(Uganda)
READ IT BECAUSE: It will Break Your Heart. And it's the Great African Novel.
As I read through the final pages of the novel and watched
the final paragraphs fade away my heart began to ache and break because I didn’t
want to let the characters go. And then I
focused and slowly read through the final line.
I won’t ruin it for you but that line—oh that line—it will break your
heart.
All Our Names is a
novel that the world should read—it’s the type of story for which all the
cliques like “one for the ages,” and a “timeless classic,” are written. It is befitting of the categorization “The
Great African Novel” as Mengestu writes beautiful rich prose capturing spiraling love
stories that appear destined for heartbreak.
Set during the struggle for post-independence power in Uganda, Names follows an Ethiopian transplant seeking an identity in Kampala as a youth and later in the civil rights era midwestern USA. The stories--told in parallel--unravel (or re-ravel) the complex relationship between love, loss, war and forgetting. Throughout it all one has the pleasure of reading Mengestu's insightful descriptions--the following concerning the nature of colonial influence is particularly apt:
‘When will you people learn?’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy killing each other?’ “I admit I had had the same thought before. I saw many people killed, as if it were nothing. I thought at times that our lives were worthless, but, hearing Henry, I knew that we were both wrong. No one needs to learn how to kill, but it took the foreigners who came to Africa to show us that it meant nothing to do so. Henry’s friend Joseph had many people killed before he died. I think now he had only done what the British had taught him.
These types of novels are the texture that makes the historical books and political science articles stick in one's memory--they add a depth of insight and of humanity that is all too often missing from the classroom.
*One of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.
See our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.
Further Reading:
NPR Dinaw Mengestu Embraces The Vastness Of Love And War (includes podcast)
WaPo Book review: ‘All Our Names,’ by Dinaw Mengestu
NYT Cultural Exchange ‘All Our Names,’ by Dinaw Mengestu
His family was from the north, one of the tall, darker tribes that a man in Cambridge had decided were more warrior-like than their smaller cousins to the south. Had the British stayed, he would have done well.Read more at location 87
Isaac and I became friends the way two stray dogs find themselves linked by treading the same path every day in search of food and companionship.Read more at location 94
“This is Africa,” he said. “There’s only one thing to study.” He waited for me to respond. After several dramatic seconds he sighed and said, “Politics.Read more at location 154
Isaac had none of the good or the bad that came with living in such close, sustained contact with your past. If there was anything I pitied him for, it was the special loneliness that came with having nothing that was truly yours. Being occasionally called “boy” or “nigger,” as he was, didn’t compare to having no one who knew him before he had come here, who could remind him, simply by being there, that he was someone else entirely.Read more at location 318
African socialist republic—“a beacon of freedom and equality where all men are brothers” was how he phrased it in the radio announcement given after he staged the country’s first coup. Millions believed him. He spoke the right language, grand, pompous, and humble merged into the same breath. He was from the military, but he claimed he wasn’t an army man, just a poor farmer who had picked up the gun to liberate his people, first from the British and then, after independence, from the corrupt bureaucrats who followed. It was rumored that he had a photographic memory, was a champion chess player, and every weekend returned to his farm to tend to his cattle and crops. Whatever people wanted in a leader and dreamed of for themselves, they found in him. The newspapers ran daily photographs of the president in various guises: the president as father, with a dozen children gathered around him; the president as village leader in a bright red-and-blue costume, using a walking stick, and the president as the intellectual statesman in a three-piece suit that tamed his massive girth and lent an air of sophistication to his bull-sized head.Read more at location 324
They were from Rhodesia—independence was still years away. No one on campus had a more powerful cause, which took the form of a single white banner unfurled each morning that read: AFRICA IS NOT FREE UNTIL WE ALL ARE.Read more at location 380
said. That first flier listed four. It is a Crime Against the Country to fail to report any Crimes committed Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country not to know what is a Crime Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country to ask what is a Crime Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country to think or say there are too many Crimes Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country to read this.Read more at location 415
Before Isaac, I had always been content to cast myself as the outsider, because only by such measures, I thought, could you break from the grips of the family and tribe around which you were supposed to order your life. I had ventured far away from home to live up to that idea without understanding that, inevitably, something had to be paid for it. Every day following Isaac’s absence, I was reminded that without him I made an impact on no one. I was seen, and perhaps occasionally heard, strictly by strangers, and always in passing. I was a much poorer man for this than I had ever thought.Read more at location 617
Even before they separated, the only thing my parents had that resembled a relationship was the fact that they slept in the same bed. I remembered trying to sleep with them as a child and finding that I felt more alone lying between them than I did in my own room.Read more at location 722
left Isaac’s apartment knowing that we were sleeping with each other not to draw closer but to try and rid ourselves of a desire we both thought we would be better off without.Read more at location 731
Most of us didn’t know one another’s names or ages or reasons for being there, and that was fine, because silence isn’t the same when it’s shared.Read more at location 782
No bureaucracy in the country until then had ever worked properly. Years could be lost in search of a birth certificate, driver’s license, or passport. It was easy to be invisible in a city that had clearly stretched its limits and was bursting at its seams. The daily records of names, entries, and departures signaled the end of that.Read more at location 865
The party had gone on long enough for them, and what they sought wasn’t a renewal of their convictions, but a quick and, they hoped, painless exit from them.Read more at location 1077
“Africa is where America sends its crazy people” was the common refrain among us,Read more at location 1138
Rescue—that is the true heart behind romance and fairy tale; the spontaneous love that frees us from the tower, hospital bed, or broken world is always only the means to that end.Read more at location 1414
What was worse was being alone in public and, for reasons you were reluctant to admit, feeling frightened because your lover held your arm.Read more at location 1462
thought I had lost the heart to take on that type of work, but I hadn’t. I had simply let the muscles go slack. What I didn’t know until then was that loving someone and feeling loved in return was the best exercise for the heart, the strength training needed to do more than simply make it through life.Read more at location 1974
‘When will you people learn?’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy killing each other?’ “I admit I had had the same thought before. I saw many people killed, as if it were nothing. I thought at times that our lives were worthless, but, hearing Henry, I knew that we were both wrong. No one needs to learn how to kill, but it took the foreigners who came to Africa to show us that it meant nothing to do so. Henry’s friend Joseph had many people killed before he died. I think now he had only done what the British had taught him.Read more at location 2271
When I was born, I had thirteen names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with my father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have thirteen names. Our family was considered blessed to have such a history.Read more at location 2297
Another man came over and kicked me playfully in the back and in the ribs. I didn’t mind that, either. For once, I thought, someone was speaking to me honestly.Read more at location 2412
I didn’t stay long enough to hear them tell the story. The women and children began to drag the bodies into the forest. As they did so, I tried to write down what had happened. I thought of counting the dead, but I was too far away to do so. I tried next to describe one of the bodies, but all I could see was death—no eyes, no face, just a blank emptiness I didn’t have the stomach to look at closely. When that failed, I tried to describe a woman dragging what looked to be an old man through the grass, but before I knew what to write, she was gone and then walking back, empty-handed. By the time I finally turned away from her, it was almost over. The bodies were hidden in the forest, which would swallow the remains before anyone knew to look for them. I had no names, not even of the village, which was too small to have existed on any map. And so I did the only thing I could think of. I waited until no one was watching me, and then left. As I walked back to Joseph’s village, I drew a map of the route. I recorded every bend in the road, and the few forks that I came upon, along with sketches of a few long-abandoned thatch-roofed homes barely visible from the path. It was far from poetry, less than a journal, and worthless as history.Read more at location 2840
“It’s not fair,” Isaac said. “What?” He pointed out the window to the lake. “You have oceans even in the middle of the country.” “It’s not an ocean,” I said. “I know,” he said. “Your lakes are my ocean. My forest is your jungle. America is a world, not a nation.”Read more at location 2884
