47 pages • 1 hour read
Dinaw MengestuThe Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Sepha Stephanos
Sepha is the protagonist and narrator of the story. Seventeen years ago, following the discovery of Sepha’s revolutionary flyers, his father was killed, and his mother sent him away from Ethiopia to protect him from the same fate. Sepha arrives in America through no choice of his own, a fate that determines his outlook in the ensuing years, and he floats through life without agency or a sense of purpose.
Sepha’s lack of autonomy is, in part, the result of this past. He remains emotionally scarred from the death of his father and his sudden, unplanned immigration, though he never acknowledges this overtly. Because these traumatic events were the result of Sepha’s actions and his involvement with revolutionary change, he comes to associate action with traumatic failure, and therefore he avoids a sense of agency or action in his new life. His sense of guilt over this course of events also makes him feel undeserving of success, further distancing him from any sense of agency that would result in his advancement or happiness.
Sepha’s lack of agency is also the result of his otherness. He struggles throughout the novel with his sense of identity. He no longer identifies as African, as demonstrated by his increasing disconnect from his family and his trivialization of Africa’s politics through games with his friends. He does not remember when he realized he would never return home to Addis, but he knows it is true. Yet he is also not an American. He feels out of place in typically American circumstances, particularly in his interactions with Judith. He works long and erratic hours, indifferent to turning a profit and apathetic to notions of the American dream. His lack of a sense of belonging in America makes it difficult for him to claim ownership of his life. Sepha moves through life as an outsider to whom life happens. He does not try to assimilate or get ahead, nor does he make actions to return to his former life. He would not fit in either society, and therefore he chooses to remain in the in-between.
And yet, despite his best intentions to seek a life of solitude and anonymity, life still seeks Sepha out. He is a reluctant testament to the resiliency of hope and relationship. He is often in the company of his two friends, Kenneth and Joseph, who refuse to let him wallow or fail. Though Sepha frequently abandons his efforts to have a relationship with Judith, she again and again forgives and pursues him, and his sense of hope returns. Even when all is seemingly lost—when he is evicted from his store, and he considers stealing his uncle’s money and running away—he returns home. No matter how frequently or absolutely Sepha abandons hope, it always returns to him.
Faced with a crossroads where he can run away or return to Logan Circle, Sepha chooses to return and see what happens next. By choosing to return to Logan Circle, Sepha demonstrates that he has accepted this place as his home. Once more, his actions point toward a sense of hopefulness for the future.
Kenneth
Kenneth, unlike Joseph and Sepha, came to America for a better life and represents the more stereotypical representation of the American dream. He is originally from Kenya, where he was the son of a poor, illiterate farmer. In America, he is an engineer, and he knows when he dies, he will have a nice suit and some furniture to leave to his family members. By these standards, he deems himself a success. Kenneth is overworked and underpaid at his job in Washington, DC, but he has an apartment in the suburbs, a used car, and enough money to buy drinks for his friends on the weekends. In his full acceptance of an American life, Kenneth abandons and rebuffs his heritage, criticizing Africa and the hopelessness he sees of a life there.
Because of his own embrace and embodiment of the American dream, Kenneth is the friend most invested in Sepha’s store and success. His encouragement—and, at times, his criticism—of Sepha drives his own halting pursual of the American dream. Kenneth stands in opposition to Joseph, who seems disdainful of the American dream. The opposing opinions of his two friends work as a tug-of-war on Sepha’s own opinion, and he is left somewhere in between, not identifying with nor opposing the American dream or American identity.
Joseph
In contrast to Kenneth, Joseph clings to romanticized notions of his homeland in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When he was new to America and Washington, DC, he dreamed of getting a PhD at the University of Michigan. In reality, he took a few extension courses at a local college, and he actively tries to write poetry that captures the history and tragedy of his homeland in the same way that Dante represented heaven and hell in the Inferno. In his current existence in America, he sees the reflection of America’s history of slavery. His perspective represents a broader question faced by Black Americans today of how to grapple with the vestiges of America’s dark past and their own heritage.
Joseph is bitter about the differences between his hopes and the American reality. As a result, he drinks too much and escapes into literature. His escapism and lack of agency reflects and parallels Sepha’s. Neither character is motivated by the sense of agency and self-improvement that defines Kenneth.
Judith
Judith is an American history professor on sabbatical who is trying to reconcile her life as a white woman with a biracial daughter. Judith takes advantage of the cheap housing market in Logan Circle to purchase an abandoned property and completely renovate it to accommodate her spirited child and many books. In her actions, Judith is the symbolic representation of gentrification that plagues neighborhoods like Sepha’s. In moving to a historically black neighborhood and attempting to change and “improve” it, as Judith does with the Victorian house, she compromises the heart and values of the community in order to make it more accommodating to people like herself. Judith’s actions are a symbol of a larger pattern of gentrification in DC, where the Black population has decreased significantly in recent decades, from 70% in 1970 to just 46% today. Judith’s appropriation of the Black community is also evident in her relationships with the two men in her life: her ex-husband, Ayad, and Sepha. She sees possibility in her relationship with Sepha, but she is unable to overcome the race and class gap that separates them.
Despite her notable differences, Sepha still identifies and connects with Judith on some levels. In some ways, she performs her identity in much the same way Sepha performs his, with apathy and a lack of agency. Judith is tired of teaching the same things to the same kinds of students, and she longs for something more meaningful in her life. She attempts to be Sepha’s love interest, but she doesn’t succeed in being more than the “stranger who comes to town.” The big new house with all of its bathrooms allows her to keep her daughter safe and contained, but just as importantly, it brings her some peace and solitude: “But it wasn’t just because she wanted to make Naomi happy. All you had to do was look at her eyes for a few minutes to see how tired and full of regret she was. She wanted peace; a hundred extra feet of plumbing were surely worth that” (58). Because their connections bridge their vast differences, Judith also represents the resilience of human connection. Is Ayad her ex?
Naomi
Naomi is the 11-year-old biracial daughter of Judith, who is white, and Ayad, who is Black, both of whom are college professors. Naomi is independent and mourning the loss of her father after her parent’s divorce. She sees Sepha as a father figure and seeks his attention and affection. Sepha responds to her desire for a father figure and fills that role willingly, and the two fall into an almost familial closeness. Naomi provides Sepha with a new purpose in life as he channels his own father and entertains Naomi with stories and aphorisms to help her be less disappointed with life.
But Naomi is unable to truly fit into Sepha’s world. She passes judgement on the local population and Sepha’s store. She undertakes her own program of gentrification, criticizing the state of Sepha’s store and spearheading a campaign to clean it. Just as he recognizes his incompatibility with Judith, Sepha seems to acknowledge and respond to his incompatibility with Naomi: When she goes off to boarding school, Sepha is sad but does not sustain his relationship with Naomi.
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By Dinaw Mengestu
