Barack Obama: Dreams From My Father

Chicago is still feeling the rush of the Obama win. The other day, Obama went to Manny’s to get corned beef and a pie. It was all over the papers. Even nationally, the Obama family is on the cover of Us Magazine and people want to know Michelle Obama’s stylist. I have to admit that I’m in the Obama rush as well having just finished his memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
This is an incredible memoir- written superbly. I highly recommend it to anyone. Although written for political reasons (so that Americans can truly understand who Obama is and where he comes from), the book itself is not political at all. Obama recounts his childhood and early adulthood growing up as a biracial young man.

In Obama’s case, even though half of him is white and he was brought up in mostly a white family, his first image to other Americans is that he is a black man. This is complicated because no one in his immediate family that nurtured him is black: his grandparents and mother are white, his pseudo-adopted father is Indonesian, and his sister is half white and half Indonesian. Obama’s father, Barack Obama senior, divorced his mother and returned to Kenya only to visit his American son maybe twice. As a result, Obama not only struggled with his feelings for and about his father, but he had to navigate all the negative stereotypes and feelings of being a black man with African ancestry alone.

Through out the memoir, Obama shows how he struggled with self-identity. The following is an excerpt from his memoir. It is one of the first times he encounters the difficulties of being black:

“…I came across the picture in Life magazine of the black man who had tried to peel off his skin…I know that seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack…that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone’s knowledge, not even my own.…I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact…and wondered if something was wrong with me…I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog that Toot and Gramps sent us, and that Santa was a white man.”

The second half of the memoir explains his early adulthood- working in New York, coming to Chicago as a community organizer, and making a trip of self-discovery to Kenya. The most pivotal part of this book is when Obama finally decides to go to Kenya to discover his roots. It is almost as if Obama kept delaying this trip of self-discovery and acceptance of his father’s other life and family. In the end, I believe this trip allowed Obama to come to peace with his self. It is beautifully narrated with imagery and written so that the reader can easily understand the impact of the trip on the author’s life.

I am really happy and relieved that this man is the president-elect. Obama is intelligent, eloquent, and has an open view of the world. I have a deeper understanding and appreciation of Obama through his memoir.