The engine of the book might be the relationships among these immigrants/refugees - Joseph from the Congo, Kenneth from Kenya and Sepha fromĮthiopia - but the book’s molten core belongs to Sepha and his witty though elegiac voice. Set over eight months in Logan Circle, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the novel shows us three characters bonding over their joint but different memories of another home, another sense of self, lost in the Africa they cannot return to. This is the kind of writer Mengestu is, and “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” is the wrenching and important book he has made of this struggle. These are writers who are makingĪmerica their own but are also bringing the larger world into its streets, to borrow a phrase from Walter Mosley. It is a difficult negotiation and yet an amazing resource for works of exquisite frustration: hopeful, lonely, joyful and something else that cannot be named.
The new writer-immigrants are more uniquely caught between loyalties - to a home they are still linked to and involved in and to the lives they are committed to making here. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call “the in-betweeners.” The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison). These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India,Įastern Europe and elsewhere. Riverhead Books: 230 pp., $22.95 Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. America, but can’t forget the one he left behindBy Chris Abani The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears: A Novel
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