Misreading the Air: Narrative Ambivalence and the Burden of Representation in Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air

Abstract

This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer’s Dinaw Mengestu’s novel How to Read the Air (2010) generates a narrative and simultaneously cultural conundrum. It contests mainstream, trauma-riddled depictions of immigrant life at the same time that it conforms to the reductive cultural tropes it criticizes. I approach the notion of the stereotypical, “singular” immigrant story, whereby the individual’s struggles stand for those of the diasporic community, by drawing on Kobena Mercer’s and Stuart Hall’s notion of “the burden of representation,” as well as Cathy Park Hong’s so-called literature of “minor feelings.” Situated within an ongoing critical conversation about Mengestu’s relationship to diasporic identity and popular migrant stories, my article’s foregrounding of How to Read the Air’s narrative dissonance departs from the current scholarly landscape, which tends to either interpret Jonas’s individual experience as an index to collective diasporic experience or overemphasize the novel’s revisionist self-consciousness. Through close textual analysis, I show that How to Read the Air employs irony masterfully whilst falling victim to its own irony. It blends opposed positions, sentiments, and tones, and in so doing it creates a pluralist revisionist narrative that rather than simply censure or elide stereotype, it assimilates it creatively.