I couldn’t be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
I’m an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances, or they are determined for us. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a Ph.D. or be a lawyer, but as soon as you say something, you may be diminished in the eyes of someone else. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I’ll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer’s ability to render a fictional world – characters, landscape, emotions – into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it’s the first one I can truly remember. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
Once I began college, I was committed to writing, which I think is different from saying I wanted to become a writer. I knew I would always write; I just wasn’t always sure how I would go about doing so. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
Personally, it’s a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America. Dinaw Mengestu Read Quote
