« The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears »… and Dinaw Mengestu
Almost every Thursday, Ken the Kenyan and Joseph the Conglese meet Sepha the Ethiopian at his shabby grocery in a run-down district of Washington that is in the process of gentrification. Ken and Joseph are the only friends that Sepha, who fled the Red Terror, has, until the arrival of a young white woman and her mixed-race little daughter disturbs the delicate balance of the neighbourhood.
Sepha’s life in the United States, “a land of opportunity”, passes like a dream – neither a nightmare nor a dream of hope – strewn with poignant memories of his father who was tortured by Colonel Mengistu’s Ethiopian revolutionaries.
And as a pastime? Or rather, to exorcise their pasts, the three friends engage in a surreal game; listing African dictators. Their memories remind them how much their lives in the United States have resembled a flight from Dante’s inferno (the title is a reference to the final lines of the poem about the inferno in the Divine Comedy). They repeat the game tirelessly, a story to hold at bay the grubby present, and its feeling of constantly beginning again. “I wasn’t meant to live here”, Dinaw Mengestu tells us through the voice of Sepha. In a text that alternates narrative, occasional burlesque and deeper reflections, Dinaw Mengestu gives us a meditation on the social regression and emotional poverty that enforced exile in a new country brings. “A man caught between two worlds lives and dies alone. I’ve lived this way, suspended, for a long time,” Sepha tells us. He will find sweet consolation in the company of the little mixed-race girl, whom he initiates to literature by reading The Brothers Karamazov to her.
Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Penguin Book, New York, 2007.
Ed. Albin Michel – ISBN 978-2-226-17976-0
