Early One Battle After AnotherOscar-winning director Paul Thomas Anderson’s story the rebellion slowly subsidedPat Calhoun, an explosives specialist played by Leonardo DiCaprio, makes a choice that will set the course for his life and film: He chooses motherhood over extremism. As Pat drives off into the night with her infant daughter lying in a laundry basket, the audience understands that she has abandoned one set of values—and war—for another.
A very similar decision animates Bsrat Mezghebe’s first novel, I Hope You Find What You Are Looking For. Its main character, Elsa Haddish, is a former fighter of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front who now lives with her daughter, Lydia, in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Lydia’s father died in the war, and Elsa is the only former fighter in the large Eritrean diaspora in the DC area. His society is happy about his past life, but he considers himself a failure. When the novel begins, in 1991, Eritrea’s 30-year war to free itself from Ethiopian rule continues, and Elsa’s inner life is dominated by the guilt of moving to raise Lydia in safety while “her comrades were not leaving the war unless their mission was accomplished or they died trying.”
And Bsrat Mezghebe
I Hope You Find What You Are Looking For it’s lightly written—the confusing title aside, it’s a novel you can rip apart—and it draws on several tropes that seasoned readers of 21st-century literary novels will immediately recognize: It’s a generational immigrant story and a bildungsroman, with elements of what critic Parul Seghal says. he has called trauma plot. But at its core, and in its most interesting novel, Mezghebe, as One Battle After Anotherrepresents a story that may seem inappropriate, but appeals to a modern audience. I call it “what happened to the radicals.”
The story of what happened to extremists has one constant: It follows rebels, insurgents, or militias long enough that their beliefs become dogmatic or, as in the case of Pat and Elsa, decay to the point of corruption. While some of these stories are warm to their protagonists, they don’t always glorify them. Instead, they explore the ethical challenges that strong ideological commitments—and the violence that often ensues—can create.
This was the case in Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book Don’t Say Anythingwhich begins with the Irish Republican Army kidnapping a Protestant mother in Belfast and follows several militias who were involved in the decades of the Troubles. But Keefe’s book also explores the terrible silence that can linger long after militants are left behind – he points out former IRA leaders. compete with despairisolation, and a growing sense that their illegal activities are in the historical record. A novel by Dana Spiotta Eat Document imagine a quieter version of this fight. Its main characters, an extremist couple who go into hiding after a bomb attack they planned go wrong, suffer as much from secrecy as from regret.
In Mezghebe’s novel, Elsa is not ashamed of what she did in the war, but of leaving it. These feelings make him unable to discuss his past with—or impart his political values to—his daughter. So, these values aren’t what drive their story forward; the novel becomes a story of the entrapment of the individual, not the liberation of society. One Battle After Anotheralthough she is more optimistic, she gives Pat’s radical results similar to Elsa’s self-esteem, although Pat takes more pain.
These types of narratives explore how much sacrifice, and what type of sacrifice, is enough to satisfy a true believer, and how long and fully one can live according to their values. In doing so, these stories also challenge readers and viewers; even if they enjoy the thrill of radicalism, they may also discover a strange pleasure in watching the beliefs of revolutionary characters fade away.
It is not surprising that many stories of what happened to extremists revolve around parentage. Few human events are more powerful or more intuitive ideological experiments. In a non-rebellious life, this might mean deciding what kind of school your children will go to or whether you, as a parent, will go to school. participate in civil disobedience.
Stories about radicalism and its decline contain extreme versions of these choices. A novel by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Back view tells the life of Colombian director Sergio Cabrera, whose radical Communist parents left Cabrera and his sister alone in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution to be indoctrinated in Maoist ideas, then brought them home to become guerrilla soldiers. The brothers survived, albeit with difficulty; nor did he remain a soldier as an adult.
Reading Back view can bring a dual sense of recognition and relief: Many people involved in the life of a young person can relate to the question of how best to educate children, and regardless of your views on raising young revolutionaries, Cabrera’s training clearly did not justify the hardships he had to endure. Indeed, Vásquez portrays it as a failure of the parent—which a parent of any political persuasion can read and think about, At least I never would that.
The greatest instances of this effect are seen throughout the forthcoming memoirs of playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Youngwhich recounts his early life as the son of underground weather leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. It’s clear that Dohrn admires her parents’ values, but not their violence—or the strength of their faith, which was stronger than any desire to give her and her brother a safe and secure childhood.
Still, he makes it clear that he had it better than his older brother Chesa Boudin, the son of Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. When Chesa was a small child, Gilbert and Boudin were imprisoned after helping a theft that exit, and Dohrn and Ayers took him inside. In Dohrn’s eyes, it was unforgivable for Chesa’s parents to run such a risk together; he writes that “their ideological commitment had surpassed their judgment, their intelligence, and even their morals.”
Dohrn is not otherwise condemning. In fact, the most prominent emotion in his memory is restlessness. His difficult feelings highlight the pattern of stories in which revolutionaries suffer from their beliefs or indulge in mediocrity: They confirm the choice of readers, even those who are sympathetic, who have never lived on the political edge.
I Hope You Find What You Are Looking For does this, too, although the method is quite different. Mezghebe is not always attractive to Elsa. Instead, he portrays her as a hapless victim of her own beliefs. Although Elsa never considered staying in rebel-controlled Eritrea with little Lydia, she also does not see raising a child as morally equivalent to war. His grief and guilt over his decision becomes a shell of silence.
For Elsa, this is very painful; for 13-year-old Lydia, it’s even worse. He worries that his mother doesn’t like him or doesn’t want to communicate with him, and he longs for his father’s stories. Lydia feels out of place in a world where “everyone called her parents heroes,” because she “didn’t imagine her mother to be one of them.” Still, he tries to evoke Elsa’s history, which leads to anger that “her mother could just open her mouth and start talking,” but she can’t. (Willa, daughter of Pat One Battle After Anotheryou might feel the same way.) Like Elsa he did the conversation, Mezghebe suggests, would bring Lydia closer not only to her mother, but also to the identity and values that Elsa has held in isolation.
Taken together, these stories of the parenting of radicalism and the past suggest that there is a clear moral choice when these commitments collide, but also that the radicalism cannot win. I suspect this is the message the audience wants. While the second-hand thrill of rebel life can be fun—many of the examples I’ve mentioned take the form of thrillers at times—many people would prefer it if it came with the assurance that choosing a radical stance, even if the cause is as righteous as Elsa’s, is a softening of the soul.
In these stories, extremes that don’t lead to violent death spread instead into smaller tragedies. That may be comforting to read or watch, but it also shows a gap in our culture. I haven’t come across many stories of sustained, long-term idealism like that of civil servants who devote entire careers to quietly ensuring essential services or pro-life activists can adapt to the changing times. Such stories may be less exciting than those of rebels whose faith burns or traps them in time, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting—and in times of hopelessness, they can be even more satisfying to read.
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