On Fathers and Sons

It was my birthday yesterday, and rather than embark on any revelry to mark my growing assault on the years, I plumbed instead for ‘quality’ time with the family, granted in the form of a meal in front of the TV and a video chosen, poignantly, by my kids. And poignantly I must say, for they had picked the film ‘W’, from the local video store.

Now, while I am in danger of committing Harikari here, I must admit to having a soft spot for old GW. Despite or in spite of his bumbling ways and at times misguided attempts at forging his reactionary views on the world I find something inherently simple and disarmingly decent about the guy. I don’t know how accurate the film purports to be to actual events. Oliver Stone the director is a serious film maker and I am sure he has an angle on this, but the film portrays a man with serious short-comings not least a generous amount of self-doubt. However, putting aside accusations of America wanting to control the world’s oil reserves or revenge for 9/11, I have a sneaking feeling that Dubya’s invasion of Iraq could have been based on nothing more sinister than a son’s arching need to win his father’s respect.

Most fathers instinctively want, or at least expect their sons to do better than they did themselves. Daddy Bush by all accounts was an accomplished man: successful business man, ambassador to China, director of the CIA, two-term vice president and for one, if inglorious, term as president. So if you were in Dubya’s shoes you probably don’t have many options bar having to man a spacecraft to the moon to feel the same sense of accomplishment. A tall, if not insurmountable, order if there was one. One therefore doesn’t have to be an Einstein or genius of the same ilk to figure how that the bludgeoning of a country – in this case Iraq to clear up his father’s unfinished business – was the least plausible for a desperate son.

Indeed one feels to have supped at the same table, and have an understanding of the demons dancing around in Dubya psyche. For although of not the same rarefied level, I myself was faced with a successful father, a physician and probably the first African playwright to be published in the English-speaking world. A man whose stature was so elevated in society that it was easy to place any label you wanted on him and it would fit. Although no acerbic comments were made, for indeed he was a man of great gentleness, it was always easy for one to generate untold feelings of great expectations, intertwined with a debilitating fear of failure. A horror I never quite conquered in nearly three decades. Like Dubya one had tried to rebel, first against, and then tried to be everything his father had been. A first and solitary attempt, at completing the draft of a novel drew absolutely no response of any kind. Twenty years later, after he died I found it wrapped and tucked away among his personal papers.

A few years before he passed away, he wrote in a letter, ‘son, I am really proud of you’. Words I found hard, and still difficult to digest. I do wish now he had said that earlier. Much, much earlier.