A few months after my 21st birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I
was living in New York at the time, on 94th between 2nd and 1st, part of
that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.
It was a cold, dreary November morning, the sun faint behind a gauze of
clouds. I was in the middle of making breakfast when my roommate handed me
the phone. The line was thick with static.
“Barry? Barry, is this you?” “Yes . . . Who’s this?” “Yes, Barry . . . this is
your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?”
“I’m sorry – who did you say you were?” “Aunt Jane. Listen, Barry, your father
is dead. Barry, please call your uncle in Boston and tell him. I can’t talk
now, OK, Barry. I will try to call you again . . .”
That was all. The line cut off, and I sat down on the couch, smelling eggs
burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure my
loss.
At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less
than a man. He had left back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that
as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and
grandparents told. He was an African, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the
shores of Lake Victoria. The village was poor, but his father, Hussein
Onyango Obama, had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a
medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father’s
goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial
administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a
scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan
independence, he had been selected to attend a university in the United
States, joining the first large wave of Africans to be sent to master
Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa.
In 1959, at the age of 23, he arrived at the University of Hawaii as that
institution’s first African student. He studied econometrics, and graduated
in three years at the top of his class. In a Russian language course, he met
an awkward, shy American girl, only 18, and they fell in love. The girl’s
parents, wary at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young
couple married, and she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name. He
won another scholarship – this time to pursue his PhD at Harvard – but not
the money to take his new family with him. A separation occurred, and he
returned to Africa to fulfil his promise to the continent. The mother and
child stayed behind, but the bond of love survived the distance.
After my father left, my mother met Lolo, another student at the University of
Hawaii, who was from Indonesia. When my mother sat me down one day to tell
me that Lolo had proposed and wanted us to move with him to a faraway place,
I wasn’t surprised and expressed no objections. I did ask her if she loved
him – I had been around long enough to know such things were important. My
mother’s chin trembled, as it still does when she’s fighting back tears, and
she pulled me into a long hug that made me feel very brave.
My mother expected it to be difficult, this new life of hers in a foreign
land. She was prepared for the dysentery and fevers, the cold water baths
and having to squat over a hole in the ground to pee, the electricity going
out every few weeks, the heat and endless mosquitoes. That was part of what
had drawn her to Lolo after Barack had left, the promise of something new
and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and
challenging place.
But she wasn’t prepared for the loneliness. Something had happened between her
and Lolo in the year that they had been apart. In Hawaii he had been so full
of life, so eager with his plans now that Indonesia was independent. He
didn’t talk that way anymore. In fact, it seemed as though he barely spoke.
It was as if he had pulled into some dark hidden place, out of reach, taking
with him the brightest part of himself. On some nights, she would hear him
up after everyone else had gone to bed, wandering through the house with a
bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.
Sometimes I would overhear them arguing in their bedroom but their
relationship remained cordial through the birth of my sister, Maya, through
the separation and eventual divorce, up until the last time I saw Lolo, ten
years later, when my mother helped him travel to Los Angeles to treat a
liver ailment that would kill him at the age of 51. What tension I noticed
had mainly to do with the gradual shift in my mother’s attitude toward me.
She had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life
chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of
the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided,
and my true life lay elsewhere. Her initial efforts centred on education.
Without the money to send me to the International School, she supplemented
my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a US correspondence course.
Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me
breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours
before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance
but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing (“My
stomach hurts”) or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five
minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defence: “This is no
picnic for me either, buster.”
She had only one ally in all this, and that was the distant authority of my
father. Increasingly, she would remind me of his story, how he had grown up
poor, in a poor country, in a poor continent. He hadn’t cut corners, though,
or played all the angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost
him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different
kind of toughness, principles that promised a higher form of power. I would
follow his example, my mother decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes.
“You have me to thank for your eyebrows . . . your father has these little
wispy eyebrows that don’t amount to much. But your brains, your character,
you got from him.”
It was time for me to attend an American school. I would be living with my
grandparents, my mother said. She and my sister Maya would be joining me in
Hawaii very soon. She reminded me of what a great time I’d had living with
Gramps and Toot just the previous summer – the ice cream, the cartoons, the
days at the beach. “And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,”
she said, a point that I found most compelling.
Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture, I felt
safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation. I wonder sometimes
how long I might have stayed there had it not been for the telegram Toot
found in the mailbox one day.
“Your father’s coming to see you,” she said. “Next month. Two weeks after your
mother gets here. They’ll both stay through New Year.”
For a moment the air was sucked out of the room, and we stood suspended, alone
with our thoughts.
“Well,” Toot said finally, “I suppose we better start looking for a place
where he can stay.”
Gramps took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Should be one hell of a
Christmas.” My mother had sensed my apprehension in the days building up to
his arrival – I suppose it mirrored her own. Like her, my father had
remarried. His new wife was called Ruth, another American. I now had five
brothers and one sister living in Kenya. He had been in a bad car accident,
and this trip was part of his recuperation after a long stay in the
hospital.
The big day finally arrived. I left the school building feeling like a
condemned man. My legs were heavy, and with each approaching step toward my
grandparents’ apartment, the thump in my chest grew louder. When, after
standing in front of the door, I could think of no possible means of escape,
I rang the doorbell. Toot opened the door.
“There he is! Come on, Bar . . . come meet your father.” And there, in the
unlit hallway, I saw him, a tall, dark figure who walked with a slight limp.
He crouched down and put his arms around me, and I let my arms hang at my
sides.
“Well, Barry,” my father said. “It is a good thing to see you after so long.
Very good.”
He led me by the hand into the living room, and we all sat down.
“So, Barry, your grandmama has told me that you are doing very well in school.”
I shrugged. “He’s feeling a little shy, I think,” Toot offered. She smiled and
rubbed my head.
“Well,” my father said, “you have no reason to be shy about doing well. Have I
told you that your brothers and sister have also excelled in their
schooling? It’s in the blood, I think,” he said with a laugh.
I watched him carefully as the adults began to talk. He was much thinner than
I had expected, the bones of his knees cutting the legs of his trousers in
sharp angles; I couldn’t imagine him lifting anyone off the ground. Beside
him, a cane with a blunt ivory head leaned against the wall. His horn-rimmed
glasses reflected the light of the lamp so that I couldn’t see his eyes very
well, but when he took the glasses off to rub the bridge of his nose, I saw
that they were slightly yellow, the eyes of someone who’s had malaria more
than once . . .
A month. That’s how long we would have together, the five of us in my
grandparents’ living room most evenings, during the day on drives around the
island or on short walks past the private landmarks of a family. I’m left
with mostly images that appear and die off in my mind like distant sounds:
his head thrown back in laughter at one of Gramps’s jokes as my mother and I
hang Christmas ornaments; his grip on my shoulder as he introduces me to one
of his old friends from college; the narrowing of his eyes, the stroking of
his sparse goatee, as he reads his important books.
Images, and his effect on other people. For whenever he spoke – his one leg
draped over the other, his large hands outstretched to direct or deflect
attention, his voice deep and sure, cajoling and laughing – I would see a
sudden change take place in the family. Gramps became more vigorous and
thoughtful, my mother more bashful; even Toot, smoked out of the foxhole of
her bedroom, would start sparring with him about politics or finance.
I t fascinated me, this strange power of his, and for the first time I began
to think of my father as something real and immediate, perhaps even
permanent. After a few weeks, though, I could feel the tension around me
beginning to build. Gramps complained that my father was sitting in his
chair. Toot muttered, while doing the dishes, that she wasn’t anybody’s
servant. My mother’s mouth pinched, her eyes avoiding her parents, as we ate
dinner. One evening, I turned on the television to watch a cartoon special – How
the Grinch Stole Christmas – and the whispers broke into shouts.
“Barry, you have watched enough television tonight,” my father said. “Go in
your room and study now, and let the adults talk.”
Toot stood up and turned off the TV. “Why don’t you turn the show on in the
bedroom, Bar.”
“No, Madelyn,” my father said, “that’s not what I mean. He has been watching
that machine constantly, and now it is time for him to study.”
My mother tried to explain that it was almost Christmas vacation, that the
cartoon was a Christmas favour-ite, that I had been looking forward to it
all week. “It won’t last long.”
“Anna, this is nonsense. If the boy has done his work for tomorrow, he can
begin on his next day’s assignments.” He turned to me. “I tell you, Barry,
you do not work as hard as you should. Go now, before I get angry at you.”
I went to my room and slammed the door, listening as the voices outside grew
louder. I heard my father say that they were spoiling me, that I needed a
firm hand.
Two weeks later he was gone. In that time, we stand together in front of the
Christmas tree and pose for pictures, the only ones I have of us together,
me holding an orange basketball, his gift to me, him showing off the tie
I’ve bought him.
When my mother was ready to return to Indonesia to do her field work, and
suggested that I go back with her and Maya to attend the international
school there, I immediately said no. I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my
grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I
kept my trouble out of sight. The arrangement suited my purpose, a purpose
that I could barely articulate to myself, much less to them. Away from my
mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior
struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and
beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly
what that meant.
I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds,
understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and
structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part
the two worlds would eventually cohere. Still, the feeling that something
wasn’t quite right stayed with me. There was a trick there somewhere,
although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being
tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.
When my studies took me to New York, my mother and Maya came to visit. For the
next several days, I tried to avoid situations where we might be forced to
talk. Then, a few days before they were about to leave, my mother noticed a
letter addressed to my father in my hand. “You guys arranging a visit?”
I told her briefly of my plans. “Well, I think it’ll be wonderful for you two
to finally get to know each other,” she said. “He was probably a bit tough
for a ten-year-old to take, but now that you’re older . . . ”
I shrugged. “Who knows?” “I hope you don't feel resentful towards him.” “Why
would I?” Then, without any prompting, my mother began to retell an old
story, in a distant voice, as if she were telling it to herself.
“It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I divorced him. When
the two of us got married, your grandparents weren’t happy with the idea.
But they said OK – they probably couldn’t have stopped us anyway, and they
eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do. Then
Barack’s father – your grandfather Onyango – wrote Gramps this long, nasty
letter saying that he didn’t approve of the marriage. He didn’t want the
Obama blood sullied by a white woman, he said. Well, you can imagine how
Gramps reacted to that. And then there was a problem with Kezia, your
father’s first wife . . . he had told me they were separated, but it was a
village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce.”
Her chin had begun to tremble, and she bit down on her lip, steadying herself.
She said: “Your father wrote back, saying he was going ahead with it. Then
you were born, and we agreed that the three of us would return to Kenya
after he finished his studies. But your grandfather Onyango was still
writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked.” She
sighed. “We were so young, you know. I was younger than you are now. He was
only a few years older than that.”
She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him;
she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way.
And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few
months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry
out over the distance.
Auma, my half sister, was waiting for me at Kenyatta International Airport. I
could see her jumping up and down behind a guard who wasn’t letting her pass
into the baggage area. I rushed over to her, and we laughed and hugged. A
tall, brown-skinned woman was smiling beside us, and Auma turned and said:
“Barack, this is our Auntie Zeituni. Our father’s sister.”
“Welcome home,” Zeituni said, kissing me on both cheeks.
The next evening, we drove east to Kariako, a sprawling apartment complex
surrounded by dirt lots. The moon had dropped behind thick clouds, and light
drizzle had begun to fall. As we climbed the dark stairwell, a young man
bounded past us onto the broken pavement and into the night. At the top of
three flights, Auma pushed against a door that was slightly ajar.
“Barry! You’ve finally come!” A short, stocky woman with a cheerful brown face
gave me a tight squeeze around the waist. Behind her were 15 or so people,
all of them smiling and waving like a crowd at a parade. The short woman
looked up at me and frowned. “You don’t remember me, do you? I’m your Aunt
Jane. It is me that called you when your father died.” She smiled and took
me by the hand. “Come. You must meet everybody here. Zeituni you have
already met. This . . . ” she said, leading me to a handsome older woman in
a green patterned dress, “this is my sister, Kezia. She is mother to Auma
and to Roy Obama.”
Kezia took my hand and said my name together with a few words of Swahili. “She
says her other son has finally come home,” Jane said.
“My son,” Kezia repeated in English, nodding and pulling me into a hug. “My
son has come home.”
A big woman with a scarf on her head strode out of the main house drying her
hands on the sides of her flowered skirt. She had sparkling, laughing eyes.
She grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake.
She laughed, saying something to Auma. “She says she has dreamed about this
day, when she would finally meet this son of her son. She says you’ve
brought her a great happiness. She says that now you have finally come home.”
Granny nodded and pulled me into a hug before leading us into the house. I
asked Granny about my father. She told me: “By the time your father was a
teenager, things were changing rapidly in Kenya. Many of his age-mates, the
ones who were not as gifted as him, were already leaving for Makerere
University in Uganda. Some had even gone to London to study. They could
expect big jobs when they returned to a liberated Kenya.
“Then, good fortune struck, in the form of two American women who were
teaching in Nairobi. They . . . said they could arrange for him to take a
correspondence course that would give him the certificate he needed. If he
was successful, they said, they would try to help him get into a university
in America.
“Barack worked diligently. A few months later, he sat for the exam at the
American embassy. The exam took several months to score, and during this
wait he was so nervous he could barely eat. He became so thin that we
thought he would die. One day, the letter came. When he told me the news, he
was still shouting out with happiness. He still had no money, though, and no
university had yet accepted him. Onyango could not raise the money to pay
university fees. Some in the village were willing to help, but many were
afraid that if Barack went off with their money, they would never see him
again. So Barack wrote to universities in America. Finally, a university in
Hawaii wrote back and told him they would give him a scholarship. No one
knew where this place was, but Barack didn’t care. He gathered up his
pregnant wife and son and dropped them off with me, and in less than a month
he was gone.
“What happened in America, I cannot say. I know that after less than two years
we received a letter from Barack saying that he had met this American girl,
Ann, and that he would like to marry her. Now, Barry, you have heard that
your grandfather disapproved of this marriage. This is true, but it is not
for the reasons you say. You see, Onyango did not believe your father was
behaving responsibly. He wrote back to Barack, saying, ‘How can you marry
this white woman when you have responsibilities at home? Will this woman
return with you and live as a Luo woman? Will she accept that you already
have a wife and children? I have not heard of white people understanding
such things. Their women are jealous and used to being pampered.’
“As you know, your father went ahead with the marriage. He only told Onyango
what had happened after you were born. We are all happy that this marriage
took place, because without it we would not have you here with us now. But
your grandfather was very angry at the time, and perhaps understood more
than you might think. For when Barack finally returned to Kenya, we
discovered that you and your mother had stayed behind, just as Onyango had
warned. Soon after Barack came, a white woman arrived in Kisumu looking for
him. At first we thought this must be your mother, Ann. Barack had to
explain that this was a different woman, Ruth. He said that he had met her
at Harvard and that she had followed him to Kenya without his knowledge.
Barack seemed reluctant to marry Ruth at first. I’m not sure what finally
swayed him. Maybe he felt Ruth would be better suited to his new life.
“Whatever the reason, I know that once Barack agreed to marry Ruth, she could
not accept the idea of his having Kezia as a second wife. That is how the
children went to live with their father and his new wife in Nairobi.
“We saw your father rarely, and he would usually stay only a short time.
Whenever he came, he would bring us expensive gifts and money and impress
all the people with his big car and fine clothes. But your grandfather
continued to speak harshly to him, as if he were a boy.
“Later, when Barack fell from power, he would try to hide his problems from
the old man. He continued to bring gifts that he could no longer afford,
although we noticed that he arrived in a taxi instead of in his own car.
“Even after things had improved again for him, and he had built this house
for us, he remained heavyhearted. He still liked to boast and laugh and
drink with the men. But his laughter was empty. I remember the last time he
visited Onyango before the old man died. The two of them sat in their
chairs, facing each other and eating their food, but no words passed between
them. A few months later, when Onyango finally went to join his ancestors,
Barack came home to make all the arrangements. He said very little, and it
is only when he sorted through a few of the old man’s belongings that I saw
him begin to weep.”
I went out into the backyard to stand before two graves – those of my
grandfather and my father. I felt everything around me – the cornfields, the
mango tree, the sky – closing in, until I was left with only a series of
mental images, Granny’s stories come to life. How lucky my father must have
felt when his ship came sailing in! He must have known, when that letter
came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all; that he possessed the
grace of his name, the baraka, the blessings of God. With the degree, the
American wife, the car, the words, the figures, the wallet, the proper
proportion of tonic to gin, the polish, the panache, the entire thing
seamless and natural, without the cobbled-together, haphazard quality of an
earlier time – what could stand in his way?
He had almost succeeded, in a way his own father could never have hoped for.
And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not
escaped after all!
For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were
finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close.
I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter
of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my
life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment
I’d felt as a boy – all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an
ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the colour of
my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my
brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.SML_STAR
— Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama, (Canongate),
paperback RRP £8.99, paperback available from Times BooksFirst for £8.54,
free p&p. 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
