How do you tell immigrant stories? Dinaw Mengestu has an answer

Novelist Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales. His earlier books — “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” “How to Read the Air” and “All Our Names” — explored the psychic tolls on Ethiopian immigrants of being adrift in an alien American landscape.

With “Someone Like Us,” out this week from Knopf, Mengestu approaches this essential material from a variety of angles. The main character, Mamush, who was born in the United States but lives in France, is a disillusioned journalist. He returns to visit his mother outside Washington, D.C., and finds that Samuel, an enigmatic father figure and member of the local Ethiopian community, has mysteriously died.

Mamush embarks on a quest to unravel the secrets of Samuel’s life and death, searching his own foggy memories as well as a paper trail that includes court documents and parking tickets to flesh out Samuel’s precarious, itinerant existence as a cabdriver in the United States.

“If looked at closely,” Mamush says, these records “say something about a larger story still being written about America and why people came to it and what they found when they did.”

Sitting outside his home at Bard College, where he founded and directs the Center for Ethics and Writing program, Mengestu spoke to the Book Review about the hidden lives of his characters, who often exist in “more than one place at a time.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: When your second novel, “How to Read the Air,” came out in 2010, you said you planned to write one more book in a cycle about the African diaspora, likely followed by one without the “same sense of dislocation and displacement.” That didn’t exactly happen with “Someone Like Us.”

A: No, I actually went back, which I was really happy about. The book goes back geographically, though on a larger scale, to the first novel, which was centered in one neighborhood in D.C. This one is about the second generation that has grown up in the U.S., straddling economic ascension but also in a strange position because they’re neither here nor there. So, no, this book felt much more like a return — there’s even a character from the first novel who reappears.

Q: The novel poses the question: How do you tell an immigrant story? Where do you begin? The fragmented structure of the book — which jumps between Samuel’s life in Ethiopia, Europe and America — reflects that dilemma, right?

A: Yes, as much as the narrator might want to understand Samuel, there’s also a sense that there’s a limitation to how fully we can truly understand his experiences. And for me, that’s a kind of respect for Samuel’s enigmatic quality and the complexity of the characters. That gap becomes part of the narrative, part of what the story is trying to deeply engage with.

Q: It’s interesting how the perception of Samuel changes over the years. When he first came to this country he stood out, he says, but now he’s just one of a million foreign-speaking cabdrivers.

A: He actually kind of disappears and becomes invisible because he becomes lost in this larger narrative of the immigrant cabdriver. For him, there is also the sense of not having done anything that distinguishes him. He realizes he wasn’t able to reimagine himself.

Q: He has one big dream: To create a fleet of taxis that will shepherd immigrants caught in “wrong” places to where they feel safe. How did that idea come about?

A: I was first writing this in the summer of 2020, so I was thinking about the particular type of vulnerability that you can feel as a Black man, compounded by the sense of being an immigrant: The fact that you don’t always necessarily trust that you can get from Point A to Point B safely. But there’s also an economic aspect to it. Samuel’s a hustler — he wants to make something.

Q: Samuel is a ghostlike presence throughout much of the book, but Mamush, too, tends to slip away and vanish. His wife complains, “You’re like a doughnut. There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be.”

A: I guess it’s a quality I find myself drawn to in characters, because it gives you the ability to create somebody who observes the world. But in his case, that emptiness says something fundamental about his own kind of damage.

Q: Mamush has lost his faith in covering “tragic” immigrant stories and war zones. How do you see your own reporting — from Darfur, among other places — in relation to your novel writing?

A: I always thought of the nonfiction I did, especially concerning conflict, as a way to do what I sometimes couldn’t do in fiction: write very explicitly about a political reality. I guess in this case, the novel became a way to be somewhat critical of how I wrote those things to begin with, or the way those things are always narrated.

Q: How does Bard’s Center for Ethics and Writing tie in to this idea of how stories are told?

A: When I started directing the writing program here, we wanted to move away from the idea of teaching writing as a purely craft-based project and figure out how to foreground aesthetics. How do we examine aesthetic considerations that can be made more complicated by the fact that sometimes we want to take on real political issues, which requires a more nuanced and intellectually rigorous aesthetic structure?

Q: Immigration has become such a politicized issue in this country. Did that affect how you wrote this book?

A: Completely. I mean, all those ideas that went into the making of the center have dramatically changed my own approach to writing. How do I implicate myself as narrator in the telling? What does it mean to take on that work in a way that feels “ethical” (which is different from “moral”)? It’s not about trying to represent the right version of the story — you’re trying to represent a story that respects its variations and nuances.

Q: Finally, I’m wondering if you can now say that your next book will take you in a different direction?

A: What I’m working on now does feel slightly different, but who knows where it will go. My first novel had a narrator named Sepha, which is my baptismal name. And this narrator’s nickname is Mamush, which was my nickname growing up. That makes me think I have to be done, because I don’t have any other names!

Q: Well, you did call your last book “All Our Names.”

A: Yeah, I have a thing with names. I need to branch out.

© 2024 The New York Times Company