A. Awosanya
My son, he’s three, and
He wants to go home
To see his teachers, he says.
He is speaking, now slowly—
I want to go to A-fri-ka—
as if we aren’t getting it.
To Uganda, he says, eyes insistent,
pointing to the sky we will fly
across to get back there. He is
pointing to where home is, the way some kids
point to the sky when asked:
Where is heaven?
With his West African blood,
and his East African bedroom—this boy
requests chapati for dinner in the United States.
He doesn’t understand the lack of plantains or
why he can’t order chicken and chips at every restaurant in Los Angeles,
where he was born at 6:29pm on a Monday
covered in my mzungu blood (or rather, my oyinbo blood)
and, stunned.
I too am stunned.
From birthing him, from mothering him, from raising him there,
in Kampala. I am stunned from the questions I already know
he’ll ask me some day (and likely at an inconvenient time)
when he discovers how different home is from home.
Momma, which one is real—this place or that?
Will he believe me when I suggest
it depends on where you are today:
the availability of chapati and plantains, that is.
And in which language to call his mother white. And
reality. And maybe,
even heaven?
Or will he embrace the paradox
I can’t seem to grasp.
Maybe I should tell him
I believe only in the
the place where my head rests at night,
and by day, the dirt beneath my feet.
But I do dream of other places which
we haven’t yet seen.
My son, age three, he
wants to go home.
To Uganda, he says, eyes insistent,
pointing to the sky we will fly
across to get there. He is
pointing to where home is, the way some kids
point to the sky when asked:
Where is heaven?
Photo by Tobson Hatsukami Morgan
A. Awosanya worked with Servant Partners for many years in Kampala, Uganda before returning to California.