Dinaw Mengestu – Children Of The Revolution

I just completed the debut novel by Ethiopian-born American writer Dinaw Mengestu, called Children Of The Revolution. In a run-down suburb of Washington DC, Ethiopian exile Sepha Stephanos runs a dilapidated and increasingly financially burdensome general store, and hangs out with two other African immigrant friends, the three of them all disillusioned with the America they have been given. As they watch their suburb slowly succumb to gentrification and all that that entails, they remember the Africa they left behind and its seemingly endless roll-call of tyrannous, murderous regimes. Sepha’s life is brightened by the arrival of a white woman named Judith and her lovely daughter Naomi to the area, but how much happiness will the world – and Sepha himself – allow him to have?

Mengestu’s taut and lyrical prose seems to glide off the page, pitched somewhere between Fitzgerald and the deceptively simple novels of Ishiguro. I found myself genuinely caring about Sepha, and – more revealingly – becoming infuriated at his emotional cowardice and defeatism when it came to Judith (demonstrating not only the strength of Mengestu’s prose but also his admirable determination not to fall into the common trap of writing a victim with no personality flaws, and no real character at all. He endows Sepha with foibles and weaknesses, gives him the respect of his failings). Moving from descriptions of the bloody violence meted out by insurgents in Africa to haunting depictions of a man without a country, without a family and without a home, the novel is an exercise in loss, isolation, nationhood and cultural identity, and is beautiful as it does so.

What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.