Dreams from My Father: a review

"Everyone was welcome into the club of disaffection." 

For the eight years he was in the White House, I watched Barack Obama with a mixture of admiration, gratitude, and curiosity. Did this man never lose his cool? Never display doubt or uncertainty? How could anyone be that ON all the time? I understood that as the first African American president he had to be better than any prior president in ways that I couldn't even dream mattered, but where was the passion? Reading Becoming last year helped me better understand the extreme pressure of that life for both the President and the First Lady. In many ways, those roles required the Obamas to give up a part of their humanity that allows the rest of us to breathe, to fumble, and to recover.

Dreams from my Father, written by Barack Obama before he entered politics, largely answered my questions about the man behind the Presidential podium. Barack Obama the fatherless son, the struggling teenager from a "broken home," the mixed-race American perceived as Black and raised white, the pre-public-figure author is real. He smokes weed, uses the N word, and questions his place in the world. He experiences anger, insecurity, and loss. He questions himself and the people in his life. He looks for learning, though not necessarily in the classroom.  

Obama of the White House always had the right words, even if he sometimes seemed to lack emotion in delivering them. Young Obama the author was allowed to combine his linguistic power with his very real frustrations with, questions about, and concern for the world. Dreams covers what Obama knows of his family background - his mother's parents from Kansas and eventually his paternal relatives in Kenya. It includes the stories he is told of his early life, his own remembrances from childhood and youth in Hawaii and Indonesia, and his development as a community organizer in Chicago. It ends with him ready to enter Harvard Law School. 

This Obama is articulate, funny, insightful and real. As a young man he struggles with who he is, knowing his place in the world, and that inescapable dichotomy of being Black in a white family and in a white country. Obama is forgiving of his grandparents, with whom he lived for most of his childhood and youth, for their blindness to their own racism. Theirs is the kind of racism we all have because of living in a culture that ensures the road for white people is laid smooth. It is insidious and alive just under the surface. He also forgives them and his mother for the impossibly perfect stories they told of his father, a man he met only once and about whom he later learns more honest apprisals. 

Like all memoirs, the structure and plot of this one are built into the telling. What makes this special is seeing the development, told with vulnerability and apparent sincerity, of a man who would go on to make history. This is the Barack Obama I wished for on TV as he attempted to rebuild America into what it might actually be, the one we only got hints of after countless school shootings. This Obama wouldn't let people compare his wife to a monkey or question his Blackness or his birth. Then again, this unpolished Obama probably wouldn't have been elected, and that's the real injustice.  

I highly recommend this book. It is pleasantly free of American jingoism, and it ends with an extended visit to Kenya, and that can never be a bad thing.