Barack Obama Dreams from My Father

the man had been warned.”

Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” she said, looking at me. “I swear, sometimes I

think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old

Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”

By this time, the dining car had emptied and the waiter was pacing back and forth impatiently, so we all

decided to turn in. The bunks were narrow, but the sheets were cool and inviting, and I stayed up late

listening to the trembling rhythm of the train and the even breath of my brothers, and thinking about the

stories of our grandfather. It had all started with him, Auma had said. That sounded right somehow. If I

could just piece together his story, I thought, then perhaps everything else might fall into place.

I finally fell asleep, and dreamed I was walking along a village road. Children, dressed only in strings of

beads, played in front of the round huts, and several old men waved to me as I passed. But as I went farther

along, I began to notice that people were looking behind me fearfully, rushing into their huts as I passed. I

heard the growl of a leopard and started to run into the forest, tripping over roots and stumps and vines,

until at last I couldn’t run any longer and fell to my knees in the middle of a bright clearing. Panting for

breath, I turned around to see the day turned night, and a giant figure looming as tall as the trees, wearing

only a loincloth and a ghostly mask. The lifeless eyes bored into me, and I heard a thunderous voice saying

only that it was time, and my entire body began to shake violently with the sound, as if I were breaking

apart….

I jerked up in a sweat, hitting my head against the wall lamp that stuck out above the bunk. In the

We arrived in Kisumu at daybreak and walked the half mile to the bus depot. It was crowded with

buses and matatus honking and jockeying for space in the dusty open-air lot, their fenders painted with

names like “Love Bandit” and “Bush Baby.” We found a sad-looking vehicle with balding, cracked tires that

was heading our way. Auma boarded first, then stepped back out, looking morose.

“There are no seats,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Roy said as our bags were hoisted up by a series of hands to the roof of the bus. “This is

Africa, Auma…not Europe.” He turned and smiled down at the young man who was collecting fares. “You

can find us some seats, eh, brother?”

The man nodded. “No problem. This bus is first-class.”

An hour later Auma was sitting on my lap, along with a basket of yams and somebody else’s baby girl.

“I wonder what third-class looks like,” I said, wiping a strand of spittle off my hand.

Auma pushed a strange elbow out of her face. “You won’t be joking after we hit the first pothole.”

Fortunately, the highway was well paved, the landscape mostly dry bush and low hills, the occasional

cinder-block house soon replaced by mud huts with thatched, conical roofs. We got off in Ndori and spent

the next two hours sipping on warm sodas and watching stray dogs snap at each other in the dust, until a

matatu finally appeared to take us over the dirt road heading north. As we drove up the rocky incline a few

shoeless children waved but did not smile, and a herd of goats ran before us, to drink at a narrow stream.

Then the road widened and we finally stopped at a clearing. Two young men were sitting there, under the

shade of a tree, and their faces broke into smiles as they saw us. Roy jumped out of the matatu to gather

the two men into his arms.

“Barack,” Roy said happily, “these are our uncles. This is Yusuf,” he said, pointing to the slightly built

man with a mustache. “And this,” he said, pointing to the larger, clean-shaven man, “this is our father’s

youngest brother, Sayid.”

“Ah, we have heard many great things about this one,” Sayid said, smiling at me. “Welcome, Barry.

Welcome. Come, let me have your bags.”

We followed Yusuf and Sayid down a path running perpendicular to the main road, until we crossed a

wall of tall hedges and entered a large compound. In the middle of the compound was a low, rectangular

house with a corrugated-iron roof and concrete walls that had crumbled on one side, leaving their brown

mud base exposed. Bougainvillea, red and pink and yellow with flowers, spread along one side in the

direction of a large concrete water tank, and across the packed earth was a small round hut lined with

earthenware pots where a few chickens pecked in an alternating rhythm. I could see two more huts in the

wide grass yard that stretched out behind the house. Beneath a tall mango tree, a pair of bony red cows

looked up at us before returning to feed.

Home Squared.

“Eh, Obama!” 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 a face like Sayid’s, smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing

eyes. She hugged Auma and Roy as if she were going to wrestle them to the ground, then turned to me and

grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake.

“Halo!” she said, attempting English.

“Musawa!” I said in Luo.

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. Small windows let in little of

the afternoon light, and the house was sparsely furnished-a few wooden chairs, a coffee table, a worn

couch. On the walls were various family artifacts: the Old Man’s Harvard diploma; photographs of him and

of Omar, the uncle who had left for America twenty-five years ago and had never come back. Beside these

were two older, yellowing photographs, the first of a tall young woman with smoldering eyes, a plump infant

in her lap, a young girl standing beside her; the second of an older man in a high-backed chair. The man

was dressed in a starched shirt and a kanga; his legs were crossed like an Englishman’s, but across his lap

was what appeared to be some sort of club, its heavy head wrapped in an animal skin. His high cheekbones

and narrow eyes gave his face an almost Oriental cast. Auma came up beside me.

“That’s him. Our grandfather. The woman in the picture is our other grandmother, Akumu. The girl is

Sarah. And the baby…that’s the Old Man.”

I studied the pictures for some time, until I noticed one last picture on the wall. It was a vintage print,

the kind that grace old Coca-Cola ads, of a white woman with thick dark hair and slightly dreamy eyes. I

asked what the print was doing there, and Auma turned to Granny, who answered in Luo.

“She says that that is a picture of one of our grandfather’s wives. He told people that he had married

her in Burma when he was in the war.”

Roy laughed. “She doesn’t look very Burmese, eh, Barack?”

I shook my head. She looked like my mother.

We sat down in the living room and Granny made us some tea. She explained that things were well,

although she had given away some of the land to relatives, since she and Yusuf could not work it all by

themselves. She made up the lost income by selling lunches to the children at the nearby school and

bringing goods from Kisumu to the local market whenever she had some spare cash. Her only real

problems were with the roof of the house-she pointed to a few threads of sunlight that ran from the ceiling to

the floor-and the fact that she hadn’t heard anything from her son Omar in over a year. She asked if I had

seen him, and I had to say no. She grunted something in Luo, then started to gather up our cups.

“She says when you see him, you should tell him she wants nothing from him,” Auma whispered. “Only

that he should come visit his mother.”

I looked at Granny, and for the first time since our arrival, her age showed on her face.

After we unpacked our bags, Roy gestured for me to follow him out into the backyard. At the edge of a

neighboring cornfield, at the foot of a mango tree, I saw two long rectangles of cement jutting out of the

earth like a pair of exhumed coffins. There was a plaque on one of the graves: HUSSEIN ONYANGO

OBAMA, B. 1895. D. 1979. The other was covered with yellow bathroom tiles, with a bare space on the

headstone where the plaque should have been. Roy bent down and brushed away a train of ants that

marched along the length of the grave.

“Six years,” Roy said. “Six years, and there’s still nothing to say who is buried here. I tell you now,

Barack-when I die, you make sure that my name is on the grave.” He shook his head slowly before heading

back toward the house.
How to explain the emotions of that day? I can summon each moment in my mind almost frame by

frame. I remember Auma and myself joining Granny at the afternoon market, the same clearing where the

matatu had first dropped us off, only now full of women who sat on straw mats, their smooth brown legs

sticking straight out in front of them from under wide skirts; the sound of their laughter as they watched me

help Granny pick stems off collard greens that she’d brought from Kisumu, and the nutty-sweet taste of a

sugarcane stalk that one of the women put into my hand. I remember the rustle of corn leaves, the

concentration on my uncles’ faces, the smell of our sweat as we mended a hole in the fence bounding the

western line of the property. I remember how, in the afternoon, a young boy named Godfrey appeared in the

compound, a boy who Auma explained was staying with Granny because his family lived in a village where

there was no school; I remember Godfrey’s frantic steps as he chased a big black rooster through the

banana and papaya trees, the knot in his young brow as the bird kept flapping out of his reach, the look in

his eyes when finally Granny grabbed the rooster from behind with one hand and unceremoniously drew her

knife across the bird’s neck-a look that I remembered as my own.

It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was

doing, every touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to

close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place. Only once that afternoon

would I feel that mood broken, when, on our way back from the market, Auma ran ahead to get her camera,

leaving Granny and me alone in the middle of the road. After a long pause, Granny looked at me and

smiled. “Halo!” she said. “Musawa!” I said. Our mutual vocabulary exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the

dirt until Auma finally returned. And Granny then turned to Auma and said, in a tone I could understand, that

it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son.

“Tell her I’d like to learn Luo, but it’s hard to find time in the States,” I said. “Tell her how busy I am.”

“She understands that,” Auma said. “But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his

own people.”

I looked at Granny, and she nodded at me, and I knew then that at some point the joy I was feeling

would pass and that that, too, was part of the circle: the fact that my life was neither tidy nor static, and that

even after this trip hard choices would always remain.

Night fell quickly, the wind making swift tracks through the darkness. Bernard, Roy, and I went to the

water tank and bathed ourselves in the open air, our soapy bodies glowing from the light of an almost full

moon. When we returned to the house, the food was waiting for us, and we ate purposefully, without words.

After dinner, Roy left, muttering that he had some people he wanted to visit. Yusuf went to his hut and

brought back an old transistor radio that he said had once belonged to our grandfather. Fiddling with the

knob, he caught a scratchy BBC newscast, fading in and out of range, the voices like hallucinatory

fragments from another world. A moment later we heard a strange, low-pitched moan off in the distance.

“The night runners must be out tonight,” Auma said.

“What are night runners?”

“They’re like warlocks,” Auma said. “Spirit men. When we were children, these people here”-she

pointed at Granny and Zeituni-would tell us stories about them to make us behave. They told us that in

daylight the night runners are like ordinary men. You might pass them in the market, or even have them to

your house for a meal, and never know their true natures. But at night they take on the shape of leopards

and speak to all the animals. The most powerful night runners can leave their bodies and fly to faraway

places. Or hex you with only a glance. If you ask our neighbors, they will tell you that there are still many

night runners around here.”

“Auma! You act as if it is not true!”

In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, I couldn’t tell if Zeituni was joking. “Let me tell you, Barry,”

she said, “When I was young the night runners caused people many problems. They would steal our goats.

Sometimes they took even our cattle. Only your grandfather was not afraid of them. I remember one time he

heard his goats bleating in their pen, and when he went to check on them, he saw what looked like a huge

leopard standing on its hind legs, like a man. It had a baby goat in its jaws, and when it saw your

grandfather, it cried out in Luo before running into the forest. Your grandfather chased it deep into the hills,

but just as he was about to strike it with his panga, the night runner flew up into the trees. Luckily, it dropped

the goat when it jumped, and the goat suffered only a broken leg. Your grandfather brought the goat back to

the compound and showed me how to make a splint. I cared for that goat myself until it was back to health.”

We became quiet again; lamplight grew low and people began drifting off to bed. Granny brought out

blankets and a twin-sized cot for Bernard and me, and we arranged ourselves on the narrow bed before

blowing out the lamp. My body ached from exhaustion; inside Granny’s bedroom, I could hear the murmur

of her and Auma talking. I wondered where Roy had gone to, and thought about the yellow tiles on the Old

Man’s grave.

“Barry,” Bernard whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“Myself, I think there is no such thing as a night runner. They are probably just thieves who use these

stories to make people afraid.”

“You may be right.”

There was a long pause.

“Barry?”

“What?”

“I’m not sure, Bernard. Something told me it was time.”

Bernard rolled over onto his side without answering. A moment later, I heard his soft snores beside me,

and I opened my eyes to the darkness, waiting for Roy to return.

them across the backyard and down a dirt path, through fields of corn and millet, Yusuf turned to me and

said, “It must seem very primitive to you, compared to farms in America.”

I told him that I didn’t know much about farming but that, as far as I could tell, the land seemed quite

fertile.

“Yes, yes,” Yusuf said, nodding. “The land is good. The problem is that people here are uneducated.

They don’t understand much about development. Proper agricultural techniques and so forth. I try to explain

to them about capital improvements and irrigation, but they refuse to listen. The Luo are very stubborn in

this way.”

I noticed Sayid frowning at his brother, but he said nothing. After a few minutes we came to a small,

brown stream. Sayid shouted out a warning, and two young women emerged on the opposite bank,

wrapped in their kangas, their hair still gleaming from their morning baths. They smiled shyly and stepped

behind an island of rushes, and Sayid pointed to the hedges running alongside the water.

“This is where the land ends,” he said. “Before, when my father lived, the fields were much bigger. But

as my mother said, much of the land has now been given away.”

Yusuf decided to go back at this point, but Sayid led Auma and me along the stream for a while, then

across more fields, past the occasional compound. In front of some huts, we saw women sorting through

millet spread across square strips of cloth, and we stopped to talk to one of them, a middle-aged woman in

a faded red dress and red, laceless sneakers. She set aside her work to shake our hands and told us that

she remembered our father-they had herded goats together as children, she said. When Auma asked how

life had been treating her, she shook her head slowly.

“Things have changed,” she said in a flat voice. “The young men leave for the city. Only the old men,

women, and children remain. All the wealth has left us.” As she spoke, an old man with a rickety bicycle

came up beside us, then a spindly man whose breath smelled of liquor. They immediately picked up the

woman’s refrain about the hardness of life in Alego, and the children who had left them behind. They asked

if we might give them something to tide them over, and Auma dropped a few shillings into each of their

hands before we excused ourselves and started back toward the house.

“What’s happened here, Sayid?” Auma said after we were out of earshot. “There never used to be

such begging.”

Sayid leaned down and cleared away a few fallen branches from between the rows of corn. “You are

right,” he said. “I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi

or Kisumu and tell them, ‘You are poor.’ So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn’t have this idea

before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is

doing. None of it brings her much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do

the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up.”

“What about Yusuf?” Auma asked. “Couldn’t he do more?”

Sayid shook his head. “My brother, he talks like a book, but I’m afraid he does not like to lead by

example.”

Auma turned to me. “You know, Yusuf was doing really well for a time. He did well in school, didn’t he,

Sayid? He received several good job offers. Then, I don’t know what happened. He just dropped out. Now

he just stays here with Granny, doing small chores for her. It’s as if he’s afraid to try to succeed.”

Sayid nodded. “I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”

I thought about what Sayid had said as we continued to walk. Perhaps he was right; perhaps the idea

of poverty had been imported to this place, a new standard of need and want that was carried like measles,

by me, by Auma, by Yusuf’s archaic radio. To say that poverty was just an idea wasn’t to say that it wasn’t

real; the people we’d just met couldn’t ignore the fact that some people had indoor toilets or ate meat every

day, any more than the children of Altgeld could ignore the fast cars and lavish homes that flashed across

their television sets.

But perhaps they could fight off the notion of their own helplessness. Sayid was telling us about his

own life now: his disappointment at having never gone to the university, like his older brothers, for lack of

funds; his work in the National Youth Corps, assigned to development projects around the country, a three-

year stint that was now coming to an end. He had spent his last two holidays knocking on the doors of

various businesses in Nairobi, so far without any success. Still, he seemed undaunted by his

circumstances, certain that persistence would eventually pay off.

“To get a job these days, even as a clerk, requires that you know somebody,” Sayid said as we

approached Granny’s compound. “Or you must grease the palm of some person very heavily. That’s why I

would like to start my own business. Something small only. But mine. That was your father’s error, I think.

For all his brilliance, he never had something of his own.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, there’s no

point wasting time worrying about the mistakes of the past, am I correct? Like this dispute over your father’s

inheritance. From the beginning, I have told my sisters to forget this thing. We must get on with our lives.

They do not listen to me, though. And in the meantime, the money they fight over goes where? To the

lawyers. The lawyers are eating very well off this case, I believe. How does the saying go? When two

locusts fight, it is always the crow who feasts.”

“Is that a Luo expression?” I asked. Sayid’s face broke into a bashful smile.

“We have similar expressions in Luo,” he said, “but actually I must admit that I read this particular

expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the

truth about Africa’s predicament. The Nigerian, the Kenyan-it is the same. We share more than divides us.”
Granny and Roy were sitting outside the house and talking to a man in a heavy suit when we returned.

The man turned out to be the principal of the nearby school, and he had stopped to share news from town

and enjoy the chicken stew left over from the night before. I noticed that Roy had his bag packed, and

asked him where he was going.

“To Kendu Bay,” he said. “The principal here is going that way, so myself, Bernard, and my mum, we’re

going to go catch a ride with him and bring Abo back here. You should come, too, and pay your respects to

the family there.”

Auma decided to stay back with Granny, but Sayid and I went to gather a change of clothes and piled

into the principal’s old jalopy. The drive to Kendu turned out to be several hours long by the main highway;

to the west, Lake Victoria appeared intermittently, its still, silver waters tapering off into flat green marsh. By

late afternoon we were pulling down Kendu Bay’s main street, a wide, dusty road lined with sand-colored

shops. After thanking the principal, we caught a matatu down a maze of side streets, until all signs of town

had disappeared and the landscape was once again open pasture and cornfields. At a fork in the road,

Kezia signaled for us to get off, and we began walking along a deep, chalk-colored gully at the bottom of

which flowed a wide, chocolate-brown river. Along the riverbank, we could see women slapping wet clothes

against exposed rock; on a terrace above, a herd of goats chewed on the patches of yellow grass, their

black, white, and roan markings like lichen against the earth. We turned down a narrower footpath and

came to the entrance of a hedged-in compound. Kezia stopped and pointed to what looked like a random