama -- this sense of disillusionment, a move from a high to a low. The book seems to be touching on that sense of disillusionment today.

"Yeah, definitely. I was writing a novel set in the 1970s, but most of my concerns were set in the present day. The things that formed the construction of the scenes that happen in Africa were the experiences I had as a journalist, watching these young aspiring revolutionaries in Sudan and Uganda and Eastern Congo who espouse the rhetoric of revolution and yet at the same time, you know that they're being manipulated. That cycle continues to occur today as it happened in the '60s and the '70s, and it never really exhausts itself. We keep returning to these same patterns. I think it's because people naturally desire change. People want their governments and their countries to become better places, and as a result they're willing to be seduced by these ideas and by these leaders. And at the same time, the tragedy is that they're still seduced."

Through writing this book and your journalism, do you have a sense of what needs to change? Obviously the need for change is still there, especially in places like Uganda and Sudan, countries where, probably more than in the U.S., there's a necessity for a radical change.

"Well, I think there's a need for change. I'm not so certain it's a need for radical change. I think the problem with the rhetoric of revolution is that it aspires to completely transform the political system of a country or society. Most of the time, that form of radical change never really happens. I think the change that's often times really needed in these countries is to create and build very strong institutions that are stable, that are not susceptible to the whims of one leader or one political movement or one election cycle. Institutions that endure and that people have confidence in, faith in, and that allows for a system of democracy to really prosper."

All of your books explore your identity as an American, because you were raised there, and your Ethiopian heritage as well. When your parents moved to the U.S., it was under difficult circumstances. It was a radical break for them. I wonder if you remember the ways that they kept that Ethiopian past alive for you or transmitted it to you?

"They tried to insist that the past was alive. They wanted us to believe and to declare that we were Ethiopian, that we eat Ethiopian food at home and that we perform certain rituals and certain manners of behavior. They were definitely very concerned about that.

"But at the same time, it's hard to transmit a culture just by those declarations... You grow up with a sense that you're supposed to be Ethiopian but your day-to-day life is actually entirely American. It's this idea of having an identity that's split along two halves: one is very immediate, one is very present, one is at your school, and the other one is an abstraction.

"But within that abstraction there are all these emotional ties; there's the relationship you have to your own family, and you know that there are people that have been lost and that you loved when you were very small but you no longer have access to them. So you inherit this strange nostalgia and this longing for a history that is yours and at the same time not yours anymore."

How did you start to tap into that? Was it a personal history you went to? Was it literature? Was it academic history?

"The very first thing was trying to create a family narrative, trying to interview my parents, my grandmother, and my uncles to ask them what happened to them in Ethiopia, what were their lives like prior to the revolution, what happened to them during the revolution, and then trying to create this strange, weird, very disjointed oral family narrative. It was almost like a prelude to wanting to write fiction. You accumulate facts, you accumulate narratives, and you lay them out on a page, and at the same time you're not sure exactly what they mean. Only by writing my first novel were those facts able to mean something to me. I knew the history intimately enough to be able to imagine characters who had lived that history rather than just trying to repeat the history that's been told to me."

In your first novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the characters constantly discuss the coups and the violence in Africa. But they're disconnected from it, talking about names and years. Now, in All Our Names, we witness Isaac in Uganda deteriorate into this immoral revolutionary. Instead of having it be something that's told to us, it happens before our eyes. Do you think that you wouldn't have been able to write that character when you wrote Beautiful Things?

"Oh, definitely. When I wrote those scenes in Beautiful Things, I would spend a lot of time doing research on the history of coups in Africa, and I had all these dates and all these names. Those scenes of characters naming dictators was a frustration -- how does this keep happening? It's probably because of that that I started doing journalism. The first story I wrote was an attempt to do a portrait of one of these revolutionary leaders, to try to figure out what makes this person, how do these characters live and breathe in the world -- not as abstractions, not as caricatures of evil, violent men, but as real human beings. Having done that over the course of several years, I was able to get to a point where I didn't have to write about it from such a great distance. I didn't have to write about it from the point of view of characters who are repeating what they read and what they know intellectually. I can create characters who are definitely based very closely on people that I've met and people that I've had a chance to interview."

Do you feel like that shift is a progress in a way? That now you've been able to capture more of a truth?

"I've been able to cover another side. You know, there are multiple facets to how these narratives are experienced. The narrative of the experience of people in the diaspora is one narrative and the narrative of people who are actually living in Africa and watching these events happen to them is another one. Part of what you try to do is cobble together as many different variations on those narratives as you can so it's no longer just one single story, one particular perspective, but a multitude of voices."

[This interview has been condensed and edited.]