America. It is a land of opportunity, a country where streets are paved with gold. Those with the highest aspirations know they can only be reached here in this place. It is the kind of place where dreams come true, and money grows on trees, and all live together pursuing freedom, and truth, and justice. It is the Promised Land purported to be flowing with the milk of hope and the honey of dreams. But for immigrants the milk and honey may have a bitterness natives don’t understand.
Author Dinaw Mengestu describes the isolation of immigrants exquisitely in his book, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Three lines of poetry from Dante’s Inferno represent the whole of the book in their poignancy,
“Through a round aperture I saw appear,
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
Mengestu’s book has five main characters, three of whom are foreign immigrants. Sepha is from Nigeria, his friend Joseph from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenneth is from Kenya. Judith, a white woman, and her biracial daughter, Naomi, are wealthy newcomers to a predominantly poor area of town, immigrants of a different kind. The lines from Inferno summarize the four isolating types of hell Sepha, Joseph, Kenneth, and Judith experience as immigrants, and the agony that’s all too common among foreign immigrants to the United States.
Joseph represents the understandable reluctance of immigrants to assimilate to a new culture. Mengestu describes Joseph as someone who cannot let go of Africa. He is a man who walks forward, but with his back to the future, forever walking backward, so that he can watch his home country disappearing. In one scene Joseph comments on the lines from the Inferno above saying, “… No one can understand that line like an African because that is what we lived through. Hell every day with only glimpses of heaven in between (Mengestu, 2007, 100).” He, like many immigrants, still longs for his homeland with an undiminished love that spans time and distance. “There was hardly a single thing in Joseph’s life…that hadn’t become a metaphor for Africa. From great lines of poetry to the angle of falling light on a spring afternoon, he saw flashes of the continent wherever he went (Mengestu, 2007, 100).” The pursuit of “flashes of the continent” manifests itself in the formation of ethnic ghettos, which provide a community for immigrants, but also perpetuate their segregation from the rest of society.The hell that Joseph and the immigrants living in ghettos are experiencing is the Hell of Homelessness. Although these immigrants have come to a new country to enjoy its benefits, it is not their home, and their true home is the unreachable star in the heavens, untouchable, except by its cheap imitation in ghettos, the Africa metaphors Joseph sees everywhere.
Kenneth is another type of immigrant. He represents an immigrant caught between two worlds who reaches unceasingly for the carrot of a new country dangling in front of his nose. While Joseph misses Africa and sees its image in everything, “Kenneth hates him for this (Mengestu, 2007, 100).” Kenneth is hyper-conscious of his status as a foreign immigrant. Like Fanon, he sees how he is being seen by the natives, and he hates it. He always appears respectable by wearing a pressed shirt and an impeccably tied tie. “He believes in the power of a well-tailored suit to command the attention and respect of those who might not otherwise give him a second thought (Mengestu, 2).” His teeth, which are neither straight, nor white, stay hidden behind his hand when he talks to natives; he is self-conscious about who he is, and yet he gives a big grin to his friends when they ask him about his teeth, saying “’You can never forget where you came from if you have teeth as ugly as these’ (Mengestu, 3,” in self-deprecation.
He lives in imitation of the wealthy, successful men he wants to be, repeating the same phrases over and over because that’s what successful Americans do, and hanging up the phone abruptly because the powerful “can dismiss with a wave of the hand and never think twice about it (Mengestu, 2007, 35).” Yet, despite all of his charades he is no closer to being a successful, wealthy American, and he is trapped his hell. He hates seeing how he is seen, and tries to make himself someone different in response, but can’t, and must continuing the cycle of loathing. He hates his hell, sees the stars outside, and cannot help but wish he were out there, and cannot help but hate the place he must remain.
Perhaps the strangest of Mengestu’s characters is not alcoholic Joseph, or Ken the engineer, but the mysterious Judith. She is a white woman, a single mother of a biracial daughter, a former professor of American political history, and she’s moved into a new neighborhood that’s so unfamiliar it’s practically a foreign country. Judith is the unwelcome immigrant, the foreigner who wants nothing more than to live her life, but finds herself the object of the neighborhood’s animosity toward strangers, the butt of nativism’s humorless joke.
Mengestu has turned nativism on its head in his portrayal of Judith as its victim. Normally when we picture over-zealous patriots uniting against foreigners, we see white Arizonans turning on the immigrants of color from Mexico, or the citizens of Boston or New York confining immigrants from all over the world to ghettos in the 1900s, but here the natives are poor, predominantly Black, and they turn on a wealthy white newcomer. The irony is striking.
When Judith first moves in Mrs. Davis, a native, sums up the neighborhood attitude towards her. “’Why do you think a woman like that would wanna live here? Doesn’t seem right, does it?’ (Mengestu, 2007, 23)” Judith is the character who represents the immigrants who come to the United States and find discrimination in the place of the welcome they expected. A 2008 article in Ebony describes the hatred Somali immigrants are facing in Columbus, Ohio. The city is home to the nation’s second-largest population of Somalis, 45,000, but nativism is a tragic problem that has fueled shootings, deaths, vandalism, and prejudice. In an irony that almost matches that of Mengestu, the native Black community is often at odds with African newcomers. A mosque where nearly 1,500 Somalis worship has been repeatedly vandalized, and the words “Go back to Africa” have been spray-painted on it. The congregation was even the target of a paintball gun attack. This type of degrading discrimination is seen all over the United States and is symptomatic of the Hell of Discrimination experienced by many new immigrants.
At last we come to the last of Mengestu’s representations of immigrants, the last of the characters he places in a hell, Sepha. He is the immigrant who hates himself, who can’t let go of Africa, but Sepha does not have the same hatred as Kenneth, or the same nostalgia as Joseph. His enemy is not the way others see him; his enemy is not the unfamiliarity of the New World. No, Sepha’s enemy is his own mind, and the trauma that tortures him. Sepha has isolated himself in a hell because his silent betrayal caused his father’s death, and neither he, nor his father, can forgive him now. Like Judas, who killed himself after he betrayed his Lord, Sepha considers his sin to be so great that he cannot allow himself to move on.
Sepha is less of a true immigrant, and more of an exile, pushed out of his home by his mother, plagued with survivor’s guilt. Although Sepha talks about going home throughout the novel, he can’t bring himself to actually do it, because he can’t go home, because he must remain in exile in penance of the sins he believes he has committed. This character represents a small community of immigrants whose very existence is painful to them. They feel that they could have done something to avert the catastrophe that caused them to flee their home country, or that the event was their fault. These survivors reside in a hell of their own making, constantly reminding themselves of the trauma they experienced. Sepha is fairly disinterested with his life in the present because to him his past makes a future to look forward to unattainable.
Sepha is so traumatized, is so entrenched in his hell, that he cannot have ambitions, cannot wish anything good for himself. He quits his job, runs away from his problems, but most of his major decisions haven’t actually been his own. His mother pushes him to leave Africa, his uncle drags him to a job interview and does all the talking, even his store is Kenneth’s idea. He sees the beautiful things heaven bears in a possible relationship with Judith, and when talking about expanding the store, but he never reaches for them because he knows he just doesn’t deserve them. This Hell of Guilt is the hell where inhabitants see the stars and do not weep to know they will never be theirs, but accept passively that they are unworthy even of the light of the stars.
Each of these characters is living in a hell. Joseph because he is homeless, constantly looking backward, Kenneth because he hates being seen as a foreigner, Judith because she is unwelcome, and Sepha because he is guilt-ridden. These four represent four types of immigrants in the United States, the ghetto inhabitant, the stereotyped, the persecuted, and the survivors. Every one of them, even the survivor, is isolated in his new “home”. We think of America as this utopia, this paradise of freedom, and truth, and justice, but we can be as unwelcoming as a nightmare of a mother-in-law, as misunderstanding as a deaf man, and as discriminatory as a slave owner. Today we rarely turn our heads to discuss the plight of immigrants in the US today, unless we’re complaining about the rising numbers of illegal immigrants. The legal immigrants are too often overlooked. But as illegal immigration increases nativist sentiments, and these issues go un-discussed and swept under the rug, we are isolating those whom years ago founded the idea of American freedom- immigrants. Too many immigrants come to America out of a hell, because they see the beautiful things our heaven bears, and too often they are instead isolated in a new hell where they can see the stars but never touch them.
