Dreams from My Father

be something else. But whatever it is, you’re gonna have to set some goals and follow through. Auma and I can help you with school fees, but we can’t live your life for you. You’ve got to put in some effort. You understand?”
    Bernard nodded. “I understand.”
    We both sat in silence for a while, watching Bernard’s spoon twirl through the now-liquid mess. I began to imagine how hollow my words must be sounding to this brother of mine, whose only fault was having been born on the wrong side of our father’s cloven world. He didn’t resent me for this, it seemed. Not yet. Only he must have been wondering why I was pretending that my rules somehow applied to him. All he wanted was a few tokens of our relationship—Bob Marley cassettes, maybe my basketball shoes once I was gone. So little to ask for, and yet anything else that I offered—advice, scoldings, my ambitions for him—would seem even less.
    I stamped out my cigarette and suggested we get going. As we stepped into the street, Bernard draped his arm over my shoulder.
    “It’s good to have a big brother around,” he said before waving good-bye and vanishing into the crowd.
             
    What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?
    I could list various possibilities. But I’d never arrived at a definite answer, aware early on that, given my circumstances, such an effort was bound to fail. Instead, I drew a series of circles around myself, with borders that shifted as time passed and faces changed but that nevertheless offered the illusion of control. An inner circle, where love was constant and claims unquestioned. Then a second circle, a realm of negotiated love, commitments freely chosen. And then a circle for colleagues, acquaintances; the cheerful gray-haired lady who rang up my groceries back in Chicago. Until the circle finally widened to embrace a nation or a race, or a particular moral course, and the commitments were no longer tied to a face or a name but were actually commitments I’d made to myself.
    In Africa, this astronomy of mine almost immediately collapsed. For family seemed to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama’s long-lost son. If I mentioned in passing that I needed a notebook or shaving cream, I could count on one of my aunts to insist that she take me to some far-off corner of Nairobi to find the best bargains, no matter how long the trip took or how much it might inconvenience her.
    “Ah, Barry…what is more important than helping my brother’s son?”
    If a cousin discovered, much to his distress, that Auma had left me to fend for myself, he might walk the two miles to Auma’s apartment on the off chance that I was there and needed company.
    “Ah, Barry, why didn’t you call on me? Come, I will take you to meet some of my friends.”
    And in the evenings, well, Auma and I simply surrendered ourselves to the endless invitations that came our way from uncles, nephews, second cousins or cousins once removed, all of whom demanded, at the risk of insult, that we sit down for a meal, no matter what time it happened to be or how many meals we had already eaten.
    “Ah, Barry…we may not have much in Kenya—but so long as you are here, you will always have something to eat!”
    At first I reacted to all this attention like a child to its mother’s bosom, full of simple, unquestioning gratitude. It conformed to my idea of Africa and Africans, an obvious contrast to the growing isolation of American life, a contrast I understood, not in racial, but in cultural terms. A measure of what we sacrificed for technology and mobility, but that here—as in the kampongs outside Djakarta or in the country villages of Ireland or Greece—remained essentially intact: the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth.
    As the days wore on, though, my joy became tempered with tension and doubt. Some of it had to do with what Auma had talked about that night in the car—an acute awareness of my relative good fortune, and the troublesome questions such good fortune implied. Not that our relatives were suffering, exactly. Both Jane and Zeituni had steady jobs; Kezia made do