Children of the Revolution

Today was my literature class at Queen’s. I haven’t read any of the books beforehand so far. I figure if the class makes an impression, I’ll read the book later. I plan to read today’s book, Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu (it had a different title in the US for some reason). Here are the first two paragraphs from The Guardian’s review:

"The narrator of this quietly accomplished debut novel is caught in the no-man's-land between two worlds. Sepha Stephanos left Ethiopia as a teenager, fleeing the Red Terror that had already claimed the life of his father. For the past 17 years, he has lived in Washington DC. On a good day, when 40 people visit his failing store, buying bottled water, toothpaste and gum, America seems a beautiful place to live: viable, even enchanted. But those days are infrequent, and by the evening he usually hates it with all his heart.

"For Sepha, the past is quite literally another country, one that he has learned to conjure at will. All it takes is a trick of architecture or light for Washington to dissolve into Addis Ababa, yielding up the ghost of his dead father. Deracinated and in mourning, Sepha is sustained by his friendship with two other African immigrants, Kenneth the Kenyan and Joe from the Congo. At first, they were under the spell of the American dream, "guilty of hyperinflated optimism and irrational hope". But over the years, the dreams have eroded. Not one of the trio is at home in the new world."

The lecturer did a good job talking about community--who is included, who is excluded, why people feel lonely even if they are part of a community. Sepha’s community falls apart when confronted with gentrification.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about identity (in light of Brexit, in light of Ireland in the post-Celtic Tiger era, in light of the perennial border problem in Ireland). The commentator I’ve been reading, the incredibly talented Fintan O’Toole, wrote: "If there is no positive Us, there is always its evil twin: Not Them.” Hence the need for a strong, locally based identity to trump (ha!) a negative, angry nationalism. He said our powerlessness over national and global politics needs to be mirrored in an engaged, active, committed approach to local governance. In an age of austerity, we’ve been abandoned by our national leaders so it is time to take control locally. This is particularly appropriate in the Republic, which has a very centralised government with little provided or controlled on the local level.
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