Thematizing Readerly Accessibility: How to Read Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air

Abstract

The proliferation of twenty-first-century novels about African protagonists’ migration to Europe or the United States has sparked a debate about the status of African migrant fiction and Afropolitanism in the Western literary canon. While there are benefits to bringing African migrant fiction to a wider readership, there are also sacrifices the narratives must make in order to be appealing to those readers. Tope Folarin considers this sacrifice to be one of “accessibility”— African writers must make their narratives accessible to Western literary audiences by recycling an essentialized portrayal of African migrants. This paper argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air (2010), thematizes this very notion of accessibility in order to resist the pressure of Western literary standards. While it adopts many of the tropes of accessible African migrant fiction, the novel engages such tropes in order to demonstrate its subversion of them. Through his use of a relentlessly dishonest protagonist-narrator, the son of first-generation immigrants to the US, Mengestu introduces some conventions of African migrant fiction and betrays them. In doing so, he instructs readers how to read How to Read the Air against the accessibility it might seem to offer.