{"id":8422,"date":"2020-05-05T20:49:24","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T00:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8422"},"modified":"2020-05-05T21:01:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T01:01:25","slug":"all-our-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/05\/all-our-names\/","title":{"rendered":"All Our Names."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names<\/a><\/em>, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior to seeing that novel of his show up on sale for the Kindle, and bought it on a whim based on the description and what I could find in a quick search about Mengestu himself. It’s a smart, incisive, and very fast-reading novel of alienation and identity that spans two continents and asks us to examine who we really are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel alternates narratives between those titled Isaac and\nthose titled Helen, but both are connected by a man who came from an unnamed\ncentral African country to a midwestern U.S. city as a refugee. In the Isaac\nsections, two young, poor men, one of whom will eventually flee for America,\nget caught up in a budding revolution that’s stirring around a university\ncampus where the men hang around but can’t afford to be students. In the\nchapters titled ‘Helen,’ Isaac, the refugee, and the woman who picks him up at\nthe airport begin a complicated love affair – and, since the novel is set in\nthe 1960s or early 1970s, good ol’ American racism is one of those\ncomplications, so Isaac ends up facing threats on both ends of his trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mengestu succeeds here by making both stories equally compelling\ndespite their substantive and dramatic differences. The half of the book set in\nAfrica is fraught with danger as the two boys are swept up by events\nsurrounding them, and eventually join forces with one revolutionary group, so\nthat they’re frequently endangering themselves or merely endangered by their\nmere existence as young men in a newly independent, barely functioning state.\nThe half set in the United States, by contrast, has very little physical danger;\nthe risk is of an interracial romance in an era and place that did not accept\nsuch couples, and of Isaac’s distance from Helen because of the unknowns in his\npast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How he ties those two together is enough of a spoiler that I\nwon’t go into it, but it’s clever, and revealed early enough in the novel that\nyou have time to adjust to this new knowledge and reassess what’s come before\nwhile still working through the remainders of both stories. It could seem like\na gimmick, and it didn’t quite help that I encountered the same gimmick two\nmonths earlier in a novel from 2019, but Mengestu makes it work because the\neventual revelation makes everything that came before it fit. (I had a\nsuspicion of what was coming a few chapters ahead, so it’s not that<\/em> big\nof a spoiler.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are just three characters in the book, the two named and\nthe other young man in Africa, with Helen probably the weakest of the three.\nThe two men seem to stand in for the two paths available to young men in such\nenvironments, with revolution brewing around them – the true believer, ready to\nstir up trouble and even take up arms; or the reluctant rebel, seeing no other\npath out of poverty but hardly believing in the cause of the rebels any more\nthan he believes in the government. Helen comes across more as observer than\nparticipant, and it’s never really clear – despite her narration – why she went\nto bed with Isaac, or how they fell in love. Once there, what follows is far\nmore convincing, but the lead up to that requires some buy-in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you accept the twist that ties the two narratives together, All\nOur Names <\/em>works as a portrait of a man adrift in two countries, fleeing his\nhomeland, where he couldn’t feel safe, for a new life as a refugee in a country\nthat will always view him as an outsider. It left me hoping Mengestu will\nreturn to fiction at some point, as he hasn’t published anything in the six\nyears since this book came out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I’m several books behind but right now I’m reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid<\/em>, Willie Mays’ and John Shea’s collaboration that’s part autobiography, part biography of the New York\/San Francisco Giants great, due out on May 12th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior to seeing that novel of his show up on sale for the Kindle, and bought it on a whim based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,31,161,247],"class_list":["post-8422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african-literature","tag-african-american-literature","tag-highly-recommended","tag-post-colonial-literature","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8424,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8422\/revisions\/8424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}