Monday, December 2, 2013

Dreams From My Father - A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama

A picture of America's first coloured President makes for the cover of Dreams of My Father. Look closer and there's a tag that says, "His remarkable story in his own words". But this book is not about the Barack Obama, we all know. It's about the other Barack Obama, the President's father.The author's 'story of race and inheritance' is an autobiographical narrative was first published in 1995 after Obama was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, but before his political career began. It traces his days back to Honolulu where he was born to Barack Obama Sr of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Kansas. The book starts with a telephone call that Barack Obama Jr received on his 21st birthday. The call from an unknown aunt in Kenya announced that the he'd just lost his father. "At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man," the author writes.It is from this point, Obama starts telling the story backwards. He talks of his early days in Hawaii, where being 'mulatto' (of mixed race) didn't really matter. He talks about the stories his maternal grandparents told about his father - how he loved to dance and win people over. He follows it up with his memories of Indonesia - statues of Hanuman, boxing with his mother's Indonesian husband, battling chicken pox, the beggars and kite-flying with children of farmers, servants and low-level bureaucrats.It was his return to the US for schooling in Hawaii and college in Los Angeles that changed his outlook. H realised he wasn't black and he certainly wasn't white. Torn between two worlds, he sought refuge in alcohol and smoke, reading books on black history. After a brief stint at Columbia, New York, he decided to work as an organiser and moved to Chicago to work among the black community there. Obama recounts the difficulty of the experience, as his programme faced resistance from entrenched community leaders and apathy on the part of the established bureaucracy. After three years, he decided he needed an education that would enable him to serve better those in need. He followed his father's footsteps to Harvard Law School and went on to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.But before Harvard, Kenya beckoned him. Here begins the most interesting part of the book - Kenya. He travels to his grandfather's house in Alego and traces the history of the Obama clan with the help of his father's other wife and his half-siblings. It was in Kenya, he found the freedom he couldn't have in America. "For a span of weeks or months, you could experience that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it's supposed to grow... Here the world was black, and you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie and committing betrayal," he writes. It was in Kenya, he rediscovered his father.Obama says, "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 had witnessed in Chicago - all of it connected to a small plot of earth an ocean away, connected more by the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain I felt was my father's pain. My questions were my brothers' questions. Their struggle, my birthright."Like his speeches, Obama's narrative too is lyrical. The book's not about racism or about the atrocities on African Americans. It exposes the dilemmas African Americans face in their day-to-day lives. Nearly all are born Americans and haven't been to Africa. Still, they fail to connect with the nation that has treated their ancestors worse than animals. There lives are governed by both history and destiny.Obama's account is refreshingly honest. What makes the book really interesting is Obama's description of life in various places - Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and of course, Kenya. It's an amazing story, beautifully t

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