Dinaw Mengestu, whose new novel, All Our Names, was recently released, believes great literature can overcome the “fractured gaze” that separates “us” from “them”.
In an essay for The Atlantic, Mengestu writes about his experience as an Ethiopian immigrant growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, and the loneliness that arose out of his perceived “otherness”.
In the article, part of The Atlantic’s By Heart series, in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature, Mengestu says he believes Tayeb Salih’s little-known 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, deserves a place next to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the postcolonial canon, but adds that to consider it in those terms alone detracts from the novel’s individual greatness.
According to Mengestu, Season of Migration to the North, which is set in recently independent Sudan, England and Egypt, “mocks and eviscerates the clichés that come with looking at the world as a division between us and the Other”.
Similarly All Our Names, Mengestu’s third novel, complicates the idea of identity, as its main character leaves Uganda on his best friend’s passport, and begins a new life under his name – Isaac – in the American Midwest. The chapters alternate between narration by Isaac and the American woman he beings an affair with, who is unaware of his complicated past.
Mengestu says he attempts to embrace the various roles that are assigned to him – immigrant writer, African writer, Ethiopian-American writer, or American writer – but stresses that he constantly asserts the limits of those identities in his writing, “by working through all the ways in which both our collective and personal stories converge once they are placed side by side”.
And he believes Season of Migration to the North does just this, by affirming “our capacity to live beyond the limited means of our private lives”.
That fractured gaze, whether it is born out of race, gender, or privilege destroys the characters in the novel, none of whom are merely victims or perpetrators. Through them, the story becomes an argument for a better way of seeing, which has always struck me as being one of the novel’s better gifts, something which it is uniquely poised to do, if only because it demands the reader’s imagination, and by doing so affirms our capacity to live beyond the limited means of our private lives. We read not to encounter the Other, but to see ourselves refracted in a different landscape, in a different time, in shoes and clothes that perhaps bear no resemblance to our own.
Book details
- All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu
EAN: 9780385349987
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Images courtesy Voices Compassionate Education and The Atlantic