Reading Guide: Children of the Revolution

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Dinaw Mengestu

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About Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and is a graduate of Georgetown and Columbia universities. He works as a journalist and reviewer and is researching a book tracing his extended family s exile from Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution. Children of the Revolution is his first book.

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About the Book

Sepha Stephanos owns a newsagent and general store in a rundown Washington, D.C. neighbourhood that is on the verge of gentrification. Seventeen years ago he fled the Ethiopian revolution after his father was killed. His life now is quiet, he spends his days reading Russian classics, serving the few customers he has and every Thursday evening he meets with his two friends, Joseph and Kenneth, drinking whisky and making jokes about Africa’s long line of dictators and revolutions. When a white woman named Judith moves next door with her mixed-race daughter Naomi, Sepha’s life seems on the verge of change. His fragile relationship with them gives him a painful glimpse into the life he could have lived and for which he still holds out hope. In an astonishingly assured debut, Dinaw Mengestu writes with powerful understatement of one man s longing for the American dream, and of the tenacious grip of the past across continents and time.

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Dinaw Mengestu interview/review

Extract from an interview in the Washington Times. 1st March 2007. To Read the full interview visit the Washington Times.

In the novel, the man called Shibrew Stephanos is the shopkeeper’s father. As a teenager, the younger man has to watch him brutalized in his own living room during the so-called Red Terror of the 1970s, then led away by government soldiers to his death.

In real life, Shibrew Stephanos was Mengestu’s father’s older brother. Mengestu was too young to have really known his uncle before he was killed. Still, he haunted the writer’s childhood. “My father would speak about his brother every once in a while, just really quietly,” he says. “He would whisper his name while he was driving. Sometimes he would just suddenly shake his head in sadness.”

Meanwhile — how did I end up here ? — Mengestu was trying to figure out who he was. In high school, “I wanted an identity so badly,” he says. “I was never going to be black enough. I was in an all-white Catholic school.” There had to be something, he thought, that you could “carve and create for yourself.” The answer was Ethiopia.

He started to read everything he could get his hands on, “doing just weird research into the country on my own.” Latching onto Ethiopia was “sentimental,” he says, yet there was also an attachment that felt real. The re-connection helped him. “And then it was a matter of building it up over the course of 10 years.”

As a Georgetown senior, he began taping interviews with family members — pressing his father to talk about, among other things, his uncle’s death. His uncle was likely taken from his law office, not his home. He was held at a military barracks in Addis Ababa. A week or so later, Mengestu’s father got a call to come get him. “I think they said he had died of pneumonia in prison,” Mengestu says. “When my father went to pick up the body, he said he remembers him being bruised and beaten, and his face was swollen.” His father and other relatives seemed “really moved” to talk about this, Mengestu says. “I think most of them hadn’t spoken about it in years.”

As for Mengestu himself: He just wanted the story to be preserved. He was thinking of writing a nonfiction version, maybe something splicing his interviews together with newspaper articles and historical artifacts into “this crazy postmodern narrative.” What’s next? There will likely be some journalism, he says: Rolling Stone sent him to Darfur for a piece that ran in September, and he came home dreaming terrible dreams but “dying to go back.” He also, finally, traveled to Ethiopia. There, he felt whole and “very happy,” and he considered nonfiction, once again, as a way to tell that tale. But who he is now is a novelist, it seems. “It will definitely end up as fiction,” Dinaw Mengestu says.

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Starting Points for Discussion

Examine Sepha’s store and its surroundings. How does the geography in the novel dictate its themes and characters?

Why do you think Sepha abandons his store? What is the significance of the house fire?

Has Sepha forged a new life in America? Where do you think he considers home?

What role does family play in Children of the Revolution ? Who is Sepha’s family?

Examine the characters of Sepha’s friends, Kenneth the Kenyan and Joe from the Congo. Are they at home in the new world? How have they tried to attain their dreams? Have they succeeded? What unites the three?

Examine Sepha’s relationship with his Uncle. How are their aspirations similar? How do they differ?

Discuss Sepha’s relationship with Judith and Naomi. What draws Sepha to the two? Is there ever a chance for happiness between Sepha and Judith? ‘I walk home at the end of the night feeling better, not only about my store but about this country. I think to myself, America is beautiful after all. There
is more here. Gas is cheap. This is not a bad place. Things could be worse. And what else could I have done?’ How do the various characters in the novel represent the American dream?

‘I could never find the guiding principle that relegated past to its proper place’ Discuss the importance of the past in the novel. To what extent is Sepha a man ‘stuck between two worlds’, suspended between past and present?