Writing home Dinaw Mengestu and the beautiful things that heaven bears

Fader, The, March, 2008 by Matthew Schnipper

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* Washington, DC is a square town. To most, it's only the city where the President lives and where laws are made. To those who reside there though, they know that a vital part of the city is Little Ethiopia. Until he was three years old, Dinaw Mengestu lived in real Ethiopia, then he moved to the Midwest for the bulk of his growing up years, and later went on to DC to attend Georgetown. Not far from the apartment he lived in at 17th and U is Logan Circle, where Sepha, the protagonist of Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, lives and works. Sepha too is an Ethiopian immigrant living in Washington, but unlike Mengestu he has lived in both places many years. DC's "power and poverty" are now just as routine in his life as Ethiopia's, which he left to avoid genocide. For Sepha, a lengthy subway ride to the suburbs becomes a metaphor for loneliness and immigration: "There's a solitude and isolation that come with knowing that out of everyone you had begun your journey with, only you and the few faces across the aisle are left. That alone seems enough to make a connection, but as it stands, the opposite is always true. The empty space, whether it's only a few feet or the entire car, becomes impassable." This blankness shapes both Sepha and the book, a world of weathered routine gnashing with unmeshable foreignness.

"I wanted Sepha's voice to have a strong, quiet undercurrent of melancholy without becoming overly dramatic," Mengestu says from France, where he is temporarily living as he begins work on his second novel. "He lives with the emptiness and loneliness of exile every day, and for me that sense of dislocation and loss could only be best expressed through a voice that was restrained, almost muted." Early in the novel, Sepha accompanies a friend on a drive, and apropos of essentially nothing, he says he will bear the friend's poor driving skills as "we had all suffered enough mockery and humiliation to last us well beyond our lifetimes." Beautiful Things is ultimately carried by that dry panic and inherent calm, large stories told through little movements.

MATTHEW SCHNIPPER

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