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Where I Come From

by Hugh Blanton

Dinaw Mengestu’s fourth novel Someone Like Us follows along with the same themes and motifs we’ve seen in his previous novels. We even get a character from The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears that resurfaces here in a key role. All four novels detail the immigrant experience in America rendered in unadorned but poetic prose. Our main character in his latest novel, Mamush, lives in Paris with his wife Hannah and their two-year-old son. They are planning a Christmas trip to the USA to introduce their son to Mamush’s mother (who Mamush hasn’t seen in five years), however the two-year-old is sick with an undiagnosed illness and unable to travel. Hannah and the child stay behind in Paris while Mamush flies across the Atlantic alone.

Someone Like Us makes herky-jerky jumps in place and time; digressions often turn on a single sentence leaving one momentarily puzzled. Mengestu plays with form and character reliability and the scrambled chronology can be difficult to follow along with. Mamush’s life is in shambles—his drug and alcohol use is destroying his career as a reporter and he’s a habitual liar. His marriage to Hannah is failing as well, she finds his poorly hidden drugs and paraphernalia throughout their apartment. Our main character’s mind is so disordered he misses his flight from Paris to DC while he’s playing around on his phone. He of course lies about it, telling Hannah that his flight was delayed. And she of course finds out the flight was not delayed. If they gave out awards for being an unreliable narrator Mamush would be a legend.

Mamush’s mother never married and she never told him who his father was, although he knows: ‘Even though I’d known for years that Samuel was my father, neither he nor my mother had ever expected me to treat him as such.’ His mother and Samuel emigrated from Ethiopia at the same time although neither of them told Mamush why they emigrated. However, we get a glimpse of what life was like in Ethiopia for Samuel when he tells Mamush what it was like to be a soldier there: ‘We kept our weapons low, near our waist. Do you know why? You don’t aim when you’re shooting into a crowd. Everyone is the same. Also, your arms don’t get tired. You can shoot for many minutes like that. I was very skinny, like you. If I held the gun up to my shoulders, I would get tired very quickly.’ After immigrating to America, Samuel became a cab driver. Mamush’s mother tells him Samuel has died as soon as he arrives at her home in DC.

Mengestu said in a 2018 interview with Lisa J. Cole of the University of Central Florida about immigrant stories:

It’s not that my characters or that I’m resistant to the idea of an immigrant or even that name. I think it’s really important, especially now, since that category’s under attack, that the term’s meaningful. And I consider myself part of that. My family definitely. But it’s when that totalizes somebody’s identity, where their experience is understood to only be within that framework, then suddenly the complexities of that quickly get lost. Suddenly, we have the immigrant narrative, but the immigrant narrative is so radically different. Somebody who came as a refugee during World War II versus somebody who’s come from Canada versus a migrant who’s left home at fourteen from Central America—they all share one thing in common, which is the loss of a home to a certain degree. But there’s a radical difference and divide in those experiences, and it’s important to try and figure out how to parcel those stories out to make sure that we see them as distinct, that we see them as individual lives.

In his 2006 novel What is the What, Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese child refugee who immigrated to the USA under the Lost Boys of Sudan program. Sudanese-American NBA star Manute Bol once addressed a group of the Lost Boys, encouraging them to adapt to American culture and to represent Sudan well. Our main character here, Mamush, was born in America (he immigrated to France as an adult to be a writer) and had no pressure from either his mother or Samuel to integrate into American culture, other than his mother forbidding him to learn to speak Amharic. Samuel mentors Mamush as much as he can, including telling him how to lie properly. ‘And if you can’t lie to people,’ Samuel tells him, ‘then you have no hope of succeeding in this country.’ Someone Like Us differs from the many stock immigrant stories being published today—it isn’t providing cultural therapy for white American readers.

Samuel had a dream of forming a national cab company for immigrants in America, someone they could trust to transport them without fear of being detained by train police, ticket checkers, etc. Samuel himself had a few times been stopped by the police and mistreated and he wants to create a safe network for foreigners who need to travel throughout America. It’s pie in the sky, of course, and he never gets it off the ground. Samuel was living in a sober-living home at the time of his death, and the owner lets Mamush spend time alone in Samuel’s room before clearing it out. Mamush finds a manuscript that Samuel had been working on. Samuel had often mentioned to Mamush that he wanted to be a writer, too, but Samuel had never mentioned a manuscript. Could Mamush finally learn something of his father’s Ethiopian past?

In April of 2024, the US Department of Homeland Security extended Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopian immigrants until December of 2025. Temporary Protected Status is for individuals unable to safely return home due to conditions or circumstances in their country. However, at the same time, the EU has tightened visa requirements for Ethiopians, citing a lack of cooperation from the Ethiopian government in accepting deportations (even Ethiopian diplomats now have to pay for EU travel visas). The conflict in the northern Tigray region supposedly ended in November of 2022, but millions of people there still rely on international humanitarian aid and the BBC reported in July of 2024 that two million people are at risk of starvation. Militias and Eritrean troops remain in control of western and southern Tigray despite the Pretoria Agreement requiring them to withdraw.

‘Do you know what we call journalists back in Ethiopia?’ Samuel asks Mamush when he finds out Mamush wants to be a reporter. ‘We have many different names for them. Prisoner number 11134; Prisoner number 2256…’ Reporters covering the conflicts in Tigray and Amhara have been detained on charges of ‘promoting terrorism’ and foreign media companies have had their television channels suspended for operating without a license. Of course Mamush doesn’t have to worry about a tyrannical government destroying him, he’s doing a fine job of it himself. His French employer had sent him to eastern Congo to write about an engineer turned militia leader. Mamush spent three months drinking in hotel bars before finally doing a single interview with him and ‘Months after returning home from that trip, I had yet to write a single word and was rarely sober enough to even try.’ The story was never written. Back in Chicago Mamush used his reporter’s credentials to retrieve records at a courthouse (where Samuel and his mother lived when they first immigrated) looking for anything that might enlighten him about his parents’ past.

Mamush had offered to have his mother flown to Paris when his son was born, knowing that her passport was voided, having been issued by a government that no longer existed. Mamush suggested she get a new Ethiopian passport so she could travel. ‘It’s that easy, you think,’ she says. ‘I get an Ethiopian passport and then go wherever I want? No.’ She lists the rigmarole she would have to go through just to fly to France. ‘How long do you want to stay? How much money do you have? Why do you want to come here? I’m not going to beg some country to let me in. They want to make you feel like a thief for traveling but look at them.’ J.M. Servín, author of For Love of the Dollar: A Portrait of the Artist as an Undocumented Immigrant, says of the process of getting legal residency status in the USA: ‘I refused to start the application process for my legal residency despite the abundance of shysters who specialized in that racket. The process could take years, five thousand dollars, and the desperate search for some employer to plea for my case in front of an immigration officer. Another alternative…was to marry someone who was a citizen and pay her a fee running up into the thousands. No thanks.’

What Mamush found (and did not find—one case had been sealed by request) in his court records search did not satisfy his longing to know his parents’ history and his own origins. The Anna Karenina principle applies here: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ With the reader of Someone Like Us being addressed by a grieving, brain fogged addict we don’t know if the advice from Samuel telling Mamush to return to his family and never, ever leave them is real or imagined. The book is not completely humorless though—when Mamush’s ontology professor assigns the class to come up with a list of places the students loved from their childhood, Mamush turns in the shortest list in the class. The professor tells Mamush to get help from his mother and come up with a longer list:

‘We need to come up with a list of places that we loved from childhood, and the professor said we should ask our family for help.’
I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘This is a class?’
‘Yes,’ I said. It’s for a class.’
‘This is a joke?’
‘It’s not a joke,’ I said.
‘This is a real class?’
‘Yes, it’s a real class.’
‘What’s the professor’s name?’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘I want to talk to him.’
‘Why?’
‘How can I get my money back. This is America. Refund.’

Mamush is torn between these two cultures, always rethinking his future, wondering about his parents’ past, never able to unpack the salient details of his life. Before he left for his Christmas trip he said to his wife Hannah: ‘I’ll be home in a week,’ I told her, and until I landed in Chicago, I was all but certain that was true.’

Someone Like Us
by Dinaw Mengestu, 272 pages
Knopf, $28.00