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who am i?
brian kwoba
24 Sep 2013

by brian kwoba

my father was a harvard-trained capitalist economist my

mother was a consultant for the world bank and white-savior-industrial complex

who am i?

by brian kwoba

 

if you really want to know me

take a look at the trees the apple fell from

 

my father was a foreign student

born and raised in a small village in kenya

went to school in a tin-roof shack

 

his father

my grandfather

was a shopkeeper who had larger dreams for his son

through hard work and perseverance

my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place

america

and while studying here my father met my mother

 

she was born in a town on the other side of the world

in kansas

her father worked on oil rigs as a geologist

my grandmother Toots started out as a bank teller

 

these are the trees of my apple

so who am i?

 

some say my parents were CIA agents

i’m not sure

but they did meet in a russian language course

at the height of the cold war

at the US government’s east-west center in the pacific

 

picture a summer hollywood blockbuster

a black and white espionage thriller

where tomb raider meets shaft

but they’re both nerds

 

my mother worked for ford foundation and USAID

as a secular missionary for uncle sam’s gospel in the pacific

 

my father gave me little more than my pigment

and the vestigial african identities hiding beneath my names

because of his absence

i’m still haunted by many

dreams from my father

 

i am a kenyan-american

born in hawaii

but i went to elementary school in indonesia

 

picture a vast archipelago

17,000 islands between the indian and pacific oceans

where the dutch came to introduce thievery, bribery, slavery

and the blessings of christ

 

picture a proud people rising up

declaring independence

where the ringing of revolution triggered the security alarms

of world domination in washington

where i now live with my family

 

picture the CIA sponsoring a coup

imagine that!

putting in power a ruthless army general called

suharto

 

this mega-murder-monster strangled over a million hearts beating with indignation

into 17,000 droplets in the bloodbath of his baptism

as a loyal US ally

 

suharto brought peace and stability to indonesia

like a napalm bomb dropped into a sanctuary of

butterfly

wings crushed in the vice grip of a bald eagle’s talons

 

i was only 4 years old

when my mother married an officer in the suharto regime

Lolo was a great role model

he gave me blood red gloves

turned my fists into apples under the dark tree of his guidance

he taught me how to box

 

and he taught me that if indonesia wants to commit genocide

in west papua or east timor

with american weapons

nobody here would hear because the

signatures on the arms shipments belonged to my respectable forebears

like lyndon johnson and jimmy carter

 

you see i have cultivated the image of being raised by a single mother

with humble beginnings

 

but let me be clear

 

my father was a harvard-trained capitalist economist my

mother was a consultant for the world bank and white-savior-industrial complex my

step-father was an indonesian war criminal and oil company executive my

grandmother broke glass ceilings to become a corporate bankster at bank of hawaii my

 

oh my

 

i guess the apple

didn’t fall far from the trees

 

who am i?

 

Brian Kwoba is a PhD student at Oxford University and is working on a dissertation about the "father of Harlem radicalism" Hubert H. Harrison. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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