Dinaw Mengestu on Deception as an Immigrant’s Tool for Survival

Dinaw Mengestu’s novel Someone Like Us is about grief, about attempting to comprehend loss because of exile, because of physical and emotional distances that often fracture our ability to truly understand our loved ones. The novel’s narrator, lovingly called Mamush by his family, returns home to Washington D.C. and finds that a beloved father-figure, Samuel, has passed away. The story spans a total of three days. And the chapters alternate between showing us Mamush’s journey from Paris, where he lives with his wife and son, to Washington D.C, and the aftermath of the news of Samuel’s passing. 

In conversation, Dinaw tells me his relationship to writing is full of surprises, and one of the joys, particularly with writing this book, was the sense of discovery, the very fact that he didn’t always know what’s going to happen. Interestingly, my experience as a reader was marked by a similar sense of wonder, awe, and often, heartbreak as the narrative seamlessly moves through past and present and Mamush tries to uncover who Samuel really was, and what his mother’s life was like, before she moved to the DC suburbs. In Mamush’s yearning to understand the two most important people in his life is an attempt to understand himself, and his place in America. 

A freelance journalist and the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books, Mengestu is also a 2012 McArthur Fellow, and has received many other honors, including Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Prize. Over Zoom, we talked about the fear attached to being a minority, deception as an immigrant’s tool for survival, who gets access to stories and the authority to tell them, and more.

Bareerah Ghani: A significant throughline of the novel is paranoia that’s quite specific to being an immigrant. We see the narrator’s mother and Samuel at various points instruct him not to trust anyone who isn’t Ethiopian. To what extent do you think this distrust, particularly in Americans, is a product of a system that has failed its minorities?

Dinaw Mengestu: Oh, I think it’s inextricable from that. They all come into contact with institutions of power in different ways. And those experiences sort of engender some of that anxiety and sense of mistrust. So there’s that sense of how these institutions as a whole are not looking out for you, and in fact, in some cases might sort of be actively hostile towards you. Some of that is about the kind of overt racial based hostility towards immigration that certainly preceded the Trump-era, but that obviously became explicit during those four years. It became magnified and became policy. It’s literally policy that we can now discriminate against immigrants, and particularly immigrant communities. So there’s that. And then there’s also a quieter, sort of unnamed space, where anxiety comes from that understanding of being a minority and vulnerable. But you can’t necessarily locate it. It’s one thing when you could say, Okay, don’t trust the judges, or don’t trust the immigration officers, or the police, or the teachers in a particular school because they might look at you in a certain way. Because those things can be named, so the anxiety has a place to be housed. But then there’s the other anxiety which can seem like paranoia because you don’t know where to locate it but you know it’s there.

There’s that Dick Gregory joke: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t watching you. You sense something isn’t right. And you understand that you’re vulnerable in particular ways, even if you can’t always name it. And so, as a result, that paranoia, that fear becomes diffuse. It permeates, sort of embeds itself in all the ordinary facets of your life. So if you’re going to go to the store, you’re like, Okay, who’s around me? And you walk and move through the world in a slightly different way, because you don’t necessarily trust its environment and your surroundings. Because you feel, of course, alien and outside.

BG: With Samuel though some of it, sometimes, felt like it was also coming from a place of not knowing what’s real and what’s unreal because of his addiction. I’m curious if that was something that was playing in your head while you were creating that character.

DM: Yeah, it does come from there. But these things are all kind of interwoven. It’s not exactly causal, say, the paranoia comes just from the addiction, or the addiction isn’t because of the paranoia. Samuel’s own life before he came, and choices that he made prior to coming to America certainly impact that as well. But I do think that the paranoia’s roots are fundamentally deeper than any substance abuse issues that he has. Those magnify the paranoia, and push it to the foreground. But his greater understanding that there are things he just feels anxious or afraid about comes much more from all the small contacts that he’s had with American life, from that initial job interview to every time he’s being pulled over to just the way he understands that his vulnerability can be toyed with by institutional forces. Certainly, the substances put it on a louder scale, it becomes a way to almost sort of dramatize that anxiety and those fears but they would have been there anyway.

BG: There’s this line that Samuel says, it goes something along the lines of how you need to lie to succeed. And the novel really explores this idea that the stories we tell about ourselves shape our sense of self and how we’re perceived by others. Lying and pretending often come up a lot. I’m curious about your thoughts on deception as an integral tool for survival, especially for immigrants.

DM: Yeah, there’s a part of that, like, you need to be careful what you reveal, and sometimes, it might be better to invent a narrative than to give somebody else too much access to you. The narrator’s girlfriend at the time tells him, you have to make this up because people will try to extract your narrative to try to do something with it. And so, to some degree, that sense of deception becomes a protective tool. You keep those private parts, private. Because there’s only so much that can be understood, and you also worry about even the ability to have those experiences translated to somebody else. And then, that’s when you begin to become the Other. When somebody begins to use language as a distancing mechanism, where they expect, or sort of want you to perform a type of narrative. And so, rather than giving them a true one, you offer them what can be considered a deceptive one, a fraudulent one, in some cases. 

Alongside that though, there’s also, as you said, something about the stories that we tell, which can oftentimes become sort of a portrait of who we are. Throughout the novel, there’s a lot of wrestling over which stories are told and how they’re told. The characters are constantly concerned with their representation in the world. There’s the other side of it too, where other characters are like, Be careful which stories you tell because those aren’t the totality of our experiences in America, like, tell the story of me and my BMW because that’s also equally true but then they also critique the very narrative that’s being told in a certain way, which is also a very real experience of challenge and struggle inside America. To wonder about how that story is not only told, but also how it’s going to be received on the other end of it—I wanted some of those questions to infect the narrative. Not only in terms of which stories are told, but also how they’re told, into what aim, into what intent? And to make the character telling the story implicated in that process—he invents, narrates and kind of constructs his own false identities. Because that false identity lets him live a version of himself that he didn’t get to live, a version that seems more authentically American while the one he actually experienced would be an almost inauthentic American reality—the authentic American reality wants a type of performance of goodness and meritocracy, while the reality of those things is quite suspect, sometimes.

BG: This reminds me of that moment when the narrator is speaking with a professor who is being reductive and the narrator says, “I wanted to tell him…I didn’t live in the world of happy and unhappy childhoods…We worked. We did what we had to do and never considered other options.” How do you contend with this reality where the immigrants’ lived reality is reduced to stereotypes, often in academic circles, despite the explicit discourse on diversity and discrimination?

DM: I think, to some degree, you try to figure out how to turn the attention back towards the person asking the question, and try thinking about how the person asking the question, to some degree, dictates the response. There’s a set of expectations that are already brought to the table before any answers are given about what your experiences are, what they may look like, and once that happens, the story to some degree is asked to perform in a certain way. Questions such as why are you here, what brought you here, ignore the very fundamental fact that I’m here now. And really, the core problem is, What do I want now? And what am I going to do next? And that’s the question that oftentimes isn’t asked, or considered, because it requires a different set of relationships with the person asking the question. So with the character, that professor, some of it was to try to figure out how to actually highlight not what the narrator says—because he never actually gives an answer, because he doesn’t know or he’s trying not to perform the way the professor is expecting him to. This is somebody who’s intelligent, who has a whole ontology for how stories are constructed, and who’s thought very deeply about it, but nonetheless is still blind to certain fundamental facts, and so he expects this person’s narrative to follow a set of ideas that he’s already constructed, that are reinforced by the fact that he has an intellectual discourse.

The intellectual discourse in academic circles is the very thing that actually, to some degree, reaffirms the goodness of its intent because it’s surrounded by critical discourse.  So how can I put that problem into the space of the narrative? How can the very challenge of trying to answer these questions be brought in if somebody is approaching it with this framework in mind. It’s not even that the question is wrong, but the entire apparatus around the question is problematic to begin with. 

BG: In your experiences as a journalist and as an author, have there been moments where you’ve come head on with this idea of, let me challenge this entire framework?

DM: One of the books that had a big influence on this was Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Her and other writers that I was thinking about were trying to position these narrative problems as something that begin, not with the story that’s being told, but with the person who’s receiving this story. There’s always a gaze on the other side of these narratives or these images that’s going to impact, or sort of demand how these things are performed. And they try to begin from thinking about how that perspective is implicated in the process from the very first time. And then, how does that get explained, or sort of compounded by a recognition of fundamental power differences that can exist, especially when we think of narrative as a commodity. So it’s not just about one person asking a question or hearing a story, but, in fact, a larger culture in society. What are the ways in which we implicate those people, we implicate that perspective in the telling, as much as possible? 

In this novel, I wanted the narrator himself to be implicated because he also comes from these places of privilege and authority that are different from those of his parents. And that also couldn’t be taken for granted. His relationship to these stories, his access to them needed to be a problem because they’re not his experience and the limitations of his ability to tell that story needed to be engaged with, and by extension, my limitations, of course, are part of that. These are lives of people I’m very close to, that I’ve experienced, but they’re not mine. I believe deeply in fiction and the ability to narrate from beyond our experiences, but I also think that rather than just asserting the authority and autonomy of the writer, which I fully agree to, it’s interesting to think, well, we can imagine whatever we want but how do we do that ethically? How do we actually bring our act of imagining, not just as something that we get to do, but as part of the narrative approach? 

BG: The larger question, then, is really about what stories can we really tell, which stories are ours to tell, even if they are technically ours. Even as people from communities who are experiencing these things, we have some authority, but not completely. And I see that in your narrator, especially in that part where he’s trying to excavate his mother’s past and Samuel’s past, and then he comes across obstacles, and it’s not obvious to the reader, but it is sort of there, the question that you can’t have access to these things.

DM: Yeah, very much. And yet, at the same time he does have to eventually kind of imagine his way into it. In order to do that though, at least for this book and this character, certainly with my relationship to it, there was a necessity to understand and respect those limitations. If it’s like, Oh, I’m gonna imagine my way into it because imagining is always somehow authentic, I think that’s a problem. If you’re like, Oh, I respect the fact that this is an experience beyond my own, it’s easy to step away and say, Well, I’m not gonna write about it. So that’s one possibility. The other possibility is to say, well, here’s a barrier, a difference in experiences and lived realities. And because I’m an author, I’m going to just imagine my way through, in which case, there is no barrier, because you’ve just given yourself the authority to do whatever you want. I was more interested in thinking, Okay, here’s a barrier, that barrier’s real, and it speaks to something fundamentally critical about the value of our experiences and the fact that I can’t be inside of your experiences. Yet, I still want to get closer to understanding you. So what do I get to make that respects that divide, but doesn’t just try to leap over it? It’s like I’m trying to open a door through it. 

BG: In the last few pages we get this conversation between the narrator and Samuel. I’m curious if in those scenes you were trying to play with this idea of not making that leap in imagination, but maneuvering and trying to imagine a reality, a narrative, that was an attempt to understand rather than just take that leap and create something that the narrator could have claimed as his own.

DM: Yeah, I like that phrase—it’s an attempt to get to something and to somebody. There’s a wonderful phrase from Sontag that I think of all the time. She’s talking about the ability to describe conflict and war, and the problem of trying to take a story and use it to magnify it, or claim any kind of authority over those experiences. She uses Goya as an example—he made a series of paintings around this conflict and in every case, it was the idea that something like this happened. And to some degree, that’s the best you can do—you say something like this happened, something like that happened, and you gesture toward it in different ways, while at the same time acknowledging that there is no one totalizing experience that could ever fully encapsulate that reality. And that’s not a loss, though. That’s what the imagination offers—these other ways of understanding Samuel’s story.

So when that moment happened in the novel, I knew something wasn’t right. I was enjoying the moment because it’s such a wonderful thing that they’re together. But I knew it wasn’t real in a certain way, and then when I was able to gesture back towards this object that he had written, it was a way to get at that idea that here is something that’s real, that he made, that we don’t ever get to really see. We get glimpses of it, but that thing is made in conversation with what the narrator says. So it’s like, you’ve got these things, you’re not imagining out of nothing. But that’s not enough—those are only fragments of those stories. So how do you actually create an architecture or a narrative that attaches to those things, while at the same time, recognizes that it’s still just an invention?

BG: So there’s this part where Samuel tells our narrator that there’s no mental illness in Ethiopia. There are no drug addicts or alcoholics, and instead, the narrative is framed as one involving a loss of faith or culture. And that really struck me because I’m Pakistani and, in my culture too, narratives are morphed, and gossip and word of mouth has so much weight. Amidst this, how do we get to the truth?

DM: Thinking about the way narratives work inside of our communities, especially in the diaspora, I think there’s a kind of protection that happens. When we say these things don’t happen in Ethiopia, we’re more likely to say that when we’re outside of Ethiopia. Because you’re protecting those cultural spaces, and the memory of those spaces because of the distance, and also because I think there’s a deep understanding that the value of the culture itself is under threat once it’s away from home, in migration, and once it’s in the Western context where other values begin to sort of dominate.

One of the flip sides of this though is sometimes you actually have the ability to name things that you couldn’t have named back home—a different type of vocabulary becomes possible. So Samuel’s able to make that joke partly because he understands that now, in this context, these things can actually exist. Because in Ethiopia they always needed to be masked. And obviously, that changes because cultures and societies aren’t static but there’s a type of recognition that becomes possible with migration. There’s language that becomes available.