Intricate Intimacies: Reading the Transatlantic Queer in Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names

Abstract:In Dinaw Mengestu's dual first-person narrative All Our Names (2014), narrator Isaac recounts his departure from a conflict-ridden Ethiopia to Uganda, where he meets the original Isaac from whom he takes the name and passport that eventually enable him to escape from a tumultuous Uganda to the United States. Once in the U.S., the newly minted narrator Isaac begins a romantic relationship with the second narrator, Helen, a white social worker, who assists him on arrival. In the 1970s setting of the novel, narrator Isaac and Helen's interracial romance is fraught, and the text is attentive to the racist complications that the couple face, reminding readers that Africa is unexceptional in the perpetration of violence against Black people. In charting geographies of unfreedom that stretch from Uganda to the United States, Mengestu's novel challenges the overdetermination of African spaces as sites of barbarity and violence. Linking the African space to the American context is the obvious romance between narrator Isaac and Helen, but the novel encodes a more cryptic relationship as well. Mengestu orchestrates interlocking triangles of desire: first with narrator Isaac, the original Isaac, and Joseph, their benefactor in Uganda, and later with Helen, narrator Isaac, and the original Isaac, from whom the narrator derives his travel documents and new identity. As I argue, at the heart of Mengestu's textualization of transcontinental geographies of unfreedom for Black people is a queer script that articulates a repressive infrastructure and repressed desires. Extending the queer archive in African literary criticism and intervening in the reading debate, I read Mengestu's depiction of intricate intimacies as a lesson for recalibrating reading practices against binaries and in praise of queer assemblages of disparate methods as text and context demand.