Children of the Revolution

The young reader is likely to doggedly finish a book, no matter how bad. The older reader simply abandons the book if it is going nowhere. After several months of starting books only to put them aside half way through, I found myself unable to put down Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution (though I quite prefer its alternative title The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears). Set in Washington, the novel’s narrator, Sepha Stephanos, is an immigrant who fled Ethiopia’s Red Terror for the US and is now content to mind his store, read his books and while away the days. His friends, Kenneth and Joseph are immigrants too and much of the novel follows their numerous meetings and discussions. Sepha’s world – one of limbo between the past and the present – is changed by the arrival of Judith, a white woman and her daughter Naomi as Sepha’s corner of the earth gentrifies. Mengestu’s novel is simple and elegant and barely freighted down by the many issues that lie beneath. For the novel touches on the history of Africa (e.g. by way of a game the friends play where you guess the African dictator, his country and the year of his ascent), family, the immigrant experience, the changing nature of Washington, race relations in the US and the like. But its characters are so believable and so true and Sepha himself such a wholly sympathetic narrator that Mengestu is successful in making individual histories representative of the larger changes they live through. And Judith herself is not a caricature, as in many immigrant novels, but wholly believable, you can see why Sepha would be attracted to her. Further, Mengestu provides a tender portrait of the relationship between Naomi, who has an absent father and Sepha. In fact, Mengestu is compassionate towards all his characters, all of them seem flesh and blood people even when, as for e.g. with the friends, they represent different African experiences. At the end of the book, I was ready to go back and start reading it all over again.

Though the two are entirely different, the book made me recall Little Senegal. The resemblance stops with both dealing with African communities in the US, the movie is more concerned with Africa’s uneasy meeting with African-Americans.