I can’t say I was completely bowled over by Dinaw Mengistu’s first novel, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” about an Ethiopian immigrant in gentrifying Washington D.C. (Some of my friends loved it though and most literary elites here raved about it: The New York Times Book Review, for example, deemed it one of “the notable books of 2007” and earlier this year The New Yorker included him, along with Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie, in its “20 under 40” list of outstanding young fiction writers.) Mengistu has a new novel, “How to Read the Air.” I haven’t seen or read it yet, so no judgment from me yet. The New York Times recently did a profile of Mengistu. Predictably they have to include a reference to his “exotic” name. There’s also this bit about his identity as a child of immigrants to the US:

In eastern Congo [doing research for “How to Read the Air”] he ran into problems trying to interview Hutu rebels from Rwanda, who … didn’t know what to make of him. “I could speak English as well as I wanted to them, but they could only see that my features are what they consider Tutsi, and that was definitely threatening to my life,” he said rather matter-of-factly. “They would look at me, and my translator would say, ‘No, he’s American.’ He was always very specific, telling me, ‘Don’t confuse them, don’t try to say you’re Ethiopian, just tell them you’re American, don’t complicate things with this extra layer, because nobody’s going to believe it.’ ”

The full profile here.

Further Reading

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.