Dinaw Mengestu

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. ”

I told my parents I was going to be a doctor and then a lawyer, but I never believed it and never tried. ”

The Rwandan policy of putting the genocide behind them is incredibly effective in many ways. But it's also incredibly frightening to think that this nation is being asked put this mass slaughter behind them. ”

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old. ”

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. ”

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction. ”

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. ”

My parents never referenced Ethiopia that much, largely because of the circumstances under which we left. We left during a time of political upheaval, and there was a lot of loss that came with that, so my parents were reluctant to talk about those things. So I had, by and large, an American childhood. ”

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. ”

Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for their own political gain. ”