Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance:
 
|
Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritanceby Barack ObamaBarack Obama's memoir, written long before his political career began, is a remarkable story of one man's search for his identity.The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life and reconcile his divided inheritance.Written at the age of thirty-three, "Dreams from my Father" is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama's journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.In Stock, Delivery: Standard 3-4 Days, £2.65
|
||||||||||
| Add to Basket
List Price: £8.99
You Save: £3.60
Our Price: £5.39
|
Book Reviews:
Oona King, The Times
01/01/1970
WHATEVER ELSE PEOPLE expect from a politician, it’s not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty. Barack Obama has produced one, possibly because he wrote it when he was 33, long before realising any political ambitions. In essence, this is the search for his lost father who left when Obama was 2, and whom he met only once, when he was 10. When Obama was 21 he received a phone call from Kenya telling him his father had died in a car crash. “I felt no pain,” Obama wrote after the call, “only the vague sense of an opportunity lost.”
It takes several years and 400 pages for the pain to seep out, during which Obama tries to unlock “the puzzle of being a black man”. The puzzle is complicated by the fact that his family is white. Like so many mixed-race children, including myself, he is brought up by a white mother and white grandparents. He wants to believe that black and white can get along, because otherwise his existence must be at best a mistake, at worst a lie.
That existence takes him from his childhood home near the beaches of Hawaii, to the markets and slums of Jakarta, and then to Los Angeles., New York and Chicago. He went to local schools in Indonesia from the age of 6 until 10. His mother woke him at 4am each morning for English lessons so that he didn’t fall behind. “This is no picnic for me either, buster,” she’d reply when he complained bitterly about his early starts.
He writes about his mother with great affection and admiration, saying that: “What is best in me I owe to her.”And yet, as the book’s title suggests, mostly it is concerned not with his white mother but with his black father. The primal wound of parental abandonment, added to the search for identity within white mainstream society, means that his journey of self-discovery must uncover the black part of him, not the white part.
At university he feels unable to fit in with white students, yet constantly has to prove himself to black students. When a right-on black comrade claims that his choice of reading – Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad – is a racist tract, Obama replies: “I read it to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”
“And that’s important to you?” asks the friend.
“My life depends on it,” Obama writes.
There is an authenticity to the book that makes you think he might really be driven by the quest for common ground; the desire to diagnose the phenomenon of hate, and to come up with a prescription; the desire to prove that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
This desire to bring harmony is not purely a Ghandi-esque display of altruism, but also an act of survival. He finds some of the answer to what feeds hate in his grass-roots work. He tries to bring hope to desperate communities in sink estates around the decaying hulk of Chicago’s industrial past, and has a surprising level of success. You have to admire him for it, especially if you’ve ever tried to mobilise local communities mired in poverty and depression.
Obama explores the extent of African-American rage in the face of white incomprehension (why are black people always angry?). But, although the book deals with race and class, it’s real strength is in revealing the flawed human psychology, black and white, that can lead any person towards misunderstanding, prejudice, despair and poverty. Much of the book is also a meditation on loneliness.
Obama is constantly an outsider in search of real community, a community he finally finds in Chicago – which he goes on to represent in the state legislature, before being elected to the US Senate, where today he is the only African-American Senator.
Obama writes candidly about himself as well as about the race divisions that maim America. He delineates people with a rare skill, using individual shortcomings to describe the hurt and failure of a whole society. And he does it in a language most politicians cannot speak, talking of moon-washed streets, computers that flash emerald messages around the globe, and the dun-coloured plains of the African savannah that seem supple as a lion’s back.
Recognition of his own ultimately privileged position, and empathy for others, comes off each page. He stands as a 10-year-old at American immigration control, behind a Chinese family who had been lively and animated during the flight from Jakarta. But “now the family was standing absolutely still, trying to will themselves invisible, their eyes silently following the hands that riffled through their passports and luggage with a menacing calm. Finally the customs official tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I was an American. I nodded and handed him my passport. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, and told the Chinese family to stand to one side.”
Obama’s background gives him a heightened ability to understand antagonistic world views. He believes in the power of words. “If I could just find the right words, things would change.” A decade later he proved this point at the 2004 Democratic Convention when he was chosen as the keynote speaker. The words he picked made him an overnight celebrity and political sensation.
What does this book say about Obama the politician? It is proof positive that he is a “listening” politician; he couldn’t otherwise have depicted the myriad lives that come off these pages. It also demonstrates his capacity to provide compelling narrative for the human condition.
The book’s epilogue ends with him at his own wedding in 1992, toasting “a happy ending”. Becoming America’s first black president would certainly be a good beginning.
Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times
01/01/1970
Forget Barack Obama. Forget the face, the smile, the presidential candidate. This is the self-examination of a 33-year-old crying out on every page, “Who am I?” and finding an extraordinary answer.
Born to an 18-year-old white Hawaiian and a transient Kenyan, Obama has writted a memoir, penned long before his fame, that evokes the anguish of miscegenation yet culminates in a cry of faith in human community. “Dreams from My Father,” he says in a new preface, “speaks to the fissures of race that have characterised the American experience.” It deserves a leading place among the sagas of that experience.
The memoir was written when Obama was finishing law school at Harvard and returning to work as a community lawyer in Chicago. In the early 1980s he had spent barely a third of his life in mainland America, having been moved soon after birth to Indonesia, where his mother, Ann Dunham, had remarried a local businessman, before returning to finish his education in Hawaii.
Obama talks to everyone, reconstructing conversations as if spoken yesterday. Above all, he talks to his mother’s parents in Honolulu, the liberal “Gramps and Toot”, who had migrated from Texas after his mother had been bullied for playing with a black girl. Obama’s mother was thus an idealistic escapee from a prejudiced America. To him she was “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism”. Obama was devoted to her and she to him. But he always knew that, for his parents, “I occupied the place where their dreams used to be.”
Brought up among whites to be colour-blind, Obama soon realises that a fellow student’s plea that he was “mixed race” would not do. He is traumatised by a Life magazine article about a black man who tried to peel off his skin. By his teens he has “stopped advertising my mother’s race” for fear of seeming “ingratiating” to whites. “People are thrown” when they find he is half white, as if they “no longer know who I am”. He knows he must “raise myself to be a black man in modern America”, even if his gut wrenches forlove of his mother when he hears blacks insulting “white folks”.
Feeling at such times “utterly alone”, he recognises that for a black person “the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness”. Black people, says an angry friend, “are the only people stupid enough to waste time worrying about their enemies ”.
Obama describes in vivid detail his emergence from this rage into a mature self-awareness. He sleeps rough on his first night in New York, finds a job in de-industrialising Chicago and realises that, to get anywhere, he must work his way through law school.
Law he at first finds intractable, seeing it as an explanation by “those who have power to those who do not of the ultimate wisdom of their position”. Yet the law is also “a memory . . . a long- running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience”. Often “conscience is sacrificed to expediency or greed”, but the young Obama is “modestly encouraged, believing that . . . what binds us together might somehow ultimately prevail”.
His mother might remark that he had “her eyelashes but his father’s brain”, but he clearly replicates her liberalism, honed on the harsh anvil of experience.
What of the father, the older Barack, an attractive, mercurial, talented but rootless ne’er-do-well who vanished back to Kenya (and more wives) soon after his son’s birth? He writes occasionally and the young Obama dreams of him often, waking in tears and craving “to search for him . . . to talk with him again”. Then comes a strange phone call from a Kenyan aunt telling of Barack’s death, and more calls about family feuds, homages and rituals. There is an elder half-sister, the remarkable Auma, who visits Obama, takes his hand and tells him simply, “We need to go home.” Kenya was ever that heart-stopping, magnetic word, home, and the family’s Luo village of Alego “home squared”.
Obama’s visit to Kenya in 1988 at the age of 27 forms the emotional climax of the book, as a young man, already wise beyond his years, struggles to straddle the many cultures in turmoil within him. He now has blood relatives on three continents, but Africa is the land of his father and the source of the overwhelming fact of his life, his blackness.
His first sensation is relief at finding a country in which to be black is to be normal, “where you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal”. Yet he is shocked on his first day to find whites ushered to the front of the restaurant queue in his hotel. His extended family is poor and obsessed with money, but stages proud feasts for this exotic relative.
We meet a bewildering array of relatives, their names reflecting their mixed backgrounds — Akumu, Sarah, Kezia, Bernard, Abo, Said, Zeituni, George.
Again, it is Obama’s grandparents who seem to hold the keys of identity. Gandmother Akumu reveals a background of mud huts, shamanic rituals and life under the British Empire. She tells of grandfather Onyango, the first man in the village to wear trousers, not a goatskin. A stern, independent man, he worked as a servant for the British army. He beheaded a goat with a panga, threatened a medicine man for casting spells and wandered at will between huts, wives and villages.
In a truly moving passage Obama visits his father’s grave and pours tears of remorse over a man who returned home but “could not outlive a mocking fate”, who died alone “trapped on his father’s island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother, gone, gone, away . . .”
In these incidents we soon smell the vivid odours of the African bush. Obama, smoking and drinking to excess, is depressed and mesmerised, aware of one thing that America has lost but here remains intact, “the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth”.
Obama’s recollections sometimes take liberties with credibility. Page after page is in direct speech which, written years after the event, he admits has to be an “approximation of what was actually said”. But the authorial voice is always real. Obama is a born narrator, with a mastery of colour, scene and personality, deftly stirring them into the melting pot of a shared American identity. Rarely has that identity found so vivid a portraitist.
Barack Obama dedicated the original 1995 edition of his memoir to his family, and in particular his mother Ann Dunham, right, holding the young Obama. Sales were modest enough to make a signed first edition rare (they fetch up to ,000 online). Later editions have done better: the paperback has dominated The New York Times bestseller lists for six months and Obama's earnings from his writing last year are estimated to be at least £2m.
Related Books
-
the politics of hope: the words of barack obama
AddYou pay: £5.59 List price: £6.99 You save: £1.40 -
what obama means: ..for our culture, our politics, our future
AddYou pay: £8.57 List price: £12.99 You save: £4.42
