The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

In Sepha, Mengestu depicts a narrator who is apathetic, disenchanted, and worn thin by his life as a refugee. By utilizing first-person narration, the reader gains access to Sepha’s truest reality, presented through a perspective thick with inertia. But by pushing the narrative back and forth through time—most specifically within the time frame of three days, but also across the breadth of Sepha’s life—the reader is constantly moving back and forth through time, an intentional contrast to the slow drip of Sepha’s everyday life. Sepha seems literally trapped between the world of his memories and his present depressing daily routines, which he does not consider to be a “life.”

Sepha’s reflection on the “over-enthusiasm” of the naive immigrant is particularly poignant, as in this insult he criticizes his past self, his friends, and his community. His cynicism is a weight that holds him down, and the optimism of his friends, as depicted by Kenneth’s purchase of a new car, stands in stark contrast.

A detached protagonist, Sepha seems indifferent to his store: he does not open or close it at consistent times, he reads rather than spending time cleaning or repairing the store, and he has not tended to the purchase orders piling up on the counter. Even shoplifting, the stereotypical bane of shopkeepers everywhere, does not rile Sepha. Although he is technically an entrepreneur—one of the most auspicious and independent career paths in America—and his friends anticipated this title would provide a fortuitous turn in Sepha’s fate, he instead behaves like a deposed man who has no agency. The author hints at Sepha’s potential self-sabotage regarding the store and indicates that something recently happened to make him especially depressed and withdrawn. His own self-sabotage seems imminent.

Like Sepha, Kenneth and Joseph long for connection to their home countries, even as they strive for a better life in America. Though none of the men have had any connection to their countries of origin for over 17 years, they try and reestablish that connection through their time together. They find in each other a nostalgic reminder of their pasts, both in Africa and their beginnings in America, and they intensify their shared connection to Africa somewhat ironically by trying to name the many dictators and coups that happened in countries throughout Africa. Their knowledge demonstrates the ways in which war and violence shaped their early years and foreshadows the trauma they endure as refugees in America.

As their nicknames suggest, the men must also endure American racism. Despite Kenneth’s hopes that he will somehow rise in social status by having a car, the fact that he can’t get service at the first dealership is a reminder that American racism doesn’t always care about status. To Kenneth, the car is a symbol of hope and one of many possible “beautiful things” that can happen in America, but to Sepha it represents their inability to achieve such dreams. Both Sepha and his friends are stuck in a nostalgic loop, revisiting the same bars, the same game, the same jukebox as they discuss the fates of their old and new countries. All of them are unable to identify as American or African, but Sepha particularly is torn between memory and reality.

These introductory chapters explicitly discuss the escalating gentrification of the neighborhood, a concept that is further symbolized in the biracial character of Naomi. She is young, bright, stubborn, petulant, defiant, and fierce. Like the neighborhood, Naomi is caught between being Black and white. As the novel progresses, we will continue to see and experience the first-person impacts of gentrification, and in his relationships with Judith and Naomi, the instability of gentrification’s ideals of co-existence. Yet Sepha, a man who typically remains detached from the people and places around him, begins to grow fond of Naomi and her white mother. In Naomi he fosters the kind of genuine relationship his life has lacked for years. Both mourning the absence of their fathers, they share a passion for books and use the latter to bond over the former. Sepha embodies some aspects of his own father as he takes on the role of father figure for young Naomi, contemplating a more fulfilling life he has avoided since his immigration.