The homecoming story of MacArthur’s ‘genius’ rejects the immigrant lifestyle

In four brilliant novels, Dinaw Mengestu challenges conventional wisdom about how immigrant narratives should be conducted. Not only was he unconvinced by pat’s yarn about trauma and assimilation into American life. He strives to use language to express the instability at the heart of the lives of exiles, emigrants and refugees without the promise of an easy resolution.

His exploration of America’s slippery self earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2012, and awarded him as a journalist covering Darfur and other troubled regions around the globe. But in “Someone Like Us,” the first novel in a decade, Mengestu’s subject is a kind of achievement for the same level of scrutiny and skepticism. Mamush, the novel’s narrator, is an Ethiopian American writer who specializes in journalism about immigrant life. A family friend was not impressed: “You write stories for people who want to feel for immigrants.”

As the story opens, Mamush mourns the death of Samuel, whom he calls his father for two pages.

“Someone Like Us” by Dinaw Mengestu.

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After learning that Samuel is terminally ill (what, we’re not sure), Mamush quickly leaves his family in Paris and flies to the suburbs of Washington, DC, where he grew up. Then, to unravel the mystery of his origins, he went to Chicago, where his mother and Samuel first lived. He got the story about Samuel’s fight with the racist police and that he “spent some time in prison, but I don’t know what for.” Mamush hoped that journalism could find the truth, but he was empty in court: The arrest record was sealed, and while he was looking for it, Samuel died.

All this information is carefully distributed in Mamush’s narration, which flashes between the true story and the imagined reality, each time flowing from one to the other. Mamush inhabits a world that constantly seems not to be here. Hannah, his wife, is a photographer assigned to capture “semi-ruins … buildings that haven’t collapsed yet but probably will soon.” While Mamush was waiting in line in court on a cold day in Chicago, a woman gave him a scarf, but he “wanted to tell me that I don’t need protection from the cold, that what he sees is a shadow version of me. ; the real me is there.” hundreds of miles on the outskirts of northern Virginia.

The break in the obvious reality is most evident when it comes to Samuel. “Today you said that you are like my father,” said Mamush. “But maybe tomorrow you will be like a distant relative whom I have only met twice. Similes can be changed. It can be revised, edited.” Samuel’s understanding is pieced together from scraps of memories and documents, but he belongs to a family that remembers. When he was in college, he asked his mother to help him write an essay about his childhood memories, she sarcastically asked if he could request a tuition refund.

So, how do you write a story about fathers and sons when fathers are questioned, or absent, and every story you can tell will be as trite and obvious as possible? Throughout “Someone Like Us,” you can feel Mengestu’s determination not to fall prey to the tropes of the immigrant narrative. Samuel’s experience with racism is maddening but not cataclysmic; Mamush talks about his family’s past in war-torn Ethiopia, and less about Samuel’s time in prison. Direct reporting was impossible for him: Mamush exasperatedly recalls the editor kicking the story back, saying that what he submitted “has nothing to do with the story you have to write. Which portrait? What’s the conflict? And why should people care?”

The kind of anti-characterization that Mengestu plays here is dangerous. Instead of just feeling detached, Mamush felt the lack of features. (“You’re like a doughnut,” a friend tells him. “There’s a hole in the middle, where there’s something solid.”) Instead of being a tragic and mysterious father figure, Samuel can be confused. who resists interpretation – Schrodinger’s father.

But Mengestu’s solution is clear: He makes the urge to create a coherent story something character in itself, revealing how desperately we contrive a narrative from scattered parts. In the closing chapter, Mengestu concocts a kind of fantasia out of this instinct, building an imagined story about Samuel from available evidence, shaped by Mamush’s own uncertain yearnings.

In the process, Mengestu achieves both, telling the immigrant narrative as well as criticizing it. He embodies the sense of loss and detachment experienced by Mamush, when he realizes that there is no clear path from point A to point B. In this, he is his father’s son: As Mamush is a traveling journalist, Samuel is a taxi driver. driver. This novel quietly captures the uncertainty that comes with statelessness and rootlessness.

At one point, Mamush described his ambition to write a story “about a group of people in one place at one time, who moved to another place at another time for a hundred different reasons we cannot explain, and we cannot fully understand. …. No there’s a plot.” It seems an impossible task. But in the hands of Mengestu, plotlessness and incomprehension never seem to be important to get the story right.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”