Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood, longing for his home continent. When a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
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Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood, longing for his home continent. When a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
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Set in the Logan Circle area of Washington, D.C. in the mid-1990's, Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, "The Beautiful things that Heaven Bears" (2007) tells a quiet story of loneliness and hope in a middle-aged man caught between two countries. Mengestu (b. 1978) left his native Ethiopia in 1980 with his mother and sister to join his father in the United States. The family emigrated as a result of the political unrest and terrorism in Ethiopia at the time that is recounted in the novel. An excerpt from Mengestu's book is included in the Library of America's anthology of American immigrant writing, "Becoming Americans Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing." I read this short, sad book in a reading group at the local Washington, D.C. library devoted to books by black authors.
Although Mengestu's novel is set against broad themes, such as the terror in Ethiopia and the difficulty of American immigrant life, it is predominantly a personal deeply introspective story told in the words of its primary character, Sepha Stephanos. When the story begins in 1996, Sepha has been the owner of a small grocery story in Logan Circle for ten years. I loved the book for the familiarity it showed with this and other parts of Washington, D.C. that I know well and for its descriptions of Sepha's endless walking around the city. As I do, Sepha also rides and observes his fellow passengers on the city buses and the subway in addition to his constant walking. In the mid-1990s, Logan Circle was in the process of gentrification. But for many years before then, the area was run down and deteriorating, the home to many prostitutes and drug dealers. The Circle, named after the Union Civil War hero John Logan was decayed and in disrepair. When Sepha established his store and moved to the Logan Circle area, the community was in its longstanding decay. When most of the story takes place, it had largely changed its character and become trendy and upper middle class.
Sepha has only two close friends in the United States, Joseph and Kenneth. He has known them for the entire 17 years of his American life when all three had menial jobs at a luxury hotel. Joseph and Kenneth are immigrants from different African countries, and the three friends enjoy playing a game in which they challenge one another to identify the many coups, revolutions, and atrocities in contemporary Africa. Kenneth has become an engineer with a good income but a feeling of isolation. Joseph, with dreams of becoming an intellectual and a poet, works as a waiter in an expensive restaurant and drinks heavily. The only friendships the three have are with each other, as they talk, drink, and watch women at D.C.'s adult bars. Sepha stayed with his uncle from Ethiopia for a number of years before moving to Logan Circle but sees little of him. When the story opens, Sepha is getting to know gentrified newcomers to Logan Circle, Judith, an academic separated from her husband who studies American intellectual history and her 11- year old biracial daughter Naomi. The young girl and Sepha become friends for a time as the precocious Naomi visits the story and has Sepha read to her from Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." And Judith, lonely in her own way, and Sepha try to become close. The book opens at a time near the chronological end of the story and the chapters move back and forth to discuss Sepha's life in Ethiopia, has early years in America and on Logan Circle, and his short relationship with Judith and Naomi.
The book shows Sepha alone, struggling with his store, walking the streets of Washington, D.C. sitting at the benches around Logan Circle, and becoming familiar over the years with many of the prostitutes who once frequented the area and patronized his store. He reads a great deal, learns about General Logan, and marvels about the ignorance of Americans about with their history and their heroes. Judith as well studies American's lack of interest in their past, and she encourages Sepha to read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Tocqueville. Isolated in their own ways, Sepha and Judith prove unable to connect. The strongest relationship in the book is between Sepha and young Naomi.
The book shows Sepha's inner life and the lives of his two friends, Joseph and Kenneth as they are caught between the lands of their birth and an America in which they feel alone. Sepha has for years been haunted by his father, who is killed in the Ethiopian terror just before he flees at the age of 16 to America. His mother gave Sepha the family treasures to make good his escape. Sepha, lost in the United States, communicates with his aged mother and young brother only sporadically.
The novel has a songlike, philosophical tone of loneliness interspersed with hope and the search for love. It is the story of an immigrant, but it describes feelings that many people will recognize. The book has a strong sense of place for Washington, D.C. as it is now and as it was not long ago. I was pleased to get to know this first promising novel by Dinaw Mengestu.
Robin Friedman
Turtle
May 10, 2007
Well writen. A quick easy read. Relatively melancholy. I kept waiting for the romance to pop or the protagonist to have a revelation. You peer in at these lives and although they begin to weave together, they mostly stay the same, but you love them all the more at the end for their consistency. It was a very authentic feeling book.
