Sunday, May 2, 2010

Home Cubed

In Barack Obama's book, "Dreams of my Father", I found the passage where the family is discussing 'Home squared' to be interesting. The children in Nairobi referred to the family's house on its ancestral land this way because though it was not their full time residence, it was considered to be where the family 'was from' if asked. At this point, Barack's relatives told him it was his 'Home cubed'. This insinuated another degree, not of separation from Kenya, but another circuit line run in parallel. If the relatives in Nairobi have two homes, the city they have gone to for work and their ancestral home, he has three. This terminology is interesting since it does not insinuate that the family home in Africa is less important or should mean any less to him than it does to his relatives in Africa. I think this is interesting given the classical Dubois-ian idea of double consciousness that is applied to Obama, or even extrapolated to 'triple consciousness'. For each place where a person must live, comes a new sense of consciousness. There is the way that Obama sees the world when he is with his white grandparents, the way the world runs when he is with his black friends, and now the way that his black Kenyan relatives see him and the way he can look at both his other worlds through their eyes. In every action he takes, he has the burden or blessing to be able to assess it as any of these people might.