The culture war dividing the US is being fought over the relevance of empathy. On the one hand a president and a ruling party that denies the imaginative possibility – or importance – of trying to walk in another’s shoes; on the other, a liberal tradition that celebrates America as the all-born-equal nation and believes understanding is synonymous with compassion.
Some of the recent writing of Dave Eggers is a kind of thought-experiment in that latter position. Since the success of his fortune-making memoir about bringing up his kid brother, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has been moving as far as he can from the notion of an insistent “I” in his books. Instead, he is on a mission to use the platform he has created as a writer/activist to give direct voice to the marginalised or unheard.
There are a few strands to this ambition: the literacy project 826 Valencia, now with “chapters” in cities across America; the oral history initiative Voices of Witness, which has produced more than a dozen anthologies of testament from groups including female prisoners in US jails, Burmese dissidents, undocumented refugees; and, the headline act, Eggers’s own ongoing literary output. His 2006 novel What Is the What, a fictionalised account of the life of a Sudanese refugee, Achak Deng, a “lost boy” who had fetched up in Atlanta, Georgia, was the start of this commitment. It was followed by Zeitoun (2009), the story of a Syrian-American painter and builder in New Orleans in the year of Hurricane Katrina. After The Circle (2013), his dystopian satire of Silicon Valley, The Monk of Mokha is a further refinement of this effort.
Eggers chooses his stories with a weather eye to the news. Mokhtar Alkhanshali (known universally as Mokhtar), whose life is told here, is a Yemeni-American, a grower and roaster and importer of coffee from his desperate homeland. The coffee Mokhtar produces is no ordinary brew: Port of Mokha espressos, sold at Blue Bottle coffee shops in the US, are priced at $16 (including a cardamom biscuit made to Mokhtar’s mother’s recipe). The price reflects not only the difficulties of production and shipping from a country in brutal meltdown, but also the quality of the product: Port of Mokha received the highest rating in the Coffee Review, the barista’s bible. More remarkable still, Mokhtar achieved all this from a standing start, knowing nothing about coffee and, having dropped out of college, working as a doorman in an upmarket apartment block in his home town, San Francisco.
His story began with a statue. The statue, 20ft high, was across the road from where he sat all day at his doorman’s desk. Even so, Mokhtar’s girlfriend noticed it before he did. The statue was of a Yemeni man drinking a cup of coffee; it had been erected there to celebrate a milestone in the march of American commerce that had happened on this spot: the invention of the vacuum pack. It was vacuum packing that enabled coffee beans to be kept fresh as they made the journey from where they were farmed. And where they were first farmed was in the hills of Yemen and Ethiopia.
This statue got Mokhtar thinking: why was coffee no longer imported from Yemen? He was 25, drifting, waiting for a purpose: suddenly he had one. With no money, and no knowledge, he embarked on an insane endeavour to recreate that trade route and that trade. Over the course of three years Mokhtar found a way to become a “master of coffee”; he persuaded hundreds of farmers in his homeland to give up growing khat and start growing Arabica; he raised the finance for processing and roasting and shipping. And, moreover, he did all this at a time not only when Yemen was imploding in a vicious sectarian war and famine, but also when Muslim Americans were increasingly unwelcome in the official rhetoric of their own nation. Yemenis in particular were among those singled out for persecution and suspicion by Trump’s vaunted travel ban.
Mokhtar’s tale, for which Eggers makes himself the conduit, starts out as a story of the frustration of second-generation immigrant assimilation and becomes an anecdotal history of coffee culture and practice. It ends as a kind of breathless thriller as Mokhtar braves militia roadblocks, kidnappings and multiple mortal dangers in order to get his first coffee samples to a producers’ conference in Seattle, the make or break for his business. In some senses, particularly at the outset, you wonder if this narrative would work best as a brilliant long-read magazine article. However, as it goes on, as Eggers explodes Mokhtar’s tale to book length, with all the detail that implies, you start to understand his wider purpose. He is anxious to put not only Mokhtar’s story on the page, but somehow Mokhtar himself, all his hopes, all his obstacles. Look at this extraordinary American, Eggers’s attention says. And more to the point, look at him at this particular moment; give him some proper time; no story is more urgent.
• The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
