TY - JOUR
AU - Thomas, Steven, W
AB - Abstract Considering the broad conversation among African novelists about the representation of Africans in America, this essay proposes a reevaluation of Ethiopian American literature that is attentive to the historical complexity of Ethiopia’s ethnic diversity. Situating novels and memoirs in their regional context of the Horn of Africa, it highlights how writers of the Ethiopian diaspora sometimes wrestle with and other times avoid the implications of the region’s ethnic politics. Focusing on the novel The Parking Lot Attendant (2018) by Nafkote Tamirat as a case study, it compares it to how other novelists and memoirists from the region, including Dinaw Mengestu, Nega Mezlekia, Maaza Mengiste, Meti Birabiro, Rebecca Haile, and Nurrudin Farrah, have managed the burden of multi-ethnic representation. Tamirat’s novel is somewhat unique for framing the immigrant experience within the story of a political dystopia and uncanny “loneless” social relations. By analyzing Ethiopian American literature in this way, the essay critiques scholarship that has been inattentive to the complex multi-ethnic history of the region because of its focus on the alienation of Ethiopian protagonists from cross-cultural and intracultural forms of political engagement. Analyzing recent fiction about twenty-first-century Africans in America, scholars of both African and American literature have observed a reimagining of geographic, racial, and political relations in an increasingly globalized world. Some of the more well-known novels include Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames (2007), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016).1 The author Dinaw Mengestu, whose family immigrated to America from Ethiopia when he was a child, has published three novels on this theme—The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014)—each of which features an Ethiopian protagonist struggling to reconcile an African past with an American present in order to realize an uncertain future. Much of this recent scholarly work has aimed to situate the migrant or diasporic subject characterized in these novels between American and African spaces in order to raise questions about national belonging, racial identities, cross-cultural solidarity, and the dubious dream of American exceptionalism for the immigrant. Deconstructing the racially inflected binary of African and non-African spaces, contemporary authors such as Taiye Selasi, Binyavanga Wainana, and Mukoma wa Ngugi have explored and debated alternative concepts such as Afropolitan, pan-African, and “rooted transnationalism.”2 Spurring us to imagine an alternative geography, Mengestu’s first novel concludes with an exemplary line often quoted by critics and scholars, in which he has “dangled and suspended long enough” between “two worlds” (228): Africa and America, past and future, trauma and redemption. In contrast to this literary paradigm, a new novel, The Parking Lot Attendant, published in 2018 by another Ethiopian American writer, Nafkote Tamirat, presents an entirely different sort of story that dangles and suspends the heroine not so much between Africa and America but within the confusing ethnic politics of a transplanted Ethiopian community. Rather than interpreting this novel through the broad lens of an immigrant’s acculturation to America or through a global Afropolitanism, we might read it in the opposite direction and focus our lens more narrowly on another question: how authors navigate the geopolitics and identity politics within their motherlands. Analyzing Tamirat’s novel as a case study, I argue for a reevaluation of Ethiopian American literature that is attentive to the historical complexity of Ethiopia’s ethnic diversity. I situate her novel within the political and literary history of northeast Africa to suggest how scholarly analysis that focuses on a specific regional context—rather than comparative across distant geographical locations—can reveal the difficult cultural terrain that authors may be carefully navigating or, in some cases, avoiding. In this sense, I critique some of the scholarship of African and American literature that misses the specificity of the local because of the continental scope of its binary opposition between America and Africa. Indicative of this deconstructed academic binary is that novels about the lives of fictional African characters in American cities could be categorized as either African literature or American literature or both. In the era of internet communication, inexpensive air travel, and multinational corporations, alongside the Afropolitan aesthetics to be found in global cities from Lagos and Addis Ababa to Paris and New York, most of these novels are certainly not the old immigrant story of assimilation and hyphenation but rather a multiplicity of pop culture references, cross-cultural affiliations, intracultural disaffiliations, and, perhaps most importantly, ongoing commitments to two or more nation-states. Analyzing and critiquing such novels, the tendency of postcolonial approaches to African and American literature has been to compare texts representing one location to texts and theoretical paradigms from another location rather than focus on the diversity and political complexity within a single region. Contemporary Ethiopian and Ethiopian American literature may or may not address how political movements within the home nation have carried over into the diaspora. Nevertheless, the complex history of such politics is certainly controversial, multifaceted, and deeply felt among different ethnic groups living in the United States. The problem for both novelists and their scholarly allies is that the political frames of reference are unfamiliar to the target readership of New York-based publishing companies. Caren Irr has remarked that one of the challenges for African writers in America is that they cannot assume a reader’s background knowledge of African history and the “motives for migration” (49-50); consequently, instead, “rather than document ‘African’ horrors from scratch, . . . they will repurpose urban scenes, multiplying, layering, and dissolving them until they reach toward a kind of global consciousness focused on the creative potential of the cosmopolitan African-origin subject” (58). One of her examples of such multiplication, layering, and dissolving is Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, whose characters Sepha from Ethiopia, Joe from Congo, and Ken from Kenya, having immigrated to Washington, DC, play a rather sarcastic game with each other about the history of African dictators as a psychological defense mechanism for dealing with their feelings of alienation both from their homelands and from America. Mengestu’s figure of the lone, politically alienated African male meditating on his “in-between” existence has been presented as exemplary of literature about what Louis Chude-Sokei refers to as the “the Newly Black Americans” in the United States by a number of scholars in the fields of both American literature and African literature.3 In response, I suggest that by emphasizing characters’ separation from Africa and by representing their traumatic past on the African continent in broad generalities, such scholarship risks being inattentive to some of the meaningful details of unique regional origins that are not so easily “dissolved.” Even more importantly, it risks overgeneralizing the diasporic experience as one of discontinuity rather than continuity with political life in Africa. Instead of socially isolated characters whose political disengagement is often read as a symptom of Africa’s traumatic history, we might instead ask ourselves about politically engaged Africans actively involved in their diaspora communities and in transnational organizations. This is the theme of Tamirat’s The Parking Lot Attendant, which is about the teenage daughter of Ethiopian immigrants in Boston. As the plot of this novel unfolds, the protagonist is pulled into a secret Ethiopian organization that intends to repatriate some of the diaspora to a utopian colony vaguely located amid the politically contested Ogaden region of Ethiopia, a location that has historically experienced intense ethnic conflict exacerbated by Cold-War politics. However, rather than explain the complex, multi-ethnic history of that region or commit to any political viewpoint, the novel instead drops hints at its history and its politically fraught ethnic diversity. Narrated from the point of view of a girl drawn into a movement that she does not fully comprehend, the novel involves the reader in an alternative political reality that is left somewhat incomprehensible; the novel opens up questions about the diaspora’s involvement in such politics through its opaque historical references of dubious accuracy. I read The Parking Lot Attendant in what I am calling a regional context—in this case, the region of northeast Africa that includes Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. According to historians and social scientists of the Ethiopian diaspora, the religious and ethnic diversity within Ethiopia is a complex dynamic of more than eighty languages, and the various ethnic groups of the diaspora manifest themselves in culturally unique and sometimes politically divergent ways.4 As the visibility of Ethiopia-born immigrant communities in American cities such as Washington, DC; Minneapolis; Atlanta; Los Angeles; and Seattle has increased dramatically since the 1990s, so has the diverse political organization of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups. This directly shapes American urban space when a street in Minneapolis, for example, is renamed after the Oromo ethnic community that lives there or when that community’s ethnic-based organizations find common cause with transnational political movements such as “fair trade” coffee. A challenge for novelists is how to narrate the intensity of ethnic culture and complexity of interethnic and intraethnic affiliation and disaffiliation for readers who are primarily not Ethiopian and who, despite their global awareness, may know little to nothing about the particularities of ethnic politics in Ethiopia. To put it another way, how does one tell the story of the ways in which Ethiopia’s ethnic politics are experienced in America that somehow transcends or transforms those politics to satisfy the demands of a global book market? As for the role of scholars and critics, how do we decode and historically contextualize the ways in which an Ethiopian American novel may be telling the story of displaced ethnic activism indirectly in order to manage intense and possibly risky political pressures that may be invisible to the non-Ethiopian reader? Toward an answer to these questions, I argue that the literary form of The Parking Lot Attendant responds to the burden of multi-ethnic representation by rendering the immigrant experience through an uncanny narrative whose opaque literary style destabilizes a reader’s understanding of Ethiopia’s history and identity. Comparing Tamirat’s novel to how other novels and memoirs by Ethiopian American writers reference and symbolize the region’s complex political history, it is clear that there are many differing viewpoints on what “Ethiopia” is and how best to represent its ethnic diversity. In making such comparisons and situating the literary works in their historical contexts, I critique both the Ethiopian American literature and the contemporary scholarship about this literature by placing such works in conversation with alternative political perspectives, forms of culture, and community organizations. The Literary Form of Political History The Parking Lot Attendant begins in a mysterious commune on a tropical island called B——. The novel never offers any geographic details or clues about where this island might be, although one of Tamirat’s earlier short stories, “Our Pharmacy” (2012), offhandedly mentions a “new Ethiopian colony in Bermuda,” with the connotation of it being lost in the Bermuda Triangle. The main character, whose name we also never learn, is a girl about seventeen years old who grew up in Boston. Everyone in the commune speaks Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic, although they appear to have emigrated from the United States, not from Ethiopia, and hence they are, in a sense, twice removed, a diaspora from the diaspora. Moreover, although they all speak Amharic with each other, the narrator makes it clear that none of them except for her and her father are ethnically Amhara. The deferred utopian promise of a “relocation into paradise” (12) may call to mind the political dreams of both Mengestu Haile Mariam’s “Derg” regime in Ethiopia in the 1970s and Isaias Afwerki’s regime in Eritrea in the 1990s. Hence, the first chapter resembles classic dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), in which the characters have to submit to an arbitrary set of harsh rules that serve some higher purpose so abstract and self-contradictory that it is beyond the comprehension of the characters struggling to make sense of their lives. However, the second chapter goes back in time to explain the history that led up to that moment, and here Tamirat’s novel shifts from the genre of political dystopia to the genre of the second-generation immigrant story where, typically, the America-born-and-raised teenager has conflicts in values with the parents. The second chapter immediately offers some dates for the reader to situate her family biography in world history: her father’s immigration to America in 1984 “to avoid enlistment” in the military, her birth the following year, her mother’s disappearance in 1991, and, finally, the departure with her father for the mysterious commune in 2004 (Parking 15). The historical significance of these dates is left unexplained, inviting the reader to guess that 1984 is the time of Ethiopia’s worst famine, and 1991 is the year of Ethiopia’s second revolution in less than two decades, when the Derg regime was overthrown. Less obvious historical context might be some American newspaper articles about how Ethiopian immigrants in Boston have worked at parking garages as a pathway to achieving the American dream.5 Almost all of the action of the novel happens during a single year, 2003 to 2004, at such a parking lot, where the narrator encounters the mysterious Ayale, the eponymous parking lot attendant, who quickly becomes a troubling and problematic figure in her life. At the end of that year, because of the secret political organization led by Ayale, the narrator and her father must flee Boston for the unnamed island B——, and the concluding chapter of the novel chronologically follows the action of the first chapter. The novel manages the complex regional history through a dystopian rendering of social spaces that produce in the narrator—and therefore also in the reader—a feeling of what Sigmund Freud calls the unheimlich, literally translated as “un-homely” but usually translated as “uncanny,” which renders the familiar strange. The placing of the immigrant story within the bookends of a political dystopia makes this book unique (at least compared to other Ethiopian American fiction). Because the framing political dystopia is so unreal, the immigrant story feels uncanny from start to finish and defies readers’ expectations of the “immigrant story” genre. As the narrator notes in the beginning, “the concept of ‘Ethiopia’ seemed too fantastical to entertain as anything but a lovely origin story” (Tamirat, Parking 28). The narrator admits that she and her father are estranged from their community, and her mother has coined a neologism for their condition: “loneless”—meaning “without a home and alone” (142). However, paradoxically, at the same time, the narrator is anything but alone, as she finds herself subjected to the demands of “the unofficial intelligence network that includes all Ethiopians in any given locale” (29). She is surprised to learn that the Ethiopian community in Boston already knows who she and her father are, even though she does not know them. Their uncanny knowledge of her reveals to her what she does not know about herself, and that motivates her to seek out such knowledge through Ayale. However, what motivates the charismatic “parking lot attendant” Ayale, who is the heart of this intelligence network, remains a mystery for much of the story. Even when the novel finally reveals the secret agenda of his political organization—which is to create an independent state in a historically contested, multi-ethnic territory on Ethiopia’s border with Somalia—it is difficult to be sure whether this has any correlation to a real political movement that might have existed outside the pages of the novel. The details of Ayale’s political sphere of influence, the ethnic make-up of his organization, and the often-paranoid secrecy with which they interact repeatedly confuse the narrator, who, nevertheless, has made herself at home in Ayale’s parking lot office. The sprinkling of allusions to history, culture, and politics in the novel evoke an ironic, rather than a representational, relation to the actual history, culture, and politics of Ethiopia and its diaspora. While the typical immigrant novel (as defined by William Q. Boelhower) narrates the encounter of an immigrant with the new world, the narrative structure of The Parking Lot Attendant reverses this by narrating the American-born daughter’s encounter with an uncanny Ethiopian “home” through a surrogate father figure. Since more scholarship has been published in English on Mengestu than on any other Ethiopian or Ethiopian diaspora writer, it is worth comparing Tamirat’s novel with his. Obviously, for both authors, history and cultural identity matter, but the allusions to history and identity in their novels tend to raise questions rather than give answers. Like Mengestu’s novels, Tamirat’s depends on the gravitas of a history as a backdrop that it then proceeds to avoid. Their novels studiously sidestep the expectation to explain their history and culture to a non-Ethiopian readership—what Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer call the “burden of representation,” where minority authors of color are expected to present some singularly authentic cultural identity or explain their culture for their majority white readers. Hall and Mercer point to the multiplicity of experiences within a racial or ethnic category and argue for how cultural identity is articulated through cross-cultural dialogue circumscribed by power dynamics. Hence, instead of simply representing their culture, both Mengestu and Tamirat drop allusions to historical events left open to interpretation. However, Tamirat’s work differs from Mengestu’s in two significant ways. First, most dramatically, in her novel, all of the characters are Ethiopian immigrants. In contrast, what drives Mengestu’s plots is the always solitary Ethiopian’s encounter with a non-Ethiopian (whether white, African American, or another African ethnicity), which provides the characters opportunities to explain Ethiopian culture and history through their conversations with others. Second, because Mengestu’s Ethiopian characters are solitary, there is hardly any exploration of dynamics within the Ethiopian diaspora and therefore also little possibility of ethnic diversity within that community. In contrast, Tamirat’s novel, by foregrounding encounters within the community, alerts the reader to its diversity. Regarding the first difference, Mengestu’s novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is about an Ethiopian convenience store owner’s quirky romance with a white female professor who has moved into the house next to his store in a gentrifying Washington, DC, neighborhood. The tensions of the interracial romance are counterbalanced by comic conversations between the shopkeeper’s two friends, Joe from Congo and Ken from Kenya, who spend their time cracking jokes about postcolonial African political history. Each character represents a different attitude toward Africa: Joe is nostalgic for his homeland, dreaming of his future as a poet; Ken is the paragon of financial success in America but emotionally unsatisfied; between these two, Sepha from Ethiopia avoids dealing with both his past and his future. Interspersed among these dialogues are flashbacks to the trauma of Ethiopia’s Red Terror that forced Sepha to emigrate. The interaction of these different characters provides a narrative structure through which Mengestu can evoke aspects of Ethiopian culture, African history, and the immigrant experience since the characters at times are compelled to explain it to each other—especially when, in awkward romantic interactions, the Ethiopian man has to correct the white woman’s assumptions or when he tries to evade her questions, thus revealing those aspects of history and identity that Ethiopians may prefer not to talk about. All of Mengestu’s novels follow this same pattern. In his second novel, How to Read the Air, the Ethiopian character Jonas works for a law firm specializing in refugee cases while he has a cross-cultural relationship with an African American woman, Angela; as Jonas and Angela work on refugee cases and debate the problematics of storytelling required of their work, the novel flashes back to his own father and mother’s migration history—a history that Jonas is partly inventing to satisfy audience expectations. All Our Names tells the story of an Ethiopian man who migrated first to Uganda in the 1970s and took part in some of the political violence there. When he arrives as a refugee in America as a substitute for another man, he has a romantic relationship with a white woman who works for Lutheran Refugee Services; interspersed with her perspective on the relationship are flashbacks to his traumatic experience in Uganda during the repressive regime of Idi Amin. Such dialogic encounters in which neither character is entirely forthcoming negotiate the “burden of representation” theorized by Hall and others. Mengestu achieves this negotiation through male characters whose flirtation with American women is achieved partly by invoking their exoticism and partly by a withholding of information. Such withholding is deeply tragic in How to Read the Air, as Jonas cannot bring himself to reveal to Angela the truth about his family history. In contrast, Tamirat drops the reader into the middle of a conversation happening within the Ethiopian immigrant community with no outsider’s point of view or third-person overview to anchor a non-Ethiopian reader’s cross-cultural exploration; in her novel, the narrator’s encounter with the cultural Other turns out to be an Other within her own community—the figure of Ayale, someone both familiar to her and yet also a stranger at the same time. The book is written in the first person as a confession aimed at an imaginary target audience consisting entirely of other members of her commune. Hence, Tamirat’s novel about a multi-ethnic Ethiopian diaspora community in Boston differs greatly from the solitary Ethiopians in Mengestu’s work. As many critics have observed, Mengestu’s characters are trying to escape a traumatic past in Africa and avoid other Ethiopians who might pull them into any commitments to that past. In the only moment in The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears when Sepha briefly visits a suburban Maryland apartment complex known to be a sort of Ethiopian ghetto, the other Ethiopian characters are characterized somewhat like Ezra Pound’s nameless faces in a metro station. As Bénédicte Ledent notes, “There is something almost ghostly about Sepha’s Ethiopian family and community” (111). There are two ways to interpret this ghost-like quality. One is how most critics and scholars have interpreted it, praising Mengestu’s poignant evocation of alienation. However, another way to interpret it is more critically, highlighting how an obvious feature of African immigrant life is missing and asking what the novel might look like if he had included a more diverse or multifaceted representation of the Ethiopian diaspora community. Since there is only one Ethiopian character, Mengestu need not concern himself with differences of opinion that two or more Ethiopian characters might have about their homeland. A contrasting example to the absence of Ethiopian community in Mengestu’s novels would be the vibrant presence of the Bajan community in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). In Nafkote’s novel, we have both: on the one hand, the narrator’s father has inexplicably separated himself from other Ethiopian immigrants, and her mother has simply disappeared (for reasons we only discover at the very end), but on the other hand, the narrator seems to be searching for a connection. In a sense, she is unconsciously running toward that trauma that her father and mother left behind, looking for a feeling of home that is not fulfilled in America. Regarding the second difference, Mengestu’s work never acknowledges Ethiopia’s ethnic and religious diversity; in his work, Ethiopia might appear entirely Amhara and Orthodox Christian to any reader unfamiliar with that region of Africa. In contrast, Tamirat’s novel begins with an invocation of ethnic ambiguity: “We speak exclusively in Amharic. It’s difficult to ascertain where each person comes from, but the accents help distinguish ethnic backgrounds. My father and I are the only Amhara, though any superiority we might be tempted to feel is tempered by the fact of who we are” (Parking 6). Later in the novel, briefly describing the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Boston, she remarks that “the priest . . . bore the cross of a heavy Oromo accent and a mostly Amhara congregation” and that the priest even has an “uncertain stutter,” marking Oromo ethnicity almost as a disability (47). By characterizing the Oromo accent as a disability within the social environment of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Tamirat’s novel here invokes but does not explain the history of ethnic differences in Ethiopia. In fact, many Oromo consider themselves to be a conquered people who practice a variety of religious faiths, including Islam, Protestant Christianity, and their own indigenous Waaqeffannaa. In some cases, as Zakia Posey has indicated, intercultural adaptation across ethnic groups involves coping strategies to overcome discrimination and find means of social advancement in a nation-state dominated by the Tigray and Amhara ethnic groups, such as when an Oromo family might adopt Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and even change their name to assimilate with Amhara culture. The novel’s evaluation of Ethiopian history is paradoxical, and the characters have a conflicted relationship to it. On one hand, history matters greatly for the characters. On the other hand, it is not clear even to the narrator what that history is. For example, remarking on the importance of history for identity and decision-making, the narrator’s father articulates a practical philosophy of ethical judgement: “[B]etween instinct and history, I guess I’d go with history” (Tamirat, Parking 146). However, earlier in the novel, noting how the truth of history is uncertain and subject to invention, the narrator reflects, “Look back on the past, given what you know in the present, and you’ll realize that all along, you’ve been inventing stories and labeling them ‘history’” (109). This statement echoes the first chapter, when her father introduces her to the other members of the commune as a “storyteller” who can invent whatever legend is required to justify their colonial project (4). Moreover, the history in this novel is not a textbook history, and it is not the carefully researched historical fiction of Maaza Mengiste’s novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) about a family in Ethiopia during the rise of the Derg regime after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Mengiste’s novel even includes a bibliographic note at the end about some of her source material for readers who may want to follow up. Rather, The Parking Lot Attendant gives snippets of Ethiopian history through the voice of a narrator, a seventeen-year-old girl finishing high school, and she has not learned her history from a book. Instead of a bibliography such as that at the end of Mengiste’s novel, in Tamirat’s novel, an older Ethiopian man jokes with the narrator, “tell me you’ve read Bahru Zewde. . . . I’ll kill if you if you haven’t read Bahru Zewde” (154). The narrator never answers whether she has read Zewde, and the novel does not explain who he is. (In fact, he is influential Ethiopian historian whose History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1974 [1991] is an often-assigned textbook in universities.) Instead, the American-educated narrator has learned her Ethiopian history primarily from the parking lot attendant: [H]e used to watch every single parliamentary gathering in Addis Ababa. It got to the point where an undersecretary of a minister of agriculture couldn’t sneeze without Ayale being informed of the fact. . . . I began to forget the order of the American presidents; the Johns, Williams, and Georges were displaced by the tribes in the north, iron-working Jews, battles with Italy that left Eritrea out in the cold. I knew that Ayale’s favorite emperor was Menelik because he was an excellent administrator, and Ayale knew that my favorite was Tewodros because he was fucking crazy, shot himself before the English could, and overall had spirit. (62-63) The narrator has been going to Ayale’s office after school to finish her homework and meeting him for late-night snacks at a diner, increasingly separating herself from American society and intensifying a cultural introversion. Ayale provides the cultural identity and past that her father did not. There is a historical context to this historical context. If one steps back and takes stock of the American publishing industry, the first book of every Ethiopian American author, from Nega Mezlekia to Mengestu and Mengiste, is about the Red Terror, as if the only way Ethiopian American writers can establish themselves in American literature is by invoking one of Ethiopia’s most painful moments. An Ethiopian author hoping to publish with one of the major multinational presses might assume that, since the 1990s, what the word “Ethiopia” means for white Americans and Europeans is three things: the terrible famines of 1973 and 1984 that prompted various media campaigns such as the “We are the World” song and charity; the Red Terror in 1977-78 following the Revolution in 1974; and, of course, coffee. Black Americans add a fourth thing: Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings, descendent of the biblical Solomon and Queen Sheba, and inspiration for the Rastafarian religion. The consistency with which such “first novels” by Ethiopian American writers in the twenty-first century are about these things, especially the Red Terror, may say more about the American publishing industry than it does about Ethiopia and its writers. Madhu Krishnan (among others) has written at length about how the global publishing industry positions authors within a demand for “authentic” stories of individual success against a backdrop of traumatic Africa.6 Ledent and Daria Tunca have raised the question in a special issue of Transition: “To what extent are editors—rather than writers—not responsible for determining the visions of Africa that make it into print? Or is the publishing industry merely satisfying Western audiences’ obsessive need to pathologize the continent?” (“What” 7-8). Echoing these questions raised by scholars, African novelists also have embedded such critique within their fiction, such as a scene in Adichie’s novel Americanah when one of the characters speculates that American publishers prefer Africans who “write terrible things about [their] own people” (394). The Parking Lot Attendant slyly avoids that narrative, and the only meditation on the Red Terror that is longer than half a sentence is when the narrator remembers feeling angry at overhearing a white woman recounting her trip to Ethiopia, where she witnessed the prisons after the Red Terror. Ironically, the narrator admits that the white woman had more experience of that reality than she did (Tamirat, Parking 43). Earlier in the novel, when giving a very brief single-sentence summary of the history surrounding her father’s emigration from Ethiopia, the phrasing is abbreviated: “When the emperor was suffocated and the military took his power only to lovingly confer it upon Mengistu Haile Mariam, who smashed three bottles of red paint and then began the killings” (17-18). The playful metonymic shorthand for such traumatic history is somewhat ironic: “suffocated” for the overthrow of Haile Selassie and the rumor about how he was later assassinated, “lovingly confer” for how the Derg regime repressed dissent, and “red paint” for the symbolic gesture Mengestu Haile Mariam infamously made before starting the “Red Terror,” in which possibly hundreds of thousands of people were killed. After this single sentence, her father arrives in Boston. Such abbreviated historical references in one sense cut off any thoughtful reflections on history but in another sense indicate a world outside the novel whose history is open to interpretation and debate. The Diverse Political and Literary History of the Ogaden An Ethiopian American novel’s relationship to Ethiopian history is fraught even before the novel is written, in part because Ethiopian history has been so thoroughly mediated by world literature and popular culture. This may serve to explain, or at least contextualize, Tamirat’s choice to render her narrator an unreliable source of information. Some of the historical and geographic inaccuracies in the novel may seem trivial, but they are part of a larger pattern that prepares the reader to be skeptical of the revelation at the end of a secret organization campaigning for political revolution. Analyzing The Parking Lot Attendant in the context of Ethiopian history and in comparison to other works of literature about the region illuminates the diversity of viewpoints on its ethnic politics. There are two significant details in the novel that warrant such historical contextualization and literary comparison: one is the novel’s centering of Ethiopian geography in its most ethnically diverse city, Dire Dawa, and the other is its setting of the utopian colony in the politically fraught region of the Ogaden. When Tamirat narrates the backstory for Ayele, she locates his origins in Dire Dawa, which she describes as “central Ethiopia” and “Ethiopia’s Europe before actual Europeans came” (59). This statement is inaccurate. Dire Dawa is located in the northeast corner of Ethiopia and only came into existence as a gateway city to neighboring Djibouti when Menelik’s Imperial Railway Company was built in 1897 by a French company. As recounted by Zewde, the same historian whom the narrator is exhorted to read elsewhere in the novel, the government made the controversial decision to bypass the city of Harar—an ancient pilgrimage destination as the fourth holy city of Islam and the former home of French poet Arthur Rimbaud—which could more accurately be called “Ethiopia’s Europe.” Because of the French-controlled railroad, Dire Dawa grew rapidly from a mere repair station to the second largest city in Ethiopia (Zewde 101). Situated at a crossroads between the Oromo, Somali, Amhara, Harari, and Afar zones of Ethiopia, it is also famous for being Ethiopia’s most ethnically and religiously diverse city. However, Tamirat’s geography is not descriptive as much as it is allusive. One example of this is the anecdote about Ayale’s mother, who was a shopkeeper in Dire Dawa; after she was robbed, she is rumored to have pursued her robber across the entire country of Ethiopia and “finally visited Axum and Gondar, and saw the people who put disks in their lips and earlobes to make them dangle and were as black as real Africans” (Parking 211). Her adventure is both mythic and improbable, since Axum and Gondar are cities in the northern highlands of Ethiopia close to the border of Eritrea, while the Mursi and Nuer ethnic groups (famous for the “disks in their lips”) are in the southwest lowlands, near the border of South Sudan and Kenya. Tracing her roughly two-thousand-mile journey on a map, one would draw a triangle connecting three corners of the country and circumscribing the capital city Addis Ababa in the center of that triangle. Thus, Tamirat’s geography is metonymic shorthand, the names of places and peoples standing in for the whole of Ethiopia, like the skeleton of a country that is never fleshed out. In contrast to the minimal description in The Parking Lot Attendant, two other Ethiopian authors offer more detailed description in memoirs that perform cross-cultural solidarity with other ethnic groups alongside sociological analysis of their homeland. Blue Daughter of the Red Sea (2004) by Meti Birabiro narrates her childhood in Dire Dawa and eventual immigration to Los Angeles, presenting a poetically comparative reflection on the religious and ethnic diversity of the two cities of her youth. In one scene, she resists her Catholic mother, who chastises her for spending so much time with Muslim friends in Dire Dawa. Mezlekia’s award-winning Notes from the Hyena’s Belly (2000) presents a compelling and often satirical view of Ethiopia in the late 1960s and 1970s, during a time of tremendous political and social transformation and struggle. Described as “[p]art autobiography and part social history” (Milz 157), a major theme for the book is the relations among different ethnic groups. Mezlekia was born into an affluent Amhara family in the city of Jijiga, the largest city in the Ogaden region, where his father was a mid-level bureaucrat for the Ethiopian government. In his memoir, Mezlekia foregrounds his own awareness of the history of Amhara conquest of the region and the social dynamic that followed: “Jijiga is a divided city. . . . The northern half is inhabited by Christians, mostly Amharas, and the southern by Muslims, mainly Somalis” (7). One of his closest school friends is ethnically Oromo. Hence, “born and raised in Jijiga, a multicultural mixing bowl, I was insulated from Amharas’ mythical view of the world—until, at the age of nine, I went to the eastern highlands. There, while visiting my mother’s cousins, I discovered how deeply rooted the prejudices were” (17). Later, like Birabiro, he resists ethnic chauvinism by poking fun at the prejudices of his elders, such as the belief that God speaks in Amharic and the devil speaks in Oromo (21). The cross-cultural solidarity performed in these memoirs is somewhat different from another memoir, Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia (2007), by Rebecca Haile. Haile immigrated to America as a young girl in 1976 when her father, a well-known scholar of Ethiopian history, became a target of the Derg regime. The memoir is about her rediscovery of Ethiopia when she journeyed there in 2001 with her white husband. In the process of rediscovering her roots, she narrates Ethiopian history and comments on Ethiopian politics. Like the earlier memoirs by Mezlekia and Birabiro, Haile also narrates her own consciousness-raising as she meets various people in Ethiopia and discovers the feelings of Ethiopia’s other ethnic groups that may not share the pride in the Ethiopian empire that she learned as a young girl from her father. She writes: “I felt a new empathy for Ethiopians who do not speak Amharic or speak it as a second language, and a fresh appreciation for the complaints minorities have voiced” (86). However, unlike Mezlekia and Birabiro, whose memoirs describe the cultures, histories, and political movements of those other ethnic groups, Haile’s memoir merely expresses pity and instead focuses on the question of whether the great historical icons of Ethiopian Orthodox culture still have the power to “anchor a unified national identity” (87), since the “timelessness” (106) of “the Church’s traditions are thus nearly inseparable from Ethiopian traditions” (112). Ultimately, although she admits that she may be speaking from her “Amhara background of supposed privilege” (160), she nevertheless concludes that the “ethnic federalism” of the current government that encourages ethnic groups to write in their own languages and express their own cultures will merely foster ethnic and religious divisions and “be a loss for all of Ethiopia” (159). One might disagree with Haile, seeing the multicultural policy of “ethnic federalism” as a gain for all of Ethiopia—not as a loss—since in recent years there has been a cultural renaissance of novelists and filmmakers from diverse ethnic groups within the country.7 Some of the passages of Tamirat’s novel seem to respond to Haile’s memoir. Describing the diversity of her commune, the narrator remarks, “It’s difficult to ascertain where each person comes from, but the accents help distinguish ethnic backgrounds. My father and I are the only Amhara, though any superiority we might be tempted to feel is tempered by the fact of who we are [in the commune]” (Parking 6). Later, in a moment of self-reflection about whether white people have the right to talk about the Red Terror, she notes, “I’ve realized . . . that I, too, have used Ethiopia and my Ethiopianess to measure my worth, to feel that I had proof of being different from or better than others” (43). In contrast to the way in which Haile’s memoir of rediscovery affirms an ethnocentric pride in “Ethiopia” and concludes with a meditation on the value of home, Tamirat’s novel about a “loneless” family caught up in a dubious political project destabilizes what “Ethiopian” means. It concludes with the narrator literally homeless and her sense of her Ethiopianness unheimlich. Instead of the thick sociological description in the three memoirs, the narrative technique of Tamirat’s novel is a metonymic shorthand that resists representation by commenting ironically on glib allusions to people and places. The central mystery in the novel that resists representation is the political motivation of the parking lot attendant. The narrator has been delivering packages for him, without knowing what they were or why she was chosen to make the deliveries, and, as a result, is accosted by the Boston police who accuse her of participating in Ayale’s secret political organization bent on sowing political unrest in Ethiopia. Deeply confused, she confronts Ayale’s collaborator, a man named Fiker, who reveals that Ayale is “creating a country. One of his very own. . . . with the cultural authenticity from Ethiopia and the latest in technology, medicine, and entertainment from America” (Tamirat, Parking 170). Ayale’s strategy is to leverage his position in America to solicit investors and purchase the land for this new Ethiopian utopia. However, the location is surprising: “contested land between Somalia and Ethiopia” (171). Ayale’s political project is improbable when one considers the actual history of the border disagreements between Ethiopia and Somalia. What is referred to as the Ogaden (after the Somali Ogadeen clan) is what some scholars consider a frontier buffer zone or periphery. When Italy, France, and Great Britain began to colonize the coast of the Horn of Africa (modern-day Eritrea, Djibouti, Somaliland, and Somalia) in the 1880s and 1890s after the completion of the Suez Canal, Ethiopia began to gradually conquer the Ogaden region, stopping in 1906 when the tripartite agreement with Italy, France, and Great Britain established the colonial borders. Despite that agreement, Italy used a minor skirmish in 1935 within the ambiguous border zone as a pretext for invading Ethiopia. After the liberation of Ethiopia from the Italian occupation in 1941 and the decolonization of Somalia in 1960, the area of Ethiopia inhabited mostly by Somalis remained a troubled zone, especially the region known as the Ogaden, which is the part of Ethiopia that is mostly ethnically Somali, just east of the Ethiopian cities Harar and Dire Dawa, extending from the border with Djibouti in the north down to the Kenyan border in the south. In 1977-78, Ethiopia and Somalia fought the Ogaden War over this border. As Robert Patman recounts in his detailed political history, the war was troubling to the Soviet Union, which was allied with both Ethiopia and Somalia at the time but eventually chose to take Ethiopia’s side. Consequently, following the typical logic of the Cold War, the United States then gave support to Somalia. The multi-ethnic communities in the Ogaden, caught in the middle, suffered greatly. We can compare Tamirat’s novel to other works of literature about this history. The most internationally acclaimed novel about the multi-ethnic Ogaden region and its vulnerability to violence between Ethiopia and Somalia is Maps, published in 1986 by the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah. Its main character is a Somali from the Ogaden named Asker, whose father died fighting against Ethiopia and whose mother was killed mysteriously when he was a baby. He is raised by Misra, an Oromo woman from Ethiopia who lives with Asker’s lascivious uncle as a servant. Later, after Ethiopia invades the Ogaden again and bombards their village, Asker’s family decides that he should move to Mogadishu, the capital city of Somalia, to live with an uncle who is a university professor. There, in the context of the Ogaden War, he develops a Somali nationalist consciousness and resolves to join the fight against Ethiopia in order to reunify the Ogaden with the Somali motherland. However, his patriotism conflicts with his love for Misra, the ethnic Other whom the novel poetically describes as an extension of Asker’s own body. Throughout the novel, Asker meditates on the problem of the wounded or divided nation, sometimes imagined in relation to a woman’s body. At one point, his uncle in Mogadishu contrasts Ethiopia with Somalia, noting that “Ethiopia is the generic name of an unclassified mass of different peoples, professing different religions, claiming . . . different ancestors. Therefore ‘Ethiopia’ becomes the generic notion, expansive, inclusive. Somali . . . is specific. . . . [Y]ou are either a Somali or you aren’t” (155). Reacting to his uncle, Asker is confused about what that contrast makes Misra, his surrogate mother, with whom he has always felt a strong emotional identification. After Somalia loses the Ogaden War, Misra is accused of being a traitor because she is an ethnic outsider, and eventually she is brutally raped and murdered. Asker does not know whether he ought to take vengeance against the Somalis who killed his mother or take vengeance against his mother for being a supposed traitor to Somalia. Scholarly analysis of the novel suggests that the story deconstructs the gendered rhetoric of nationalism by raising questions about how we understand family, community, and nation.8 After the publication of Farah’s novel Maps in 1986, the geopolitical situation of the Ogaden changed as resistance to the Ethiopian Derg regime took the form of a coalition of various ethnic and political liberation movements, including the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, the Oromo Liberation Front, and the Ogaden Liberation Front, among others. When the Derg regime was overthrown in 1991, the Tigray elite dominated the ruling coalition government, which reshaped Ethiopia into eight ethnic regional states: Tigray; Amhara; Oromo; Somali; Afar; Gambela; Benishangul-Gumuz; and the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region. For many, this political solution of “ethnic federalism” was unsatisfying, and some people remained resistant to the dominance of the Ethiopian state. Consequently, some of the ethnic fronts that participated in the 1991 revolution went underground after 1992, still fighting for independence and ethnic self-determination. However, because of the collapse of Somalia in 1991, the Ogaden resistance no longer received the same level of support from the Somali government, and, therefore, its tactics changed to become a more local struggle. For the first decade of the twenty-first century, clashes between Ogaden liberation fighters and counterinsurgent forces of the Ethiopian government are estimated to have taken several thousand lives. Simultaneously, other ethnic groups such as the Oromo have also engaged the government in a variety of ways, ranging from violent clashes and nonviolent protests in Ethiopia to petitions by diaspora organizations to the US government. Although Tamirat’s novel never explains any of this history, the narrator alludes to it when she expresses her confusion about Ayale’s plan to establish a utopian colony in the “contested land between Ethiopia and Somalia.” She says: “I just have no idea how you take over a piece of land that two whole countries can’t settle between themselves.” The answer given her by Fiker is that Ayale “‘decided that the only thing he could do . . . was join those caught in the middle: fight against their oppressors . . . to make sure they won their war of independence’” (Parking 171). When she questions this logic, Fiker responds: “No matter what you think about the man, at the end of the day, he’s helping a nation gain its rightful sovereignty” (176). But what “nation” is he talking about? The identity of those “caught in the middle” is unclear and left open to interpretation. One could guess that they are the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), which, like the organization narrated in Tamirat’s novel, was begun in secret in the diaspora in 1984, growing in prominence after Ethiopia’s civil war ended in 1991, when it was able to elect representatives to the transitional government. When the ONLF voted for independence in 1994, Ethiopia’s ruling coalition government outlawed the party and replaced it with the Ethiopian-Somali Democratic League. The ONLF and other outlawed ethnic liberation fronts are rumored to have received support from diaspora organizations. In addition, after the Eritrea-Ethiopian war of 1998-2000, the Eritrean government began to secretly support the ONLF and other ethnic liberation movements as part of its proxy-war strategy. Could Ayale have been a secret double-agent for a larger strategy of political destabilization? The narrator and her father are not the only characters suspicious of Ayale’s motives, but the possibility of such double-dealing speaks to the atmosphere of paranoia that troubles diaspora politics. The interesting question that Ayale’s project raises, however, is the possibility of a multi-ethnic collaboration that brings Christians and Muslims together to create an alternative to the already multi-ethnic and secular Ethiopian state. However, any notion of such a cross-cultural alliance is undermined by the fact that one of the recruiters for Ayale’s organization is a somewhat fanatical Orthodox Christian monk who makes disparaging comments against Islam, Judaism, and other religions (54). In contrast to the opaque rendering of clandestine politics in Tamirat’s novel, Mezlekia’s life recounted in Notes from the Hyena’s Belly mirrors that cross-cultural quest for justice, both as a teenager during the overthrow of Haile Selassie and as a young man during the Derg junta of Mengistu Haile Meriam. In the genre of the memoir, an individual’s life can serve as an allegory for the nation, as the individual’s dilemmas are a microcosm of broader conflicts. After the Derg comes to power and begins to repress the political opposition, the ethnically Amhara Mezlekia enlists with what he calls the Ogaden Liberation Movement, not as an expression of ethnicity but “because we had a common enemy in the junta and the front operated close to Jijiga” (153). However, according to Mezlekia, when the Soviet Union shifts its military support from Somalia to the Ethiopian Derg, the multi-ethnic solidarity of the Ogaden Liberation Movement breaks down, as the Somali members of his unit become suspicious of the others. As many historians have observed, agreeing with Mezlekia’s memoir, the effects of Cold-War politics on the Ogaden region have been disastrous. The immorality of European, American, and Soviet behavior in and toward the Horn of Africa has been exposed in great detail by such books as John H. Spencer’s memoir Ethiopia at Bay: A Personal Account of the Haile Selassie Years (1984), about his job as Haile Selassie’s legal counsel, and the British journalist Michela Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (2005). After the publication of Mezlekia’s memoir in 2000, the political landscape of Ethiopia and the Ogaden region changed once again after the terrorist attack against the United States on 11 September 2001 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003. Political strategists in America debated what possible role Ethiopia might play in President George W. Bush’s War on Terror and feared the influence of Islamic fundamentalists groups in northeast Africa. The United States used Ethiopia as a base for launching drone strikes and encouraged the Ethiopian government to hunt down Muslim extremists in Somalia. This exacerbated ethnic tensions within Ethiopia, so the Ethiopian government borrowed American anti-terrorism discourse to justify its repression of dissent, branding some opposition parties as terrorists. Remarkably, although The Parking Lot Attendant takes place in Boston in 2003-04, at a time when American political rhetoric stoking the fears of Islamic terrorism was most intense, the characters in the novel never mention it. Although Ayale is planning to foster an independent state either in the Ogaden region or somewhere in the border zone between Ethiopia and Somalia, none of the characters show any awareness that the border was a significant issue for American security interests in its War on Terror. Instead, FBI agents monitor Ayale’s network, especially after an apartment complex is burned down killing several members of the Ethiopian immigrant community. The narrator only discovers the extent of Ayale’s project and the levels of secrecy involved when she is interrogated by the police. The paranoid political climate in the United States in 2003 haunts the margins of the novel, as Ayale’s group begins to unravel in its members’ anxious fear of each other. In contrast to the memoirs by Mezlekia and Haile, where their personal experiences serve as lenses through which to view history, Tamirat’s dystopian critique of diaspora politics is a valuable contribution in part because it resists the burden of representation. Alternative Contemporary Contexts However, Tamirat’s dark dystopic imagination of how Ethiopian politics manifests itself in the diaspora—her rendering of her displaced cultural identity as an unheimlich set of social relations—is only one aspect of the diasporic imagination. One may contrast the novel’s clandestine political intrigue with the more ordinary forms of political and social organization, such as the many university clubs and diaspora associations that hold barbeques, participate in African culture events at universities, and raise money to send to families back in Ethiopia who have lost homes or lives due to ongoing conflict. Far from existing in the shadows, these organizations are highly public, often collaborating with local institutions such as libraries and inviting high-profile guests such as the mayor or chief of police. Ethnic organizations in the diaspora often partner with other transnational organizations such as Amnesty International, historically black institutions such as Howard University, and “fair-trade” coffee distributors in their work toward social justice. One significant example for multi-ethnic collaboration in the diaspora is the passing of House Resolution 128 by the US Congress in 2018, within weeks of the publication of Tamirat’s novel. This resolution, whose original draft was written by diaspora intellectuals and activists, put pressure on the Ethiopian government to release political prisoners and better respect human rights and freedoms. On the successful passing of the resolution, Adotei Akwei, a Kenyan who is the deputy director for advocacy and government relations at Amnesty International USA, gave a speech at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on 8 June 2018. The event was a special occasion because two of the other speakers were recently released political prisoners from Ethiopia: Eskinder Nega, an Amhara journalist, and Bekele Gerba, head of an Oromo opposition party. The event also included representatives from the Amhara Association of America, the Oromo Studies Association, and Kenyan organizations. The argument made by Akwei and others at this Amnesty event was that for years the different ethnic groups in the diaspora had failed to persuade the US government to pass such a resolution opposing human rights abuses in Ethiopia, but when they finally joined together and formed a multi-ethnic alliance, collaborating with a range of other international organizations such as Amnesty International and with other African organizations, they were successful. This is a far cry from the sort of isolation and political disillusionment we find in both Tamirat's and Mengestu’s novels, and as valuable as those novels are as evocations of alienation or critiques of diaspora politicking, it is worth placing them in dialogue with other diasporic voices. Returning to Krishnan’s critique of the global publishing industry, one may wonder whether its preference for African novels about political alienation rather than political solidarity is itself politically motivated. However, my purpose here is not to generalize about the condition of the publishing industry since, as I have tried to show in the examples of literature that I survey, there is actually a diversity of representations of the region. Rather, I am concerned with how scholars have drawn broad conclusions from a narrow sample of the literature. For instance, in a recent assessment of novels about Africans in America, Louis Chude-Sokei expresses doubt about the possibility of pan-African solidarity among Africans and African Americans. To illustrate, he focuses on a passage in Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears where, while wandering the mostly black U Street neighborhood of Washington, DC, the main character encounters a “black-owned bookstore called Madam X where once were Afrocentric poetry readings,” but now the “black empowerment books gathered dust” (53). Chude-Sokei takes this moment as a metaphor for the whole novel, a reflection on the failure of old political narratives such as pan-Africanism and the deep feeling of loss and alienation that the novel poignantly evokes. Connecting Mengestu’s novel to a broader hypothesis about the “Newly Black Americans,” Chude-Sokei cites Khalid Koser’s book New African Diasporas (2003) to argue that “there is no evidence whatsoever of a Pan-African movement, ideology, or even sensibility attempting to unite them” (58). What he does not consider is that there is a real black-owned bookstore in the U Street neighborhood where, unlike Mengestu’s fictional bookstore, the books are not gathering dust and Afrocentric poetry readings are frequently hosted. The Sankofa bookstore, located just a few blocks from where Mengestu’s novel takes place, is owned by none other than Haile Gerima, arguably the most famous Ethiopian filmmaker and a well-known pan-Africanist. Haile Gerima emigrated to the United States from Ethiopia in 1968, and his many films signal black solidary, such as Bush Mama (1976) about a black Vietnam veteran whose family becomes radicalized after he returns home from the war to face poverty and injustice. His later film Sankofa (1993), after which the bookstore is named, is about the transatlantic slave trade, and his most recent film, the award-winning Teza (2008), suggests connections between the racism the main character experienced in Germany and the trauma of the Red Terror in Ethiopia. How might Chude-Sokei’s argument change if, instead of focusing on a single Ethiopian American writer’s novel about solitude and alienation, he juxtaposed that writer with another Ethiopian writer’s pan-Africanist activism with his local community in the heart of Washington, DC? How might we evaluate the popularity of novels about isolated, politically cynical African characters rather than vibrant ethnic African organizations and politically networked, idealistic Afropolitans? I do not mean to suggest here that Mengestu’s and Tamirat’s novels about the feelings of alienation, paranoia, and loss are unrealistic depictions of diasporic life, since their emotional resonance has been clearly felt and widely praised, but perhaps the scholar’s job is not simply to notice how those novels express the deeply felt anxieties of individuals in the diaspora as they wrestle with conflicted feelings about the different communities they inhabit; perhaps the scholar’s job is also to place that anxiety in a dialectic with other forms of self-presentation, such as memoir, political activism, and community-building. Footnotes 1. See journal issues devoted to this topic in Transition (2014) and Research in African Literatures (2015), both edited by Bénédicte Ledent and Daria Tunca. 2. Mukoma wa Ngugi surveys these concepts in The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership (2018) (175-88). For a summary of the debate on “Afropolitan,” see Susanne Gehrmann. On various approaches to the topic of the “postnation,” see a special 2018 issue of Research in African Literatures, Interrogating the Postnation in African Literary Writing: Localities and Globalities, edited by Madhu Krishnan. 3. On Dinaw Mengestu as a representative author in the scholarly conversation about the African diaspora, see Nicole Cesare, Louis Chude-Sokei, Caren Irr, Ledent, John Masterson, and Aliki Varvogli. 4. See Solomon Getahun, Zakia Posey, and Pekka Virtanen. 5. 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TI - The Context of Multi-Ethnic Politics for Ethiopian American Literature
JO - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlz065
DA - 2020-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-context-of-multi-ethnic-politics-for-ethiopian-american-literature-7VLu5RNteJ
SP - 117
VL - 45
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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