Complicated by ambivalence: "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam

I think it's fair to say that "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam puts a lot of demands on a regular reader, one who isn't heavily invested in literary fiction. It's not that it's terribly hard to follow what's going on, but the tone of the story--which is actually the opening to her novel, Hangman-- isn't one that's designed to make turning the page easy. The story announces early on that it's full of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, and the style lends itself to that. That's artistically honest, but it means a retired engineer in Sacramento reading the story for an adult enrichment class might struggle with it. I'm going to argue, though, that although its feeling is kind of similar in places to the infamously self-indulgent and pretentious movie The Brown Bunny, with a traumatized character unable to feel who travels bleary-eyed and emotionless through a landscape, "Do You Belong to Anybody" is a satisfying story. 

Let's start, as I sometimes do when a story hides its own plot a bit, with a very prosaic and artless retelling of the "what" of it. While this might be taking what was done very skillfully and artfully and turn it into something bland, I think that a reader, armed with the simpler history, can go back in and more fully enjoy the verbally richer version.

We've been through worse, people. Hang in there.

The plot reworked for non-English majors

Two brothers, sons of a wealthy landowner, are living in Ethiopia at what I believe is the end of the reign of Haile Selassie, around 1974. Sometime after the takeover of the Derg, the quasi-Marxist organization that replaced Haile Selassie, confiscated their land, one of the brothers, the unnamed narrator of the story, goes to fight them by joining one of the armed groups opposing them, perhaps the Tigray People's Liberation Front or one of the other regional liberation fronts. This brother is captured by the Derg and put in prison to await execution. While in prison, many of his comrades are put to death, and his son is born. His wife brings the son to see the father in prison. The son is named "Revolution." 

Somehow, the fighter brother does not die, but when he leaves prison some time in the early 1980s, he also leaves the country. Perhaps he is too traumatized to remain, perhaps his life is still in peril (the Derg won't be overthrown for another ten years or so)--we aren't told. But he never comes back. For twenty-six years, he remains in the United States, where he drives a taxi cab like so many other members of the Ethiopian diaspora. He also gets remarried. Meanwhile, the brother who stayed out of the fighting takes care of the abandoned son and wife, but he develops health conditions that are hard to treat. The non-rebel brother called the exile brother for years asking for money to help with his condition. Exile brother did not seem to help much. Eventually, the brother who stayed dies, and the exile brother returns to Ethiopia for the funeral. His wife has helped him pack and made all his travel arrangements for him. While on his way to the funereal, he happens to overhear his brother's son retelling his whole story. The narrator's nephew doesn't appreciate the narrator's sacrifices in joining the revolution; instead, he hates the narrator for abandoning his family.

There is a possibility I have it wrong. There have been many cab drivers' strikes in Addis Ababa, so that's an unreliable way to date the story, but I'm pretty sure about this being generally correct. If so, he's back in Ethiopia somewhere between 2006 and maybe 2010. That would make sense with the "America having some economic issues now" thoughts of the taxi driver the narrator encounters. It's the only thing that fits, timewise. 

Of course, the story doesn't actually ever say it's Ethiopia. It doesn't make any of this simplified version overt, and you'd have to know something about Ethiopian history, as by wild fate I sort of do, to pick all this out. Otherwise, it's just a story about "some place in Africa," which is, unfortunately, the way some critics have read it. One review of Hangman even suggests that reading Ethiopia into it might be counter to the novel's purpose. Which on one level, I sort of understand--the story doesn't name anyone or any place, and seems to invite as much ambiguity about place as the narrator feels about everything. Still, all of the details fit a history of Ethiopia.

Why no names? 

The story's style is aggressively blank. In the first few lines, the narrator violates that time-honored rule of unimaginative editors everywhere and uses passive voice several times: "I...was told"..."arrangements had been made"... "my clothes had been packed"..."jacket...was handed to me" and so on. 

In real life, passive voice is used when we want to hide the subject. For example, if I broke something my mom cared about, and she asked what happened, I might say, "It got broken" rather than "I broke it." There's something similar going on here. It so happens that it's the narrator's wife who's being elided here, because, as we later find, she's the one who packed his clothes and made his arrangements. We might think that the narrator had something against his wife that made him want to keep her out, but we soon find that no names are used anywhere in the narrative. We don't get the name of the country he's going to, the names of any of his relatives, the names of any of the people he meets, not even the name of the former president who founded a charity that operates in Ethiopia (Clinton, I presume). Even the radio does not "care to identify" the occupation of a woman in an accident. 

There is one exception, perhaps. The narrator recalls a story of two women who were his passengers in his cab once. They did not pay the full fare, and when he asked for the rest of the money, one called him the N word. It wasn't his name, of course, and even hearing it confused him, but it was an attempt at a name. In retaliation, he locked one of the passengers in the car and drove her back to where he had picked them up. Almost the only thing that can stir our emotionless narrator to action is to be called by a name, even a name that is not his. 

The narrator prefers a nameless state because a name indicates a specific something, and the narrator prefers vagueness. A name also indicates belonging, and the narrator resists "belonging to anyone," in the term of the title. 

He is, above all, ambivalent. He shows no preferences for one food over another, and is sometimes unaware of his own physical inhabiting of his own body. When the passenger next to the narrator on the plane complains that his own life has been "complicated by ambivalence," he thinks this makes him different from the narrator and, really, from anyone who has to work for a living. The passenger thinks he suffers from ennui because he has nothing he really needs while most people might struggle for a living but at least know why they're struggling. In reality, the narrator is suffering from something similar. 

From ambivalence to preference

There is a break in the ambivalence, however. Once on the plane, the language changes from English to "our destination's national language," most likely Amharic. When a flight attendant asks the narrator what he wants to drink, he can't answer because he doesn't have any preference. She then changes languages and he suddenly realized he wants coffee. 

In Ethiopia there are over forty languages spoken. Most people have at least two languages, one that they speak at home and then the national language of Amharic. I think what has happened is that the attendant first asks him in Amharic, and then when she switches to his home language, maybe Oromo or Tigrinya or something else, he suddenly remembers what he likes. Perhaps the use of the language he grew up with brought back memories from before his trauma, memories that allowed him to find a human inside himself with wants. Soon after, she asks again if he wants sugar, and not only does he say he does, but he finds it "delicious." Later on, when he goes to an Internet cafe, he doesn't even have to wait to be asked to know he wants a macchiato. They don't have it, but at least he knows what he wants. The possibility of overcoming ambivalence is dangled before the reader.  

The four dialogues

Most of the structure of the story is built around four dialogues, three of which the narrator participates in and one that he overhears. In two of the three dialogues he participates in, there is an interrupting narrative. In the first case, it's a movie that the narrator watches on his seat mate's device. In the second, it's the narrator himself recalling a story from when he drove a cab in the U.S. 

Dialogue 1

The first dialogue is with the man on the plane who thinks he's unfortunate to have everything he wants, so much so that he can't even muster lust for his mistress. This conversation is interrupted a few times by the attendant asking about coffee and sugar, and then, after the narrator struggles to sympathize with the man, the man begins to watch a movie on his device. The narrator watches alongside.

It's some type of artsy film about a man who wanders a cityscape asking people if they belong to anybody. He starts by asking people on a street corner, and then he begins to wander the city in search of people to ask. When he runs into obstacles, he just keeps going, finally climbing a building and falling off. At this point, the DVD player goes blank, and the narrator realizes the man next to him is dead. 

There are two things about this movie that stand out to me. First, it's a doubly and even triply indirect or vicarious experience for the narrator. It's a movie, so that's one level of indirectness, as watching or reading any story involves an audience experiencing somebody's else's lived reality. But it's technically the movie of the guy next to him, which he's just watching out of the corner of his eye. Since it wasn't the narrator's choice to put the movie on, he could claim that he's not really "watching a movie" in the way we normally mean it. So if the movie is good or bad or objectionable, it's not the narrator's fault that he chose it. Third, at one point in the movie, the character in it is himself watching a movie, in fact a pornographic one. I suppose this counts as a type of mise-en-abyme, a sort of picture-within-a-picture or art-within-art effect, as when Hamlet watches a play within the play Hamlet. 

The effect of it is that the narrator, who is unable to feel anything, is permitted to feel indirectly through this triple filter. The man who, as his nephew will put it, "pretended...that like an angel he had no relation to anyone," is able to face the question "Do you belong to anyone?" This is a question he's been running from for twenty-six years, and now he has begun, at least indirectly, to confront it. 

When the plane disembarks, people start to offer their condolences to the narrator for the dead person next to him. Maybe they assume that they are related because the flight crew covered up the man's head, so they can't see that these are just two people who happened to sit together. They don't "belong" to each other. In any event, the narrator finally receives the condolences he's had coming to him for a long time, but when they finally come, they are misplaced. 

Dialogue 2

The narrator takes a cab to the bus station and ends up talking with the driver. The driver reminds the narrator of a younger, better-looking version of himself. The driver, like the hero of the movie he has just partly watched, has to navigate a cityscape. Unlike the hero, though, he can't just go through obstacles. Instead, he has to continually go around them in new ways, as the obstacles themselves seem to keep moving. During his conversation with the driver, the driver does not believe the narrator is a cab driver in America, because the driver believes everyone in America gets rich. 

This scene with the taxi driver could maybe be seen as another form of mise-en-abyme, because the narrator is seeing himself reflected in the driver. But it's not an infinite repetition, because the narrator has a difficult time getting the driver to see the himself in the narrator. This all has a bearing on the dialogue that nearly closes the story, the one the narrator overhears between two people in which one person, his nephew, argues that history is cyclical. We've already seen a few examples of cyclicality and repetition in the mise-en-abyme of first two dialogues, but perhaps there are limits to the repetition. It's ambiguous, like the narrator is himself when he cannot decide which man he agrees with in the argument.

I've already commented on the significance of the flashback story the narrator tells the driver of is own adventures in taxi driving. It's the only time in the whole story in which the narrator overcomes his ambivalence and takes decisive action. Except, maybe, for re-discovering that he likes coffee and sugar. 

The narrator discovers he has lost his luggage. Does this mean he has been forced to let go of the past he was carrying with him? Will he overcome his trauma and its attendant ambivalence? 

Dialogue 3

The narrator meets an aid worker from the <Clinton?> Foundation on the bus to his destination, which is somewhere many hours' ride from the capital in Addis Ababa. Here, we start to get details of the narrator's life, but even those come grudgingly. He doesn't want to answer the aid worker's questions about his family, but he does mostly because he can't think up a lie. To the reader, his answers might even seem more evasive then they are revealing, but in the final dialogue, the whole story, more or less, will come together, and we will learn that everything he told the aid worker was true.

In the context of the final debate between someone who argues that history is doomed to repeat itself because of human greed and weakness and another man who argues that progress is possible, although difficult and never final, this third dialogue might itself be seen as an argument for the possibility of progress. At the end of it, for one thing, they have actually made it to his destination. For another, he's started to face his past, albeit involuntarily. It's possible at this point that the narrator will be able to achieve some sort of catharsis. Maybe he will meet the family he abandoned at the funeral and make amends? 

The overheard dialogue

But no, it's not to be. Instead, the narrator happens to overhear two men at a cafe arguing about world history, and is forced to listen as his own story is told. It's the second time the narrator has indirectly been told a story, and this one's retelling his own. Cyclical history seems to be reasserting itself, and with it, the narrator also returns to his ambivalence, his avoidance of conflict. He flees the scene just as he is being invited to join the two speakers.

As he leaves, he complains that even if you've already suffered greatly, there's no guarantee you won't suffer more. It's the second time he's worried about guarantees, the first being when he noted that "even a guarantee was unreliable, as anything could happen between the present and the future, including death." 

There are, at the end, nothing but cycles in the story, and even the apparent progress is undone, just as the man scaling the buildings in the overseen movie only ends up falling to the ground. Does the narrator belong to anyone at the end? He's steadfastly refused to name anyone, including his son, his brother, and the wife who arranged his whole trip for him and without whom he can't find his blood pressure medicine. Although he's shown occasional capacity for action, it is eventually swallowed up by ambivalence, or at least "complicated" by it. 

This is, perhaps, the inevitable fate of the person who refuses the "comforts of complicity," as the nephew puts it, who faces "being tortured, or imprisoned, or separated from one's family." The narrator is viewed as a bad man by his family at the end, although he, unlike his brother, did the noble thing in putting the needs of his family above the needs of society. The nephew, rather cynically, holds that sacrifices only matter if they achieve success. 

The funny thing is that if I'm right about the political situation being referred to in the story, the man did have a role in success. The TPLF and its allies did overthrow the Derg. He is visiting Ethiopia more than fifteen years after the fall of the Derg, when the TPLF that overthrew it is already beginning to annoy Ethiopians itself. 

Given that the TPLF (technically, the EPRDF, but the TPLF always dominated the coalition in these days) that played such a key role in liberating the country was beginning to wear out its welcome, it's no wonder sacrifice seems pointless. Given how it seems that human malice always comes back, and how sacrifice never seems to achieve the hoped-for end, how could one not be ambivalent?

Three after-the-fact digressions

I've treated this like a short story, because that's how it appeared in "The Paris Review" and in BASS. I'm sure it takes on a different meaning as the start of a novel, but since I'm reviewing BASS and not the novel, I've treated it the way it appeared. 

Secondly, I comment every year on how many stories in BASS aren't set in America, how they require the reader to have a rather deep understanding of political and geographical settings elsewhere that, frankly, I doubt most readers have. Maybe it's possible to appreciate this story without knowing the exact historical setting, but reading it the way I did made me feel like some of my readings last year, such as the one I did for "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjina Sathian, may have missed the mark. I really doubt that most American commentators do a good job reviewing work set in foreign countries. They'll treat a story that is obviously--to anyone who knows Ethiopia--set in Ethiopia as sort of a generic tale of sub-Saharan African. But that's really because Americans can't tell one African country from another. So I'm very skeptical of professional critics commenting on stories like this. That includes me on many stories.  

Finally, I'd like to note something about coffee. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. If you're a coffee lover and you've never had coffee out of a jebena, you need to correct that right now. I have often been told by coffee snobs that I am not a real coffee drinker because I don't drink it black. But let me tell you, the majority of Ethiopians don't drink it black, either. For the most part, they love to put as much milk and sugar in it as they can. So if any uppity coffee drinker gives you a hard time for seasoning up your gross bean juice, let them know that the real coffee drinkers don't drink it black, either.