Many people learn of a family secret long after childhood. Often, the revelation comes once they have already left home and are living in another city or even another country. The greater the distance, the farther the secret travels before finally arriving. In communities shaped by war and migration, silence can become a form of protection, and family histories are often told in fragments. When those fragments surface, they can fracture relationships or, sometimes, bring loved ones closer together.
In Bsrat Mezghebe’s I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For, three generations of women in Washington, D.C.’s Eritrean community are bound and haunted by their secrets. In 1991, as Eritrea stands on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule, thirteen-year-old Lydia lives with her mother Elsa, a former guerrilla fighter. When Berekhet, a relative from Ethiopia, arrives in their community, his presence unsettles the fragile equilibrium Lydia, Elsa, and their neighbor Zewdi have built.
Spanning four months, Mezghebe rotates chapters between the perspectives of Lydia, Elsa, and Zewdi. The shifting viewpoints allow the reader to witness how each woman’s choices reverberate through the others’ lives as time passes. Elsa remains guarded about her past and about Lydia’s father, prompting a frustrated Lydia to set out with Berekhet in search of answers. Meanwhile, tensions between Elsa and Berekhet force Elsa to confront long-buried memories of her past life and past loved ones. For Zewdi, the community matriarch, the summer offers an unexpected possibility: the chance to imagine a future of her own making.
I spoke with Mezghebe over Zoom in early March about the challenges of writing a novel, the research behind honoring a pivotal moment in Eritrean history, and the complicated role language plays in immigrant families.
The Rumpus: You begin the novel with the three women awaiting Berekhet’s arrival at the airport. What made that the right entry point to the story? Did you always know the novel would begin with a moment of waiting?
Bsrat Mezghebe: No I didn’t. Writing a novel is a very strange thing, especially a novel that has multiple narrators. It’s not just one person’s story. It’s a story about a family. As I was writing, it felt like the right place to start. A stranger arrives and there’s a moment where everyone has to pause because you want to see how that stranger affects the current dynamics. I thought it was also a good place to start because it’s the story of this kind of multi-generational family. I wanted to show how immigrant communities get built. And it literally is that people get off a plane, the clock starts, and it’s go time. Berekhet challenges a lot of people’s perspectives and perceptions about how life is, how your life is supposed to go, and how to make the best of your opportunity. So I thought that would also be useful to kind of start with somebody who is a bit of a provocateur in the family.
Rumpus: The chapter rotation of the multi-narration created a very deliberate rhythm. Why did you want the consistency of the different perspectives?
Mezghebe: I just needed to create some rules and it helped me. Writing a novel is like a big dark forest, and it’s how I see it in my mind. I knew that it was a family story, and I’m very intrigued by group dynamics. Families are fascinating groups, and you are always in negotiation with your own dreams and your own desires. And then the pressure of staying in the pack, which is to conform your dreams and your desires in exchange for great benefits like protection and for safety, for goods and services.
By switching voices, I wanted the reader to be able to hear directly from each character about how they felt about the negotiations that they had to make. But I needed to pin the narrative arc down. So I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to alternate characters’ voices instead of dividing the book into sections.” I also wanted to put some bounds on the time, following the family over the course of late spring into summer: May, June, July and August. And then within each division it alternates in the voice.
I struggled with it at times.
Rumpus: What did you struggle with exactly?
Mezghebe: With each chapter, it’s marking the progression of time. So I have to move the plot along. It’s not just a character study. For some chapters, I had to use that person’s narration to advance a part of the story that I had introduced in another character’s chapter so that we wouldn’t lose the thread. My fear was that the reader would forget the dramatic tension that I had set up in a previous chapter. I kind of had these threads in my mind. I didn’t really write it chronologically. I had different scenes and the scenarios that I was imagining them in. And then as it started to build, I was losing track. I had to chart out the novel at one point, and each character had some sort of dramatic tension. But they don’t get the spotlight always. So in the other characters’ chapter, I had to keep a little bit of the other dramatic tension alive, even if they’re secrets in some way.
Rumpus: I read in an interview that Zewdi was a character you especially enjoyed writing. Why her in particular and what specific choices were you intentional about making to bring her voice alive? Because she has a very distinct voice, too.
Mezghebe: Yeah, Zewdi is very distinct. Zewdi is the matriarch of the family. She’s unmarried, never had kids, but she’s a matriarch. She runs the show and she’s the boss. And she’s the keeper of the flame with a big personality. At first, it wasn’t conscious. I felt like these characters kind of came to me, and then I was just kind of following them along.
But the more time I spent with her, the more I wanted her to have her say. She’s on the cusp of turning 50. She’s exploring whether to embark on a romantic relationship, which she’s never experienced, or pursue a business opportunity that she’s fantasized about. She doesn’t really have anyone to talk about it with, which is kind of the point, because she’s not in a marriage or other relationship. And then, in the culture that the family comes from, there’s not a lot of space for your personal dreams, especially when you’re a woman. All of your time goes to nurturing the family.
I wanted to give this woman a microphone to her interiority and to talk about what she wanted to do with the next third of her life. She’s someone with a profile that is invisible and visible, usually at the same time. People like her are visible because they’re doing all the labor a lot of times for families—they’re the ones who make sure that there are meals and get-togethers. They’re the backbone of a family. It is constant labor. But they’re invisible in a sense that they don’t always get to articulate if that is what they actually want.
And I have fun with her because she’s kooky. I’m making it sound very dramatic, but she’s funny and kind of nuts. She has an opinion about everyone’s life and everyone’s choices, and is considering very dramatic choices for herself. It was fun for me to think about what a woman at the age of 50 would think about love and romance. I felt protective of her. She lost her father at a young age, and she moves through the world like she didn’t have protection.
She represents a certain type of woman I grew up with who is modern and traditional at the same time,and it’s kind of when it suits them. There is a particular algorithm that they have about when they’re the keeper of the flame and when they’re like, “Excuse me, it’s 1991. I’m doing what I want to do.” It’s fascinating to me how they can toggle between those two things, which a lot of women do. I really locked in with her. I wrote a good part of her when I was doing research in Eritrea. Eritrea’s famously under-networked—you have to go to an internet cafe to get that network. There’s no data. So, I was at my parents house—we have a home there—and I had a digital detox, and I wrote her with no distractions. It was a joy to write her.
Rumpus: How did you approach the research process in Eritrea and how long did you spend there?
Mezghebe: I grew up in the DC area and this book follows an Eritrean family in the DC area. It explores some of the family’s backstory in Eritrea and Ethiopia, before they immigrated to the United States. A lot of the book was me reflecting on some of the early childhood memories I had, but thinking about them more carefully because I wanted to flesh out details for the book as it’s set in ‘91, when I was a kid.
I informally reached out to people in my family and asked them whether they remembered various things. I also did more formal interviews of community members, family members. I also realized that I wanted to write about a female guerrilla fighter—a third of the Eritrean rebel voices were women. I went to Eritrea twice during the book writing process. Once in 2015, in the summer between my MFA program, and then in 2017, after I graduated, I had a fellowship to finish the manuscript. I spent six months in Eritrea on that second leg. There’s an official Eritrean research center that I got connected to, and they identified former guerrilla fighters who are now between their 60s and 70s. I interviewed a bunch of them. Eritrea is a small country. Everyone was kind of connected and affected by the war.
I went to the small town where Elsa was stationed when she has her more dramatic experiences with her crew, and I got to see what it felt like there. Doing oral history is doing research. People were very open and honest with me, and I had a sense of some of the more morally ambiguous scenarios I wanted to put my character Elsa in. But I was starting to feel bound by that real history. It was good because it allowed me to capture authentically what the experience was like. But it ended up becoming a danger because I wasn’t feeling free as a fiction writer to write what I wanted to write. Even the things that I want Elsa to experience, there’s no way that I can expect someone to confide that in me, as I’m somebody with a pen and a recorder.
I was talking to my dad and he was like, “What are you afraid of? Just write it. People are people. People are complicated.” I explained to him the scenario that I imagined and he was like, “Yes, whatever. You’re the boss!” So that freed me because I had felt restricted by this story that has never really been told. Eritreans are very proud of their history. I didn’t want to misrepresent guerrilla fighters who are seen as heroes. I got free of that because as a fiction writer, I’m presenting the human experience. The human experience is messy and it’s complicated and it’s sometimes morally ambiguous. So that was the challenge. But I also remind myself that it is a privilege to have access to people to interview.
At the same time, history and research can be a great way of procrastinating. You can always tell yourself that you have to read this one more thing and talk to one more person.
Rumpus: How did you decide what historical and cultural details to render on the page versus what to leave more implicit for a reader who is not as familiar?
Mezghebe: I generally wrote as if the reader would know what I was talking about. I did not want to be bothered with incredibly long and detailed descriptions of culturally specific food, clothes, events et cetera. I thought it would slow the story down and take the reader out of the gap. I didn’t think long about it. It just felt intuitively like the right thing to do. I’m not writing a Wikipedia entry. I’m not writing nonfiction. I’m writing a story. I’m a reader first. I came to writing late in life. The beauty of literature and fiction is that if you’re a good storyteller, there are enough universal connections to do much of the work that will allow the reader to let go of specific details, and I decided I’m doing that.
The few people who actually did want me to explain more were the old Eritrean uncles and aunts. They told me to “say this is what this is or what that is.” I think because they’re used to explaining everything such as where we come from and what things are. Luckily my editorial team supported me and said people will figure it out. There were some things that they asked me to explain but all within reason.
Rumpus: Having the “twin” character of elder Lydia to Elsa is a fascinating double motif. The “twin” naming creates both intimacy and inevitability—as if their lives are braided from the start, even as they move in different directions and fate ultimately. What made you want to pair them that way?
Mezghebe: Talking about your work afterwards is so hard, because I don’t know. I really felt like the characters and the dynamics were coming to me. I’m conjuring something. I knew that I wanted Elsa to be someone who didn’t have a strong sense of self. It starts with positioning her in her family and losing her father, being uprooted from her nuclear home and being sent to live far away and with her siblings that have a big age gap.
So she’s someone who doesn’t feel moored. Once I got to her joining the rebels. I knew that there was going to be something complicated with her love life. As I was writing it, her twin appeared and she meets her first friend. There is nothing like young girl friendships. It’s very powerful. It’s very intense. It can be as intimate as romantic love, even more sometimes. I also wanted to show that there were different ways to be a young girl rebel. Elsa was kind of unsure of herself. And there’s Lydia who’s very sure of herself. I wanted Elsa to use her best friend, sister, twin as her cover. Lydia can speak for her.
It took me nine years to write this book. I remember reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and being invested in that friendship. Also Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, which the protagonist’s childhood best friend is a huge part of the protagonist’s personal development. I’ve read Swing Time over and over again. And after I developed Lydia and Elsa’s relationship, I could see that what I was doing was in the same family as what Zadie Smith was doing. Like her, I wanted to show girlhood and how important that is to develop your identity.
I wanted Elsa to have a very strong survivor’s guilt. For freedom fighters, their expectation is to die. It is to be martyred or to live to usher in independence, and Elsa finds herself on the outside of that. She created a third way—she left, which is not valorized. That’s not how they see themselves. So she has a lot of survivor’s guilt for leaving her comrades and she leaves her sister. So I wanted to show the intensity of their relationship and why Elsa is so conflicted and repressed.
Rumpus: Young Lydia and her first intense friendship with Berekhet parallels Elsa and elder Lydia’s relationship. Halfway through the book, Lydia and Berekhet are having a conversation about the English language, and she tries to correct his pronunciation of education, even as her own Tigrinya is limited. That exchange feels loaded with questions of fluency, power, assimilation, just in terms of language. How did you think of language as a marker of intimacy or hierarchy and belonging within community?
Mezghebe: When you’re in a family that is multilingual, you can’t avoid language. If you’re in an immigrant community, your family speaks another language. You’re expected to be assimilated and to speak the language of your home country. But your familiarity with your parents and your country of origin’s language can become a source of intense grief and anguish. If you don’t speak it, it kind of can feel isolating in your family. I remember this, growing up, that it could sometimes be a way that parents could talk privately about things if their kids couldn’t speak their language. It can also be a point of pride for parents if your kid does speak it. I think it represents how your family was able to negotiate America honestly.
In that era, our parents were told that kids would be overwhelmed if they were taught too many languages. Later on, people realized kids can handle it and it’s good for them. So a lot of our parents didn’t speak to us the way they do now because they didn’t want any issues with school and thought, “Oh, once they get older, then we’ll do it that way.” But at that point, the kids are uninterested. Language becomes like a badge of honor or a badge of failure as a parent. If your kid can’t speak their home language, it isolates you from your relatives when you’re making those long distance calls back home. You feel a little bit removed. So it’s an important part of your experience in your family.
For Eritreans who were raised in Ethiopia, language can be an indicator. Amharic is the language that Eritreans were forced to learn, as opposed to their own languages, one of which is Tigrinya. In regards to Berekhet’s and Esla’s family, their uncle equipped them with both languages but he was heavy handed. Language learning in this context is about access, power, and understanding. Its role in shaping your experience is hard to avoid if you grew up in a family that raises you in a country other than their own.
