E-mail a friendDinaw Mengestu
airdate March 9, 2007
Born in Ethiopia, Dinaw Mengestu immigrated to the U.S. in '80, joining his father, who fled their native country during the Red Terror. He graduated from Columbia University's MFA fiction program and interned at The New Yorker. A Visiting Writer at his Georgetown alma mater, Mengestu has written a firsthand account of the situation in Darfur for RollingStone and draws on his background to tell a story of the African immigrant experience in his debut novel, Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.
Dinaw Mengestu
Tavis: Dinaw Mengestu is a visiting professor at Georgetown University and a freelance journalist who's written frequently for "RollingStone.” Born in Ethiopia, he was raised here in the United States. His debut novel is just out and is receiving wide acclaim. The book is called "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.” Dinaw, nice to have you on the program.
Dinaw Mengestu: Nice to be here.
Tavis: When I say wide acclaim, everybody and their mother seems to be extolling what you've done here in this debut novel.
Mengestu: Yeah, I've been incredibly fortunate with the reception that the book has gotten. You know, you write something and you never know what's going to happen when it actually hits the stands and then people have actually responded to it. You know, I think people really feel connected to the characters and they are definitely moved by the story that's being told inside of it. It's been great, actually, seeing the response to it.
Tavis: When you walked on, I was asking you off-camera about the characters. We'll come back to that on camera here in just a second. Let me start, though, this Dante reference is inescapable, but tell me about the title itself, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.”
Mengestu: The title comes from the last few lines of "The Inferno" just as Dante's character is about to leave hell and is on his way to purgatory. The last few lines say, "Where we came and saw the stars from the beautiful things that heaven bears." One of the characters from the novel, Joseph, from the Congo, imagines himself to be a real poet. Buried deep inside of him, he knows there's a poet and he takes those lines to be the most perfect lines of poetry every written.
He also believes poetry is, you know, best understood by the African mind, especially those lines because they're symbolic to him of what his life was like in Africa where he can, despite all the violence that he knew was going on inside of him, despite all the poverty, he always had the sense of what was beautiful and what was waiting in the future if they could only get to that point.
Tavis: You mention Joseph. Tell me about the others. It's built around a few characters. Tell me about the other characters.
Mengestu: It's built around a few characters. It's three main characters. Joseph, who's from the Congo; there's another character, Kenneth, who's from Kenya; and then the main character is the narrator of the novel, Sepha Stephanos, who's from Ethiopia.
Tavis: Your experience notwithstanding, tell me why three characters from three parts of Africa.
Mengestu: You know, I wanted to kind of really get the whole continent. I wanted characters who would be able to say different things about Africa because, obviously, fifty-four countries and it's a really broad place. There's no one singular monolithic idea of Africa and I wanted characters who all had different things to say about it and also characters who weren't the typical immigrants.
You know, they were characters who were all disconnected from their own communities and disconnected from America as well at the same time. The three of them together formed, to me, this surrogate family that they built in this little store together.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question that has two sides to it, if I might. What's the value in being able, in a novel format, to tell these stories about Africa that you want told that aren't often told, and what's the challenge in telling that story to an American public that too often writes off Africa?
Mengestu: The real value is that, one, you get to actually create characters who are fully formed, who are really alive. You're not getting - you know, with fiction, you actually get to really endow somebody with life. You're not getting a stereotype; you're not getting a cliché. You get characters who are complicated if you're hopefully doing your job right.
So with that, I mean, I wanted African characters who really came to life on the page, who transcend general stereotypes, who transcend cliché ideas of what it is to be African immigrants. That was really important to me, being able to make these characters really breath, really be seen, really be successful, really be poor, really be frustrated, have real aspirations and dreams, and also to be able to use them to reflect back onto Africa itself from different perspectives at the same time.
Tavis: What's the challenge, then, of getting an American reading public to take seriously a novel about this continent that we diss in so many ways?
Mengestu: Yeah, the trick is, you know, people say, "Oh, it's an African novel. No one is going to buy that. No one's going to want to read it." I don't think that's true actually. I think people do want to read it and they do want to actually know more. They just need to have the information presented to them in a way that's actually going to make it something new and alive and fresh for them.
So with this, you want characters who are going to be complicated. You know, these aren't characters who are generally represented in fiction anyway. African writers have done a really great job of that, of course, in the past. But putting them into an American context is a very different situation and you want the readers to really be able to connect to them at the same time.
Tavis: Does something get lost in that translation? Is there a part of the novel that could allow Dinaw to be accused of selling out the characters? Does that make sense?
Mengestu: Yeah, it does. You know, I think something does get lost. I think anything, when you translate something from a foreign culture into American, always gets lost. I mean, the characters themselves are lost at the same time. To say that they could be sold out would be to also say that there's only one idea that they could possibly represent. I don't think that's true.
If the characters fall short, it's because I didn't do a good enough job making them alive, but not because I'm ever selling them out. It's because, you know, they're too complicated. I think every character in the world is too complicated and, in every character from Africa, there's no one idea that they should ever be held to. So I think, if they're not coming fully alive on the page, that's only then because of being stereotyped actually by me.
Tavis: Let me ask a far-out question. I don't know if there's any comparison here or not or any relevance, but I just want to give you a blank canvas on this one question. So we have a guy running for president now who happens to be Kenyan, a guy named Barack Obama, obviously.
The book is about these characters coming to America and finding their way in the world even though they have this blood that runs through them from the continent of Africa. When I say Barack Obama, relative to this novel, what comes to mind? Anything at all?
Mengestu: Yeah, definitely. I think the dialog that's happening with Barack to me is really important dialog that actually needs to happen because it's pushing the dialog of what it means to be Black in America. It's not saying that it's not just a matter of skin color, but there also is an African American experience that's very distinct and very particular from an African immigrant experience.
Obviously, of course, there's not a lot of shared experiences that happened just by nature of being Black in America. There's also going to be whole other historical burdens that both sides carry, you know. Coming from Africa, you carry different political historical legacies that you have to bear when you come to America. Being African American, you bear a different legacy as well.
Watching to see like how America actually starts that dialog and not letting it fall short either. I think it should be pressed. The idea should be taken as far as it possibly can and, you know, question it. Don't necessarily be comfortable with the idea of saying, "Well, we're all going to be the same." It's more complicated than that and I think, actually, to challenge it is good.
Tavis: It's one thing, Dinaw, for America, to your point now, to have that dialog. It's another thing for Black America to have that dialog. You and I both know that, inside of Black America, there's this ongoing conversation and perhaps we don't have enough dialog about this, but this ongoing conversation hovers, at least, around this issue of who is authentic, what experience is authentic and what the difference is, what the distinction is, between being an African in America and an African American. In the context of the novel, talk to me about that.
Mengestu: In the context of the novel, the main narrator himself, Sepha Stephanos, is an African immigrant. He comes to the United States. He's living in a poor African American neighborhood and he himself knows that he doesn't quite fit into that community at all. He knows he's very much a part of it and he's lived in the community for seventeen years, but he's very much attached to Ethiopia.
He's very much attached to the death of his father that happened inside of his country. So he feels no attachment to America as an idea, to America as its symbol of land and opportunity and freedom. He doesn't connect to that and he doesn't necessarily want to connect to that.
At the same time, he also doesn't connect fully to the community around him. He knows that he is almost invading it, to some degree. He's actually there and owns a grocery story inside of it, but he hasn't been a part of the community his whole life. He wasn't raised inside of it. He was a part of his birth.
Tavis: As an African American or an African, I can see the value in reading this book, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.” Back to my earlier point where we started the conversation because it's receiving such critical acclaim from all sorts of sources, what's the value, what's the benefit, in a person who happens not to be of African descent reading this?
Mengestu: Hopefully, the book does actually a lot. My idea in writing the book was that, you know, I wanted to touch on as many different parts of America, I mean, gentrification, race relations, class relations, definitely relations obviously with immigrants, and also to push the idea of what it means to be an immigrant inside of America further than the stereotype of, you know, you come to America, you pull yourself up, you progress, you strive, everything is eventually going to be all right.
But characters who actually come realizing that everything's not going to be all right, they're not going to make it into the world and also to look at America very critically. I think the book spends a lot of time, you know, looking at American history, looking at American politics, race in America, and really try to see what is happening especially inside of American cities.
The book is set entirely in Washington, D.C. and inside of that little community that's rapidly gentrifying, where this historically Black neighborhood is being rapidly displaced by the new white upper-class community that's moving in. I think that's a dialog that still needs to be happening, especially right now where you can see cities transforming and changing so rapidly and, in my opinion, irresponsibly.
Tavis: So finally, this is the debut novel. What do you make of the novel-writing process? Something you want to do again?
Mengestu: Yeah, I hope so. If more people want to keep reading it, then, yeah, that's where I hope all my future lies.
Tavis: I'm sure they will. It is, again, receiving critical acclaim. "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" by Dinaw Mengestu. We highly recommend it. Dinaw, congratulations on the first one and I'm sure it won't be the last. Nice to have you on the program. It's a pleasure to meet you.
Mengestu: Thank you very much for having me, Tavis.
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