‘Hangman’ by Maya Binyam    (2023) – 194 pages

I struggled with this novel. So much of it made little sense to me, but every once in a while there would be a stunningly original insight that would redeem my efforts to comprehend what was going on.

‘Hangman’ is a novel that pushes the boundaries of fiction. A word that is often used in the reviews for ‘Hangman’ is “enigmatic”. Perhaps my problems stem from the fact that the unnamed narrator is quite confused himself.

He has been kicked out of the country he has lived in for 26 years and returned to the African country where he was born. The author is deliberately vague about the country he was kicked out of (although there are hints that it is the United States) or the African country to which he is returned.

“In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.”

He still has a brother, a son and an ex-wife (She is always referred to as “my son’s mother”) in this African country. I suppose returning to a country you were born in after 26 years away would be very confusing.

“I wanted to apologize to everyone, myself included. I wasn’t used to being a confused person, but that was how life was. Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and at other times they rearranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did, they made no discernible sense to me. Either that or I was jet-lagged, which was another possible explanation.”

The sentences are short, and the words used and the ideas presented are not at all difficult. Those are not the problems I had with ‘Hangman’. One of the main problems I did have is that our narrator is constantly running into people who are deliberately described in a surreal fashion. None of the characters are named. These encounters with assorted local people include a group of missionaries, a zookeeper, a bank teller, and a taxi driver. Even his encounters with his brother and his ex-wife seem almost aimless and arbitrary.

“I thought to ask about their lives, but I was sick of hearing about people’s lives, which were made up of stories that were not even true. People liked to talk, because talking made them feel like their experiences amounted to something, but usually the talk turned those experiences into lies.”

The reviews praised ‘Hangman’ for its deadpan humor in these encounters, but in most cases I did not get the joke.

So what kept me reading ‘Hangman’? Perhaps the reviewer Houman Barekat said it best: “Refreshingly, there is none of the dreary didacticism or syrupy sentimentalism commonly found in novels about migrant diasporas.” I knew there was something important in ‘Hangman’ if only I could find it.

Meanwhile, there was one other reason I kept reading, some of the profound statements that these random characters and our narrator make. Here is one from ‘Hangman’ which applies to Putin and other authoritarians:

“The world was experiencing such an extreme consolidation and sequestering of wealth that it had become almost impossible to compete with agents of exploitation.”

Another astute insight:

“No matter who was suffering, anyone could feel something for them, even people who found them abhorrent, because even abhorrent people reminded us of ourselves and all the things we had gone through or assumed we one day would.”

About politicians, Maya Binyam is particularly sharp.

“She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. For most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a familial sense of humor.”

So I found ‘Hangman’ extremely exasperating, yet also valuable. Is that even possible?

Grade:    C+