“If you were a tourist from Ohio, or if you worked at the Smithsonian,” says Mezghebe, “if you were a federal employee, you bought a hot dog from her, but you have no idea the things that she’s seen.” Mezghebe says Washington is incredibly diverse, but its communities can still exist in their own silos. “D.C. is funny that way … we can have superficial interactions,” she says.
“We can’t help but cross each other’s paths, but sometimes you have no idea what your neighbor, what your service provider, your teacher, whoever, what their story is.” That is what she wants readers to consider through Elsa and the other characters. “I want people to be really curious about people who are very visible in their lives,” she says, “but maybe are a little bit voiceless.”
Mama Zewdi lives boldy
The third central character is Mama Zewdi, the family matriarch, and Mezghebe’s favorite character. Mama Zewdi is approaching 50. She has never married and never had children, although she’s deeply maternal. Her life has taken her from studying to become a nurse, to being displaced by war, to working as a domestic for Saudi royals, before eventually establishing a life in the D.C. area.
Now she’s trying to decide what comes next. Mama Zewdi is weighing a business opportunity against the possibility of marriage — something she has long thought might have eluded her. Mezghebe says Mama Zewdi represents a different kind of immigrant woman than Elsa.
“She’s not nearly as subdued and kind of repressed as Elsa is,” she says. “She lives a very big life.”
That was important to Mezghebe. “There isn’t just one way to be an immigrant woman who’s had to make hard choices. She lives boldly.”
1991: Celebration and reckoning
The novel takes place at a pivotal moment in Eritrean history.
After 30 years of war, Eritrea was approaching independence from Ethiopia. For the Eritrean community in Washington, the impending independence wasn’t an abstract geopolitical event. Virtually everyone had a personal connection to the war. Relatives were fighting.
Others had been killed or displaced around the world. So when independence came in May 1991, there was enormous celebration. But there was also grief and confusion. Mezghebe remembers that period herself.
“I remember 1991,” she says. “It was huge. There were parties. Everyone was super happy. But we had to reckon with the cost of what independence meant.” That tension is central to the novel. For Elsa and Lydia, the end of the war also means long-held family secrets may finally come to light, including the circumstances surrounding Lydia’s father’s death.
Political freedom and personal freedom become intertwined
Mezghebe says she wanted to explore “the drama of being a person” alongside “the drama of a political revolution.” A time capsule of D.C.’s Eritrean community Although the novel is fiction, Mezghebe says writing it also allowed her to capture a specific moment in the history of the D.C.-area Eritrean community. The immigrants who arrived in the 1980s built a tightly connected community.
They supported one another as they established new lives in America, while also organizing around Eritrea’s independence movement. But the community has changed. It’s larger now. Independence has been achieved. And the children of those early immigrants have grown up in America. Their parents may once have imagined returning home.
Their children gave them another reason to put down roots here.
“Children find a way to make you entrench wherever you raise your kids,” Mezghebe says. That has changed the community’s orientation. The first generation may have been looking toward Eritrea; subsequent generations are increasingly looking toward the United States. In that regard, Mezghebe admits, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For is a kind of time capsule.
“It does feel like a time capsule for a time that feels very different in lots of ways,” she says. D.C. itself is also an important part of the story. The novel is filled with local places and references, including Southern Towers in Alexandria and the National Mall. But Mezghebe isn’t simply using those locations as scenery. She’s interested in the people who helped shape the region we know today.
Eritreans became part of the fabric of the region as taxi drivers, restaurant workers, hospital employees, parking attendants and other service providers. Those jobs may be familiar. Their histories may not be.
“Ordinary people who have gone through really, really extraordinary circumstances,” Mezghebe says. People who were displaced from their homes, separated from their families and forced to rebuild their lives in another country helped shape the Washington region. What are they looking for? The novel’s title comes from a line spoken by Lydia to her mother.
But by the end of the story, it becomes clear that all three women are looking for something. Mama Zewdi is looking for permission to live life on her own terms. Elsa is looking for peace and forgiveness for choices she made during the war.
And Lydia is looking for the truth about where she came from. Mezghebe says she was interested in the different forms of control that shape our lives: family expectations, social norms, laws and political circumstances. Her characters are all searching for some version of freedom.
That search is what makes the story bigger than one family or one immigrant community.
And when asked what she would tell someone standing in a bookstore deciding whether to pick up her debut novel, Mezghebe has a simple answer: “If they want to read about women trying to get free, they should read the book.” It is a fitting description of I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For: a novel about Eritrea and Washington, immigration and family, war and motherhood, grief and secrets, and three women trying to figure out who they are and whether they can live the lives they want.
WTOP's Terik King talks with Bsrat Mezghebe about her debut novel "I Hope You Find What You're Looking For." AUDIO
Bsrat Mezghebe’s debut novel, "I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For," is a story about three generations of Eritrean women living in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1991, as Eritrea approaches independence from Ethiopia. (Author Photo by Meron Hagos/Cover Art Courtesy Liveright/W .W. Norton & Company)
