Someone Like Us: A novel

“challenging, but endlessly fascinating, as the reader follows Mamush’s geographical, mental, and spiritual journey. . . . a poignant and beautiful book.”

Early in Someone Like Us, Dinaw Mengetsu’s absorbing novel of cultural displacement, our Ethiopian-American narrator Mamush, now a Paris-based writer, recalls the words of a college professor: “Things can be, and in fact almost always are, in more than one place at once. You are here in this room, in these desks, but so what. This is only one part of you, one version of you.” Throughout the novel, Mamush, mentally, is in more than one place and in more than one point in time. Sometimes his memories and imaginings are more vivid than his “real” experiences. The reader is challenged to find a chronological narrative in this welter of memories and imaginings.

Much of the novel is devoted to Mamush’s memories of his relationship to Samuel. The novel begins at the moment when Mamush’s mother informs him that Samuel has died. Mamush has known for most of his life that Samuel is his father, but his mother has never admitted that. When Samuel married Ella, she acted like a second mother to Mamush.

Like many Africans who have left their homelands, Samuel has to find work where he can. By day he works in a parking garage: by night he drives a taxi. Eventually the exhaustion leads him to drugs and alcohol. He suffers indignities at the hands of the American police who see him as just another Black man. Samuel has a dream of creating a nationwide network of African cab drivers that “catered exclusively to . . . immigrants, migrants, refugees, anyone who was in the wrong place but needed to be somewhere else but didn’t know how to get there.”

Throughout the novel. Mamush is on a real and imaginative journey: starting in Paris, where he now lives with his wife and seriously ill son. He feels that his relationship with his wife Hannah is waning and has difficulty accepting his young son’s illness. They live in a poor area of Paris where there are regular police raids rounding up illegal immigrants. Like Samuel, Mamush has a substance abuse problem.

Mamush’s trip to the United States is in part escape from his current life, part journey of discovery of his own identity. A college girlfriend told Mamush, “You’re like a donut. There’s a hole in the middle where something solid should be.” Finding that solid core depends on dealing with what Samuel meant to him, and, perhaps, purging himself of the negative aspects of his education: “I’m like Samuel in that way. I don’t believe anything is permanent. Everything can be taken away.” Can he find permanence in his wife and child?

While trying at the airport to reach Hannah by phone, Mamush misses his flight to Washington and eventually, at considerable expense, gets a flight to Chicago, his first American home. There, he stays in a cheap hotel near the neighborhood of his boyhood. The journalist in him searches for facts, documents, while the truth about Samuel and about Mamush himself lie inside his memories. He goes to the courthouse to find if Samuel had a criminal record.

Later, in Samuel’s old room, he finds a manuscript of Samuel’s notes for a novel. Every step in Mamush’s American journey jogs memories. At times, it leads him into his imagination. He imagines that he travels from Chicago to Washington on Samuel’s dream of a taxi network, each step with an African driver who has tried to assimilate into the American dream in ways Samuel couldn’t. His last driver on this imaginative journey is Samuel himself. They talk about the books they dream of writing. Mamush’s is about the imagined cab rides he takes from Chicago to Washington.

Meanwhile, Mamush and Hannah send each other photographs, often of empty landscapes and city streets, even of a rifle lying on a bed. The only personal photo is of his beautiful son, looking out of a window, “with one hand propping up his head as if he knew already that whatever was out there might someday exhaust him.”

Part of what Mamush discovers is his relation to but separateness from the experience of African immigrants. His mother wants him to be an assimilated American who speaks only English. Sam’s wife Ella feeds him hot dogs because that is what American boys should eat. Yet Mamush identifies most with Samuel, who yearns for an Ethiopia that no longer exists and who does not feel fully at home in the United States. Mamush lives in Paris but knows he has to find himself in the United States.

Someone Like Us is challenging, but endlessly fascinating, as the reader follows Mamush’s geographical, mental, and spiritual journey. In Samuel, Dinaw Mengetsu gives us a beautiful, fascinating character who mainly exists in Mamush’s mind. This is a poignant and beautiful book.