Published in 1995, when only a small handful of people knew him as the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father is a beautifully-composed memoir about the events, discoveries – things in general – that had shaped the future president’s understanding of the world and his place in it. In a (large) nutshell, the book traces Obama’s unorthodox origins, as the son of a white Kansas girl and a Kenyan man who left the young boy and his mother when he was just two; through to his carefree childhood roaming the backstreets of Jakarta with boys the same skin colour as himself; back to living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii during his adolescence, where he discovers the politics of race and its inequalities; then to his troubled, drug-taking, conflict-ridden years in college; to his work as a community organiser in the worse-hit areas of Chicago; and finally to his home-coming in Kenya where Obama unearths the secrets and untold stories of his identity. Obama’s introduction sets the tone for the entire book – it is honest, modest and realises the vanities of recounting one’s ‘life’ mid-way through. He genuinely acknowledges his untrustworthy, almost falsified, memories (backed up predominantly only by verbal histories), and concedes that they are tainted by the 20/20 vision of hindsight and the wisdom and retrospective understanding that time allows. And yet, Obama pushes on with tales of his childhood with a loving, yet ambitious mother and her Indonesian husband, and the day he began to realise that his skin was different and somehow undesirable. He recounts the one time that he met his father, at age ten, the awkwardness and tension that washed over them both, and the fact that he would carry the man’s impossibly high-standards as a benchmark for all successes and failures in his life. Even when the mythologised image of his father would be shattered, in a single chapter which compounds the man’s life story as told to Obama by his half-sister, the man’s image, his absence and contradictory life, would continue to shape Obama’s own troubled grapplings with the world around him. Such troubles are exacerbated in a large portion of the book simply titled ‘Chicago’. Here Obama discovers for himself, and subsequently reveals to his reader, the now debunked international image of the USA as land of freedom and prosperity. Interwoven with Obama’s own story are those of the people whom he meets during his years as an organiser, and of course the lessons – political, social and personal – that he learned from these years. What he witnessed in the most racially, and hence economically, divisive areas of Chicago was not unlike the poverty, deficiencies and overall sense of hopelessness that he would come to see during his first trip to Kenya. And one of the gems in Obama’s book is the way in which he reflects on such encounters with humbling, insightful and deeply honest empathy for society’s Others, neither excusing or blaming them, but rather seeing a possible version of what could so easily have become himself.
The story’s third and final section is ‘Kenya’ when, in the summer before beginning Harvard Law School, Obama journeys to his father’s land to meet the family he never knew and to discover the truths about his father. Obama first recalls the beautiful, sobering feelings of ‘returning’ to an unfamiliar home, where his name is first recognised as a relation to Dr. Obama, his late father. ‘No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tone,’ he writes. ‘My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand.’ What transpires from this web is something I can only describe as both mind-blowingly complex in their inter-familial conflicts, yet strangely familiar and universal for the same reason. Due to the ongoing practice of polygamy in Kenyan society, Obama has a myriad of half-siblings, countless aunts and uncles, and even a paternal grandmother who is not biologically his. But while Obama may come from a stranger-than-usual mixed family, the dynamics, conflicts, fleeting moments of familial love and loyalty, have an uncanny familiarity, even for those of us from the most ‘normal’ of family situations. His encounters with family and the obligations, expectations and allegiances expected from people you’ve never even met, but with whom you share an unbroken bond, resonates with a universal familiarity, particularly for those of us who have families in economically unstable countries like Kenya. Obama writes with brutal honesty about the mess and confusion that is his inheritance, which he initially begrudgingly accepts, but comes to fully embrace as an indelible part of who he is. And towards the end, Obama is told the story from the beginning, starting with his father’s father, in the remote deserts of Kenya, when white people did not exist, to when they eventually came with their irreversible changes, to Barrack Obama senior meeting a young girl at Hawaii University, through to his final demise. I devoured these pages of family history, paralleled by that now-ubiquitous tale of colonialism that has made its way to the far corners of the Earth, seeing again its effects in yet another part of the world. When the story ended I felt with Obama an overwhelming catharsis; a sense that his long and harrowing journey to manhood had finally come to a sufficient conclusion.
Obama’s story, while extraordinary and extremely peculiar, resonates with a sense of commonness that we can all empathise with. That search for your identity, the wrestling between your inherited culture and the (white) one you grew up in, the fact that you never quite fit into either world whole-heartedly or without reservation. His is the universal story of difference, of living in and through disparate cultural identities that are all supposed to be your own, but that you can’t completely claim. Obama’s captivating and eloquent prose captures the heart, honesty and humility of this story. It speaks to our own insecurities about self and place with neither dogmatism nor false optimism. The story’s simple, yet powerful, conclusion leaves us with a sense of peace, contentment, and the knowledge that, at short intervals in time, everything is alright with the world. [Image from http://www.mylib.in/]
