A friend who migrated to the United States young once told me that her first and only return to her birth country ended with a bout of malaria. There was no revelatory homecoming; in lieu of self-knowledge came sickness, as though her origins were trying to spit her back out. Narrative is one of many tariffs that the world exacts from the uprooted. But what happens when the vagaries of displacement don’t add up to a story, or at least not one that its subject is willing to tell?
In “Hangman”—a slim, stark, and captivatingly enigmatic début novel by the writer Maya Binyam—this dilemma inspires an experiment in erasure. Its narrator is a middle-aged émigré, who’s returning to his birthplace to visit his sick brother after a quarter century abroad. He is also a nameless cipher, whose lack of definite features recalls the doomed stick figure in the titular children’s game. Filling in the blanks about who he is, why he left, and how he feels about returning propels an exploration of what people demand from migrants and their stories. The narrator, too, is tested, as his journey becomes a confrontation with the ghosts of an abandoned life. “Death was a communal process,” he observes, “even if you wanted to experience it alone.”
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