← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Dinaw Mengestu's 'Someone Like Us'
00:31:18
We air highlights from our conversation with author Dinaw Mengestu who joined us for our October Get Lit with All Of It event.
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- [00:09]
Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In the new novel from Danao Mangestu, an Ethiopian American journalist tries to get to the bottom of his father's sudden death and his mysterious life. Mamouche has left America behind. He lives in Paris with his wife and young son. Back at home in the U.S. his mother lives in the suburbs of Washington D.C. not far away is Samuel, a cab driver that Mamush knows as his father, even though it was never really spoken out loud. In fact, Mamush's mother seems to want to keep some distance between her son and Samuel. Samuel was a larger than life person with big hopes and dreams. He had a tenuous relationship with the truth and a murky past. He struggled with addiction and mental health. After Mamouche learns that Samuel has taken his own life, he sets out on a journey to discover who his father really was. The novel is titled Someone Like Us. It's a story about grief, the American dream, and how much we can really understand another person. It was our choice for our get lit with all of it. October Book Club author Denouement joined us last week for a packed in person event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Let's hear part of that conversation now. So I read in the New York Times that Mamouche was your nickname.
- [01:36]
Dinau Mengestu
Yeah, in Amarnia, Mamouche just means little boy. And so any little kid you see walking on the street, you could say, mamouche, nay come here. But yet every once in a while, for some reason it becomes like attached to a child. So growing up, that was the name everyone in my family called me. And it's still the name that most of my uncles and aunts call me in part because my name, Dinau, doesn't really exist in Ethiopia. So most Ethiopians think it's an American name. And so like Mamouche was a very sort of like familiar one. And so it's still like a very close term of endearment.
- [02:12]
Alison Stewart
How do you go about naming your characters in your books?
- [02:16]
Dinau Mengestu
You know, I realized once this book was done that I'd been kind of secretly naming my characters after myself for quite a while. The narrator of my first novel is named Sephus Stephanos, which was the baptismal name that my grandfather wanted to give me shortly before he passed away. In another novel, the narrator's only referred to as D, which is obviously for my first name. And then, and then of course Mamush. And you know, some of it was, you know, paying a Kind of respect and homage to my family and to, like, the legacy and inheritance that I take from them. But with this novel, it was. It felt like I needed to make myself personally accountable. I knew I was drawing on stories that were based on real people in real lives that were very close to our family. And I felt like if I were going to take narratives that already weren't mine, then I needed to have kind of an equal sense of investment inside of the story myself. Like, I needed to be held accountable both by the reader and I think myself.
- [03:19]
Alison Stewart
Mamouch eventually comes to understand that Samuel is his father, yet he doesn't call him Papa. He doesn't call him Father. Why doesn't he ever call him Father?
- [03:30]
Dinau Mengestu
You know, I mean, it's one of the kind of slippery qualities of these characters, as I think has been said before. There's a certain distance and detachment and yet, at the same time, a lot of love. But there's a kind of understanding that there's only so much he's going to be able to understand and know about his mother and about Samuel. And in part because their lives are separated by these sort of very radically different experiences and including the terms of, like, how Samuel came to be his father and the relationship that he has with his mother. And so they have this intimacy and this love. But there's also a point at which, you know, he tells Samuel that, you know, I think of you like a cousin or like a close family member. And Samuel says, well, you know, that's right, because that means I have to work really hard to make you sort of believe in our relationship. Right. Like, I have to put in all this extra effort for you to know how much I love you. Because it might not be very obvious given some of the distances and some of the kind of uncertainty and ambiguity around our relationship. So, yeah.
- [04:31]
Alison Stewart
Why does Mamouche's mother sort of question the amount of time that Samuel spends with him with Mamush?
- [04:41]
Dinau Mengestu
I think because she knows he's troubled and she doesn't know how to say that explicitly. There's a way in which all the characters, I think they live in a cultural context that for them makes it hard to kind of express certain realities that a character might be going through. Right. So, like, what's the word for addiction and for depression, for these sort of, like, very hard emotional states that even though we might have the terms for. And we use them, I don't think we're always very comfortable with them ourselves. So I think they're just different ways in which we kind of mask or we try to cover up or we try to acknowledge, but yet at the same time, not really recognize the truth of what somebody's going through. And with her, I think she knows that he has. That he carries a lot of sort of, like, troubled memories and a legacy with him. And she knows that. She knows she doesn't want his son to kind of get maybe too close to that. Like, she thinks she can protect him by making sure they don't spend too much time. But, you know, of course, there's a lot of similarities and echoes between the two.
- [05:44]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk about how you wrote the book. The book goes back and forth in time, sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks. Why the structure.
- [05:56]
Dinau Mengestu
Some of it was, I think, just wanting to think about the way we live in a present moment where our lives move forward from A to B. But, of course, that forward momentum is constantly interrupted by the past. We are always pulled back by memories, by experiences that suddenly sort of throw themselves at us, unexpected. So even while we're here, parts of ourselves are always kind of, like, moving in and out of time. So I wanted the novel to certainly reflect that. But there's also a way in which the characters, you know, they create their own identities through the stories they tell. And they are constantly telling stories. Samuel is constantly inventing different versions of himself. And, you know, one way to look at it might be to think, well, he has a kind of, like, unstable character, or there's something missing. And another way to think of it is that he's controlling, as much as he can, his own narrative. And controlling that narrative means a kind of multitude of stories. And that multitude of stories kind of makes. Kind of serves almost as a kind of architecture for the novel where I start telling you one thing, and that thing's going to connect me to something else. And if you want to know what this means, then maybe you should also know what that means. And together, I think, hopefully, they kind of make a constellation of meaning that. That it's not certainly intended to, like, confuse the reader, but just to kind of show the expansiveness and the kind of, like, intricacy of our lives and how one moment is connected to the next. And in order to understand who we are, we have to kind of hold together all of these different strands of our past. And what does it mean to create a narrative that can try to do that?
- [07:30]
Alison Stewart
Did you think about us, the reader?
- [07:32]
Dinau Mengestu
All the time. Probably more so than ever, you know, and in part. And this is where it. Maybe it sounds a little strange is I thought a lot about how the readers will see these characters and how if there was a way for the characters to see the reader back. And one of the things I thought a lot about was how I wanted to make sure these characters had a kind of, like, a fullness and a complexity to their lives, but that they were not going to be asked to reveal themselves in kind of a totalizing way that made their experiences sort of reducible to, like, one or two singular events. And I wanted characters who. Who had a kind of ethics and an ethical representation which comes with a kind of, like, not only a complexity, but a kind of respect for the profound sort of mysteries that we sort of carry. Right. The more, you know, somebody oftentimes, the more, you know how little you understand them. And I wanted the characters to have that complexity, but also because they're immigrants, and oftentimes we want those stories to be given over to us. And I wanted them to have the capacity to not have to do that, to be able to say, like, maybe I don't tell you the totality of who I am, but I'll tell you so many other things. You know, I'll give you all of these versions of myself, some of which may or may not be true, but they are all equal representations of me. And for me, that was the best way I could think of creating a dialogue between the characters and the reader. So it's not just the reader who comes in and kind of, like, consumes the characters, but the characters themselves are kind of talking back and asking you to kind of like to let them live kind of on their own terms.
- [09:13]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, the book has a great deal of suspense and mystery to it. What is it? What are some of the choices that you made in the pacing of this story? To keep the suspense, to keep the mystery?
- [09:32]
Dinau Mengestu
You know, I think maybe I mentioned this before, but, like, I really thought at the beginning, too, that this would kind of, like, feel almost like a detective novel slash ghost story, that there would be maybe, like, a central mystery that would resolve and that would, you know, kind of center around what happened to Samuel. And then I realized that, you know, the mystery. The mystery wasn't really what happened to him, but obviously what are all the things that have kind of, like, surrounded their lives to, like, get him to the place where he was, and not just him, but, of course, Mamush as the narrator. Once the question kind of opened up that way, you realize just how hard it is to answer that question and just how complicated it is. But I wanted to try to, like, Set him out on a quest, right. He almost becomes, you know, he's a journalist or former journalist who is kind of becoming a bit of a detective. And he's trying to figure out, like, well, how can I pull together someone's experiences and what does it mean to try to create a kind of profile of them through these, like, little trace elements or these little shreds of facts? And I wanted that hopefully, to kind of, like, compel the reader, because I also knew that, like, you know, the story has. There's a kind of melancholy and there's a tragedy, but also hopefully, love and hopefully a kind of something that pulls you along and carries you with them.
- [10:54]
Alison Stewart
In someone like us. Mamouche is a journalist. I'm going to read a little bit. This is. He is about to get on the flight. He's got his kid on his chest. He's with his wife. And it says, a few months after he was born, his son. I spent seven days in Calais in the north of France, reporting on what was supposed to be the last large migrant camp in Europe. It was the first story I had been commissioned to write in two years. And Hannah insisted on saying goodbye at the train station with our son. Goes on to say there had been an immig raid in our neighborhood earlier that morning. It was a second since we moved into the apartment whose two bedrooms we would have never been able to afford had they been almost anywhere else in the city. The first raid had been near riotous affair with armored cars and policemen swatting through the neighborhood. The second was far more subdued. What's happened to her journalism career?
- [11:46]
Dinau Mengestu
I mean, some of it he's, you know, destroyed it. He kind of was unable to function in. In part because of his addiction, but I think also underneath that, an understanding that he was constantly trying to contort the stories he was being asked to write to fit into a framework that after a certain point in time, I think he realizes he doesn't want to do. And, you know, there are references to other stories that he was asked to write in the way if he wrote a certain kind of story, he gained a certain amount of attention. And the more attention you get, then the more kinds of stories like that you continue. So you can start by writing about immigrants, so long as there's a kind of tragedy, and then he moves and is rewarded by writing about Africa. And as long as he's writing about Africa in certain contexts and when it comes to violence and conflict, then that also rewarded him a little bit more. But he also knows that I Think the stories he's telling don't even come close to capturing the complexity of experiences. And there's stories that are being framed for an audience that's very different from the one that are actually being written about. And that divide between the people he's writing about and then the stories he's producing, I think, are kind of, like, you know, hard for him to sustain.
- [12:58]
Alison Stewart
And in that same section, his wife's a photographer, and she wanted to take a picture of where the raid had been. And the picture's in the book. It's a picture.
- [13:07]
Dinau Mengestu
Right.
- [13:08]
Alison Stewart
So there's lots of. But there's a lot of pictures in the book. Tell us why you have photos in the book.
- [13:15]
Dinau Mengestu
In part because the narrator's wife is a photographer, and my wife is also a photographer. And it started almost by thinking about other ways of communication that can happen between two people, and the idea of an image being able to perhaps express something that language can't always get through, in part because the image allows for multiple interpretations. Right. Like, I can tell you something explicitly, but if I show you an image, there are multiple ways of kind of thinking about and interpreting and encountering that. So it began with taking one of her photos and putting it inside of the novel and thinking, oh, that actually looks really interesting. And then as it evolved, I actually asked her to make the photos. I gave her the pages where the photos were being described, and I said, create whatever you want. I won't do anything to control the image. I won't do any editing. I won't ask you for them to look a certain way. And it gave me a chance to have another narrative presence in the novel that wasn't my own. It gave her a voice inside of the novel that I had literally no control over beyond saying, these are the words that surround the image, but you can do whatever you want. And so she took that and she created these really wonderful and beautiful images that kind of tell their own story inside of the novel.
- [14:35]
Alison Stewart
When we first meet Mamouche, how would you describe what's going on in his marriage?
- [14:43]
Dinau Mengestu
I'd say the marriage is in a rapid state of decline, but he doesn't fully understand why and his own kind of accountability inside of that. Whereas, you know, his wife sees him much more clearly, and he's kind of still incapable of actually seeing himself. And one of the reasons why she sends him these images throughout the novel is she's trying to kind of, like, offer him ways to kind of, like, see what's there. Like to see, you know, things that are both sort of beautiful and that are important about who he is and who he's been. And I think that sort of inability to kind of look at himself fully and honestly, but more importantly, to recognize that here's somebody who loves him, who does see him in that totality of that experience and still loves him. And that can be like, a really hard thing to kind of really accept or believe that, like, that you are worth being loved, you know, And I think he spends so much of the novel kind of, like, hiding and isolating and sequestering himself from that love until hopefully, you know, by the end, I think he's out of that. But. But, you know, she. She's kind of constantly calling him back and kind of being like, look, you know, this. This is a part of who you are, and I know that, and I still love you.
- [15:57]
Alison Stewart
He misses his plane and he lies to her about it.
- [16:01]
Dinau Mengestu
Yeah. I mean, why. You know, I. You know, there's. I revert to, like, a Flannery o' Connor coat where she talks about the mystery of our characters, and characters are most fully realized when we can't explain why they do certain things, which is always, like, frustrating. Like, no, I need to know why I say some of it is that certainly that hiding part of him, he's unable to kind of recognize, really, where he is emotionally and psychologically. And so he kind of, like, walks through his life as if things aren't in his control. But of course they are. But I think he also knows that, like, he's going back, leaving the sort of, you know, his family and returning home is a place that's going to be very difficult for him to manage. And even though he doesn't know that Samuel is dead yet, he knows that going back into that space is going to kind of make him confront certain things that maybe he hasn't before. And so Chicago becomes a kind of like both a detour, but also obviously a way to maybe try to figure out something important about who his parents were before going back to see them.
- [17:14]
Alison Stewart
Samuel is. He's sort of obsessed with this idea of being in the wrong place. And he thinks Mamush is one of those people who's in the wrong place. What does Samuel mean by the wrong place?
- [17:27]
Dinau Mengestu
You know, he means, I think, probably multiple things. He's, you know, I think part of why he tells so many different versions of himself, why he at times describes him, you know, acts as if he's a doctor, is because the versions of himself that he's been able to live so far are kind of incomplete. He hasn't had a chance to kind of live the life that he really wanted. And so he creates and invents new ones. But then there's, I think, also an understanding that, you know, one. There's a kind of framing idea that we have of what, like, a normal life looks like, and. And they don't fit into that. Right. So the idea of understanding where you are in the world. There's the professor who also tells Mamush, like, you know, tell me about the important places, and I'll be able to understand you. And he gives him these examples. And, you know, for him, he's like, well, that's. That's a framework that doesn't apply to me. Right. I can't. I can't talk to you about the playground I grew up in. I can't talk to you about these kind of quintessentially familiar ideas. That's not the way we lived. There's another kind of life that we had. And so our lives kind of need to be written about in a way that hasn't necessarily happened before. And then there's another sense of, like, you know, where you are in place can be a very precarious and difficult thing. And Samuel has a very clear sense of that. That being a cab driver moving and driving through certain parts of America puts him at risk at times in different ways. And that risk is something that is shared, certainly, by a larger immigrant knowing. You know, when I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot, of course, about, like, you know, some of the deportation rates that had begun under the Trump administration and that sense of precarity, like, in the way it began to kind of seep into communities, that feeling that you are more vulnerable now than ever before and you don't trust the government or the country or the state that you're in, because it's kind of announced its intentions to perhaps, like, move you away.
- [19:25]
Alison Stewart
So, yeah, Samuel likes to draw a distinction between himself and Mamouche. He says, it doesn't matter what I tell you or how long we've known each other, we will never understand each other. How much is that about one being an American, one being an immigrant? Is it intergenerational?
- [19:48]
Dinau Mengestu
I think certainly all of those things, but I also think it's, you know, goes back to this kind of, like, respect for just how full and complicated our lives are and what it means to make yourself, like, fully known and the expectation that people can be sort of fully known. I think, you know, looking across generations and certainly looking across this sort of divide between Mamush, who's, like, raised in America, and they see that in him, right? They see his relationship to the language. They know the way he moves through the world is less fraught than the way they do. And for them, I think they don't want to let him think that he can fully understand that reality just because he knows them. And I think oftentimes we do allow ourselves to think that, oh, I know what it's like to have that experience because I had this one. And we flatten out these realities to render something more familiar. And I think we, we do that at the great risk of losing the kind of like, complexity and sort of profundity of some of the most like, you know, both beautiful and hard experiences that we live through.
- [20:57]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to my conversation with author Danao Mengestu about his new novel, Someone Like Us. It was our October get lit with all of it book club selection. We'll have more after a quick break. Stay with us. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Danau Mingestu. His new novel, Someone Like Us, was our October Get Lit with all of it book club selection. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 2,140 people were able to check out an E copy and read along with us. Our audience was packed and as always, our readers had great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in just a minute. But first, more of my conversation with Danau. Mangestu. Samuel struggles with addiction. So does Mamouche. Do they have their addictions for the same reasons or for different reasons?
- [22:21]
Dinau Mengestu
That's a good question. I think, you know, I think fundamentally they probably have them for the same set of reasons, one of which is I think the inability to look at themselves honestly. I think the inability to kind of like, I think they're both very good at giving love. I think they're both very flawed in receiving it, which, you know, which means, like, that's, that's, that's a negative, obviously, that's like, terrible for the person on the other end to love somebody who says they love you back, but yet at the same time isn't able to kind of commit in an honest and sort of full way. And I think that certainly contributes to both of their, to both of their addiction. But Samuel also, I think has, you know, something sort of beyond that is that he has, he has all of these lives that again, like, I Think he's still hoping he might be able to live. And he makes peace with them at some point in time, but it doesn't last. And, you know, there's one point where, you know, Samuel Mamish recognizes that. Samuel asks him if he's still writing and. And he says, you know, by which he means, like, are you taking care of yourself? Have you learned to live with whatever it was that was destroying you? And to some degree that's, you know, they share that. Right. The ability to kind of like, tell your story and to control your. To have an understanding of your own narrative and to be honest about that narrative is one path forward. And without that, I think they both suffer from the same kind of like, addiction.
- [23:51]
Alison Stewart
Let's go to the audience for questions.
- [23:54]
Dinau Mengestu
I was intrigued by the book also by the.
- [23:58]
Alison Stewart
By people's inability to tell the truth to each other. Do you feel that's the human condition in general?
- [24:11]
Dinau Mengestu
Very simple question. Yeah. Well, you know, I think we all have the capacity for like, different kinds of deception and self deception. But I also think there's a slight difference between like, some of the kind of like, deception that the characters practice and then some of the kind of like invention that they sort of willfully and kind of sometimes joyfully practice. Right. There's a kind of, again, a storytelling and kind of like self making that certainly Samuel indulges in, which is, I think, you know, kind of like really beautiful part of his character. And that obviously does become, you know, attached to the. To the kind of like, I need to hide from the world and I hide through the world through these deceptions. And they're both, you know, they're linked together, but on one side they're quite beautiful. Right. Like we write novels, we create poems, we do all of these things where we invent falsities and we give them over. And we're grateful for that. We love those experiences. But yeah, they go hand in hand in certain ways back there.
- [25:09]
Alison Stewart
Hi.
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Dinau Mengestu
Hello. My name is Brian. Thanks so much for a beautiful book. Dinau. I was curious if Samuel's Cross Country.
- [25:19]
Alison Stewart
Taxi company idea was meant to mirror the Underground railroad. And if that's the case, what did.
- [25:27]
Dinau Mengestu
What did it mean for Mamush to be transported via this system towards the end from Chicago to Virginia? Thank you. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that question. Yeah. There is certainly a desire to want to kind of echo because that idea of the cab company is created in a very sort of in dialogue, I guess, with that, with the Underground Railroad, which less obviously extreme Circumstances. It's not, you know, taking people from slavery, but it was born out of, you know, his idea that. And understanding that, you know, he has a community that at times feels danger and risk, and how can he tend to them? Right. And this very sort of lovely idea that I can help you get to these safe places. I can. I can help you get to your daughter's house, which might just be something that you imagine you can't do safely. But he's very attuned to that precarity. Right. He's lived through and knows quite well, like, how precarious life in America can be and how easily that sense of stability is sort of damaged. So it. Yeah, it leans forward from there. And. And, you know, when what gets to happen with Mamush is it's like that dream that Samuel has created is kind of like, realized in a certain way. And for him to be carried through that, it is. It is like being carried along by this sort of fantasy of Samuel and being kind of brought to safety by this fantastic idea that he has. So, thank you. Thank you for the book and also some of your earlier work. Big fan. I just wanted to ask, in the.
- [27:00]
Alison Stewart
Tapestry of your works, how does this one fit in and your works in.
- [27:04]
Dinau Mengestu
General, do you feel as though it's.
- [27:05]
Alison Stewart
A continuation from the earlier themes and characters?
- [27:10]
Dinau Mengestu
Yes. You know, there's a point near the end of the novel where the narrator of my first book, Sepha Stephanos, unexpectedly emerges, which for me was just a wonderful moment, partly because that book was, you know, almost 20 years ago, and it ends on this sort of uncertain future for. For this man and to see him come back in the novel and to be in this, like, very healthy space and to be doing something was. Was quite, like, fantastic for me. But also, you know, I think the book in some ways, is. In some deliberate ways, it's a kind of like, both an extension of and a critique of some of my earlier works. I think in this book I wanted to. I wanted to try to sit harder and more consciously and more deliberately inside of this, you know, Ethiopian American community. I wanted the book to kind of let the characters gain a kind of complexity that I think I was perhaps reluctant to allow them to have in earlier works. And so, you know, when we talk about the stories and the stories within the stories and the kind of, like, sort of looping inside of it, some of that was a way for these characters to kind of, like, to evolve and kind of gain a largeness that I didn't think I knew how to do earlier, not say that I know how to do it now. But I did want to push these characters, and I wanted to push this novel into kind of, you know, slightly new terrain for me. I wanted to be in conversation with, like, you know, slightly detective mystery things, but to have elements of real imagination inside of it.
- [28:41]
Alison Stewart
I listened to this as an audiobook, so I missed the pictures.
- [28:44]
Dinau Mengestu
I know I've heard that before. And I was like, I didn't even think of that. Audio books, but.
- [28:51]
Alison Stewart
And I also felt. And possibly this was also because it was on an audiobook for me, but I realized that we were in the fantastical part once I was already in it. And then that made me wonder whether there had been a clean break when he goes from being an unreliable narrator to describing a fantastical situation, or if that had happened gradually or if it had been there throughout.
- [29:21]
Dinau Mengestu
Yeah, that's a great question. It's not a clean break. It is something that there's sort of one kind of critical gesture when he reaches back where I. And when I wrote that, I was a little, kind of, like, surprised and kind of almost like, made nervous by what was happening and what it might ask of the reader to sort of do and how it could kind of almost destabilize the rest of the narrative. Because here was something that was kind of quietly announcing a rupture from what we understood to be a reality. Right. But then the more that sort of followed out and played through, the more I understood, like, you know, it's part of the narrative, and it's part of the storytelling that the characters engage in. It's also something that it's like he gets to give to Samuel. You know, it's this kind of, like, realization of a potential experience that wouldn't have been possible except through fiction. And it's, you know, sort of at that moment, too, that the novel, I think, sort of really embraces what fiction can do. Like, it's the moment where it becomes really about what and how powerful stories can be. Because what he is doing at that point is like creating a story in conversation with the story that Samuel had been writing. And it's the sort of moment of convergence right between these two seemingly very different lives and also at the same time, very intertwined lives. And they. They kind of. They join hands, you know, in this hopefully, you know, meaningful way for you.
- [30:47]
Alison Stewart
That was my conversation with author Danao Mengestu. His novel Someone Like Us was our October get lit with all of it book club selection. Up next, for the first time ever we had a get lit dance party. Stay tuned to hear how international superstar Angeliqueau got an audience on their feet with an amazing live performance. Performance. That's next. I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high quality news about science, technology and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24 7, our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, Climate change. Genetic engineering. Childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news. For more sponsorship information, visit sponsorship. Wnyc.
- [31:55]
Dinau Mengestu
Org.