The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengestu

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears (2007)

 by Dinaw Mengestu

Logan Circle, Washington DC

Washington DC: 3/12

  I certainly remember Logan Circle from my time in Washington DC, the more run down and decrepit cousin of Dupont Circle (home of the DC LGBT community) but always on the brink of revitalization and gentrification.  The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears is two things:  An immigrant living-in-America story, Ethiopian diaspora version and a gentrification novel.   The Ethiopian immigrant story-line I found compelling, the gentrification angle, less so, but overall this book fits within the 1,001 Novels project because it is so focused on the location of Logan Circle.

   The Ethiopian diaspora is the opposite from what many Americans, raised on images of starving Ethiopian children, might expect.  Ethiopia is/was an indigenous African empire, with its own elites- two of them- actually, and a host of what you might call "tribal peoples"- groups not really in charge of their own destiny under the Ethiopian Empire or the governments which followed.  The Emperor was deposed in 1974 by a group of Marxist revolutionaries who were largely led by the Omoro.  The Emperor was Amharic.  Thus, most of the Ethiopian immigrants fled in the aftermath of that change in power, and most of them were Amharic ethnicity people who were high-status Ethiopians under Selassie:  Wealthy, educated business men, soldiers, scholars and government officials.   

  They were all people who got to the United States of their own accord, using their own resources, and most if not all of them spoke English when they arrived courtesy of their educational background in Ethiopia.  In other words, the Ethiopian immigrants to America had as much to do with the starving Ethiopians of our television sets as the Pilgrims had to do with the Native Americans they destroyed.  

    Which all goes to say that the children of the Ethiopian diaspora were the children of educated people, and were themselves educated, even if the status of their immigrant parents didn't match their status in pre-Revolutionary Ethiopia.  It's a different immigration story than the proverbial tired, huddled masses, yearning to be free.   The literature of the Ethiopian diaspora reflects that background.  

   That difference has already been identified in the 1,001 Novels project courtesy of The Parking Lot Attendant (2018) by Nafkote Tamirat.  Both books feature shadowy elders with a hidden past and mysterious present and narrators who are younger, well educated, but with a feeling that they are neither Americans nor Ethiopians, and that they are in some sense only here in America temporarily.  Of course, that didn't really happen, even after the fall of the Marxists in 1991.  According to a report from 2018 there are more than 3 million members of the Ethiopian diaspora and over a half a million in North America.

    The center of the diaspora in North America is Washington DC and the surrounding suburbs- something that was very clear to me during college.  This book talks about entire apartment buildings in the Maryland suburbs filled entirely with Ethiopians and DC is chock a block with Ethiopian restaurants.   So, again, The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears, with its Logan Circle location, is very classically Ethiopian diaspora.   The gentrification angle- about a white lady with a young daughter who buys and renovates a decrepit old mansion, with sad and predictable results, was less compelling for me.