Dreams from Obama

Finally, after four months of hand-wringing - and a detour in the form of a quick re-read of Eat, Pray, Love - I finished reading Dreams from My Father!  As excited as I am about finishing the book, I think I may have to revisit it at least once more as I journey through my own race, space and place.  The book is a rich and thick description of Obama's struggles with belonging, or the lack thereof.  And it is well-written and compelling, with just the right amount of schmultz and zero politicking.  I loved it!  And yet I trudged through this book: I sped past the 'Chicago' section, where he details his efforts as an intrepid community organiser, but I slowed to a complete stop (enter Liz Gilbert, who is also an amazing author and speaker - check her out) when I hit 'Kenya'.  In 'Kenya', Obama tells the story of his father, his father's father and what it was like going to the place from whence they came with his brothers and sisters.  He does not sugarcoat Africa.  The story is told in plain speech, and his descriptions of a country not quite recovered from the ravages of that centuries-old evil, colonialism, conjures images of my own Africa.  In short (before I begin to gush), he manages to go into details (including an episode of gastric misadventure) without sounding like a 21st century travelogue writer.

So, why did it take me four months to finish this impressive book?  Well, maybe it was that it was that good (yes, alright, that may have been slight gushing).  The honesty about Africa, and the psychosocial effects of socioeconomic, cultural imperialism was difficult to swallow.  The story contained in Dreams from My Father, and particularly in 'Kenya', is not just Obama's, but is the story of most Africans struggling to eke out a coherent identity on a continent crippled by structural racism.  In the following passage, he describes what he now understands about his father, and his father's father:

"I see my grandfather, standing before his father's hut, a wiry, grim-faced bot, almost ridculous in his oversized trousers and his buttonless shirt.  I watch his father turn away from him and hear his brothers laugh. [...] And as his figure turns, I know that for himthe path of his life is now altered irreversibly, completely.
"He will have to reinvent himself in this arid, solitary place.  Through force of will, he will create a life out of the scraps of an unknown world, and the memories of a world rendered obsolete.  And yet, as he sits alone in a freshly scrubbed hut, an old man now wiht milky eyes, I know that he still hears the clipped voice of a British captain, explaning for the third and last time the correct proportion of tonic to gin.  The nerves in the old man's neck tighten, the rage builds - he grabs his stick to hit at something, anything.  Until finally his grip weakens with the realisation that for all the power in his hands and the force of his will, the laughter, the rebukes, will outlast him.  His body goes slack in the chair.  He knows that he will not outlive a mocking fate.  He waits to die, alone.
"The picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy - my father.  He's hungry, tired, clinging to his sister's hand, searching for a mother he lost.  The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great; until finally the slender line that holds him to his mothernsnaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness.  The boy starts to cry; he shakes of his sister's hand.  He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father's house.  He will find a new mother.  He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his mind. 
"But he won't forget the desperation of that day.  Twelve years later; at his narrow desk, he will glance up from a stack of forms toward the restless sky and feel that same panic return.  He, too, will have to invent himself.  His boss is out of the office; he sets the forms aside and from an old file cabinet pulls out a list of addresses.  He yanks the typwriter toward him and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, typing the nevelopes, sealing the letters like messages in bottles that will drop through a post office slot into a vast ocean and perhaps allow him to escape the island of his father's shame. 
"How luck he 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 [...] He had almost succeeded in a way his father could've never hoped for.  And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all!  To discover that he remained trapped on his father's island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone, away..."

This is who we are, Africa.  Constantly running, trying to escape the fear, the humiliation, the anger of our continent's demons.  As hard as it is to read about, it is almost impossible to live it.

A note on labels (shoutout to Graeme)

I call myself 'Single Black Female' because these are the official social categories I occupy.

'Single':
I am not and do not consider myself single.  I am in a happy relationship with my best friend.  I love him more than I have ever loved Anything, Anyone, Ever.  I wear the ring he gave me for our two year anniversary on my ring finger.  We're planning on getting married and having babies.  I need him around because (1) I need help...um...conceiving and raising said babies and (2) The (aforementioned, seruously, Anything Anyone Ever) Love.  The fact that I can write these blog posts on his computer, with him beside me and that I can talk to him about the stuff I post here, that he reads the posts, is testament to the fact that I can trust him with My Stuff, and that we can hash this stuff out, together. 

This blog is me fighting.  For me, and for us.

We're not married yet, though.  So on forms, I tick single.  It is an arbitrary label in a world that only affords me two.  And I'm not married...yet.

'Black':
Where to start.  On forms, I tick that I am 'Black African'.  I am trying to figure out what this means, given that I move, live, work, learn and love in mostly white spaces.  Watch this space on this.

'Female':
Again, a favorite of mine on forms.  I identify as female, as woman, and as a feminist woman, I try to live my life in a way that negates societal definitions of womanhood.  That doesn't mean negating womanhood, though, and I hold fast to it.  Thus the label 'female', here, is a stand in for the label 'woman'. 

We clear?

Storing up my anger

In between Christmas and New Years, I got busy with moving, family functions, more moving, more family functions... Also, after the first post, something weird happened, and all of the things I had been bursting to say all seemed to have been said.  All the anger and pain and everything that had to come out (on the internet, where else) disappeared.  Or so I thought.  New year, same questions, and (for today, anyway) some of the old anger. At breakfast with my friend (let's call her Siphokazi - she has a Xhosa name, but is white), I mused out loud about what I would write about: the white people in the pretentious cafe where we had breakfast who seemed unable to serve me or to stop staring (simultaneuosly),  or my partner's mother's white middle-aged friends (mostly female) who all appear to love me so much that I sometimes wonder if it isn't part 'we love you' and part 'you're black and/but we're totally fine with it'.  All of it relevant and current, all of it tearing down my writer's block. 

But when the universe gives, she sure does giveth.  When I got back to my flat for my scheduled visit with my family, one of my new neighbours - she is old and white, as most of my new neighbours are (I suspect this shall ward off any future writer's block) - mistook my brother for...well, I guess a burgler.  Let me explain: the intercom button one has to press to let me know they're at my gate is not accessible to someone sitting in a car seat.  One has to get out, ring the bell, get in and drive in before the old automatic gate closes prematurely and leaves a mark on your car (as it did last week, when Siphokazi visited).  So my brother just didn't get back in the car after he rung the bell, and instead chose to walk in after my dad's car.  Which is how he came to run into Old White Neughbour Lady who kindly asked his parents if 'they [knew] this gentleman'.  She was very polite; in fact, she stopped and chatted and laughed with my parents whilst I watched on, appalled.  Anyway.  My parents - and my brother - laughed it off.  They are glad I live in a building with such security-conscious neighbours.  The visit was fun and short.  After they left, I thought more and more about what had just happened, I got angrier and angrier.

And just when I was at my angriest I - you guessed it, people in interracial relationships - called my partner.  This is something I do often, when I am in this kind - or any other kind - of distress.  He is my best friend, you see, I call him about everything, good, bad, unflattering.  So I called him and told him about it.  We had a standard phone conversation, which I read as 'he was offish'.  This may have just been my own relationship stuff (and that is a whole other blog, believe me).  But part of it is this: I started thinking about how he has no idea (through no fault of his own) what it is like to have his sibling mistaken for a criminal, how that kind of thing, even when your family laughs it off and subjects are duly changed, seeps into the air so that your family can't even stay for one cup of tea in your new flat that you're so excited to show them.  He doesn't know.  He can't know.  I also started thinking about all the other things he and other white people don't and can't know: walking into a cafe and having the entire place watch you (not exaggerating), never being able to trust the outward kindness of people of another race because they could be overcompensating, never seeing faces like yours at the front of lecture theatres (or names like yours on office doors in university corridors), having to go by a shortened version of your name because the people in your world who are all white (how in the hell did I let that happen) cannot - for love or money - say your full, given name...  The list goes on.  As I listed, I got madder and madder. 

And I just spewed out some of my anger to and on my partner.  I am not proud of it.  He is not the genesis of whiteness and its attendant hysteria.  But if I am in a space where - and I am hovering there right now - I hate white people, what does that mean for the person whom I love who is white?  How can I say to him (which I just did) 'I hate white people', and expect my relationship to remain whole and affirming and loving?  But on the other hand, how can I swallow this anger that bubbles up from deep within me, corroding my insides?  It needs to come up, I need to let it out.  So, my question is this, where do I put my anger and my pain?  Where will my brother put his when he goes home?  Where does my partner put it when I let it out at him?