Of course one of the main themes of Dreams from My Father is Obama’s quest to understand the legacy he has inherited from his father and his Kenyan ancestors. As he only had one face to face encounter with his father that he could remember (his father’s visit to Hawaii when he was ten) in addition to occasional letters, he really didn’t know much about his father up to the time when he was studying in New York and received a call from a relative in Kenya telling him that his father had died in a plane crash. He first learned the outline of his father’s life when he was in Chicago from his half-sister Auma, who came to visit him there. She told him how his father had been a fairly successful government official and a friend of Vice-president Odinga, who like Barack Sr. was a Luo (one of the major ethnic groups of Kenya). But Odinga was forced out after a conflict with President Kenyatta, who was a Kikuyu (the largest ethnic group). Barack Sr. began to speak out about corruption and ethnic favoritism, eventually angering Kenyatta, who forced him out of government and prevented him from getting a decent job in the private sector. He even blocked him from taking a job overseas by revoking his passport. Since Barack Sr. stubbornly stuck by his principles and refused to make up to those in power, he fell on hard times and became drinking heavily. It was only after Kenyatta died that things began to look up for him again, but he remained somewhat bitter until his death. By an odd coincidence, I read this part of the book within days of the recent presidential election in Kenya, a contest between Kenyatta and Odinga – the sons of the country’s first leaders.
The German-educated Auma was clearly the relative on his father’s side that Obama was closest to, and she is portrayed as a very positive character, though also someone with strong opinions about many subjects (most – but not all – of which I tend to sympathize with). Obama also met his brother Roy in the US, paying him a visit in Washington, D.C. Roy is shown to be a somewhat more erratic character, impulsive and with a bit of drinking problem, though Obama is clearly sympathetic to him, and explains some of the past issues that torment him. Indeed, as it becomes clear in the final section of the book, which covers Obama’s first trip to Kenya, his African family is large, complex and torn by conflicts. Barack Sr. had many children by several different women, and was married (formally or not) to more than one simultaneously at different points in his life. Roy and Auma were his oldest children, and he had two more sons by their mother after returning to Kenya following Obama’s birth (though as she was seeing another man at the same time, there was some doubt about their parentage). He also married another American woman and had two sons by her. One of these songs died in an accident before Obama visited, but the other, Mark, was a student at Berkeley with little interest in his African heritage who was visiting his mother in Kenya and so met Obama (he is apparently now living in China). Barack Sr.’s youngest son was by another woman, who laid claim to his estate after his death, creating a split in the family, with a few elder relatives on her side and most of the family on the other. As a result, Obama only briefly met this youngest brother.
These tangled relationships went back to the previous generation as well. The woman that Obama and most of his half-siblings knew as Granny, a cheerful friendly old woman who Obama met when he went with several relatives to his father’s hometown in the western part of Kenya (he had to communicate with her through them, as she only spoke Luo and Obama only learned a few words of it), was not actually Barack Sr.’s natural mother, but rather his step-mother. Obama’s grandfather was married to three women, the first of whom was unable to have children, and the second of whom, the father of Barack Sr., his older sister Sarah (who Obama met briefly as well, though she was feuding with the rest of the family) and a younger sister, left him. As Barack Sr. was mostly raised by his step-mother and felt his real mother had abandoned them, he treated his step-mother as his mother, though his older sister remained closest to their natural mother (and his younger sister presumably hardly knew her father, as her mother took her away when she left).
Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Onyango, was a very interesting though not entirely pleasant character. When the British first appeared in their part of Kenya, he was a teenager and he went off to see them for himself, returning many months later dressed in Western clothes. His father Obama (great-grandfather of the author) concluded that he must be unclean and ostracized him. He went to work for white men in Kenya, become one of the first people from his area to learn to speak English and Swahili and to read and write. He was also practically obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness and order, striking even guests who failed to observe the rules of the table. This was one reason he had great difficulty finding a wife who could live with him. If a Luo man paid dowry on a wife and took her home but she later fled back to her father, the marriage did not count. Onyango would beat any woman who didn’t meet his exacting standards. He lost several prospective wives this way and even lost their dowries because he was too proud to ask for it back. While he did finally find a wife who would put up with him, she proved unable to bear children. He didn’t send her back to her parents but he did eventually look for a second wife. This was Obama’s real grandmother, who turned out to also be fairly strong-willed and stubborn and so eventually deserted him. It was his third wife, the one the family called Granny, who ended up raising Barack Sr. and his siblings (both those born to Onyango’s second wife and her own children) and remaining with her husband till his death.
Despite Onyango’s obsessive strictness and abusive behavior, he also was intelligent and capable and even fairly progressive about some matters. Sometime after World War II (which he served in overseas as a cook for the British), he moved his family from the area they were living south of Lake Victoria (where much of the extended family still lives) to the area north of the lake that his ancestors had come from several generations before. He quickly built a successful farm. He also showed a disdain for superstition. One time a local villager hired a shaman to kill a rival suitor. Onyango went to meet the shaman and challenged him to strike him with magic. He then knocked the shaman down and took his medicines. The village elders were called to adjudicate. Onyango again challenged the shaman to use his magic, and told the man who hired him to find another woman. The elders agreed to ask the shaman to leave, but told Onyango to return his medicines. Onyango did so, and even paid the shaman so his trip would not have been wasted, but he made the shaman first explain what all his medicines did so he would know the tricks the shamans used. Unfortunately in his later years he was reported to the British by an enemy and detained. Though his detention only lasted half a year he was treated badly and remained somewhat bitter towards the British in his later years. His relationship with Barack Sr. was rocky, as might be expected. He lived to be 84, dying only a few years before his son.
While the story of Obama’s ancestors and his encounters with his Kenyan relative take up much of the last section of the book, we also read about Obama’s observations about Kenya itself as he travels around and sees different things. In some ways, this part of the book is much like a travelogue. He even goes on a safari with a reluctant Auma and encounters Masai tribesmen and a British doctor who had grown up in Kenya and, after spending some time in England, had come back to Africa to work in Malawi, since he felt more at home in Africa. Politics even comes in briefly when their guide starts complaining about the corrupt government and then acknowledges that the Kenyan reluctance to pay taxes is also to blame. “We don’t trust the idea of giving our money to someone. The poor man, he has good reason for this suspicion. But the big men who own the trucks that use the roads, they also refuse to pay their share. They would rather have their equipment break down all the time than give up some of their profits.” When Obama points out things are much the same in America, the guide remarks that “a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”
All in all, the book is a fascinating read, and would be so even if the writer had not gone on to become President of the United States. Some of the praise that the book has received may be a bit excessive and more reflective of Obama’s later career than the book’s own merits. Joe Klein said it “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician” and NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani said it was “the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president”, both of which seem likely enough, but in both cases the field is rather a narrow one. The book was also praised by both Toni Morrison and Philip Roth, though they may also be seen as not entirely objective, as they were both supporters of Obama politically. However, though it is difficult to judge the book completely separately from what happened to Obama afterward, my own impression is that if the details were changed to make the author unrecognizable, most readers would still be quite positively impressed. Even if they didn't agree with all the author had to say, no one who read it with even a moderate amount of objectivity could possibly conclude that the author was an extremist or that he hated America (though he recognizes its very real flaws), much less that he was a Muslim fundamentalist or a radical Marxist or any such nonsense.
So how did the book affect my view of Obama as a person and as US President? I wouldn’t say it changed it much one way or another, but what change there was in my opinion of him was positive. The book confirms that he is intelligent, thoughtful, articulate and deeply concerned about social matters. While my perspective on race is (perhaps inevitably) somewhat different from his, I agree with the vast majority of what this younger Obama had to say about most issues, and I particularly respect his ability to look at things from different angles and consider different nuances. To illustrate this, I will conclude with a passage from the book in which he compares poverty in Indonesia and poverty in America’s inner cities, and reflects on how industrial development affects countries like Indonesia (bizarrely, at least one right-wing blogger asserted that Obama was advocating a traditional old-world system like Indonesia’s for America, when he was merely pointing out that it had its advantages; Obama is clearly far too intelligent to think America could somehow revert to a pre-industrial society). For some briefer quotations from the book (some transcribed imperfectly), see here and here. For an account of the history of the book, see the NY Times article "The story of Obama, written by Obama (if that requires a login, try accessing it from here). To read the entire book online, go here.
“As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her. The scene took me back to my childhood, back in the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.
I'd always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Roseland [these are housing projects in Chicago, the former being the one Obama worked in as a community organizer], Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trade routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.
It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might that take in this land of dollars?
Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastic manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into deeper despair.”
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