The Reading Self in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Abstract

Abstract:This essay argues that Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears testifies to how reading and reading acts—broadly defined and of a variety of texts and text types—becomes an identity in and of itself for the novel's narrator, Sepha. The narrator is an Ethiopian immigrant-exile who settles in Washington DC and is unable to forge identifications with white or Black Americans, or with other Ethiopians and Africans. Reading constitutes the narrator's way to make sense of his conditions and reconcile himself with his unbelonging to any human collective.