The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Chicago was also a place where Obama was trying to divine how race figured into his life as a man. How does tribe, especially when tribe is so complicated and mixed, figure into the question of whom to love, whom to marry? Obama dates both black and white women, and he is not reluctant to make that experience, too, a part of his narrative. In New York, he tells us, he loved a white woman: "She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime." They dated for a year. At one point, the woman invites him to her family's country house. It is autumn. They go canoeing across an icy lake. The family knows the land, "the names of the earliest white settlers--their ancestors--and before that, the names of the Indians who'd once hunted the land." The house is a family inheritance, and so, it seems, is the country itself. The library is filled with the pictures of dignitaries whom the grandfather had known. And Obama, who needs not remind us that his own inheritance is a more elusive thing, sees the gulf between him and this woman. "I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany," he writes. "And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider." He is like the "ethnic" in a hundred novels, the outsider who, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension, enters the world of the established order through romance.

  The connection is fraught. After leaving a theater where they have seen a bitterly funny play about race, Obama's girlfriend is confused. She asks why black people are so "angry all the time." They argue. It is a familiar moment of romantic culture-clash; Obama is like one of Jhumpa Lahiri's young Bengali-Americans in the town house of his wealthy Wasp girlfriend. But Obama, as ever, refuses to describe their breakup as evidence of a hopeless gap. "Maybe even if she'd been black it still wouldn't have worked out," he writes. "I mean, there are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good."

  Obama ends the Chicago section by discovering Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. The scene doesn't merely flirt with melodrama; as the portrayal of revelation, it insists on our good faith. As he sits in the pews early one Sunday morning, he hears in the music and in the minister's voice the convergence of "all the notes" of the many life stories he has been listening to for the past three years. Then, as in so many (far greater) memoirs, from Augustine to Malcolm X, Obama dramatizes his spiritual shift, his own leap of faith. Until now, he has resisted or deferred that leap, despite the blandishments of so many well-meaning ministers and activists, but now the stories of suffering and redemption suddenly link with the story of suffering and redemption. "In that single note--hope!--I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories--of survival, and freedom, and hope--became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black." Obama's tears this time are not tears of despair, as they were at the end of "Origins." They are tears of release, the joy of having gained something profound: the comfort of community, the immensity of faith.

  Obama begins the section on his journey to Kenya, which he made in the summer of 1988, with a series of portentous gestures. He spends three weeks in Europe before going to Africa and he reports gloomy disappointment with Paris, London, and Madrid (a plaza has "De Chirico shadows"). He is a "Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers." On the road between Madrid and Barcelona, he encounters a Spanish-speaking African, a doppelganger from Senegal. ("What was his name? I couldn't remember now; just another hungry man far away from home, one of the many children of former colonies--Algerians, West Indians, Pakistanis--now breaching the barricades of their former masters, mounting their own ragged, haphazard invasion. And yet, as we walked toward the Ramblas, I had felt as if I knew him as well as any man; that, coming from opposite ends of the earth, we were somehow making the same journey.") It is not an especially convincing sequence; even the highly sympathetic reader senses a young man wanting to dramatize his loneliness with maximal symbolic freight and artificial political meaning.

  The symbol-laden atmosphere carries over to his five-week tour of Kenya. At the Nairobi airport, he encounters the beautiful Miss Omoro who helps him with his lost baggage and dazzles him by recognizing his name. Throughout the book (and, as we know, throughout his political career), Obama's name has been a symbol of his identity, both of his wrestling match with identity and of the way others see him. "For the first time in my life," Obama writes, "I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people's memories." And he hasn't even left the airport.

  On his first day, he experiences the shock of recognition: everyone looks like him! "All of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that [Obama's friends] claimed to have undergone after their first visit to Africa. For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it's supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway.... Here the world was black, and so you were just you."

  But Obama's naivete and his eagerness to be transformed recedes as he starts listening to his storytelling relatives, men and women who deepen his knowledge about his father and all that his father has come to stand for in his mind. Obama's sister Auma, who studied in Germany, had spent time with Obama in the States. During that first encounter, she not only relayed the basic facts of their father's life in Nairobi--his work for an American oil company and various ministries; the political intrigues in Nairobi; his sad deterioration--but was prepared to separate myth from reality. She is, unlike so many others, properly skeptical, as well as highly intelligent. When she tells a story about how Jomo Kenyatta summoned the Old Man (as she calls Barack, Sr.) and warned him to "keep his mouth shut," she adds, "I don't know how much of these details are true." What is certain is that Barack, Sr., was a man made miserable by his political disappointment, and also by his "survivor's guilt," as one who was lucky enough to be airlifted to another world and return with an education. Auma is sympathetic, but she is also far more clear-eyed than Obama's mother was. The Old Man, she reports, was a miserable husband and a worse father. Drunk and raging, he would stagger into Auma's room late at night, wake her, and rail at her about how he had been betrayed. Obama realizes rather quickly that when he was ten and his father came to visit him, Barack, Sr., was already in the midst of his decline. The revelations are utterly at odds with Obama's long-held myth of his father's grandeur, a myth propagated by his loving and well-meaning mother. It is a myth, he comes to understand, that he can no longer rely on. "I felt as if my world had been turned on its head," Obama writes of his discoveries about his father, "as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men." He realizes that he had been "wrestling with nothing more than a ghost." And in that discovery there is a dawning sense of wisdom and, even, liberation: "The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live."

  As Obama spends more time in Kenya with Auma and his aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, and step-siblings, his own vanities begin to peel away. Sitting with his relatives in the shabby apartment belonging to one of them, with its "well-worn" furniture and "two-year-old calendar," he recognizes the same attempt to ward off poverty, the same chatter, the s
ame "absence of men" that he knew on the South Side. The apartment is "just like the apartments in Altgeld." In Africa, he sees that his self-willed collegiate asceticism is "hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent." And as he walks in the vast Nairobi slum called Mathare, with its tin shacks and open sewage, he, too, comes to see what survivor's guilt is all about.

  One day, he and a reluctant Auma go on a safari. Here, again, Obama cannot resist the symbolic weight of what he is seeing. In the Great Rift Valley, where remains of the early hominids, including "Lucy," were found, the same place that Obama's father described to the eager schoolchildren in Hawaii, Obama sits at twilight watching hyenas feed on the carcass of a wildebeest and vultures loom on the perimeter of the kill. "It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture's wings as it strained to lift itself into the current," Obama writes. "And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over the hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear."

  Finally, Obama visits the scene of his own origins. With his sister Auma, his stepmother Kezia, his aunt Zeituni, and his brothers Roy and Bernard, he boards a train for Kisumu, the town closest to his ancestral village of Kogelo. He is riding on tracks that the British began laying in 1895, the year that Hussein Onyango Obama was born. While he rides the night train, Obama experiences one of his not infrequent reveries. Colonialism and its legacy are a persistent theme in Obama's book, and once more he crosses the wires of the personal and the political and imagines the result. Would a British officer on the train's maiden voyage "have felt a sense of triumph, a confidence that the guiding light of Western civilization had finally penetrated the African darkness? Or did he feel a sense of foreboding, a sudden realization that the entire enterprise was an act of folly, that this land and its people would outlast imperial dreams?"

  In Kogelo, Obama meets "Granny" (this is Mama Sarah, as she is known locally, Barack, Sr.,'s stepmother) and learns from her his family's history as if from a Homeric singer of myth and epic. In interviews with visiting journalists, Sarah is plainspoken. When Obama gets her to recount family history, she is a vatic presence. Sitting outside her simple house, she speaks at great length, beginning:

  First there was Miwiru. It's not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma, Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo. The women who bore them, their names are forgotten, for that was the way of our people.

  She tells the whole story: The family's migration from Uganda to Kogelo. Battles with the Bantu. The saga of Onyango. It is a story of Genesis, of Exodus, of generations--all recalled and told in the Luo language, with the sagacity of a village ancient. The opening soliloquy lasts for more than ten pages and, after some narrative business, resumes for eighteen more. It's probably safe to say that these extended quotations are constructed out of Obama's effortful attempts to derive as much information from her as he could, and that he re-created her words in the most poetic way possible, but it is not a wholesale invention. Such recitation is a rich Luo tradition; often, even illiterate elders can recite their family histories for many generations.

  The story of father and son, Onyango and Barack, Sr., and their attempts to move out into the greater world and then return, their attempts to be cosmopolitans--one at the high noon of colonialism, the next as colonialism dwindles and disappears--is a remarkable and tragic story. Onyango is, in many ways, an unsympathetic figure: brusque, cruel. But his curiosity and his ambition fascinate his grandson. Onyango, Sarah tells him, "became curious and decided that he must see these white men for himself." He sets out on foot for Nairobi, and returns "many months later" wearing the white man's clothing: trousers, a shirt, and "shoes that covered his feet," a sight that frightened the village children. They think that he has been circumcised or is somehow unclean and, therefore, hiding under these strange garments. He is an exile from Eden, and is now estranged from his village world. Soon, the white man's presence extends to every corner of Kenya and, as Sarah says, infects black Africa and economic norms and cultural values: "With tea, we found that we needed sugar, and teakettles, and cups. All these things we bought with skins and meat and vegetables." Then the Luo start working for wages, for "the white man's coin." Guns, war, a wholesale fall from grace soon follow. "Respect for tradition weakened, for young people saw that the elders had no real power. Beer, which once had been made of honey and which men drank only sparingly, now came in bottles, and many men became drunks. Many of us began to taste the white man's life, and we decided that compared to him, our lives were poor."

  At the end of the long day with her grandson, Mama Sarah rummages around in a trunk that contains a few invaluable scraps of the past and gives them to Obama "like messages in bottles": the frayed document that Onyango carried as a servant among British officers, one of Barack, Sr.,'s letters of application to an American university. ("This was it, I thought to myself," Obama writes ruefully. "My inheritance.") Finally, he leaves his grandmother's hut and goes out into the yard to contemplate two concrete slabs covered in tile, the graves of his grandfather and father:

  Standing before the two graves, I felt everything around me--the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky--closing in, until I was left with only a series of mental images, Granny's stories come to life....

  For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father's pain. My questions were my brothers' questions. Their struggle, my birthright.

  The epilogue of Dreams from My Father ties things together neatly. The dreamy spell of recovering the past is broken before Obama leaves for home. A history teacher named Rukia Odero, a friend of his father's, warns against coming to Africa in a false quest for the "authentic." Obama must realize, she tells him, that every question has not been resolved.

  Then the narrator brings us up to date. He admits that Harvard Law School was not always fun ("three years in poorly lit libraries"), but his idealism and heightened rhetoric are undiminished. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, he says, he also hears the spirit of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, of Martin and Malcolm, of Japanese families in internment camps and Jewish piece-workers in sweatshops, of dust-bowl farmers and the people of Altgeld.

  The story ends as traditional comedies do--with a wedding. When Michelle Robinson appears in the story, everything falls into place. Surrounded by his American and African family, by friends from organizing and from law school, from Punahou, Occidental, and Columbia, Obama and Michelle are married by Reverend Wright. "To a happy ending," Obama says as a toast and, in the African tradition, dribbles a little of his drink on the floor for the elders buried in the earth. Everything is reconciled. As befits the form of so many narratives of ascent, Obama has found himself and he has found a wife, a family, a community, a city, a faith, and a cause. At the same time, he has avoided his father's mistakes and grown out of his own. He is at ease. His wedding unites black and white, America and Kenya. And, since nearly all of the millions of people who have read the book read it in the light of an even greater quest, the hero and his story are elevated to mythic levels.

  Peter Osnos and his colleagues at Times Books did not have outsized commercial ambitions for Dreams from My Fa
ther. "We had mid-list hopes for Obama," Osnos said. "Most galleys were done plain then, but we did a nice advance reader's edition, which indicates a certain interest. We were going for the multicultural thing." The book was reviewed positively in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, but it received scant publicity. Obama was interviewed in Los Angeles for the cable-television show "Connie Martinson Talks Books"; at the end of the show, Martinson turned to the author and said, "You know, I've never said this to anyone, but you would have a terrific career in politics." As part of a modest book tour, Obama gave readings for small crowds at bookstores including his local, Fifty-seventh Street Books, in Hyde Park. At Eso Won Books, an African-American bookstore in Los Angeles, just nine people came to see him, and Obama simply sat everyone in a circle and, after reading for a few minutes, shared details of his life and, ever the community organizer, asked people, "Tell me your name and what you do."