January 4, 2009

Dreams From His Father

Posted in America, Politics at 9:48 pm by Paul Sagar

I never thought I’d read either of Barack Obama’s books. When I saw them on display (everywhere) in the United States I assumed they were simply campaign fodder: ghost-written contributions to the electoral machine. I think that may still be true of his second book, The Audacity of Hope. It’s certainly not the case with his first offering, Dreams from my Father.

The only reason I read this book was because my dad bought it for me this Christmas. At first it looked like a straight-to-ebay job, but I bothered to read the blurb first. I’m glad I did.

Dreams from my Father, for those who don’t know, was written before Obama was a politician. It was commissioned after he was made editor of the Harvard Law Review, a prestigious academic journal which Obama was the first ever black man to edit. The book received moderate interest upon initial publication, and would probably have remained largely forgotten thereafter had Obama not gone on to be the first black man to receive the nomination of a major political party for president of the USA.

And what a tragedy that would have been.

Dreams from my Father is Obama’s story, written in his own words, presumably before he had a political agenda. It traces his own roots in Hawaii and Indonesia, through his time as a community organiser in Chicago, and up to his soul-searching journey to Kenya to meet the family he’d never known, looking for the spirit of a dead father he barely knew.

The first thing to say about this book is how unbelievably well-writtenit is. It reads like an exciting and gripping novel – at times I forgot I was reading an autobiography. Obama has a style most professional novelists would envy. Even more impressive is the subtle structuring of this work; although there is a clear linear narrative, it is interspersed with memories, flashbacks and structural compositions which both engage the reader and connect Obama’s thoughts with his memories, whilst simultaneously telling his story in an accessible and engaging manner.

In fact, the composition of this book is a testimony to the intelligence of the author. The outgoing President Elect is well known to be no intellectual (read: pig stupid), but neither were many of his predecessors. Clinton was a political animal but not an intellectual, while the same can be said of Bush Snr. Ronald Reagan was a second-rate film star with no particular cranial talents beyond his hair-do, and so on down the line for a fairly long way. A man of real intellectual prowess has not occupied the oval office for some years. If this books is anything at all to go by, one certainly will do by the end of the month.

But intellectualism alone is not enough in a politician (that charge has been levelled not just at Plato’s philosopher kings, but at real-life politicians – Harold Wilson, Gordon Brown, anyone?). Sometimes you don’t wantintellectualism in a politician (Lenin stands as a shining example). So what else is to note about this book? Well, it seems that Obama might be the first president in a very long time (perhaps since Lincoln) who has lived amongst not just ordinary people, but amongst the exceptionally poor and downtrodden.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Sarah Palin mocked Obama at the Republican Convention by making remarks such as “what isa ‘community organiser’ anyway?”. Her sneering tone implied it was nothing. Reading Dreams from my Fatherwe see that it is anything but. Obama is a man who turned down well-paid jobs in big business to go and work in a strange city with some of the poorest, most deprived and most dis-enfranchised people in his country. Obama is a man who has had direct contact with America’s biggest taboo: its poor, black working- and under-classes. That’s pretty unique for a President in a country where you basically have to be a millionaire to even run for the highest office, and where most candidates inherited either their wealth or their advantageous start in life.

And the best thing about finding this out? Obama freely admits that it had more to do with his own demons, his own anger and confusion at being a black man in modern America, his own search for meaning and worth than it did about the people he set out to help. Indeed, that sort of honesty, self-analysis and admission of his own failings is a hallmark of the book. It’s part of what makes it so readable, but also so refreshing.

Indeed, Obama’s own demons play a big part in the earlier part of the book especially. As a white middle class English male, I don’t think I had any idea what it means for a black man to grow up in America, mostly because I’d never thought about it. Sure, i’ve been to the States and was shocked by the elephant-in-the-room nature of race relations there. But it was reading Dreams from my Father that began to make it clear to me just what it means to have a black man in that white house. Of course, it’s the sort of thing that a white middle class man from England can only ever partially understand, by definition. But in the same way that finding out what a community organiser isconvinced me that Obama is something generally different from what has gone before, hearing his thoughts on what it means to be black in America, reading his account of black people’s experiences in America, convinces me that it is worth believing his message of ‘change’.

I must admit, I found Obama’s personal soul-searching in Kenya less interesting than the first two-thirds of the book. If I must level a criticism it would be that the work is a little too long, and that more could be cut from the final third. However, the reader can expect to learn a lot about Kenya and its people, whilst Obama’s ruminations on the colonial legacy are certainly worth reading. Throughout, his ability to take large, complex and difficult issues and convey them through an anecdote or conversation with a long-lost family member testify to his fantastic style and comprehension of ideas.

Ultimately, Obama has yet to prove himself. His message of ‘hope and change’ may prove either insincere, or un-fulfilable given the economic and political mess he is about to inherit. Yet I now have what I secretly lacked during the 2008 campaign: reasons to believe that Obama might genuinely desire and bring change, and in its wake, hope. A man with an absentee black-African father, with a Muslim middle name and grandfather, who lived in the Far East and worked in the South Side of Chicago? If you wanted ‘change’ in the Oval Office, it would be hard to imagine a character who embodied that change better.

Many commentators on the left are wary of Obama: he may afterall have changed greatly since his idealistic young days organising in Chicago, and he said many right-wing things on the campaign trail which set alarm bells ringing. But as my old tutor and friend Chris Brooke said on the eve of the election: “I’m no kind of Obamaniac, and there’s always going to be a lot wrong with any US politician who could conceivably win the Presidency, but in a contest between Obama and McCain I don’t think there’s any reason to qualify an endorsement at all”. I’ve always backed that thought, but Dreams from my Fathernow makes me think that there may be a lot less wrong with Obama than there has been with any US President for a very long time.

But as it happens, there is a reason to read Dreams from my Father regardless of the politics and attempts to predict the future. A reason beyond the fact that this book is a historically unique event: a memoir by a President written before he was President and before he had even gone into politics, offering a unique window into his thought and character.

The reason is simply that the book is inspirational. This is the story of a mixed-race boy in a country living in the shaddow of racism. A boy who met his father only once and was raised in large part by his grandparents, who dabbled in drugs and nearly became another black statistic of crime and delinquency. Who travelled from Hawaii to the crime-infested streets of black Chicago. Who saw the poverty of Africa first-hand. And who one day became the President of the United States. It’s more than just Obama’s ability as a writer which can lull you into thinking you are reading a work of fiction: if the American Dream ever needed a poster-book, this is surely it.

(End note:

One lingering question that does come out of reading Dreams from my Fatheris the following: why didn’t the Republicans succeed in making more of the Jeremiah Wright affair? My impression was that Wright was just a preacher whose sermons Obama had attended on occasion – not the man who performed the ceremony which wed Obama to his his wife, and who inspired the title of Obama’s second book (The Audacity of Hopewas the name of the first Wright sermon Obama heard when still organising in Chicago before he studied at Harvard). Given how easy it was to take some of what Wright preached and make it sound profoundly un-American (although in my opinion it was fairly on-the-money if you listened to what he was actually saying), why did the McCain campaign not make more of it? It seems Obama got let off very lightly with a simple “oh, i’m not going to his sermons anymore” disassociation. Was this just another example of a supremely badly-run campaign, or what? Thoughts in comments please.)

For more pro-Dreams From My Father writing and in case you weren’t convinced by the above, go here.

Permalink