About
An Addis resident who blogs on books, films and music from Ethiopia and beyond.
I value input from you, what do you like most and least about the blog? What would you change if you were a blogger? Don’t hold back.
If you have an idea for a story or wish to inform me about an art event, e- mail me at arefaynie@yahoo.com or at arefaynie@gmail.com.
January 12, 2007 at 4:42 am
been following… keep it up man!
March 5, 2007 at 4:57 am
Hey Arefaynie:
It’s so exciting to discover your blog just by sheer chance, as they say.
This is Tedla, Kume’s and your friend, just you know that this is your friend dropping by to share his excitement at discovering your blog. It’s good to know that you’re blogging something of value about art, and culture, etc. I really liked its name and that is what led me into check it out. Glad I did!
I’ll certainly stop by regularly and see if I’ve something to share as the days go by.
Keep up the good job and you’re living the kind of life I’ve expected of you years back when I was there.
Much love to Kume and yourself.
Cheers,
Tedla, from Michigan, USA.
March 7, 2007 at 9:00 pm
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears: A Novel
Dinaw Mengestu
Riverhead Books: 230 pp., $22.95
Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call “the in-betweeners.” The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison).
The new writer-immigrants are more uniquely caught between loyalties — to a home they are still linked to and involved in and to the lives they are committed to making here. It is a difficult negotiation and yet an amazing resource for works of exquisite frustration: hopeful, lonely, joyful and something else that cannot be named. These are writers who are making America their own but are also bringing the larger world into its streets, to borrow a phrase from Walter Mosley. This is the kind of writer Mengestu is, and “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” is the wrenching and important book he has made of this struggle.
Set over eight months in Logan Circle, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the novel shows us three characters bonding over their joint but different memories of another home, another sense of self, lost in the Africa they cannot return to. The engine of the book might be the relationships among these immigrants/refugees — Joseph from the Congo, Kenneth from Kenya and Sepha from Ethiopia — but the book’s molten core belongs to Sepha and his witty though elegiac voice. Seldom has a character emerged in a recent novel who is so compellingly dark but honest, hopeful but dismal, and able to turn his chronicle into a truly American tapestry: racially fraught, culturally limited, haunted by a dream of itself that has driven writers like Twain and others to make and remake it.
The book’s title, placing an emphasis on paradise (and thus redemption), is one of the many subtle indications of the book’s debt to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” For the narrative structure is one of a variety of circles, of the hells and purgatories that characters endure, and that nest within each other like Russian dolls. Sepha opens a convenience store in Logan Circle, named after the general whose statue graces its middle. What happens here, as Sepha watches families getting evicted to make way for gentrification and redevelopment, is symbolic of an American empire that is as disappointing as the empire that Haile Selassie created in Ethiopia and from which Sepha has fled. Sepha never contacts the family he left there, but he is unable to move forward until he can reconnect with them. In fact, in one attempt by Sepha to escape the monotony of his grief, we are led with him on a vision quest through the heart of D.C.
But “Beautiful Things” is no simple coming-to-America fable. Mengestu constantly parallels Ethiopia’s failed revolution with life in the U.S., and readers see in what happens in Logan Circle some proof that the alternative that America offers is failing and failing fast — what kind of paradise evicts its occupants on behalf of gentrification?
The author sustains parallels between Africa and the U.S., between the immigrants’ experiences here and there, with devices such as the wonderful but tragic letters that Sepha’s uncle writes to President Carter. Judith, a white woman who moves into the predominantly black Logan Circle, becomes Sepha’s Beatrice, and, as with Dante, she leads him from his exile to purgatory and, eventually, to redemption. They meet over the counter in Sepha’s store, which is where all the community eventually comes together — to buy, to hang out, to shoplift, to receive and pass along gossip. Sepha’s relationship with Judith is facilitated by the wonderful connection he has to Judith’s precocious daughter, Naomi. And like Dante and Beatrice, they have a love that remains fraught and unconsummated but powerful and transformative nonetheless. Part of the difficulty is that Judith represents the new wave of gentrification and Sepha’s decision to date her is seen as an act of betrayal by the other residents. Neighborhood tensions build because of Judith (since she symbolizes the oppressor), and her home is fire-bombed by local thugs. Sepha’s own redemption and the choice he makes in this matter are what shape his new self.
Naomi, Judith’s biracial daughter, is the angel who saves Sepha. He reads to her from “The Brothers Karamazov,” and their tender friendship is one of the book’ strongest delights. The child is a symbol of hope, partly because she represents all the factions in the book — here, the idea Mengestu seems to be suggesting is that we are all cultural mongrels, and the only chance we have is to accept that. There is of course no mistake in Naomi’s choosing Dostoevsky for Sepha to read to her: No other Russian writer seems better suited in a novel about the struggle between the possibilities an adopted land offers and the tortured agony that an investment in the past demands. In an Africa that often struggles with Marxist ideologies and power-hungry dictators, the effect of Russian literature and the emblematic opportunities it offers cannot be underestimated in the work of writers such as Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and South African Alex La Guma.
But Mengestu also has a sense of humor that is pitch perfect, falling between complete despair and pure sarcasm. Even the choice to name an immigrant from the Congo after Conrad and a Kenyan almost after Kenyatta seems at first obvious but is so subtly pulled off that the reader notices it only afterward. This triumvirate of friends, led by Sepha and his endlessly deferred dream, often plays a game of trying to match coups with dictators by using only dates or vague locations as clues — it is a kind of charades gone wrong.
The most haunting moments in the novel occur when the narrative tries to balance small, quiet moments of shame with those of true tenderness. When Naomi, for instance, is helping Sepha in his shop, she tells an old homeless man who dotes on her, “Take a bath,” and her tone is full of delicious scorn and insult. After this harshness comes a scene in which Sepha, nearly broke, buys and wraps Christmas presents for Naomi and Judith, presents he never gets to give them.
Ethiopia has one of the oldest histories of literacy and written literature, going back to the Middle Ages, and it is no wonder that Sepha is the chronicler of this book — he is the one who can contain it all and process it into the possibilities for transformation.
With “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” Mengestu has made, and made well, a novel that is a retelling of the immigrant experience, one in which immigrants must come to terms with the past and find a way to be loyal to two ideas of home: the one they left and the one they’ve made in America. If there is a more American concern, I haven’t found it yet. This is a question that American writers like Walt Whitman, and even Ben Franklin, have wrestled with: how to make an America that is born of Europe but free of it and at peace with it. With this book, Mengestu moves the conversation forward.
Chris Abani’s most recent novel is “The Virgin of Flames” by Penguin.
March 8, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Thanks E.M.
I rarely read fictions/novels but now I promise to read this one based on what you say and the following very good reviews too:
Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
“A startling, necessary novel. Dinaw Mengestu’s vision of America is clear and precise, opening our eyes to the country we inhabit, for better and for worse.”
Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of Sightseeing
“This is a wonderful novel. It is not only the story of an Ethiopian immigrant living in Washington, DC–it is also, in the end, the story of this country, of the dreamers who continue to dream it despite the unfolding, unforgiving American nightmare. Dinaw Mengestu is a marvelous, abundantly talented writer.”
Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales and Highwire Moon
“The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is unlike any other novel I’ve ever read - I was captured from the first page, with this wry, melancholic and very funny trio of immigrant friends who have made their own small place in this world. Stephanos, with his voice of hope and memory and survival, is a marvelous creation, and his attempts at love and salvation are rendered with exquisite care and humor by Dinaw Mengestu, a shining entry into the literary world.”
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Mengestu skirts immigrant-literature clichŽs and paints a beautiful portrait of a complex, conflicted man struggling with questions of love and loyalty… A nuanced slice of immigrant life.”
About the Author
Dinaw Meng Estu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Veritas
March 22, 2007 at 2:45 pm
This is a blog on addis: addiswatch.blogspot.com. I appreciate if you could add it as a link here…
Thanks
March 22, 2007 at 3:34 pm
This is a blog on Addis. I appreciate if you could add it as a link on your blog.
Addis Watch
January 8, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Yeah i would like to echo what most of you have said so far. And i would also like to add that your blog would have been more personable if you had your picture on it.
It’s like i enjoy reading your blog so much that i would like to know who is behind it.
Keep up the good work.
Your friend and reader from,
http://www.abesha.wordpress.com
March 25, 2008 at 7:06 am
Hey Arefe,
Thank you for your comment on one of my “new” (but not really) blog. Well, you know you are my inspiration and that i’m your biggest fan.
Anywho, i came here to check if you had anything on the “Hissna Hayassiyan” guba’e that took place at the Chamber of Commerce the other day. Esti.. say a thing or two about it when you get time (I dream of becoming a “hayassi” when i grow up; mentally, that is! Lideten “chibo” beMabrat makber kejemerku senbichalehu :-)). While you are at it, give me your comment on the Teddy-Afro post I published yesterday (man, that feels good! Actually “Publishing” something :-)).
Keep in touch.
Elli
March 31, 2008 at 9:18 am
Do you have the website address for the e-mail beAmarigna they were advertising on ETV a few days ago?
March 31, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I think I saw the ad on the Reporter.I’ll check and e-mail it you.
April 19, 2008 at 12:38 am
Hello, Your site is great. abra2 [url=http://www.abra3.com]abra3[/url] http://www.abra1.com [URL]http://www.abra4.com[/URL] Regards, Valiintino Guxxi
May 1, 2008 at 8:33 pm
selam wondeme, my name is Dawit and i run an ethio entertainment site called ethioclips and was wondering if you could add a link in your blog.
May 16, 2008 at 7:57 pm
hi there,
I am a new bee here, and from what Iam browsing I like the variety of your topics, gives me options
one thing I expect from your blog since you are stationed in Ethiopia would be writings in fidel, some things are just butter untranslated
thank you for sharing your blog
Cher Yigtemih
May 21, 2008 at 7:04 am
Hey arefe,
What up?
Was coming around to check if you have a piece on Abreham Retta Alemu, the journalist/writer who Sheger F.M. said died yesterday evening. And, ofcourse, regarding the bombing at Arat Kilo. Esti.. annd hulet belen.
May 21, 2008 at 8:15 am
He died! So sad. I didn’t hear. I am sorry for the loss. I met him a couple of times a year ago. He was a nice person to be with. I used to read his book review that he used to write for Addis Admass mostly under a pseudonym and articles for Rose magazine.
I will try to write an obituary, enshalah.
The blast news is all over the internet, check Google Ethiopia. I don’t know any more than what is written there.
The more depressing news is the famine that is taking a toll on 7 million children. It so disheartening and sad. But all what the state media is talking is the Ginbot 20 celebration. Shame on them.
For now I am working a story on a documentary on the Ethiopian music of the 60′ and 70′ that that I have seen on Saturday at Alliance. May be that makes sense
May 21, 2008 at 10:49 am
Was coming to tell you I took the trouble of posting both newses. Yeah, Abreham’s death is sad and the famine problem sounds very scary. But nothing, I’m sorry to say, is scarier to my person right now as the knowledge my little bro & sis may be the next minibus bombing victims.
Selaam yamta!
May 21, 2008 at 10:55 am
Hmm.. reminds one of other famins in our history the same media refused to talk about. First to celebrate Atse Haileselassie’s 80th birthday and then “iSsapas aseregna amet”.
I say: shame on all of them!
June 20, 2008 at 10:38 am
Hi Arefe,
Endet neh? Long time no see!
Have you read Alemayehu Gelagay’s controversial new book on Sebhat G/Egziabher and his works? Please read it and tell me what you think. Been having some “eseT aGeba” at my blog on it and I could use a comment from somebody who ACTUALLY read the book.
Eskeza, cher yagenagegn.
AdnaQih!
June 22, 2008 at 11:54 am
Oh dear, lememeles hulet ken fegdebign aidel?
Ye alemayehun metsehaf alanebekutm. Ke Addis Admass tichit besteker. I should say Keep the eset ageba up.
Right now, I am reading Tesfaye Gesese’s novel that I am planning to write some reaction some time in the future. Ahunem kal sebari kalhonku.
Ye adnaki thing, Seifu fantahun yehonku meselegn.
June 23, 2008 at 12:10 pm
It’s ok, arefe. I know you are a busy guy. Too busy to check out on the sister, obviously. But understandable ;).
So Tesfaye Gessesse wrote a novel! Didn’t know! Bought his “Rubayats” of Umer Hayam from the book fair at the AAU i mentioned in this very blog a few months ago. But I gotta tell you, was an up hill work getting past the first two paragraphs! There seems to be something wrong with either the translation or myself. Myself, more likely. Coz Sebhat has been gushing about it under the comment section, and I’d like to think Sebhat knows what he’s talking about. Speaking of whom, check out my blog for more “Eset AgeBas” on the above mentioned book (and Sebhat the writer, and Sebhat the person). Most of the “tekerakaris” haven’t read the book either, so you’d be fine.
Lol. Poor Seifu! Who would have thought, right?! I’m sure he’d have been shot at and missed atleast half a dozen times by now were he in addis. Rotten luck, his!
June 23, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Check out = check on