A Story of Race and Inheritance
"Dreams From My Father": Barack Obama's first memoir
“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.
At least that's what I would choose to believe.”
A word about the book and why I chose to read it
Barack Obama is one of my most-admired world leaders – partly because he is a democrat (with a lowercase ‘d’), partly because he is a lawyer and a committed constitutionalist (having served as a professor of constitutional law in Chicago Law School), partly because he is one of the most important Black voices of our times, and mainly because he is so charismatic and ‘the coolest US President yet.’ I firmly believe you only admire people that you relate with in some way, and I connect with Obama for a lot of reasons. First, he’s a known nerd and an introvert. Second, he’s a profound thinker and worries about things that do not immediately concern him, Bigger Things (which I think is part of being a nerd). Third, and most important, he inherits a race, a community that he feels responsible towards and constantly strives to protect and better. This memoir is the first one he ever wrote, back when he still was Senator from Chicago. I chose to read this memoir because it is in this one that Obama confronts the question of identity, race, and inheritance – big, difficult questions that I think all of us confront at a point in our lives and realise that the answers are not so easily found. At such a time, it becomes necessary to read someone who has confronted these questions before us and, hopefully, found some workable answers. Obama himself, when confronted with the realities of his own race and confused about what to make of it, found great solace and guidance in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. When I confront this questions – of my own identity, my own inheritance, my own responsibilities towards a community that I’m reluctant to embrace as my own, my own belongingness and the lack of it – I turn to people who have confronted these questions before me in hope that I will be able to find some answers or at least find the way to find the answers. It is to seek answers like these that I turn to people like Barack Obama, his wonderful wife Michelle Obama, or closer home, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Dr B R Ambedkar. For all of them are individuals who have wrestled with these questions of identity and inheritance at a certain point in their lives and found answers that I so desperately seek. It is in the hope of these answers that I turn to them for guidance. It is in hope of these answers – and the strange satisfaction of the mere realisation that the questions I confront are not unique to me, wiser people before me have confronted them as well – that I turned to Barack Obama’s first memoir, The Dreams from My Father.
The memoir recounts the time of Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia (where he moved with his mother after she remarried and remained there for four years), his time in college, and his work as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago, a city he made his home, and his first trip to the country of his ancestry, Kenya. The book ends just before Barack joins Harvard Law School, although it was written after his graduation as a lawyer. It has an interesting cast of people – Obama’s brave mother, his wise Grandpa and Grandma ‘Toot’, his step-father Lolo who has lessons in practicality to teach young Barry, his friends at college, his colleagues in Chicago, but most importantly and admirably the Kenyan part of his family, an assortment of half-brothers and half-sisters, uncles and aunts, (step)mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, and, of course, his absent father, Dr Barack Obama Sr, who is in fact the key character. Obama ruminates extensively on his absent father, who was a student in Hawaii when he married Obama’s mother and later moved to Harvard to pursue further education and then back to Kenya, his native-land. Barry and his mother were supposed to follow him to Kenya, but for some reason or another, they didn’t. It is this absent father and everything he stood for – and he really did stand for a great many things – who is the centre of discussion throughout the book, and everything Barry inherits from his father – the race, the legacy, the grudges, the burdens, everything. Dr Barack Obama Sr appears to be a smart, charismatic man, one of the first people from his country to pursue an education in the States, study in an institution as prestigious as Harvard, and go on to become a well-known economist in his native country; a genius of kinds, a disciplined, suave man but also a promiscuous man, siring many children with different women over the course of his lifetime – at least 4 women are mentioned throughout this memoir itself, wives and girlfriends of Dr Obama. Although his fall from grace was equally stellar as he locked horns with the erstwhile Kenyan Government. Obama Sr only met his son once in his life, when Barry was ten years old and his father visited him in Hawaii for Christmas. When Barry was in college, Dr Obama died in a car accident. Throughout the memoir, Obama tells the story of his childhood, his discovery of what it means to be Black and his own inheritance of a Kenyan legacy and the legacy of a father as stellar and impressive as Dr Obama Sr, and his exploration of his identity as a Black man and a half-Kenyan.
Why Obama is such a Family Man?
Among others, the book answers one question very clearly. Why Obama himself is such a Family Man. All those who follow him know of his relationship with his wife Michelle and his daughters. He’s really a family man, he’s there for his family always, he prioritizes his family, and has remained married (without scandals, I must mention) to his wife for decades (an amazing feat in itself). Compare that to his successor, Donald Trump, for some perspective on the matter. I think part of the reason behind this is that Obama himself grew up without a father and saw his mother work hard as a single mother for most of the time. That must have left a deep imprint on his mind. It must have been exacerbated by his experience as a community organizer in South Side Chicago and from his trip to Kenya, best captured by this one paragraph in the book:
“We returned to the living room, and I sank down into an old sofa. In the kitchen, Zeituni directed the younger women in cleaning the dishes; a few of the children were now arguing about the chocolate I’d brought. I let my eyes wander over the scene – the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld [in South Side Chicago], I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men.”
Obama saw first-hand the effect of absent men on the families (absent for whatever reason: some went in search of jobs and employment, others just left their wives to fend for themselves, still others never intended to stay probably). It must have left a deep imprint on him. And isn’t it true that those of us who are the hurt ourselves try our best to ensure that nobody else goes through the same hurt, because we know the pain all too well, and wish to shield others from it? My own father has a piece of wisdom that he used to tell me when I was young. He would say that there are two kinds of people in the world – or at least two ways of dealing with hurt. One is where you go, so-and-so happened to me and everyone must suffer it to know how much pain I went through. The other is, so-and-so happened to me and I know how painful it is, and therefore I must ensure nobody else goes through it. “You must always be the second kind of person, son,” my own dad would tell me when I was very young. I hope I have lived up to that hope of his. But I think it was this instinct that Obama had, which makes him such a great father, husband, and a thorough family man.
An Idea From the Book that Reverberated With Me
The book is full of wisdom and reflections, but there’s one idea that particularly reverberated with me, for some unknown reason, I must admit. I thought it worthwhile to include it here. When Obama was a community organizer he met a certain Mr Asante Moran, a school counselor, who had some ideas for a mentorship program for young Black men. Obama records this conversation and Asante shares something worth reflecting on.
“The first thing you have to realize is that the public school system is not about educating black children… Just think about what real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of himself, his world, his culture, his community. That’s the starting point of any educational process. That’s what makes a child hungry to learn – the promise of being a part of something, of mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything’s turned upside down. From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically rejected him, denied his humanity.”
Profound, really. It was hard to ignore the parallels between what Mr Asante said to Obama and what Professor Kancha Ilaiah complains about in his book Why I am Not a Hindu, a Dalit critique of Hindutva, that I read earlier this month. Ilaiah says, much like Mr Asante, that the Dalit boy in India has to read a history that is not his own, read about Gods that are not his own (for Hinduism never really accepted that Dalits as its own, they were always the avarnas, the ones without a Varna), his gods were always different from Hindu gods, his culture and language was not Hindu at all, and now he has to study all this – a history, a culture, a language that is not his at all – in the schools. That’s not a very sensible education system, if it doesn’t educate him about his own identity, culture, and history. The words Mr Asante speaks in the context of the Black children are equally applicable in the context of Dalit children of India, and they’re worth repeating, with certain changes, “But for the [Dalit] child, everything’s turned upside down. From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically rejected him, denied his humanity.”
I hope you see the point I’m trying to get across. I think this is why the idea really reverberated with me.
Final Thoughts
There’s no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most moving and profound memoirs I have read. It moves at a rather slow pace, but it does not get boring. I would recommend this book to any person who, like me, is wrestling with questions about their own identity and what to make of it, their inheritance of a history and culture they don’t fully comprehend yet, their responsibility towards their people, the hope they represent to their people, and who really wish to do something for their people. It’s a profound read. It’s also a very, very inspiring read – and inspiring not in a sense that temporarily fuels you with fire but in a sense that moves you profoundly, alters your worldview for the better, and in the process shapes you into a finer person.
I would like to end it with this quote from the book:
“You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.”