Hangman by Maya Minyam

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 8, 2023

In its prose style and surrealistic plot, Hangman reminds me of José Saramago’s novels. Maya Binyam didn’t make my belly jiggle with laughter or my mind explode from an excess of awe, so she isn’t quite Saramago, but the comparison is nevertheless meant as a high compliment.

Saramago wrote some amazing riffs. Like Saramago, Binyam delights the reader with an abundance of startling observations. At a funeral, the narrator concludes that most people have felt greater sadness in their lives from less consequential causes than a friend’s death, but “the job of the funeral was to make everyone forget about that prior sadness and pretend that the death at hand was the most devastating event of their lives.”

And: “Her parents didn’t have any customs, so she learned values from people she saw on TV, who taught her to buy random objects, discard them, and buy some more. That was her life goal.”

And: “Elected officials were relevant to their lives only insofar as they made them feel cared for or alerted them to the fact that that care was being threatened by an outside force. People could be mobilized to rally against that outside force because it infringed upon the legacy of their elders, who they were certain had died so that their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, might never be forced to contend with the past. Elected officials encouraged the people’s forgetfulness and told them that their lack of history was their greatest asset.”

Apart from being a vehicle for delivering riffs, what is the story about? At the age of 55, the unnamed narrator returns to his unnamed home country to visit his seriously ill brother. He is a citizen of the country where he has lived for the last 26 years, a place where he hoped he would never be killed, having initially been granted refugee status after fleeing his home country with forged documents following his release from prison. The country where he is now a citizen is also unnamed, but clues in the text (the president is black; a celebrity has just died who claimed to have a skin condition that affected his perceived race) make clear that the narrator was naturalized in the US and that he is telling his story in 2009.

The country of the narrator’s birth seems to be somewhere in Africa. The specific country is probably left unidentified because Hangman is meant to be a bigger story than the one the narrator tells. Faces sometimes lose their characteristics when the narrator examines them closely. One country might be similar to another country; one person might just as well be another person. Details are often fuzzy, perhaps as a reminder that details aren’t important to larger stories.

In the country of his current citizenship, the narrator recalls having a wife, although his attempts to send her emails always fail. In his birth country, he might have a son. He hasn’t had contact with his son in so long that he’s not sure whether he still has a son.

The country of the narrator’s birth is a place where a kitchen might have a dirt floor, where a bus depot is simply a roped off area, where churches have been taken over by the government and charge admission fees. Arriving at the airport, the narrator begins a dreamlike journey that forms the plot. He loses his cash to scammers. He acquires more cash so he can scammed by a cousin who has scammed all his relatives. The cousin sends him on a bus trip to a place where his brother might or might not live. The narrator loses his luggage. At the insistence of an aide worker, he trades the clothing on his back for an inferior shirt and pants that have been donated to a charity by Americans who feel good about sending their ugly and unwanted clothing to foreign countries.

None of these events seem to disturb the narrator. In fact, when he tries to make a deposit in a bank where he has no account, he simply hands his wallet and all its contents to a bank teller and leaves without any concern that he no longer has access to money. Eventually he parts with his passport, the last remaining proof of his existence. He takes it all in stride. The narrator feels he has little control over his actions: “My body continued to stay, so I chose to believe that I had decided to keep it there.” When he assesses the inside of his body, he discovers that the place where his heart is supposed to be is empty. At that point, he is a bit disturbed but feels powerless to heal himself.

Nothing much matters to the narrator because life is a series of choices and consequences and regardless of his particular choices and their consequences, “in the end, I would live or die, just like anyone else.” When he happens upon his son’s mother, he thinks they have become “just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might have been any country in the world. That’s how insignificant our personal experience was, even if that personal experience had derailed the events of everyday life.”

Finding his family members is largely a matter of luck, coincidence, or destiny (the narrator isn’t sure whether he believes in any of those). He has repeat encounters with the same strangers, or perhaps they aren’t strangers at all. The narrator doesn’t always understand the language in which he is addressed, or he understands it for a while and then doesn’t, just as people abruptly change languages when they speak to him, perhaps to avoid answering his questions.

The narrator talks to a yoghurt vendor and a bank teller and a bus passenger who all share life stories of no great significance that he would rather not hear. The narrator eavesdrops on other conversations before deciding that they are not worthy of his attention. “People like to talk, because talking makes them feel like their experiences amounted to something, but usually the talking turned those experiences into lies.” He believes that people talk about their lives because they are trying to find an explanation for their existence, but their experiences are pretty much everyone’s experiences and aren’t worth discussing. He concludes that “even abhorrent people reminded us of ourselves and all the things we had gone through or assumed we one day would.”

The narrator doesn’t care about the stories or anything else. Asked if he wants tea, he tells us “I didn’t want it or not want it” but accepts a cup to be polite. Asked if he has decided to pursue salvation, he answers “that I hadn’t decided for it or against it.” Similar responses of indifference permeate the novel.

So the plot is not just a physical journey, but an observational journey that forces the narrator to consider his life in the context of all other lives. The narrator becomes less substantial, less likely to be noticed, as the story unfolds. His sense of being just another insignificant person in a world of insignificant people seems to be physically manifested, as his internal organs (not just his heart) feel like they have vanished, which might explain his feeling of constipation, although his skin remains intact. Perhaps he is fading away; perhaps he has taken the identity of another person. Given the novel’s surreal nature, the narrator’s fate is open to interpretation. Readers might find the narrator’s perspective to be depressing and maybe it is, but it’s also a reasonable if unsettling way to view life.

Putting aside the plot and its suggestion of life’s futility, the novel is worth reading for the narrator’s relentlessly amusing commentary. Apart from the passages quoted above, Hangman touches upon the history of human relations, the merits of different political and social structures, predestination versus coincidence, international charity, religion, suffering, American news broadcasts, and the difference between value and price, in addition to less serious topics like body odor and lousy food. This is a novel of big ideas and a small life. It might be too downbeat for some readers, but it scores points for making deep thoughts entertaining.

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