Dinaw Mengestu - Ethiopian-American Writer - Essay Example

Dinaw Mengestu asserts that he came a long way to become an American. He argues that all black people are forced to be painfully aware of the color of their skin. In fact, he holds that blacks are forced to perceive the whole world through the lens of their skin color. We regularly feel that the migrant story is one of a kind to individuals who have left their homes. However, for the speaker, it has progressively turned into an account of individuals who have lost something vital to who they are and need to rehash themselves and choose who they are in the wake of that misfortune.

The thought of an immigrant is an exceptionally political term for Mengestu. It does not exist as a genuine meaning of a sure collection of individuals. He recalls living in France for quite a long time and being called an expatriate, not an outsider. In fact, the speaker speaks a lot about the status of an “expat”. He states that it is amusing how one educated person is actually an expatriate in any country of the world, rather than an immigrant or even a refugee.

The thought that one can just claim one space for oneself appears a tiny bit foolhardy, particularly given the outcomes of the diaspora: How we regularly live in more than one place nowadays, and the way that not very many of us have a solitary personality. Mengestu emphasizes that he loves the word “diaspora”, as it implies the meaning of an individual who has more than one cultural identity. Although the speaker himself was raised in America embracing an American culture all along, he still considers himself an Ethiopian firsthand. Africa is certainly one of his characters; the greater part of his books have a foot in Africa, and he sees himself as still profoundly appended to Ethiopia, his nation of origin. Despite the fact that he might have left the nation when he was youthful, he has kept it integral to his work and his creative ability.

This expression of oneself as a writer of diaspora was one of the major points discussed in the lecture. The speaker underlines that the fact of the matter was this, by marking others as immigrant writers the ones who mark them as those, are hardening their position as overwhelmed, their story as standard, and the encounters of the migrant scholars as other, as underestimated, as extraordinary. Obviously, to add to this, there is no single immigrant experience, which makes the name rather insignificant at any rate.