Review of “An Honest Exit”

Story review: An Honest Exit by Dinaw Mengetsu, published in New Yorker, June 12, 2010.

This is a multilayered story about a father, a son and many continents, aspirations, journeys and transformations of identity, which are all part of an immigrant experience. The story has an episodic structure that oscillates between New York and parts of Africa, mostly the Sudan. The death of the protagonist’s father is the event that precipitates the young English teacher in a privileged prep school to open up and reveal a journey that he kept to himself for too long, and in the process discovers that he could make a connection with the privileged, presumably white students while rediscovering himself. So, from Kafka’s “monkey” to a teacher who makes a difference in the students’ worldview, we see a gradual transformation through the arc of the story.

Images of slavery, racial stereotypes and other themes emerge from the opening paragraph itself. In reflecting about his father’s death, the protagonist subtly or sometimes explicitly probes his relationship to his father and the entirely different upbringing of the two. The story is narrated as a series of lessons to a bunch of students who remain unnamed, but evolve from a monolithic mass that is oblivious to the travails continents across to that of a sensitive and empathetic group that begins to communicate and connect by text messages and conversations outside of the class. Much to the protagonist’s surprise even the dean of the school responds positively to this spontaneous development in the classroom.

The journey of the father is the centerpiece of the story. An engineer who finds himself oppressed and out of job due to his political views, decides it is better to venture into the unknowns and uncertainties of treacherous journey toward the West via strife-filled regions of the desert and the coast of Sudan. He leaves his family, his culture, his entire life lived till that point behind, and walks across the desert with nothing but a hope, and heads toward an unnamed port city in Sudan. There he meets Abrahim, a man who remains intentionally vague, generic and, at times, a metaphorical middleman who helps smuggle immigrants in less than legal ways. But Abrahim is at best a man of unknown intentions who cannot be trusted and yet must be followed as the alternatives are no rosier than that.

We learn about the travails of preparing for an exit that could either mean an exit from the testing conditions of Africa or from life itself. Promises must be made, hard earned money must be parted with, and inhumane treatment must be tolerated in hope of life of relative freedom.

That the father makes it to Europe and on to the United States is a foregone conclusion. Exit from Africa liberates the father, and father’s exit from life liberates the son who finally comes to terms with his identity and the richness he can bring to an otherwise monolithic world where he grows up. There is an inherent message here: Life doesn’t always start with birth, and doesn’t end with death, and identity is at best fluid fiction.

-Mahesh Senagala