Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

Read the title again. Its not bad grammer, it is exactly how it is laid out. The book is about dreams from a father and a son’s journey into the life of his deceased father, into another continent & culture. The recent popularity of Barack Obama has meant that the book assumes a different halo but even shorn of the author’s notoriety this is a very well written autobiography. The book apparently was written before Obama became a senator and a superstar orator and covers his life from childhood, learning the meaning of being differently coloured to his trip to Kenya to discover his roots and his journey into the life of his father and his grand father through the stories told by his people.

In a manner the book is divided almost chronologically into distinct parts:

· Barry growing up in Hawaii

· Barry’s time in Indonesia

· The teenager Barry learning about himself

· Barack’s time in Chicago as an organiser

· Barack’s trip to Kenya

The thread that runs across the book is one of self discovery. It starts with Barry getting to understand the differentness of his situation growing up in Hawaii as a brown kid of a white mother and a black father with a cultural heritage rooted in two continents. The story never flows in a sequential fashion and the writer takes you back and forth through time giving you the back story of the characters. The story then moves onto his adolescence and his discovery of the subculture of the Blacks in America and his attempts to identify with this group. One gets to see his confusion regarding his actual bearings within the place and his attempts to absorb a culture he has not been born into. You get a glimpse of his mother and grandparents’ efforts to help him with his confusion.

The second part of the book relates to his work in Chicago as an organiser among the poorer neighbourhoods of Chicago. As before, the section is studded with stories of people he interacts with and the struggles and compromises that have to be made at each level. One gets to read about his initial stumbles into this process and the lessons he learns while on the field. Obama’s early works made him work closely with the church in the various neighbourhoods and here he realised the enormous organising power of the Church in a modern western society. This is specially true in the lower stratas of the society where the Church forms the only aggregator of the masses. It is the church that works as an assimilator of people and also a cross pollinator of ideas and. Like earlier, this section is filled with stories of characters each straddling the amorphous space between self interest and community service. His interactions also open to him this notion of the purity of culture and how the black people of America look at Africa almost romantically for their roots

The last part of the book deals with his journey into Kenya to discover his roots. Obama has the company of his sister as they travel in time and space through the stories told by the extended family and relive the lives of their father, their grandfather and the ancestors before them. This section stands as complete contrast to the previous one however as one reads through one gets a general feel of the common thread that runs through.

In many ways, this book is about a persons journey as told through the stories of people he comes across. Either deliberately or otherwise, Obama, with his life creates a metaphor of the general coloured people – people in an alien land with identities linked back to Africa. He acknowledges this and undertakes this journey and towards the end, in his meeting with a Kenyan historian realizes that this notion is nothing more than romantic belief – that the pure Africa as imagined the blacks is no more a figment of imagination as the noble past but it is required for the people to maintain their sanity. As with Jewish belief of Zion, the power of this concept is immense only in the imaginary form and quickly dissipates when one starts questioning it.

This book in essence is not a biography but story of the people who feature in Obama’s life. Obama just acts as a recorder and assimilator of stories as he tries to make sense of things. The pattern is evident through the course of the book, you get to hear about a person and his belief and as the author then delves deeper trying to reason the belief. All in all, this book is a wonderful read. This is one person whose memoirs are going to be very interesting.