The Parking Lot Attendant (2018)by Nafkote Tamirat

Author Nafkote Tamirat

1001 Novels: A Library of America

The Parking Lot Attendant (2018)

by Nafkote Tamirat

Jamaica Plains, Boston

Massachusetts:  13/30

   I've been pretty harsh to YA fiction and its YA protagonists since I started the 1001 Novels project, which seemingly features a parade of such work. One of my issues is an obvious fact- none of these YA books are written by YA authors.  I'm not sure why that is the case.  After all, if you look at other areas of the culture industry: music, film, there are tons of child participants.   However in the world of fiction, the views of children are almost entirely written by adults. Strange.

   The Parking Lot Attendant is another 1001 Novels book with a YA protagonist, but this is adult fiction with a child narrator, not YA fiction.  The nameless narrator is a high school girl, the child of Ethiopian immigrants. She falls under the sway of Ayale, putatively a parking lot attendant but in reality some kind of guru, criminal mastermind and/or cultural icon of the Ethiopian expatriate community.  Tamirat, to her credit, doesn't provide any backstory to the Ethiopian-ness of her characters, but its worth noting that the highly negative popular view of Ethiopia as a destitute land of famine and poverty disguises the fact that Ethiopia was, until a 1970's Marxist revolution, an ancient Empire that ruled over a variety of lesser developed African tribes.  The ruling class, speakers of an ancient Semitic language called Amharic are lighter and are generally considered to be the descendants of immigrants from the Arabian peninsula after Judaism and Christianity developed but before Islam.

 Which is all to say that the Ethiopians who make it over the USA are not the starving tribesmen that people remember from USA for Africa, but the children of elites from the capital of Addis Abba, many of whom fled the Communists in the 1970's and 1980's, making them closer to immigrants from Cuba and Eastern Europe than the economic immigrants from south of the border.     

     In other words, a book written from the point of view of an Ethiopian adolescent is as sophisticated politically as say, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, which is a reference point that popped into my head frequently as I read this slim volume.  Ayale and his people are not just a bunch of immigrants trying to hustle in a new world, they have political goals, which are gradually revealed as the narrator recounts her recent past from a present where she is part of some kind of political movement with the goal of creating an independent state in between Ethiopia and Somalia.