In André Acimany’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, a narrator describes a deep longing for Paris while still living in Nasser’s Egypt, “My romance with Paris begins, as one says of earthquakes, at an epicentre — surrounded by tall, turn-of-the-century buildings, a small empty park, and silent avenues. This is how I pictured Paris as an adolescent, before ever seeing it… a papeterie [stationery shop] where I could buy a longed-for pelican pen; the smiles of girls outside a vaguely imagined lycée [secondary school]; a secret rendezvous at the cinema.”

Most of us have fantasies like this narrator of cities we would wish to visit overseas. However, some people like the character Sepha Stephanos narrator of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu, have no choice but to go to America.

“I did not come to America to find a better life. I came here running and screaming with the ghosts of an old one firmly attached to my back. My goal since then has always been a simple one,” he says.

The writer highlights an import issue that is now common in Western capitals — immigrants from “damaged” places. In Mengestu’s Beautiful Things, Sepha, who is a university student, flees into exile in Washington DC when the communist revolution cracks down on dissent in Ethiopia. Sepha’s father has been arrested and died in prison.

One of the biggest mysteries is why African governments make it hard for brilliant people especially those critical of the government to live on the continent. Doctors, engineers and some professionals have been hunted down, harassed and if not killed, they will be lucky to flee to America or Europe.

Ken Saro Wiwa once wrote that: “Africa kills her suns — her brilliant sons who could be her ‘suns’ to help drag her into the light of knowledge.”

In Beautiful Things, Mengestu pokes fun at the subject of poor governance in Africa, punctuated by intermittent coups and counter-coups. The Sepha and other characters — Congo Joe and Ken — have a habit of playing a game that requires naming of a year and the country where a coup took place.

He writes: “So far we have named more than 30 different coups in Africa. It has become a game with us. Name a dictator and then guess the year and country. We have been playing the game for over a year now. We have expanded our playing field to include failed coups, rebellions, minor insurrections, guerrilla leaders, and the acronyms of as many rebel groups as we can find — the SPLA, TPLF, LRA, Unita — anyone who has picked up a gun in the name of revolution. No matter how many we name, there are always more, the names, dates, and years multiplying as fast as we can memorise them… Bokassa, Amin, Mobutu....”

Even though Sepha is hounded out of Ethiopia, Adis Ababa remains a kind of “capital of memory” and Washington DC is a new “adopted” city he is trying to fit in. However, like all immigrants, as the narrator says in Chimamanda Ngozi’s Americanah, the new city brings with it feelings like “an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness.

It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living…”.

One of the things both Chimamanda’s and Mengestu’s characters reveal is that African immigrants leave Africa but they never really settle or arrive in America. They seem to be somehow suspended helpless between Africa and America. As American critic Rob Nixon once wrote, the African immigrant experiences “the animate presence of loss.

He reminds us that departure and arrival are deceptively decisive words. Airport terminals, passenger lounges and Customs posts cement the illusion that we know when we’re coming and going.”

This is not true. It’s possible to leave and never reach, as Sepha says: “How was I supposed to live in America, when I had never really left Ethiopia?”

Sepha proves that exile can be a terrible experience, what Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’ calls “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home….”

To make it worse, the American dream is ever receding for most African immigrants, as Sepha says, after working menial jobs, “My arms and legs were numb from 13 hours of lifting luggage and bending at every moment to someone else’s needs. ... I couldn’t believe that my father had died and I had been spared in order to carry luggage in and out of a room.”

In this debut novel, Mengestu plays with one of the oldest and most cherished themes of world literature — the paradigm of exile and return.

Only that in exile, Sepha unlike other wanderers, cannot return from his exilic experiences because an authoritarian Ethiopian government is waiting to swallow him like a hungry crocodile. This is a testimony that our African democracy and governance have a long way to go.

Unless our democratic institutions improve, Africa will continue “killing her suns” and remain a “dark continent” as more sons escape to toil and build other continents.

The writer is the CEO of Phoenix Publishers

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