In Conversation: On Addis Ababa Noir & Out of Mesopotamia

Emily Raboteau is the author of The Professor’s Daughter and Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, winner of the 2014 American Book Award. Her next two books, Caution: Lessons in Survival, and Endurance, are forthcoming from Holt. She is the 2020-2021 Stuart Z. Katz Professor of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York, CUNY, and a member of XR Writers Rebel – NYC, a chapter of Extinction Rebellion.

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist who was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. Her second novel, The Shadow King, was published in September 2019. Mengiste’s work can be found in the media outlets such The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC. In her introduction to the anthology Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Noir) Mengiste sets the scene thusly: ” What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It’s a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It can also be disorienting, and it is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside. […] No single book can contain all of the wonderful, intriguing, vexing complexities of Addis Ababa. But what you will read are stories by some of Ethiopia’s most talented writers living in the country and abroad.” Kirkus Reviews noted that “Mengiste presents 14 stories showcasing Ethiopia’s capital at its darkest…A nice variety of bad behavior. East, West: Noir’s best.”

Salar Abdoh was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He is the author of the novels Tehran at Twilight, The Poet Game, and Opium; and he is the editor of Tehran Noir. He teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York. Told through the voice of Saleh, a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran’s most popular TV shows, (Akashic Books) is an unprecedented glimpse into “endless war” from a Middle Eastern perspective. Drawing from his firsthand experience of being embedded with Shia militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, Salar Abdoh gives a voice to the voiceless while offering a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true. Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, called it “a brutally realistic look at war and love and fear and everything else that humans do. The writing is impossibly good.”