Barack Obama Go Home (Volume Book 1)

Some of the real people made news during the campaign when they protested at some aspect of their portrayals. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, who was dying of cancer, read drafts of her son's book and, although she admired it, even she had quibbles. She told her friend Alice Dewey that she was really not quite so naive about race as her son made her out to be.

Obama's story contains many of the familiar features of African-American autobiography: Obama, however, is in many ways more privileged than his literary predecessors. He is middle class. He has benefited from the passage of time and from many laws. He enters institutions of privilege often denied his precursors. And, as both a person and a storyteller, this poses a problem for him. The lawns and quadrangles of Columbia and Harvard Law School are not ordinarily the landscapes of epic struggle. Moreover, Obama has grown up, sometimes to his frustration, after the civil rights movement.

His is hardly a world free of racism, but it is one in which the popular culture around him is rich with African-American stars, from the musicians he watched on television as a child in Hawaii to the enormously influential figures of his adulthood. What's more, his white friends have listened to those records, watched those shows, idolised those same stars. Knowingly or not, they have come to accept Ellison's idea that what we understand to be American is, in countless visible and invisible ways, impossible without African-Americans.

Narratives of ascent, by their nature, must begin with deprivation, oppression and existential dread. Obama seems to sense this problem and, at the very start of his book, darkens his canvas as well as he can. He is 21 and living in New York. He places himself in "that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan", knowing that the mere mention of Harlem, to some white non-New Yorkers, will resonate in a minor key. The block is "uninviting", "treeless", shadowy; the buzzer is broken; the sounds of gunfire echo in the night; a "black doberman the size of a wolf" prowls nearby.

And, to flavour the menacing picture with a dash of class resentment, Obama reports that white people from the better neighbourhoods walk their dogs on his street "to let the animals shit on our curbs".

He heightens the facts of his spare and lonely life. His "kindred spirit" is a silent neighbour who lives alone, and eventually dies alone, a crumpled heap on the third-floor landing. A paragraph later we realise the literary effect for which Obama is striving: As he is cooking his eggs "on a cold, dreary November morning", Obama gets the news on a scratchy line from Nairobi. His 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 and peels back layer after layer of secrets until he becomes his mature, reconciled self. When Obama writes a new preface for the edition, he is the Democratic party nominee for US senator for 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".

The invention of Barack Obama

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: 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 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. But his 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, and finds a collection of Life magazines. He thumbs through the ads: 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.

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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 his mother.

That is part of the drama of his book: He is proud of her broadmindedness, her insistence that her family avoid behaving abroad like "ugly Americans". This clearly had an enormous influence on Obama, as a person and as a politician. And yet, early in the book, he is suspicious of his mother. He is the adolescent whose vanity resides in the way in which he "sees through" his parent. 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, he rolls his eyes. 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 organiser, was killed in Lansing.

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. He emphasises two aspects of his life at Occidental College in California, nearly to the exclusion of everything else: The audiobook version of Dreams from My Father is arguably of greater interest than the print edition, 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.

He does not mock them; but there is a comic affection in those voices, a rich texture to the performance. 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 to satisfy an inner search, to answer the questions of his divided self. In Chicago, he enters a realm of political work where an essential part of his job coincides with his internal search: 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. 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.

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In New York, he tells us, he loved a white woman: Her voice sounded like a wind chime. At one point, she invites him to her family's country house. 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 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. 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.

The invention of Barack Obama | Books | The Guardian

The connection is fraught. After leaving a theatre 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". It is a familiar moment of romantic culture-clash; he is like one of Jhumpa Lahiri's young Bengali-Americans in the town house of his wealthy Wasp girlfriend.

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But Obama, as ever, refuses to describe their breakup as evidence of a hopeless gap. 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, he dramatises his spiritual shift, his own leap of faith. His 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: Obama begins the section on his journey to Kenya, which he made in the summer of , 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.

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He is a "westerner not entirely at home in the west, an African on his way to a land full of strangers". On his first day in Kenya, he experiences the shock of recognition: Obama's sister Auma had spent time with him 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; his sad deterioration — but was prepared to separate myth from reality.

The Old Man, she reports, was a miserable husband and a worse father. Beyond this, almost every chapter touches on how the actions of the Republican-controlled House and later Senate made legislating by consensus almost impossible for the Obama administration. The frustration of the authors with regards to Tea Party and Republican politics brings us onto the third theme of note: Many have claimed since his election that Obama is a believer in incremental change , which failed to fit with one of the most memorable, energetic and, most of all, hopeful presidential campaigns.

At this point I have painted a rather miserable image of the Obama presidency. This is particularly so with regards to the economic recovery, health-care legislation, the decreases in economic inequality, higher-education reforms and social issues such as LGBT rights. The broader political context is again important, though: For an exploration of this dynamic as early as , see here. As he concisely puts it:. The amount of energy they dedicated to discrediting him, often on charges that any reasonable person would immediately recognize as ludicrous, has been staggering Considering this unique challenge to the Obama presidency is of vital importance in judging the essentially mixed record that this book presents.

His research interests lie in American foreign policy, specifically counterterrorism discourse in the Donald Trump era and the value of presidential rhetoric in this area in historical comparison. Read more by Jonny Hall. Click here to cancel reply.