by David Garrow
In “Origins,” Barack described how his own birth stemmed from “my mother’s predicament” and admitted that how his parents came to marry “remains an enduring puzzle to me,” with even the supposed facts “a bit murky.” He offered a decidedly uncharitable portrait of his grandfather, criticizing Stanley’s “often-violent temper” and “his crude, ham-fisted manners.” Ralph Dunham, Stan’s far from uncritical older brother, later spoke with dismay about Dreams, saying Barack “was a bit unfair with Stanley,” and a later critic lambasted Stan’s portrayal as “unmistakably ironic and patronizing.” Lolo Soetoro fared significantly better, with Barack citing his “imperturbable” temperament and writing that “I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad.” Of his own father during his childhood, Barack wrote that “my father remained a myth to me,” and even after Obama Sr.’s 1971 visit he “remains opaque.” Once Barack’s narrative reached his high school years, an angry character modeled on an exaggerated version of Keith Kakugawa was given the pseudonym “Ray,” no doubt by an author fully aware that his senior yearbook entry had thanked “Ray”—Ray Boyer—for “all the good times.” Smoking “pot” was expressly acknowledged, as was “a little blow when you could afford it.”
Frank Marshall Davis figured in the book as “a poet named Frank,” although with no full identification, and one ostensible lesson of black male adolescence was that “you didn’t let anyone . . . see emotions . . . you didn’t want them to see.” His mother Ann appeared episodically, including once to complain that “one of your friends was just arrested for drug possession” and to demand “the details of Pablo’s arrest,” the character based on Bobby Titcomb. Barack wrote that Malcolm X’s autobiography affected him because Malcolm’s “repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me” given how they were “forged through sheer force of will.”
Dreams’ account of Barack’s time at Oxy featured his reprimand by “Regina,” and presenting “Regina” as a black Chicagoan allowed her to stimulate “a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history” that Barack indeed “envied” and finally attained once he moved to Chicago. “Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seemed that way in retrospect.”
Scholars would write that “identity may be as determined by events we believe happened to us as ones that did,” an insight that could also apply to Dreams’ account of the traumatic impact the magazine photos of a black person who wanted to be white had had on him at age nine. In Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, developmental psychologist David Pillemer writes that there can be no doubting the importance of a “person’s beliefs about what happened,” for “psychic reality is as important as historical truth” given how “memory is an active, reconstructive process” and not a fount of empirical facts. “Memories of personal life episodes are generally true to the original experiences, although specific details may be omitted or misremembered.”
Dreams’ presentation of Barack’s unforgettable 1985 conversation with Bob Elia in the lobby of the Fairway Inn that summer 1985 night on the road to Chicago was transmogrified into an exchange with “Ike, the gruff black security guard in the lobby” of BI’s office building at One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. No one else at BI remembered any security guard, but that was subsidiary to how impactful Bob’s challenge was on the young man on the road to a new life in a place where he had really never been. “People frequently trace the beginning of a life path, or the birth of a set of enduring beliefs or attitudes, to a single momentous event. Memories of originating events need not carry an explicit, rule-structured directive,” Pillemer writes, because “they inspire rather than prescribe. The memories are a source of motivation and reorientation in the pursuit of life goals.”
Far more so than “Regina,” Barack’s conversation with Bob Elia was one he would recount not only in Dreams but for years afterward. “Memories of originating events convey a sense of enduring influence and even causality,” Pillemer explains. “The initiating episode is seen as the original motivating force behind a momentous decision. But it is possible,” as was true with Barack, “that the memory simply represents the first conscious acknowledgment of a gradually shifting life path. Yet another possibility is that originating events are identified and selected only retrospectively” as “a coherent and orderly life story is constructed in which past events are spuriously linked to known outcomes.”
But at a minimum, as with Barack’s experience in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, “an originating event is perceived as creating, or at least contributing to, a new life course.” Such a turning point “appears to alter or redirect the ongoing flow of the life,” and autobiographies like Dreams “frequently draw implicit or explicit causal connections between specific early episodes”—as with Bob Elia—“and the subsequent direction of the life course.” Northwestern University psychologist Dan P. McAdams stresses that someone’s life story “is more like a personal myth than an objective biography, even though the subject believes the story to be true.” As with Barack, “life stories provide modern men and women with narrative identities,” and although childhood experiences “provide material for the life story,” the “story itself does not begin to take shape until society demands that a person begin to formulate a meaningful and coherent life,” as Barack experienced during his young adulthood in Roseland. In Dreams, Barack created a life story that was a carefully crafted public version of a “developing person’s own internalized and evolving narrative of the self.”
In Dreams, Ike the security guard was just as fictional as the story of how at BI Barack had “my own secretary,” and how at NYPIRG his job had been “trying to convince the minority students at City College about the importance of recycling.” Yet when Dreams’ Part Two brought Barack to Roseland, its accuracy quotient soared, if not its chronology, which made a jumble of his actual work there, but with characters directly and mostly accurately modeled not just on Dan Lee but on Cathy Askew, Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, Margaret Bagby, Eva Sturgies, Maury Richards, Salim Al Nurridin, and Alma Jones. Jerry Kellman, Mike Kruglik, and Greg Galluzzo would be melded into a single “Marty Kaufman” who was in large part Jerry, and Barack apologized to Mike for his absence from Dreams, explaining that editors had eliminated some characters. Similarly, although his sister Auma’s visit to Chicago was accurately rendered except for her mundane arrival by train from southern Illinois, and not at O’Hare Airport, Alex McNear, Genevieve Cook, and Sheila Jager were condensed into a single woman whose appearance in the book was fleeting indeed, and Mary Ellen Montes, a married Mexican American mother of three, did not appear at all.
Learning from Auma about how deeply tragic Obama Sr.’s later life was had transformed Barack’s relationship with his deceased father. “Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes,” he wrote in Dreams. The composite girlfriend “was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine,” living in their “own private world. Just two people, hidden and warm.” This was largely Genevieve, except the “specks of green” were in Sheila’s eyes, not Genevieve’s. “One weekend she invited me to her family’s country house,” and “I realized that our two worlds” were seemingly distant. “I knew that if we stayed together, I’d eventually live in hers,” and so “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world. One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright,” and after it “we had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car, she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.”
Barack and Genevieve had argued, but the “big fight” on the street had been
with Sheila in Chicago, not in New York with Genevieve. The summary treatment of the unnamed New York girlfriend was unremarkable, as Dreams both overstated—as with BI—and mentioned not at all—e.g., the almost weekly “partying” with Hasan—major aspects of Barack’s postcollegiate years there. Yet apart from one passing reference to “someone staying over” one night, Dreams omitted entirely the existence of any girlfriend in Chicago, never mind one Barack had lived with for almost two full years.
“I am completely missing from” Dreams, Sheila observed, and “I never understood why he wrote it that way.” Dreams made quite clear how Barack had solidified his identity during those years in Chicago, yet she highlighted how “this transformation happened over the course of a very tumultuous love affair which, intriguingly, and paradoxically, Barack does not even mention in his memoir.” Sheila mused that perhaps she had just been edited out. “I wonder if the unedited Dreams is as inaccurate as the published version.”
“Johnnie”—Owens—and Jeremiah Wright appeared as true-to-life characters under their own names, yet Wright did not preach his “Audacity of Hope” sermon at Trinity any time in early 1988. Part Three, about Barack’s summer 1988 trip to Kenya, was the most detailed part of the book by far, as Sheila appreciated better than anyone when she read Dreams. “There are whole passages from the book that are essentially copies of his letters to me,” the ones Barack wrote during his trip and then sought copies of after he signed his first book contract. “I always found it ironic that he was using his love letters to me to write his book and then completely omitted me from the entire account.”
Dreams inaccurately had Ruth Baker Ndesandjo inviting Barack and Auma to her home, instead of them appearing unannounced, but the book did not shy from confronting how troubled were the relationships Obama Sr.’s life and legacy impacted. On the last page of Part Three, Barack noted “the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy,” but in the preceding several pages he reenvisioned both his grandfather’s and his father’s lives through the lens of his own. Onyango “will have to reinvent himself” and “through force of will, he will create a life.” Likewise, Barack Sr. “too, will have to invent himself” and when accepted by the University of Hawaii “he must have known . . . that he had been chosen” thanks to “the blessings of God.” Pierre-Marie Loizeau, an insightful literary scholar, would note that “this repetition is neither fortuitous nor arbitrary,” that “in fact, Obama might just be talking about himself” and that Dreams was “an exercise of self-invention” whereby “blackness . . . is something to be achieved and continuously reinvented.”
Dreams stated that Barack Sr.’s inability to acquire “a faith in other people” had been his fatal flaw, that “for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past,” that “for all your gifts . . . you could never forge yourself into a whole man” because of his failure to exhibit “loyalty” and “a strong, true love.” That was Barack’s closure with the “paternal ghost” who had “haunted his son’s life from childhood” right through to the final completion of his book. Likewise, perceptive philosopher Mitchell Aboulafia would realize that the insistent advice that a Kenyan teacher who had known Barack’s father gives Barack in Dreams—“we must choose,” just as Barack had insisted to DCP’s Cathy Askew—was “actually Obama’s” own stance, and that Obama Sr.’s “failures could in large measure be attributed to his uncompromising commitment to principles, which undermined his ability to compromise and make choices.”
Only in Dreams’ last five pages did Barack write about life after August 1988. He downplayed his enjoyment of law school, calling it “disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure . . . a sort of glorified accounting.” His most recent years had been “a relatively quiet period, less a time of discovery than of consolidation,” and the book concluded with a two-page account of Barack and Michelle’s 1992 wedding. Much of it was devoted to praising Abon’go’s demeanor at the reception, and the narrative ended with Abon’go offering a toast, “To those who are not here with us.”36
Times Books had bought a third-of-a-page ad for Dreams in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, featuring the glowing endorsements by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Derrick Bell, and Marian Wright Edelman plus Kirkus Review’s advance praise and a small, grainy photo of Barack. Ironically, the ad ran alongside a review of a book about John Dewey, father of Ann Dunham’s mentor Alice. Far more important, four pages earlier there also appeared a top-half-of-the-page review of Dreams entitled “A Promise of Redemption.” Written by a young white novelist, Paul Watkins, the review characterized Dreams as a “provocative” book that “persuasively describes” growing up amid “a bewildering combination of races, relatives and homelands.” Barack experienced “the pain of never feeling completely a part of one people or one place,” but when he moves to Chicago “he quickly becomes the pawn of professional organizers, intent on profiteering from money gouged out of the city budget.” Watkins obviously had not given Dreams a careful reading, and although he claimed that Barack’s “story bogs down in discussions of racial exploitation,” Watkins acknowledged that many scenes “are finely written.” He observed how “Obama is no more black than he is white,” yet Dreams offers “no emotional investigation into his other half, his ‘white side,’” only his African American one. Watkins wondered if he was right in thinking that Barack’s underlying argument was “that people of mixed backgrounds must choose only one culture in which to make a spiritual home” and “that it is not possible to be both black and white.”
Other early reviews called Dreams a “poignant, probing memoir,” a “lively autobiographical conversation,” and “a moving and articulate exploration of what it means to be a black American” by an “eloquent and thoughtful” writer. The adjective “compelling” appeared in multiple reviews, and a day after the New York Times review ran, there was another in the Los Angeles Times that praised Dreams for its “sharp eye” and “generous heart.” A Boston Globe column announced the book’s publication and reminded readers that the author “was a local celebrity of sorts five years ago” as president of the Review.
Barack’s modest book tour took him first to Manhattan and a Tuesday-night reading at a Barnes & Noble store on Astor Place. At least two familiar and friendly faces were present: Ann Dunham’s old friend Pete Vayda, whom Barack had met years earlier, plus his dear friend Hasan Chandoo. Barack inscribed and signed a copy “To my brother Hasan who helped me through some tough times with love and loyalty.” Barack’s next stop was Washington, where he was interviewed about how Dreams had become so personal a narrative. “What I realized . . . was that the starting point for any insights I might have really had to do with the story of my own family,” yet “I have not been completely comfortable with calling it an autobiography.” Barack later reiterated that point, remarking that Dreams “wasn’t really an autobiography,” yet he told journalist Bill Thompson that “probably the most difficult part of writing it” was recounting Stan and Madelyn’s argument about her fearful reaction to the aggressive black panhandler.
From Washington, Barack flew to San Francisco and a bookstore appearance way out near Golden Gate Park. Then he headed to Los Angeles and a pair of television interview tapings prior to another evening bookstore event. On Connie Martinson Talks Books, Barack claimed that “it was extraordinarily difficult to grow up in both Hawaii and then later in Indonesia where I was often the only person of African extraction there, and I did not have any male role models.” He acknowledged that his father “dies a very bitter and lonely man,” and when Martinson asked about Jeremiah Wright, Barack called him “a wonderful man” who “represents the best of what the black church has to offer.”
In a second, far longer interview with Marc Strassman for Book Channel, Barack spoke of “the importance of making choices” when confronted with family traditions, such as “the oppressive sexism which exists in Africa,” choices “about what traditions we want to c
ling to” and “which ones we’re willing to discard.” He mentioned his UC Law School class, although he mispronounced W. E. B. Du Bois’s surname, wrongly using a French enunciation, and spoke about the importance of “building up human capital.” Social progress would require “a grassroots mobilization . . . at the level of the street,” and black America had to “break loose of this either-or mentality” in arguing about what was responsible for black inequality. “Inner-city black males who are running around getting young ladies pregnant and then leaving them” was indeed a problem, for “values do matter” and “moral purpose does matter.”
Barack spoke expansively with Strassman, saying that in “my journey to understand who I was . . . it wasn’t until I moved to Chicago and became a community organizer that I think I really grew into myself in terms of my identity.” He admitted that “the accomplishments of my organizing were modest,” but “I connected in a very direct way with the African American community in Chicago.” That allowed him to “walk away with a sense of self-understanding and empowerment and connection.” But Barack had come to realize that “the kind of community organizing that I did” in Roseland “did not take into account the major structural barriers to change that exist in this society,” including “the international economy” and “the power of the media to shape reality.”
