Book Review: Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
Having followed with interest the actions of every US President since Franklin D Roosevelt, and having concluded that the personage who filled that office with the greatest dignity and highest aspirations was Barack Obama, his book was sought to shed light on how such an exemplary character had been moulded. The book is beautifully written and tells a story of absorbing interest, but in terms of insight into the author’s personal development it leaves some questions unanswered. Maybe further significant progress was made after the book was written.
Barack Obama relates how he was born in Hawaii of a white mother and a black father who was a student from Kenya. His father left after two years and Barack was raised by his mother and her second husband in Indonesia, and by his mother and her parents back in Hawaii. His father came on a one month visit when Barack was ten years old and this was the only contact he could remember. Yet being only half-black and raised by his white family, Barack became mindful of the colour of his skin, writing: ‘… my color had always been a sufficient criterion for community membership, enough of a cross to bear.’ After working with the poor black communities of Chicago, he set out to explore his father’s roots in Africa.
Children of mixed parentage can vary widely in skin colour from almost as black as the black to almost as white as the white. Barack Obama seems to have considered himself to be towards the darker end of the spectrum. For example, he relates how he was mistaken for a deceased half-brother, David, who was a full-blooded Kenyan. Another half-brother, Mark, who was born in Kenya to a white mother, Ruth, is described as being ‘a black man of my height and complexion.’ His appearance being in no way unusual, Barack became readily accepted into his wide ranging extended family in Kenya.
Half-brother, Mark, is reported to have been moved by Beethoven’s symphonies and Shakespeare’s sonnets and to prefer the USA to Kenya. One suspects these sentiments are shared by Barack, but he does not say so. However, in the preface to the 2004 reprinting of his book, Barack Obama mentions that his mother passed away shortly after the original publication. He writes movingly that ‘I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book – less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.’ It is perhaps with this additional insight that we can begin to see how the most admired US President of the modern era came to harmonise and personify the best characteristics of two continents and two cultures.