Walt Whitman Writers Series Speaker Shares from Novel "How to Read the Air"

He was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to the United States when he was two, but Walt Whitman Writer Series speaker Dinaw Mengestu says despite obvious physical, ethnic and geographic differences, it is what all people have in common that makes literature such an effective way to communicate and educate. (Watch an interview with Dinaw)

"I don't write because I want to give you the idea of the Ethiopian American experience or the immigrant experience, I write because I believe we all know what it is to be lonely. We all know what it is to want love in our lives. We all know that at some point in time we are forced to create a sense of home and identity," said Mengestu during a reading of his latest novel, How to Read the Air, on October 17 in the St. Francis College Maroney Forum for Arts, Culture & Education. "These are struggles that are not particular to any ethnicity or identity. They are greater than those issues." (Watch the entire reading)

Mengetsu, who before recently moving to Paris, lived only a few blocks from St. Francis in Brooklyn Heights, said that the literary tradition in America is unlike any other in the world.

"Part of the joy for me being back in Brooklyn is you can see this diversity and this range happening; this constant state of flux. Some of which is not always the way you would like it to happen but never the less it still happens. The fact that we make room for each other constantly especially in this borough, in this city, seems more and more miraculous the farther away I get from here.

The portion of How to Read the Air Mengestu read was about a young man who worked for immigration lawyers and was tasked with the responsibility of editing the stories of asylum seekers to make their cases stronger. He commented on the parallels between the recent incident with Dominique Strauss-Kahn in which defense lawyers tried to discredit his sexual assault accuser by claiming her asylum papers were littered with lies about her past.

"Whether or not she lied was sort of irrelevant to the fact that we acted as if this was unheard of. I'd say most of the stories that pass through immigration officers have been doctored in order to get through those processes. It's an unfair system an imperfect system," said Mengestu. "We're not looking for truth, we're looking for a reflection of our own political necessity in those moments."

Mengestu is the sixth speaker in the Walt Whitman Writers Series which brings top contemporary authors to St. Francis to share their work and writing experiences with students, faculty and the entire Brooklyn community. Previous authors include Kate Christensen, Julie Orringer, Jonathan Lethem, Darcey Steinke, and Rick Moody.

The next Walt Whitman speaker will be Ben Marcus on March 8, 2012. Marcus's new novel, The Flame Alphabet (Knopf) will be published in January, 2012.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. He is a graduate of Georgetown University where he also returned as a Visiting Writer and of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He also reported stories for Harper's and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur.

Photo: Dinaw Mengestu being interviewed by St. Francis College student Noel Jones '12.

St. Francis College, founded in 1859 by the Franciscan Brothers of Brooklyn, is located in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y. Since its founding, the College has pursued its Franciscan mission to provide an affordable, high-quality education to students from New York City's five boroughs and beyond.

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