Barack Obama : Dreams from my father

This book is impressive; considering that Obama was just 34 years old when it was published in 1995 and his Presidential dreams were far from the horizon. You get a glimpse into the man as he was before he put on political airs.

Obama clearly saw himself as a man of destiny. His unwillingness to settle, his idealism, search for inner meaning and quest for identity- all are impressive. But I doubt if he considered himself a Presidential hopeful in 1995 and hence the writing appears authentic.

The book was a result of an advance given by a publisher to  Obama when he gained some publicity as the first African-American President of the 'Harvard Law Review'.

It's  a long read at 442 pages and sometimes very self indulgent. But you press on as you know this man became the first African-American President of the United States of America.

The book covers Obama's life in three parts:

-His childhood brought up by his White grandparents;

-His community service at Chicago to uplift  lives of African-Americans;

-Return to roots to Kenya to understand his origins and identity.

The book could have been 300 pages slimmer I feel; just about 150 pages would have been fine; if Obama had  simply stuck to the main narrative. And make no mistake; the book is all about being 'Black in America'.

But Obama being Obama, sticks to detailed characterisations(even of peripheral characters like a co-passenger in a plane) and elaborate descriptions; which is nice sometimes, but then sometimes you just want to get a move on.

In his childhood, Obama is fed with glorified uplifting stories of his mysterious father, Barack Obama, Sr who has left his mother and moved back to Kenya. These stories leave a lasting impression and he has an ideal to look upto. His grandfather(mother's side)is the one who feeds him these stories. Sample one:

'And Gramps, suddenly thoughtful, would start nodding to himself  “It’s a fact, Bar (Barack),” he would say. “Your dad could handle just about any situation, and that made everybody like him. Remember the time when he had to sing at the International Music Festival? He’d agreed to sing some African songs, but when he arrived it turned out to be this big to—do, and the woman who performed just before him was a semi professional singer, a Hawaiian gal with a full band to back her up.
Anyone else would have stopped right there, you know, and
that there had been a mistake. But not Barack. He got up and started singing in front of this big crowd—which is no easy feat, let me tell you—and he wasn’t great, but he was so sure of himself that before you knew it he was getting as much applause as anybody.”
My grandfather would shake his head and get out of his chair to flip on the TV set. “Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence". The secret to a man's success."

But Obama also had a role model closer home- his Caucasian  mother, Ann Dunham. She taught him the one  fundamental truth that mattered:  'There is no substitute  to hard work'.

While in Indonesia with her second husband, worried that the Indonesian schooling was inadequate, she used to wake up at four in the morning to teach Obama for three hours before she went to work and drop him to school.

And Barack was only 9 years old at that time! Here's how Obama recounts it:

"Her initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send  me to the International School, where most of Djakarta's foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to Supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a US correspondence course.

Her efforts now redoubled. Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing (“My stomach hurts”) or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense:
“This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

Being a black in America; what does it mean? Who was he? 

Obama was obsessed with these questions.
He thought folks who tried to focus on their 'individuality' and not be overtly concerned with their race and community to be missing the essential point: As a black you can't forget who you are; maybe for a white, but never for a black:

"That's how Joyce liked to talk. She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her.
One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students' association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn’t want what it sees on the spoon.
" I am not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial." Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest  man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something  else.  “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice  cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they're willing to treat me like a person. No—it’s black people who have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that l can’t be who l am. . . .”

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce.They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective
Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white Culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and We're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the Woman in the elevator clutches her purse; not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives -although that’s what we tell ourselves- but because we’re wearing a Brooks brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.
"Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual"

There are other such vignettes in the book. For all his attempts to find meaning being a black, Obama was simply not the average African-American you would find in America. His brilliance kept him apart and his success is not something that is easy to replicate.  His genes;a brilliant  Kenyan father and a competent mother gave him a head start most other people do not get.
But Obama carries out a fair amount of rumination on this aspect when he recounts the reaction of his fellow community action members  to the news that he was going to join Harvard Law school:

'The minute I told him the schools I'd applied—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—he had grinned and slapped me on the back. ‘
“I knew it!” he shouted.'
“Knew what?”
“That it was just a matter of time, Barack. Before you were outta here."
"Why'd you think that?”
Johnnie shook his head and laughed. “Damn, Barack. . . ’cause
You got options, that’s why. ’Cause you can leave. I mean, I know you’re a conscientious brother and all that, but when somebody’s got a choice between Harvard and Roseland, it’s only so long somebody’s gonna keep choosing  Roseland."... I just  hope you remember your friends when you put up in that fancy downtown"

.....For some reason Johnnie's laughter had made me defensive. I insisted that I would be coming back to the neighborhood. I told him that I didn't plan on  being dazzled by the wealth and power that Harvard represented, and that he shouldn't be either. Johnnie put up his hands in mock surrender.

" Hey you don‘t need to be telling me all this. l ain’t the one going
nowhere.”
I grew quiet, embarrassed by my outburst. “Yeah, well . , . I‘m just
saying that I’ll be back, that’s all. l don’t want you  or the leaders to
get the wrong idea."
Johnnie smiled gently. “Ain’t nobody's gonna get the wrong idea,Barack. Man, we’re just proud to see you succeed."

.....I lit a cigarette and tried to decipher that conversation
with Johnnie. Had he doubted my intentions? Or  was it just me that mistrusted myself? It seemed like l had gone over my decision at least a hundred times. I needed a break, that was for sure. l wanted to go to Kenya.....

And I had things to learn in law school. Things that would help me, bring about real change.....

.....Maybe Johnnie was right;
' maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom  or crime or the shackles of your skin. Maybe, by going to law school, I’d be repeating a pattern that had been set in motion centuries before, the moment white men, themselves spurred on by their own fears of inconsequence, had landed on Africa’s shores, bringing  with them their guns and blind hunger, to drag away the conquered in chains. That first encounter had redrawn the map of black life,
recentered its universe, created the very idea of escape.....

Another passage recounts, rather poignantly the resentment shown by Mary (on the news of Obama's departure), a lady who worked with him at community  service in Chicago :

'Only Mary seemed upset. After most of the ministers had left, she
helped Will, Johnnie, and me clean up. When I asked her if she
needed a ride, she started shaking her head.
“What is it with you men?" she said, looking at Will and myself“
Her voice trembled slightly as she pulled on her coat. “Why is it
you’re always in a hurry? Why is it that what you have isn’t ever good
enough?”

I started to say something, then thought about Mary’s two
daughters at home, the father that they would never know. Instead  I
walked her to the door and gave her a hug.'

In Kenya in search for his roots, Obama captures what it's like for a African-American to be in Africa for the first time:

'And all of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes.....
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. You could see a man talking to himself as
just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the rent page of the
daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.

How tempting, I thought, to fly away with this moment intact. To
have this feeling of ease wrapped up as neatly as the young man was now wrapping Auma’s necklace, and take it back with me to America to slip on whenever my spirits flagged.

But of course that wasn’t possible. We finished out sodas. Money
changed hands. We left the marketplace. The moment slipped
away.'

The situation in Kenya, akin to any third world country, is easily comprehensible to Indians. The confusion that Obama recounts when he starts 'thinking' of money when in Kenya is simply a 'White man's/Westerners problem':

'The situation in Nairobi was tough and getting tougher.Clothes were mostly secondhand, a doctor’s visit reserved for the direst emergency. Almost all the family’s younger members were
unemployed, including the two or three who had managed, against
stiff competition, to graduate from one of Kenya’s universities. If
Jane or Zeituni ever fell ill, if their companies ever closed or laid
them off, there was no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people burdened by similar hardship.

Now I was family, I reminded myself; now I had responsibilities.
But what did that mean exactly? Back in the States, I’d been able to
translate such feelings into politics, organizing, a certain self-denial.
In Kenya, these strategies seemed hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent. A commitment to black empowerment couldn’t help find
Bernard a job. A faith in participatory democracy couldn’t buy Jane a new set of sheets. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy. A part of me wished I could live up to the image that my new relatives imagined for me: A corporate Lawyer, an American businessman,  my hand poised on the spigot, ready to rain down like manna the largesse of the western world.'

The story of his father and grandfather is recounted in a great amount of detail and  Obama feels that he has at least partly answered a few questions.
It gets a little bit melodramatic though. The scene where Obama describes himself sitting amidst the graves of his father and grandfather and crying was total bollywood.

A few hundred pages slimmer and this book would have been one of my favorites. But of course it is the  President; and you have to give him his due.