Obama's book is a multicultural picaresque, a search both worldly and internal that will take him to Honolulu, Jakarta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Nairobi, and his ancestral village of Kogelo. Along the way he accumulates knowledge, he peels back layer after layer of secrets, until he becomes his mature, reconciled self. When Obama writes a new preface for the 2004 edition, he is the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. senator from Illinois, and he insists that "what was a more interior, intimate" quest has now "converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come." His quest is not just his own; it becomes emblematic of a national political quest. Writers rarely insist so boldly on the importance of their own books.
At the end of each of the memoir's three long sections ("Origins," "Chicago," and "Kenya"), the narrator is in tears and experiences an epiphany: first, he weeps when he sees his father in a dream and resolves to search for him; then he cries in Jeremiah Wright's church when he realizes that he has found both a community and a faith; and, finally, he collapses in tears at his father's grave, when he realizes that after discovering so much about his father--his intelligence, his failures, his tragic end--he is reconciled to his family and his past.
It is not difficult to understand why politically sympathetic readers were prepared to make extravagant, extra-literary claims for Obama's book during his Presidential campaign. They were reading him not as the civil-rights lawyer and law professor he was when the book was first published, but as a candidate who hoped to succeed George W. Bush, a President who was insistently anti-intellectual, an executive who resisted introspection as a suspect indulgence.
Race is at the core of Obama's story and, like any good storyteller, he heightens whatever opportunity arises to get at his main theme. When he is writing about the more distant past of his mother's side of the family, he tries to plumb the racial memories of his grandparents, people who "like most white Americans at the time" had "never really given black people much thought." Jim Crow around Wichita, Kansas, where they grew up, was in its "more informal, genteel form": "Blacks are there but not there, like Sam the piano player or Beulah the maid or Amos and Andy on the radio--shadowy, silent presences that elicit neither passion nor fear." But when the Dunhams lived briefly after the war in north Texas, they begin to feel the presence of race. At the bank, Toot, Obama's grandmother, is told that a "nigger" like the janitor, Mr. Reed, should never be called "Mister." His mother, Ann, who was eleven or twelve, is harassed as a "nigger lover" and a "dirty Yankee" for having a black girl as a friend. Here Obama is careful to signal his own doubt; memory, and its deceptive nature, is also his theme. "It's hard to know how much weight to give to these episodes," he writes. Obama is skeptical when his grandfather says that he and Toot left Texas for Seattle to escape Southern racism; Toot suggests that a better job opportunity was more likely the case. Obama's predilection, as the book will show, is to reconcile possibilities. He comes to suspect that, in his grandfather's mind, the wounds of blacks "merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away," the sense that as a young man he had been shunned as not quite respectable--a "wop," his in-laws called him. "Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in."
Obama is also wise to Hawaii, to the "ugly conquest" of the islands through "aborted treaties and crippling disease," the exploitation by missionaries and the cane and pineapple barons. "And yet, by the time my family arrived"--in 1959, the same year as statehood--"it had somehow vanished from collective memory," he writes, "like morning mist that the sun burned away." There is something deeply attractive about Obama in this mode, when he is unsentimentally trying to grasp the complexity of things.
Obama's novelistic contrivances can sometimes feel strained. In Chapter 2, he recalls a day when he is nine years old and living with his family in Indonesia. He is sitting in the library of the American Embassy, in Jakarta, where his mother teaches English. The scene is painted in palpable detail: the traffic-choked road to the embassy, with its rickshaws and over-crowded jitneys; the "wizened brown women in faded brown sarongs" with their baskets of fruit; the "smartly dressed" Marines at the embassy; his mother's boss, who "smelled of after-shave and his starched collar cut hard into his neck." Obama recalls ignoring the World Bank reports and geological surveys and finding a collection of Life magazines. He thumbs through the ads: "Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV ('Why not the best?') and Campbell's Soup ('Mm-mm good!')." Then he comes on a photograph of a Japanese woman "cradling a young, naked girl in a shallow tub": the girl is gnarled and crippled. Then he comes across a photograph of a black man who has used a chemical treatment to whiten his complexion. "There were thousands of people like him," he learns, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person." Reading this, Obama recalls, "I felt my face and neck get hot." The article is like an "ambush" on his sensibilities and innocence. "I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama writes.
During the Presidential campaign, a journalist from the Chicago Tribune searched for the article. No such article ran. Obama responded feebly, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?" Archivists at Ebony could not find anything, either. It might have been that Obama was thinking of John Howard Griffin's book Black Like Me. Griffin, a journalist and a burly white Texan who was wounded in the Second World War, decided, in 1959, to explore the lives of African-Americans in the South. On assignment for Sepia, a black-oriented magazine, Griffin shaved off his hair, exposed himself to long sessions of ultraviolet rays, and took huge doses of medication prescribed by a dermatologist to darken his skin; he then traveled around Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi where he discovered the indignities suffered by men and women of color. His book, which was published in 1961, was a best-seller and remained popular for decades in American schools; however, in the Texas town where Griffin lived with his family, he was hanged in effigy.
Obviously, Obama was after an emotional truth here, and there certainly were articles published over time about black men and women who used whitening creams. The scene cannot help but echo that famous moment in Malcolm X's autobiography when he gets his first "self-defacing" conk, allowing a barber to take the kink out of his hair with a stinging lye-and-potato mixture called congolene.
Obama is not always easy on Ann Dunham. That is part of the drama of his book: his obvious love for a woman who is intelligent, idealistic, brave, and engaged with the world but also, at times, maddeningly naive and frequently thousands of miles away. Obama's father, who is almost completely absent from Obama's life as anything more than a ghost, is angry and self-indulgent, brittle with his son on his one trip to Hawaii, and yet he is the singular object of the narrator's imaginings, at the center of a young man's quest to claim a race and a history.
Obama is proud of his mother's broadmindedness, her insistence that her family avoid behaving abroad like "ugly Americans." She demands that the family resist the temptation to treat anyone as an "other," as a "foreigner" or a benighted "local." More than her Indonesian husband, she does not automatically assume that an American habit of mind or culture is superior to the Indonesian. She aspires to be cosmopolitan. This clearly had an enormous influence on Obama, as a person and as a politician. And yet, early in the book, Obama is reflexively suspicious of his mother. He is the adolescent whose vanity resides in the way in which he "sees through" his parent. "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues," he writes, "depended on a faith I didn't possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious; that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny." He could hardly bear
her self-conscious admiration for black culture. When she brings him Mahalia Jackson records and recordings of the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., he rolls his eyes. "Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne," he writes, echoing the sarcastic tone of his teenaged self. "To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear."
Obama realizes that he has to learn how to be an African-American almost entirely on his own. It is not something that his mother and grandparents, however well intentioned they may be, can provide.
Obama sometimes felt himself a fake when he tried to imitate the language and resentments of his few black friends. When they would talk about "how white folks will do you," the phrase felt "uncomfortable in my mouth." "I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase." Poignantly, Obama "ceased to advertise" his mother's race "when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites." But, at the same time, he is well aware that he is no Richard Wright, who made the classic migration from Mississippi to the South Side; nor is he Malcolm Little, whose father, a Baptist minister and Garveyite organizer, was killed in Lansing.
"We were in goddamned Hawaii," Obama writes. "We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the proverbial bus. None of our white friends, guys like Jeff or Scott from the basketball team, treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. Shit, seemed like half of 'em wanted to be black themselves--or at least Doctor J."
Nevertheless, Obama is lost, almost completely without African-American adults around to help him figure himself out. For an adolescent black kid in an almost wholly white world, Hawaii was a vexed and confusing paradise. "As it was, I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere."
Obama is hardly humorless in private. Occasionally a wry, mocking wit comes through in his public appearances. As a writer, though, he is usually earnest in the extreme. Chapter 5, which covers his years at Occidental, opens with him stretched out on his couch at three in the morning, listening to Billie Holiday singing "I'm a Fool to Want You" after a party at his apartment. Hasan has gone off to his girlfriend's house. He has a drink, a cigarette; we are led to believe that he has been partying pretty hard. He thinks about his father, about the drugs he has taken, about his youthful disaffection, his tussles with his mother. Then the record ends. "I suddenly felt very sober," and he pours himself another drink: "I could hear someone flushing a toilet, walking across a room. Another insomniac, probably, listening to his life tick away. That was the problem with booze and drugs, wasn't it? At some point they couldn't stop that ticking sound, the sound of certain emptiness." It is a 3 A.M. scene in which Sinatra meets Sartre.
Obama emphasizes two aspects of his life at Occidental, nearly to the exclusion of everything else: he rehearses different kinds of African-American voices and describes his increasing politicization. The audiobook version of Dreams from My Father is arguably of greater interest than the text, and one of the reasons is that Obama, who admits that he has become a master of shifting his own voice and syntax to fit the situation, expertly mimics his black Occidental friends: Marcus, "the most conscious of brothers" with a sister in the Black Panthers; Joyce, who insists on her multiracial identity; Tim, with his argyle sweaters and peculiar taste for country music. As the book progresses, he is equally adept at imitating "Rafiq," the black nationalist, "Marty," the organizer, and his Kenyan relatives. He does not mock them; but there is a comic affection in those voices, a rich texture to the performance. He is also telling us something about the diversity of the black community, its range of qualities, anxieties, talents, and backgrounds.
The specifics of Obama's background are sui generis, but at Occidental he begins to identify with a nagging, and fairly common, problem: an anxiety about authenticity. He is reminded again of his bland good fortune at this pleasant college campus near Pasadena: "I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape. You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria. When pressed, they would sputter and explain that they refused to be categorized. They weren't defined by the color of their skin, they would tell you. They were individuals." But Obama sees the lie in that, too. Race is a "fact." The kids who insist completely on their own individuality, the ones who want to trip the lock of color, of tribe, are also deluded. "They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people."
The role model who shocks Obama into a sense of the life he ought to pursue is the straight-talking Chicago girl he calls Regina. She pointedly asks to call him Barack. She is delightful. She lives with her mother (the father is absent) on the South Side of Chicago. She talks about taverns and pool halls and close-knit neighbors, "about evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter." Hers is a vision of black life that fills Obama with longing--"a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history." Not only does he get involved in the anti-apartheid movement; he also resolves to live, as an adult, in a large African-American community. The appearance of Regina, we come to feel, is a harbinger of Michelle Robinson.
Obama is on the move in his book, but he moves not to escape the onerous bonds known to the early memoirists--the bonds of slavery, Jim Crow, prison, or an oppressive home. He is on the move in order to satisfy an inner search, to answer the questions of his divided self.
As a well-read student who is coming of age in the era of multiculturalism and critical theory, Obama is keenly aware of the academic notions that identity is, in some measure, a social construction. Race is a fact, a matter of genetics and physical attributes, but it is also a matter of social and self-conception. A commanding theme of the book is a young man's realization that he has a say in all of this; that he is not merely a "product" of family history; he has to make sense of his circumstances and his inheritances, and then decide what he wants to make of it all and who he wants to be. Identity and race are matters over which he has some influence.
In Chicago, Obama enters a realm of political work where an essential part of his job coincides with his internal search: he essentially canvasses the South Side. And, as he asks about the problems of one pastor, priest, and community activist after another, he adds to his store of knowledge about the way people live. Every possible form of black politics and political thinking--liberal integrationism, black nationalism, Afrocentrism, apathy, activism, even the tendency to conspiracy thinking--is heard and, in the memoir, given voice. At a meeting with a colleague called Deacon Will, a roomful of people are inspired by Will's moving description of his own life. "Then, as if the sight of this big man weeping had watered the dry surface of their hearts, the others in the room began speaking about their own memories in solemn, urgent tones," Obama writes. "They talked about life in small Southern towns: the corner stores where men had gathered to learn the news of the day or lend a hand to women with their groceries, the way adults looked after each other's children ('Couldn't get away with nothing, 'cause your momma had eyes and ears up and down the whole block'), the sense of public decorum that such familiarity had helped sustain. In their voices was no little bit of nostalgia, elements of selective memory; but the whole of what they recalled rang vivid and true, the sound of shared loss." The scene is sentimental, but the reader cannot help thinking that it, and a hundred instances like it, shaped Obama's thinking and political style: the belief in "sacred stories" as a form of political communication, understanding, and cohesion.
Obama is less sentimental about politics. In fact, as he recalls his dail
y encounters with the despair of the de-industrialized South Side, his instinct to personalize his vision is combined with a capacity to see problems with a certain dispassion, a clear-eyed sense of how markets and shifting economic fortunes create or destroy places like the South Side with a historical ruthlessness:
I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sort of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics.
It is a passage that sounds strikingly similar to his mother's descriptions in her dissertation of how modern economic change threatened the culture of the Javanese villages where she was finishing her doctoral fieldwork. In Chicago, Obama is doing his own sort of fieldwork.
On the South Side, Obama could take in the full range of black political opinion. His neighborhood, Hyde Park-Kenwood, was also home to Louis Farrakhan, to Jesse Jackson's headquarters, and to intellectuals of varying ideologies and tempers. Obama's exposure to the sort of political viewpoints that are aired regularly on the street and black radio, but never on "Meet the Press" or "Washington Week," is something that he takes seriously. Obama allows Rafiq many paragraphs to dilate on a black-nationalist vision, one that interests, but, finally, frustrates the narrator. He reads issues of The Final Call, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam, and he listens to the nationalists on the radio, but he worries that what had been a generation ago, in Malcolm X's voice, a wake-up call and a summons to pride, has now become fantastical delusion, "one more excuse for inaction." Obama determines that the sort of black nationalism he is hearing from Rafiq and others has "twin strands": one that is an affirming message "of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility" and another that depends on hatred of whites. Obama concludes that Rafiq is right to think that "deep down, all blacks were potential nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward." But a nationalism that depends on racial animosity, that is subject to conspiracy theory, contradicts the morality that his mother taught him, a morality of "subtle distinctions" between "individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference." Obama concludes that nationalism, like Reagan's own sunny right-wing vision, depends on "magical thinking." African-Americans, he says, are those "who could least afford such make-believe." If community organizing insists on anything, it is pragmatism. And, since nationalism lacks "a workable plan," Obama looks elsewhere.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 32
