Dis/ruptures of Home and Citizenship: Memory, Migration and the Production of Translocalities in Dinaw Mengestu's Children of the Revolution

Abstract

Following the Ethiopian Revolution – or Red Terror – of the 1970s, many Ethiopians fled to several parts of the world. The majority became refugees and exiles in the United States which resulted in the formation of official and non-official 'Little Ethiopias' in different parts of the country. Dinaw Mengestu's novel, Children of the Revolution, explores the experiences and lives of Ethiopian – and by extension, African – immigrants in Washington DC. The novel is particularly insightful in investigating the entangled travels of people, place, memory and home. It portrays how Ethiopians install their memory of home – and the home of their memory – in a migratory setting and how that leads to the production of a translocal connection between Addis Ababa and Washington DC. However, I argue that inhabiting the translocal does not necessarily translate as being in a safe space.  I examine how, despite their visible presence, the African migrants in the novel constitute an absent community because of their lack of political voice. I also investigate how, despite their peripherality in the American nation-space, the migrant subjects write themselves into America's past and present while holding tenaciously onto their painful pasts in Africa. In essence, I argue that these involuntary migrants perform several forms of non-normative citizenship which, in turn, challenges rigid understandings of home, belonging and nationhood.