Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, younger brother of President Barack Obama, has penned a new novel which chronicles his experiences as the son of Barack Sr. and Ruth Nidesand, a woman he met after divorcing Stanley Ann Dunham.
"It's a work of fiction, but there's a lot going on in there that parallels my life," Ndesandjo said in a brief interview before a news conference called to launch the book he said was nearly a decade in the making. While he allowed that some of the characters are composites, he said the violence at home echoed his own experience as a victim of, and witness to, domestic violence.
"My father beat me. He beat my mother. And you just don't do that," Ndesandjo said later. "I shut those thoughts in the back of my mind for many years."
"I remember times in my house when I would hear the screams and I would hear my mother's pain," he said. "I was a child. . . . I could not protect her."