News:

Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency set an avalanche of critics, pundits, and common readers rifling through the pages of his early autobiography Dreams from My Father. The book was a magnet for the throngs of Americans of seeking to unravel the psychology of a public figure—the first viable black presidential contender who is now, of course, the president. What did these readers find?

And what were they looking for? Americans have usually demanded genuineness of their leaders. Readers of the author Obama were looking for proof of his sincerity, his integrity, his moral center. In the argot of today’s politics of charisma, they were hoping to find the “real” Obama. The country has always expressed a personal interest in its contenders for the Oval Office. The traditional answers applied, of course, except that Obama was a candidate like no other before him.

His biracialism was impossible to ignore. His background (apart from his race) was unique. His campaign was intensely symbolic. And by virtue of his heritage, he was a symbol. Even a casual purchase of a books-on-tape copy of Dreams from My Father represented a conscientious attempt to unravel the meaning of Obama. The man potentially represented so much. His motto was unity—which could be a vacuous message or the fulfillment of the American dream. He could be the crowning achievement of the civil rights struggle of black Americans; he could be the coup de grâce to the significance of race. For many, he heralded a postracial future; for others, Obama, like a political Tiger Woods, epitomized a new, cosmetic multicultural order of things.

Curious readers only naturally turned to Obama’s story in his own words. I wonder how many of them paid attention to the form in which Obama worked—meaning that the form he takes in Dreams from My Father might have answered their speculations. Remember, too, the days when Obama was a newcomer with less experience than other candidates and with a funnier moniker than most. His initial primary victories were accompanied by Islamophobic insinuations (Barack Hussein Obama), which segued into several weeks of conjecture about whether Obama’s background was black enough. The logic applied tended to reduce black cultural identity to formulaic clichés about poverty and parochialism. The debate skimmed the surface of Obama’s past. Obama was born in Hawaii. He spent several formative years in Indonesia. Hawaii isn’t exactly a cradle of the African American experience, as popularly conceived (no Hawaiian gangsta rappers, for instance). He was raised by his white grandparents. As the son of a Kenyan immigrant, he wasn’t the descendent of slaves. He (gasp) attended Ivy League schools. The multicultural, international man from Harvard—was he a white soul in black clothes?

But consider this: The African American autobiography is a definitive genre. First-person accounts such as Dreams from My Father in which a narrator abandons or ventures away from his home place on a journey toward physical freedom, racial understanding, or postracial enlightenment have been the source of the characteristic patterns and tropes of African American letters since the fugitive slave narratives. The first-person memoirs of escaped slaves fixed in place a narrative structure that helped produce the first and several of the greatest African American novels, as black novelists have adhered to the autobiographical format. Henry Louis Gates observed, “Of the various genres that comprise the African American literary tradition, none has played a role as central as has black autobiography.” The statement comes from the introduction to Bearing Witness, Gates’s anthology of African American autobiographical writings. There Gates elaborates further:

Deprived of access to literacy, the tools of citizenship, denied the rights of selfhood by law, philosophy, and pseudo-science, and denied as well the possibility of possessing a collective history as a people, black Americans—commencing with the slave narratives of 1760—published their individual histories in astonishing numbers. … The will to power for black Americans was the will to write; and the predominant mode this writing would assume was the shaping of a black self in words.

In other words, African American literature was forged in autobiographical fires by writers for whom a tale of the self was less a narcissistic indulgence than a summary history of the race. And Gates explains a further development for African American writing, a tradition he calls “distinctive in that an author typically publishes as a first book her or his autobiography, establishing her or his presence and career as a writer through this autobiographical act—rather than, as for most authors, at or near the end of a productive career, or at least after an author’s other works have generated sufficient interest in the life that has generated the author’s oeuvre.” He points to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings as a first book that exemplifies the pattern.

Where does Obama’s Dreams from My Father fit into this structure? It was the first book from a young man—thirty-three years old when he wrote it. Its primary motif is that of a journey: Obama’s maturation to adulthood while journeying from Hawaii to Indonesia to Chicago, and finally, in a sojourn intended to provide connection with the African side of his family, to Kenya. It tells the story of his education with an emphasis on the ways that his personal story establishes his credo within the greater history of the black diaspora. The action occasionally detours into an impassioned lesson drawn from personal experience against a backdrop of public affairs. No less so than Black Boy, Dreams from My Father adopts the familiar tropes of the African American autobiographical tradition. And judging by his book’s artless continuity within this genre, in his own mind, at least, the youthful author thought himself to be black enough.