Word: childhood
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...marking the high-point of the yearly Hindu festival of lights. In the amber glow of dozens of diya (ceremonial candles), students sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor, chanting bhajans (devotional songs), reading excerpts from sacred texts and sharing stories about the festivals they had known in their childhood...
...unlike, say, John Kerry, Obama is a master at shaping his own mythology. When he talks of his childhood, we hear little of his Hawaii years, of his fondness for bodysurfing and sashimi. Instead we hear in every speech that his mother was from Kansas ("That's why I talk the way I do") and his father was from Kenya ("He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack...
Ahem. Obama does not have a Kansas accent; he grew up in Honolulu except from ages 6 to 10, when he and his mother lived in Indonesia. His father, though a potent symbol in his childhood, left when Obama was 2. Aside from letters and one visit, he was absent from his son's life. When Obama was 21, his father died in a car accident in Kenya...
...African World (1976), a collection of poems, and The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1996), which Soyinka adapted from a lecture series he gave at Harvard. He has also written two well-reviewed autobiographical works, Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) and Ibadan, The Penkelemes Years, A Memoir...
Soyinka says he never anticipated that he would be the central figure in Aké. He says he had hoped to focus the story of his childhood around an uncle, but the man died before Soyinka could record his reminiscences...