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

Abstract

Abstract: This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu's novel How to Read the Air (2010) generates a narrative and cultural conundrum. It contests mainstream, trauma-riddled depictions of immigrant life while simultaneously conforming to the reductive cultural tropes it criticizes. I approach the notion of the stereotypical "singular" immigrant story, wherein 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 "literature of minor feelings." Situated within an ongoing critical conversation about Mengestu's relationship to diasporic identity and popular migrant stories, this article foregrounds How to Read the Air 's narrative dissonance and departs from the current scholarly discourse, which tends to either interpret Jonas' individual experience as reflective of collective diasporic experience or overemphasize the novel's revisionist self-consciousness. Through close textual analysis, I show that How to Read the Air both masterfully employs irony and falls victim to it. The novel might not ultimately rise above tropes, but its ambivalence blends opposed positions, sentiments, and tones, and in doing so creates a pluralist revisionist narrative that assimilates stereotypes creatively.