Balogun arrived in America as a wiry-thin young man in his mid-20s, toting one small suitcase and brimful of hope of becoming an economist…

With the eagerness of an only child on his first day of boarding school, Balogun disappeared into the grey, half-boarded apartment complex behind the chain-link fence and submerged himself in inner-city America.

He flipped burgers, cleaned office buildings, and worked security for cantankerous residents in a variety of elder-care facilities—pursuing the American dream, unskilled, undocumented, and with an accent.

“On holidays and birthdays, Balogun called home… with promises — to his mother that he would take care of himself and not marry a white woman; to his father that he would focus on his studies; and to his sister, Ayo, that he would one day bring her to America. But inner-city America overwhelmed Balogun. Even his occasional phone calls home stopped.”

This is a passage from the short story Foreign Aid by Sierra Leonean writer Pede Hollist, which was on the shortlist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Whether it’s the Caine Prize for African Writing, Chimamanda Ngozi’s Americanah or NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, African fiction seems to be experiencing a shift towards “emigrant literature” — partly because of the many talented writers now living in Europe or America.

The older generation of African writers abroad like Ngugi wa Thiong’o initially experienced “forced migration” or exile as they fled from dictatorial regimes. For most of the new breed of African writers, however, “exile” has become more complex and widespread and most of them live abroad out of their own volition. This has birthed vibrant prose that is alert to the movements of African men and women to new places, becoming global citizens.

The latest entrant to this subgenre is All Our Names by Ethiopian writer Dinaw Mengestu. It is a lively exploration of that formless and vexed territory, where memoir and fiction meet, clash, meld and blur; each enriching and complicating the other for better or for worse.

Most of us have glamorous images of Africans in the diaspora; we picture them in sunglasses with professional briefcases in their hands, looking sharp yet exhilarated by the glitzy pedestrian traffic of city life in New York, Washington, London or Paris as they commute to work.

A tale of two characters

Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names (narrated by two characters: One by a bookish student caught up in the revolutionary fervour of Uganda in the 1970s, and the other by Helen, a social worker in a Midwestern college town called Laurel) debunks some of these myths of life in the diaspora as paradise.

The major themes in the novel are alienation, displacement and loss, especially the loss of “home” and identity. These are issues that other “emigrant” writers from Nabokov to V.S Naipaul have already grappled with in varying degrees.

As the English critic James Wood writes, “The jet engine has probably had a greater impact than the Internet. It brings a Nigerian to New York, a Bosnian to Chicago, a Mexican to Berlin, an Australian to London, a German to Manchester… What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like… homelessness... Perhaps it is not even homelessness; homelooseness (with an admixture of loss) might be the necessary (hideous) neologism: in which the ties that might bind one to home have been loosened, perhaps happily, perhaps unhappily, perhaps permanently, perhaps only temporarily. Clearly, this homelessness overlaps, at times, with the more established categories of emigration, exile and postcolonial movement.”

The “Ugandan emigrant” narrator lost a home and all his names. “When I was born,” the narrator says, “I had 13 names. Each name was from a different generation.”

And this narrator (at that time called Isaac) is constantly named and renamed, maybe symbolising how fluid the situation is and how easily impressionable he is in losing his identity in order to fit into the new environment.

Another character makes a revealing statement of something that Isaac once said. The other character says, “He told me once that he’d accepted the fact that there was no place in the world where he feels fully at ease”.

This is very close to how many of us feel, what one critic described as “that lingering dissatisfaction…the puzzling unease of who we are, where we are, and how these two ought to intersect”. It also reminds us of what the character Preethi hauntingly told her cousin Nil in the novel Homesick by Roshi Fernando: “Nowhere is home, nowhere! And it makes me so angry!”

The narrator seems to have what the poet John Keats calls, “negative capability,” which he describes as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This is a kind of gumption and ability to continue with life (what Kenyans call “moving on”) despite seemingly insurmountable challenges.

However, as happens to all strangers in new places, Isaac is desperately searching for some solid ground to anchor his wandering feet. He is looking for some semblance of stability and familiarity; searching for home. It becomes evident he is missing home when he says of a friend from Ethiopia: “He’s the closest thing I have to a past in this country.”

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa in 1978 and moved to Chicago with his mother and sister when he was two years old to be reunited with his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that exile is central to his work. He joins Nigerian writer Teju Cole (author of Open City) based in New York, the London-based half-Nigerian, half-Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi and many others in writing fiction that mirrors not only the lives of emigrant African writers but also the lives of the many Africans in the diaspora — and their quest to find a home away from home.

The writer is CEO of Phoenix Publishers. [email protected]