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 everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them. Over time, we have figured out how to express and overcome our irritations and occasional rage. When we fight now, it’s far less dramatic, often more efficient, and always with our love for each other, no matter how strained, still in sight.
We woke the next morning in Nairobi to blue skies and fresh energy, less zonked by the jet lag and feeling like our happy, regular selves. We met Auma at a downtown train station, and the three of us boarded a passenger train with slatted windows to head west out of the city and toward the Obama family’s ancestral home. Sitting by a window in a cabin packed with Kenyans, some of whom were traveling with live chickens in baskets, others with hefty pieces of furniture they’d bought in the city, I was again struck by how strange my girl-from-Chicago, lawyer-at-a-desk life had suddenly become—how this man sitting next to me had shown up at my office one day with his weird name and quixotic smile and brilliantly upended everything. I sat glued to the window as the sprawling community of Kibera, the largest urban slum in Africa, streamed past, showing us its low-slung shanties with corrugated-tin roofs, its muddy roads and open sewers, and a kind of poverty I’d never seen before nor could hardly have imagined.
We were on the train for several hours. Barack finally opened a book, but I continued to stare transfixed out the window as the Nairobi slums gave way to jewel-green countryside and the train rattled north to the town of Kisumu, where Auma, Barack, and I disembarked into the broiling equatorial heat