No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Summary

The reasons for leaving home are myriad: war, famine, economic hardship, better opportunity, survival. Suffice to say, displacement would not need to occur – would not happen nearly so often – if the places from which migrants and refugees flee were sustaining and supportive. As such, many immigrant and refugee fictions are deeply imbued with the trauma of origin. There is nothing that the subject can do about this original trauma, as in the guilt of original sin, and Sepha Stephanos, the Ethiopian refugee at the centre of Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is one such displaced person. He fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror, and finds himself plunged into immigrant America. In his most recent incarnation, he is the manager of a dilapidated corner store in Logan Circle, Washington, DC, where he becomes close to a new resident, Judith, and her precocious daughter, Naomi. This child, early in the novel, has ‘run away’ from her home to seek refuge in Stephanos’ corner store. By way of reaching out to her, Stephanos explains, ‘“I used to run away all the time when I was a child.” She smiled back gratefully at me…“And how did your mom get you to stop?” “She didn't. That's how I ended up here”’ (Mengestu: 26). Stephanos makes it clear that there are many routes to emigration, to refuge, but not all concerned with the same ends: ‘As it was, 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: to persist unnoticed through the days, to do no more harm’ (41). This declaration makes clear the central problematic of the novel: the shame, guilt, and affective numbing that accompanies his long-term experience of depression in displacement. Shame, Timothy Bewes convincingly argues, is inherent in the form of postcolonial writing, proceeding from the premise that ‘shame appears overtly, as the [postcolonial] text's experience of its own inadequacy’ (The Event of Postcolonial Shame: 3), an inadequacy inscribed in the circuitry between the writer and the text, and the text and its audience.