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The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
Excerpted from Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu. Copyright © 2024 by Dinaw Mengestu. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
While suicide is the seminal event in the novel Someone Like Us, its characters anchor the story, shedding light on male anxiety and fragility. Ethiopian American writer Dinaw Mengestu portrays a relationship between two men as loyal, complicated, and gentle. While Samuel struggles to stay afloat as a cab driver in Virginia, his son Mamush is drowning in his marriage in France. The connection the men have with one another as they experience dissatisfaction is the putty that holds the story together.
The novel begins with Mamush arriving at his mother's house two days before Christmas. His mother announces with sadness that Samuel has died in his garage. Mamush is stunned into silence and grief while his mother clings to a familiar Ethiopian sermon, the idea that the death can be explained by a government conspiracy.
From there Mengestu untangles the past experiences of both men, and how things fell apart. The chapters alternate between Virginia and Chicago, places where the characters live parallel yet dissimilar lives as first and second generation immigrants. While a specific timeline isn't attached to the chapters, Mengestu shows the story through the perspective of Mamush, who is introduced to Samuel at the age of six without knowing the stranger is his father: "When my mother opened the door and found him on the other side, she seemed more resigned than alarmed to find him there…She never shared how and why she and Samuel had left Ethiopia, nor did she ever say why, years later, he followed her to Chicago, and then to the suburbs of Washington, DC." The message that Samuel is acceptable but only in slender doses, like a rich caramel syrup, is received. That he can't be trusted to impart wisdom only makes Mamush more attracted to him.
This is a story about adaptation as much as it is about assimilation. Mamush's mother owns a house she can't afford and this links her to her adopted country with its millions of debt-happy citizens. Samuel's failed cab business dreams cost him in far worse ways. He rarely sleeps. He self-medicates with an array of substances and is often enraged and paranoid. It is left to his wife, Elsa, to rationalize his terrible wrongs. "You understand," Elsa tells Mamush, "he isn't himself these days. He's sick. He's in pain all the time." The emotional cost of leaving his country is a continual piercing, like tiny holes through the skin, until the scabbing is too much to bear.
The risk in this kind of story, dark even with its lyrical passages, is that the reader will fit the suicide arc into a generic template of unhappiness, a one-size-fits-all characterization, and not recognize it as a silent hazard of immigration. Immigrants may hold on to their secrets because they have to pretend their decision was worth it. Mengestu has an authentic connection to this material, being Ethiopian American himself, and is skilled at writing male anxiety, so readers might wonder why he abandons us to figure out for ourselves what's wrong with Samuel based on the clues he provides. But maybe it is not we as readers who are abandoned but the immigrant characters who are forced into isolation.
Mumash, for instance, lives in France with his wife Hannah, a photographer. One day Hannah discovers Mumash's drug paraphernalia and challenges him to get his life together. But helpless men can be their own worst enemies and the women who love them dismissive of dark secrets. Here's what I think Mengenstu wants us to know about second generation immigrants: They are enslaved in a different way than their fathers but the end result is the same. Their search for belonging comes up short.
American-born Mamush wants the kind of acceptance that's often missing if you're non-white. In college, he creates the pseudonym Christopher T. Williams, which he uses as a personality he can climb into and out of when it suits him, a capitalistic costume, someone who can fall from grace. The ability to fall would indicate a starting point denied Mamush and most of those from immigrant families. While wanting—lusting after—the exterior veneer of ordinary American, he is less faithful to his ancestry, including the Amharic language, which he doesn't speak. Samuel uses this as an opportunity to other him, to remind him he is a betrayer of his family. This is ironic, because Samuel, who can speak Amharic fluently, wants the same kind of acceptance as Mamush but lacks the American-born capitalist insight to make the necessary compromises.
And so, what we are left with as we take in these characters and their complications is the truth of men like them. The necessary fluency to complete their dreams depends on the skill of making themselves visible and then remaking themselves all over again, and in a country that believes you are what you earn, this still might not be enough. Samuel and Mamush, a generation apart, are the same sort of man: lonely, nihilistic, and perceived as replaceable, a combination that can and often does lend itself to a quiet kind of tragedy that goes unnoticed. That's a part of nativism that is baked into us: Ignore the invisible. The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka wrote poems on toilet paper in prison. That's the experience of Mamush and Samuel in America. Culturally isolated and yet trying to express their art.
Someone Like Us is a story that ultimately lives beneath the skin of its characters, a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. The air we breathe is the air that makes others cough. Mengestu's novel is an examination of an absurd contradiction. Often, loving a country isn't reciprocated by the country loving you back. Choices, then, remain bleak. The wound grows, without interruption.
Reviewed by Valerie Morales
Abdul Saleh was fifty-nine when he died at home in Brooklyn in 2018 after working as a cab driver for thirty years. His roommate found him hanging from an electrical cord. His shifts had lasted as long as twelve hours but financial difficulties plagued him. It was hard to stay afloat in the era of Uber, Lyft, and rideshare companies that diluted demand.
The executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), Bhairavi Desai, summed up the situation bluntly: "This is what he knew. This was his job. This is how he knew to earn a living for himself and his family overseas in Yemen. Your days are spent hearing about your family in the middle of such a devastating war and you have little means to financially support them."
The same year, Yu Mein Chow, who everyone called Kenny, jumped into the East River. He was fifty-six years old and was struggling to pay off a $700,000 debt — a mortgage on his medallion, the permit that allows drivers to operate their vehicles as taxis. His brother said Kenny had lost all hope, and stated, "NYC has to act as soon as possible on bringing fairness and a level playing field to the taxi industry."
The immigrant community is over-represented in car transportation, data shows. Thirty-eight percent of taxi and limo drivers were immigrants in 2000, making up the third-highest immigrant population of any occupation, with only tailors and farm laborers including a higher percentage. In the New York metro area, 82% of cab drivers were foreign-born. In the metro areas of Chicago and Washington, DC, where Dinaw Mengestu's novel Somone Like Us is set, 57% to 62% were immigrants. Many drivers are from South Asia, the West Indies, and Africa.
Someone Like Us reflects on a taxi driver named Samuel, an Ethiopian immigrant trying to achieve his dream of owning a fleet of taxis. Although ridesharing isn't specifically mentioned as a factor, financial insolvency puts a dent in his plan of American exceptionalism.
Samuel is sensitive to those like him and it isn't unusual for him to give someone necessary transportation to help keep them from being deported: "Samuel began to describe his plan of building a business that stretched from DC to California, one that operated by word of mouth and that catered exclusively to people like the woman he drove to Boston—immigrants, migrants, refugees, anyone who was in the wrong place and needed to be somewhere else but didn't know how to get there."
After Samuel's suicide, Mamush, who knew Samuel was his father but never treated him as such, remembers the older man telling him, "When someone died in this country it used to be a big deal. Ethiopians from all over would come, even if they didn't know the person. Now when I die, it will be like everyone else. I'm one of a million cabdrivers in this country who speak with an accent. For a long time, I thought there would be more to it than that, but we came to this country too late in our lives."
"I was wrong. This is not the end," Samuel wrote before his death, referring to the opportunity that still awaited Mamush. His wife and son. His career. Perhaps he thought it was not the end because Mamush's life could still center around hope.
Taxi crossing the Brooklyn Bridge
Photo by Brandon Day via Unsplash
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