Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century by Li Stephanie;

Author:Li, Stephanie; [Li, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040 Literary Criticism / American / African American, LIT024060 Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century, SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Becoming Visible: All Our Names

Sepha and Jonas both use invisibility as a way to protect themselves from the dangers of intimacy. Rather than asserting their unique experiences, they hide in versions of African American identity that do not adequately reflect their own desires and histories. Isaac, one of Mengestu’s dual narrators in his latest novel, All Our Names, also escapes into the identity of another—but in a far more literal manner. A refugee of Uganda, Isaac has adopted the name and identity of his closest friend and comrade in order to begin a new life in the United States. A literal fugitive of his past, this new Isaac must further contend with American expectations of race that complicate his relationships with others. As in How to Read the Air, this African immigrant becomes a site of racialized fantasies for his lover. These projections reflect the long-standing historical anxieties of Helen, a white social worker assigned to help Isaac adjust to the United States. All Our Names, like Mengestu’s second novel, alternates between two narratives. However, while Jonas struggles to make the story of his parents merge with his marriage and eventual divorce, the stories of Helen and Isaac at last converge in their decision to build a new life together in Chicago. All Our Names represents the culmination of Mengestu’s exploration of invisibility by presenting a romantic relationship grounded in the intimacy of mutual storytelling. Both Helen and Isaac are made visible to each other through their shared narratives; to be seen is to be heard. By recognizing the deceptions that structure their behavior, they move past the fear and hesitation that so limited Sepha and Jonas.

Born and raised in the Midwest, Helen has never before encountered someone like Isaac. Upon seeing him for the first time, she comes to realize “two assumptions I wasn’t aware of possessing: the first that Africans were short, and the second that even the ones who flew all the way to a college town in the middle of America would probably show signs of illness or malnutrition” (14). Tall and as Helen concludes not “bad-looking,” Isaac exposes and challenges her unconscious prejudices. Though hardly racist, Helen discovers that she is not as open-minded as she expected. Unable to identify or categorize this mysterious man, she finds that “compared with others, Isaac was made of almost nothing, not a ghost but a sketch of a man I was trying hard to fill in” (21). While Mengestu’s first two novels explore invisibility from the perspective of those who are or want to be invisible, All Our Names examines the process by which an invisible man is made visible to another. This unusual narrative approach emphasizes how invisibility is a condition born of both the seen and the seer. In Invisible Man, Ellison stopped short of exploring how characters like Mr. Norton and Jack make the novel’s protagonist invisible. Though he ventures, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581), neither author nor narrator dares to imagine how this mutuality of experience works for white characters.

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