“The Eritrean story is the greatest story never told,” says Bsrat Mezghebe. Her debut novel, I Hope You Find What You Are Looking For (Liveright, Feb.), attempts to tell that story, focusing on an Eritrean family living in the Washington, D.C., area in 1991, as the East African country’s 30-year war against Ethiopia concludes in victory. Mezghebe grew up in D.C.’s tight-knit Eritrean community, which supplied her with plenty of “crazy” stories about life during the war.
“A third of the revolutionary forces were women,” Mezghebe explains. Elsa, the mother of her protagonist, Lydia, is one of them, having joined the fight before emigrating to America in the late 1970s with her infant daughter. In 1991, Lydia is 13, and the family welcomes an Eritrean relative into their apartment. Elsa is reluctant to discuss her past or share details about Lydia’s father, which frustrates both members of the younger generation. “It’s complicated for children of immigrants,” Mezghebe says, “because there’s this dislocation from their family history.”
Mezghebe worked in international development and for a trade association before starting a “slow march” toward writing that began with a class at the Bethesda Writing Center. A two-week residency at the Callaloo Writing Program followed, after which she entered NYU’s MFA program. “The two weeks at Callaloo felt like a dream, so imagine what two years at NYU felt like,” she says, noting that she never had so much time to dedicate to writing. Certain books, she recalls, were especially important in her writerly journey: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun for its blending of war, romance, and family drama, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for giving her permission to “get weird.”
The novel is being published in a Liveright series in partnership with Glory Edim’s Well-Read Black Girl book club. Edim, who has known Mezghebe since childhood, says she’s excited for readers to learn about the fascinating “hidden history of an underdog nation. Eritrea is a very small country, but it has such a mighty presence and such a beautiful culture that many people don’t realize.”
