2008/05/10

Dreams from My Father

Barack Obama on returning to his ancestral homeland in Kenya...
For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it culd carry an entire history in other people's memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, "Oh, you are so and so's son."
     ---Dreams from my father: a story of race and inheritance (Ch. 15)

Having moved constantly while growing up, I sympathize with this profoundly.



Words of a British physician, raised in colonial Kenya, who felt compelled to return to the continent
Once you've lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.
     ---ibid Ch. 16

Somehow, I seem to feel the same way a little, living in Germany and comparing it to the US. Not that Germans are materially poor, but...

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