Dreams From My Father is not the kind of book you’d expect from a politician, much less one who hopes to be president of the United States (and is in with a chance). Maybe that’s because it was written before he entered politics – in 1995, when Obama was the first black president of Harvard Law Review. It’s a book about growing up and coming to terms with his identity as a black man in a racially divded America, as the son of a white American woman and a black African father.
Obama’s mother was originally from Kansas, and grew up in Hawaii. She met Barack Obama Sr at the University of Hawaii, where they were both students. They married at a time when ‘mixed race’ marriages were still illegal in many US states. When Obama (Jr) was two years old, his father returned to Africa (via Harvard). He had a wife and family in Kenya, and acquired another wife when he got there – and American who followed him from Harvard and settled in Africa.
Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and (Muslim) stepfather from the age of six, where he grew up in a very different world to affluent America. His pets included a chimpanzee and crocodiles, in his backyard pond. He got up at 5am every morning to do lessons in English with his mother before he went to school. Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents when he won a scholarship to a prestigious Honolulu prep school. This represented an elevation in the family status; the most anyone had yet achieved.
His first day at school, a redheaded girl asked to touch his hair and was offended when he refused. A boy asked him if his father ate people. He was one of only a handful of African American students. From the outset, he felt his outsider status, though he fit in more as time went by.
One of the things he struggles with is trying to learn how to be an African American man, with no real role models to speak of. The closes thing he has is his grandfather’s friend, an ageing poet. He turns to pop culture, particularly basketball.
He writes: “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’s varied background and upbringing means that he is adept at moving between worlds and speaking the language of different people from different backgrounds, in a language they will relate to: an ideal skill for campaigning for president.
He made his first speeches at university in LA, on affirmative action: “I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions. It was a discovery that made me hungry for words. Not words to hide behind but words that could carry a message, support an idea.” Observed “the power of words to transform”. The seeds of his future political career are sown, but also the seeds of his style as a speechmaker – a politician whose way with words is compared to Kennedy and Lincoln. It’s the start of the concept that words and ideas are important, not just window dressing. After he makes his first speech, a student comes up to him after his speech and tells him that he moved her, that he spoke from the heart.
Jonathan Raban writes, in an absolutely wonderful article in the London Review of Books: “He courts his listeners not as legions of the blissful but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognisable as their own”. This memoir is about alienation, about looking for identity, for a place and a people to call home. Obama is a lifelong outsider looking in, and this memoir is full of close observations of people and society.
Hillary and Obama have many similar ideas about the changes that need to happen in American society. The big difference in their positions is how those changes should happen. Raban makes the point that Hillary is “a classic technocrat and rationalist”. For her, change comes from the top down. For Obama, change is from the bottom up – inspiring and organising a shift in the popular consciousness. Traditionally, this approach is associated with the political right. His style – from his organising days, and even more, from his ambition to be a community organiser, is to listen to people’s experiences, problems, hopes and dreams, and build practical solutions and policies from what he hears. It’s the opposite of bringing a set of beliefs to a problem and imposing them – top down. It’s also why he’s very good at engaging people on an individual basis, why he formulates answers to questions in interviews and doesn’t just use the questions as springboards for pre-prepared answers.
The Audacity of Hope is Obama’s policy book, specifically outlining his views on various policy issues and the way government should function. It’s the book tour that segued into a political campaign.
But Dreams From My Father offers a window into the inner workings of the man. It’s a much more unguarded look into the way he thinks, and the circumstances that made him the politician he is today. It’s a beautifully written, sharply intelligent, sometimes provocative book about race and identity, one that contains echoes of Malcolm X’s autobiography in the way that it links one man’s story and political evolution to the world he sees around him. (Interestingly, when Obama turned to literature looking for answers to his identity crisis, Macolm X’s book was the one that really resonated with him.)
Read Dreams from my Father to understand the presidential hopeful Barack Obama. But, more than that, read it because it’s a fantastic book, and would be worth reading if Obama worked at the local milk bar.
JC (reviewed on Triple R Breakfasters, March 2008)
