Obama's Dreams From My Father; First of Two Parts

Note: This is the first of a two-part review of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father.

As Barack Obama's candidacy grows, there will naturally be more interest in his life story, and Obama has the advantage of having told this story himself, eloquently and forcefully, in an autobiography written before his Senate career or his presidential run. Dreams From My Father isn't as famous as The Audacity of Hope, his campaign manifesto, but the story he tells in the former may ultimately win him more votes, and convince Americans that he is, after all, a different kind of candidate, different in every way from any major candidate for President in our history.

The differences become clear in the book's opening pages, which tell the story of Obama's African father. The narrative begins with his death, when Barack was 21 years old, and meanders through the memories and legends of his father he grew up hearing. Living in New York at the time his father died, Obama is reminded of an old man who lived in his apartment building until he was found dead in his apartment, a lonely ignoble death much like his father's in Kenya. As Obama describes later in the book, his father died a shell of his former self, alone, alienated from his children, struggling to maintain relevance and dignity in spite of his doctorate and prosperous past. But the stories Obama grows up with are the stories of his youthful vigor and charm, his seriousness, his promise, his charisma--qualities that might be applied to Obama himself.

From his white mother and grandparents, he hears glowing portraits, tales of strangers in rapt attention to his words.

"Your father can be a bit domineering," my mother would admit with a hint of smile. "But it's just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes."

She preferred a gentler portrait of my father. She would tell the story of whwne he arrived to accept his Phi Beta Kappa key in his favorite outfit--jeans and an old knit shirt with a leopard print pattern. "Nobody told him it was a big honor so he walked in and found everyone standing around this elegant room dressed in tuxedos. The only time I ever saw him embarrassed."

The shadow of Obama's father remains throughout, but this book is about Obama himself. That story begins, after the opening flashforward to his father's death, begins with his grandparents' nomadic wanderings which lead them eventually to Hawaii, to a new life, where Obama's mother meets his father and where he is born, where he is left behind by a father whose departure is never explained to him.

Obama lives in Hawaii until he is six years old, when his mother accepts a proposal from an Indonesian named Lolo. When they move to Indonesia, Barack adapts quickly and becomes close to Lolo. However, as time goes by, his mother begins to wonder if she is losing her son to a culture and identity that is unfamiliar to her. While Barack attends Indonesian schools, his mother works to inculcate midwestern values of honesty and fairness, and wakes him up early every morning to provide her own English lessons before he went to school. While he is in Indonesia, he has a bit of a racial awakening. He describes looking through a Life magazine and discovering a story of a black man who had tried to peel away his skin. As Obama describes it, it was a moment of racial awakening for him, and he began to question why television shows had so few black characters, that the Sears catalog had so few people in it that looked like him.

I kept these observations to myself, deciding that either my mother didn't see them or she was trying to protect me and that I shouldn't expose her efforts as having failed. I still trusted my mother's love--but now I faced the prospect that her account of the world, and my father's place in it, was somehow incomplete.

After a time Obama returns to Hawaii and his grandparents to attend an American school, the Punahou Academy at age ten. Obama describes the traumas and lessons of his youth, including a mement where he was unkind to an overweight classmate who was supposed to be his girlfriend, and the moment where like a typical 10 year old he bragged about his father only to have it backfire. Telling the story of his father as tribal chief, he becomes uneasy, wondering if the story is doing more harm than good. He begins to wonder what his father's identity means to his own. Obama continues his education at Punahou through high school, playing famously on the basketball team, finding his racial identity and his sense of belonging in the drug-infused seventies. Living with elderly white grandparents on a multiracial but mostly white and asian island made learning about racial politics difficult, but he sought the advice of books by Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, and the black friend of his grandfather, and his friend Ray. His growing racial pride and struggle to express it is illustrated by a story he tells from high school when a white acquaintance approaches Ray:

"Hey Ray! Mah main man! Wha's happenin'!"

Ray went up and slapped Kurt's outstretched palm. But when Kurt repeated the gesture to me I waved him off.

"What's the problem?" I overheard Kurt say to Ray as I walked away. A few minutes later Ray caught up with me and asked me what was wrong.

"Man, those folks are just making fun of us," I said.

"What're you talking about?"

"All that 'yo, baby, give me five,' bullshit."

"So who's Mr. Sensitive all of a sudden? Kurt don't mean nothing by it."

"If that's what you think then hey--"

Ray's face suddenly glistened with anger. "Look," he said, "I'm just getting along, all right? Just like I see you getting along, talking your game with the teachers when you need them to do you a favor. All that stuff about, 'Yes, Miss Snooty Bitch, I just find this novel so engaging, if I can just have one more day for that paper, I'll kiss your white ass.' It's their world, all right? They own it, and we in it..."

This and other moments in the book, like when Obama dismisses a black friend as a "tom" and is rebuked by another friend, show Obama's struggles to articulate his own feelings about race. He mentions repeatedly throughout the book that he is part of neither race, or part of both, but being raised in a white family but feeling more at home with black friends causes him so moments of tension and self doubt, feelings which at length seem to get worked out, especially by the time he goes to college and on to work as an organizer in Chicago. Even in Chicago, Obama describes feeling pulled between "two strands of black nationalism" as he begins to feel uncomfortable with the white antipathy he finds himself surrounded with at times:

Ever since I'd picked up Malcolm X's autobiography I had tried to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, agruing that nationalism's affirming message of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility, need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munificence. We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change.

It's less compelling reading, the nuts and bolts of community organizing in Chicago, but that section of the book provides the most insight into Obama's leadership skills and his values. Obama arrives in Chicago a wide eyed idealist, and although his idealism isn't dampened necessarily, he learns that good intentions aren't enough. The organization he's part of, in spite of their efforts and heart, never seem to actually get anyone in the projects a job, or improve the lives of people in measurable ways. It isn't until Obama learns to apply his charisma and energy into concrete political action, working the Harold Washington administration into concrete steps such as moving an employment office into the neighborhood of the people they are actually serving.

Obama's early life shows him to be sensitive, smart, and worldly. The first half of the book includes some material that has provided ammunition for right wing attacks--he did attend Islamic school for a couple of years in Indonesia, he used drugs in high school and college, he reflects on the merits of black nationalism. But anyone who actually takes the time to read Obama's story can't help but come away inspired by his unusual life, impressed by his elegant prose, overwhelmed by his insights and attention to the people around him. Next week I'll look at the second half of Obama's Dreams From My Father.