Nairobi

Nairobi appears in Becoming as the setting of a passage Michelle Obama wrote about travel and foreignness. In the highlight Kyle saved, she describes feeling “Nairobi’s foreignness — or really, my own foreignness in relation to it — immediately, even in the first strains of morning,” and frames it as a sensation she “came to love” the more she traveled: the way a new place “signals itself instantly and without pretense,” with different air, unfamiliar smells of wood smoke or diesel, and a sun that comes up “looking slightly different from what you know.” The reference is evocative rather than analytical — Nairobi as the place where she first registers the productive disorientation of being somewhere genuinely new.

Context: Nairobi is the capital and largest city of Kenya. Michelle Obama visited there with Barack Obama on a trip to meet his Kenyan relatives, an episode recounted in her memoir Becoming.

Where this appears

• Becoming — Michelle Obama’s reflection on the “foreignness” of arriving in a genuinely new place, set on a morning in Nairobi.