tottering, informal jitney-like buses that could be seen everywhere, painted
brightly with murals and tributes to God, their roofs piled high with strapped-on
luggage, so crowded that passengers sometimes just rode along, clinging
precariously to the exterior.
I was in Africa now. It was heady, draining, and wholly new to me. Auma’s
sky-blue VW was so old that it often needed to be pushed in order to get the
engine into gear. I’d ill-advisedly bought new white sneakers to wear on the trip,
and within a day, after all the pushing we did, they’d turned reddish brown,
stained with the cinnamon-hued dust of Nairobi.
Barack was more at home in Nairobi than I was, having been there once
before. I moved with the awkwardness of a tourist, aware that we were outsiders,
even with our black skin. People sometimes stared at us on the street. I hadn’t
been expecting to fit right in, obviously, but I think I arrived there naively
believing I’d feel some visceral connection to the continent I’d grown up
thinking of as a sort of mythic motherland, as if going there would bestow on me
some feeling of completeness. But Africa, of course, owed us nothing. It’s a
curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in
Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted
in both lands.
Days later, I was still feeling dislocated, and we were both nursing sore
throats. Barack and I got into a fight—about what exactly, I can’t remember. For
every bit of awe we felt in Kenya, we were also tired, which led to quibbling,
which led finally, for whatever reason, to rage. “I’m so angry at Barack,” I wrote
in my journal. “I don’t think we have anything in common.” My thoughts trailed
off there. As a measure of my frustration, I drew a long emphatic gash across the
rest of the page.
Like any newish couple, we were learning how to fight. We didn’t fight
often, and when we did, it was typically over petty things, a string of pent-up
aggravations that surfaced usually when one or both of us got overly fatigued or
stressed. But we did fight. And for better or worse, I tend to yell when I’m angry.
When something sets me off, the feeling can be intensely physical, a kind of
fireball running up my spine and exploding with such force that I sometimes later
don’t remember what I said in the moment. Barack, meanwhile, tends to remain
cool and rational, his words coming in an eloquent (and therefore irritating)
cascade. It’s taken us time—years—to understand that this is just how each of us
is built, that we are each the sum total of our respective genetic codes as well as