Autobiographical Fire and Obama’s Creation of Self
by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
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.
There are so many important volumes in the canon of African American autobiographies that even a partial listing is intimidating; leaving aside the slavery narratives, they still abound. In Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths, V. P. Franklin briefly describes the relationship between black history and black autobiography from 1870 to approximately 1930. According to him, the genre was a utilitarian one:
In the late nineteenth century when numerous scholarly and “eyewitness” accounts of the so-called Tragedy Era of Reconstruction were being disseminated promulgating a new southern orthodoxy on the inability of black people to participate in ‘civilized society’ as free citizens, African Americans who participated in the social and political struggles of the period wrote autobiographical works that presented their versions of the true facts of Reconstruction. And when ideological differences developed between spokespersons of the African American population about how to best advance themselves, these leaders turned to autobiography to present the personal experiences that led them to adopt their particular set of ideological principles.
Some of these books stand out, and for the sake of comparison: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Alex Haley and Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler, and many of James Baldwin’s finest essays. Alex Haley’s Roots is a study in autobiography extended into ancestry and genealogical research. Turning to the novelists, one merely needs to consider James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. All of these, while fictions, blatantly imitate or borrow heavily from the voices of earlier autobiographical works. Perhaps preeminent among them, the modernist Invisible Man is a slave narrative turned absurdist.
African American autobiographies chart the discovery of a self by narrators dogged by the sense of lacking a heritage or of lacking knowledge of something other than a sadly ambiguous heritage. The discovery of self usually occurs in savage or at best inhospitable surroundings. The self is under attack and responds by taking up the most silent and self-reflective habit of them all: reading. This sets the stage for classic motifs of the genre—movement (literal or metaphorical) and literacy, meaning the very ability to read or the first recognition of one’s own experiences in the mirror of the printed word.
In A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince—purportedly the first of the slave narratives—the slave Gronniosaw listens to his master reading a prayer and misunderstands the relationship between the book and his master’s moving lips. He imagines that magic is afoot, that his master possesses “talking books.” He later steals a Bible and puts it to his ear. The realization that his master’s mind penetrates the text by intellectual comprehension rather than magic brings him to anguish.
In Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, the author resolves that the key to freedom is literacy. He becomes unruly and disruptive because he has lost a slave’s unreflective contentment. He learns the alphabet by studying the letters and numbers that carpenters scratch on unused timber. In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the teenage protagonist forges notes to gain access to the massive collections housed in segregated libraries. Malcolm X recounts that his redemption from a life as a petty thief and pimp began between the shelves of the prison library. After Maya Angelou was raped as a young girl, she retreated into a period of neurotic silence before she discovered poetry. The need to voice the verses liberated her tongue.
The unnamed narrator in Invisible Man is obviously literate—even literary. Yet he, too, suffers from a wounded sense of self. A beloved southern grandfather initiates his journey with cryptic comments somewhat reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s evil twin: “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” The narrator’s northbound journey leads to the novel’s infamous closing metaphor. From the depths of an underground cellar, strewn with thousands of electric lights, he discourses on race, freedom, and his lack of visibility. Neither race prejudice nor invisibility are undoable; thus, the narrator must challenge a sociological condition that has neither a scientific nor a racially essentialist basis. The prototypical slave narrative ended with a final exhortation for emancipation. Invisible Man—for all its irony and modernist polish—ends with a classic emancipatory speech.
Dreams from My Father pivots on the themes of literacy and movement. Near the beginning of the book, a teenage Obama has sunken into a fallow spell of recreational drug use coupled with adolescent racial angst. He muses about America, characterizing it as “a white man’s playing court” run “by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could because he had the power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man[,] it was because he knew the words you spoke, the books you read, your dreams and ambitions were already his.” Obama would spend long hours into the night looking for positive answers in the pages of the major black autobiographies. But he is somewhat disappointed by what he discovers there: “I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt neither irony nor intelligence seemed able to deflect.” He isn’t immersing himself in Baldwin, Wright, and Malcolm X to survive slavery, segregation, prison, or sexual abuse. How much less dramatic: he’s looking for role models. He’s specifically looking to supplant the major role model he has—and yet hasn’t. The journey recounted in Dreams from My Father will lead backward to the story of his parents Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. and forwards to a confrontation with the image of his absent father.
The general consensus holds that Barack Obama’s first book is, for a politician, refreshingly unstuffy. (A quality no doubt assisted by the fact that he had not yet announced overt political ambitions when he wrote it.) Beyond its literary merits, Dreams from My Father proves this: Obama’s sense of the poetry of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr.’s interracial union was not a spurious invention of his presidential campaign. Its outlines are all too plainly clear in Dreams from My Father.
Familial reminisces are natural to the black autobiographical tradition. The family drama par excellence may be Roots, in which Alex Haley attempts to bring his entire family genealogy to life as three-dimensional characters via a third-person narrative. But Haley’s literary artistry is limited. He may have achieved a degree of success with his distant African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, but the rest of the characters in Haley’s ancestry read like stock creations. The wooden reenactments dotting Roots should make readers appreciate Obama’s relative ease and maturity in handling emotionally sensitive subjects including his mother, his father, and his own birth.
Obama will often begin a paragraph of prose with the implication “this is how the story of my parents’ love affair was told to me,” and then slip effortlessly into a close-up account that puts the reader immediately—and intimately—in the place and time. This is how he tells the by-now classic story: at the University of Hawaii in the early 1960s, Ann Dunham, a young white American from Wichita, Kansas, met Barack Obama of Kenya. Within a year of meeting they fell in love and married, despite the social stigma then attached to interracial unions.
It’s the story Barack Obama repeated so often throughout his campaign. But the story doesn’t end there. In Dreams, there is so much more. Ann and Barack separate shortly after their son’s birth, and both remarry. Barack Obama Sr. attends graduate school at Harvard and then returns to Kenya. Ann, her new husband, and Obama Jr. move to Indonesia, where Ann’s second marriage also collapses, after which Barack returns to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.
Barack Obama Sr. thereupon reappears in his son’s life for a month when Obama is approximately ten years old. Visiting from Kenya, the elder Barack is a proud and imposing presence—a formidable intellectual who, despite his years of absence, cockily berates Obama to apply himself in school. “You do not work as hard as you should.” Reinforcing the Freudian overtones of his sudden appearance, he flirts with Obama’s mother (who had returned to Hawaii, too). Obama receives his first intimations of the power and strangeness of sexuality when he suspects his mother and father have spent the night together. Nothing permanent comes of the flurry of passions. For thirty days, the father pontificates. Then he leaves. Shortly beforehand, however, he visits Obama’s grade school, as a special speaker. In effect, this is Obama’s parting image of his father:
The other kids looked at me as my father stood up, and I held my head stiffly, trying to focus on a vacant point on the blackboard behind him. He had been speaking for some time before I could finally bring myself back to the moment. He was leaning against Miss Hefty’s thick oak desk and describing the deep gash in the earth where mankind first appeared. He spoke of the wild animals that still roamed the plains, the tribes that still required a young boy to kill a lion to prove his manhood. He spoke of the customs of the Luo, how elders received the utmost respect for all to follow under the great tree trunks. And he told us of Kenyans’ struggle to be free, how the British had wanted to stay and unjustly rule the people, just as they had in America; how many had been enslaved by the color of their skin, just as they had in America; but the Kenyans, like all of us in this room, longed to be free and develop themselves through hard work and sacrifice.
From that day on, Obama idolized his father. To an extent that Barack Jr. himself seems less than fully aware of, his father enters his moral imagination. Based on a few childhood memories, a grade school oration, and particularly the reminiscences of his grandmother, Toot, and grandfather, Stanley—who have made a conscious decision to surround Obama with positive images of black men—Barack Sr. becomes the child’s exemplar of a life lived for the betterment of society. He is the face of civic responsibility (with an exoticizing touch of African wisdom). His presence is magnified by his absence. He remains in Obama’s life as a patriarchal figure who occasionally sends letters from Kenya characterized by aphoristic wisdom. “Like water finding its level, you will arrive at a career that suits you.” His dream father is employed as an economist by the country of Kenya. This inspires Obama’s pictures that his father is “sitting at his desk in Nairobi, a big man in government, with clerks and secretaries bringing him papers to sign.” The patriarch’s image is the bulwark upholding the Obama’s provisional answers to issues of racial identity. He knows he is black. Why? Because he is his father’s son.
Yet mere letters cannot address the twists and turns that Obama faces at home in an interracial household that, however loving, occasionally exhibits the fissures of race lines. In one of Dreams from My Father’s most poignant scenes, Obama is caught in the crossfire of an argument between his grandfather and grandmother—whose love can still display the noble excesses of white guilt. Toot expresses concern over having to wait at a bus stop. Stanley accuses Toot of being unduly suspicious because a fellow passenger at the stop is a black man. Obama is cast in the role of an arbiter, saddled with the responsibility of adjudicating guiltlessness and guilt now that Toot stands accused of racism.
Barack Obama Sr. dies when Obama is a college student. By then, Obama has become interested in public speaking. The topics that ferment his interest in public service tend toward social and political subjects. Obama commits himself to civic duty and leaves for Chicago to take a job as a community organizer.
Throughout his account, Obama scantily mentions his love life. This is a traditional characteristic of black autobiographies that differentiates them in style and substance from the classic European bildungsroman. Sexual romantic love is an understated theme. Barack briefly describes courting a biracial girl named Joyce, whose slick, debutanteish version of multicultural transcendence strikes him as too convenient. “That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good until you noticed they avoided black people.” Elsewhere, Obama summarizes a committed relationship with a white female he “pushe[d] away” because she couldn’t understand his racial identification. In both cases, the romantic element is subsumed within the larger issues of race, politics, and power. (Even Obama’s marriage to Michelle receives only a few perfunctory pages.) In short, none of the concerns of the heart are allowed to supplant the role of public affairs, the world of Barack Obama Sr.
Dreams is the story of how Barack Obama begins to understand the nature of social commitment, of how he learns to balance his sympathetic identification with black struggle and discontentment against the knowledge verified by his birth and his experience of the veracity of interracial love and compassion. It shows him committing to the role of community organizer before deciding that an activist’s power base is too constricted and that attempts to reform society would require a legal background. After two years in Chicago, Obama enrolls in Harvard Law School. Throughout these changes, his childhood image of Barack Obama Sr. seems to presage his decisions. From the first pages, the reader has few doubts that the narrative will finish with Obama in Africa.
“Will this trip to Kenya fill that emptiness?” Obama ponders as he boards the plane. The emptiness could also be called the heaviness of his father’s ghost, his weighty presence-in-absence.
A decade later, the older, less volatile Obama will offer an endearing version of his birth story. Obama the politician will offer the public a tidier version to highlight its America the Beautiful components. By contrast, the story in Dreams from My Father is riskier and more jagged, showing us Obama grappling with the cultural and even sexual dynamics of race relations and interracial unions. In Dreams, for example, Obama recounts his memories of feeling embarrassed that his mother used to playfully, if unabashedly, express her physical preference for men of color (Sidney Portier stole her heart over Charlton Heston!). This is the kind of frank detail excised from his campaign speeches, interviews, and subsequent writings. In Dreams, his interracial family unit is a circle in which racial tensions are lovingly negotiated, but they still exist. The narrative structure of Dreams from My Father seesaws backward to evoke the twists that led to Obama’s birth and forward to his inevitable encounter with Barack Obama Sr. in Africa.
Is Barack Obama’s childhood paragon the same man that one Kenyan relative describes as a drunk? Is he the same man skewered by David Samuels in the New Republic as “a monster”? By any account, there is little bitterness in Dreams from My Father. Another child in the same set of circumstances might easily have decided that Barack Obama Sr. had effectively abandoned his family. Is an irresponsible father the most heinous of men?
The culture critic David Samuels pulls no punches in his account of contradictions between Dreams from My Father’s rose-tinted naïveté and the harsher facts. In “Invisible Man: How Ralph Ellison Explains Barack Obama,” he writes:
Dreams from My Father is a story about the consequences of a fiction created by a white mother and well-meaning white grandparents in order to give a fatherless black child a sustaining myth by which to live. . . . [T]he father whose legacy he chooses to embrace, is a bona fide monster—a scary polygamist who abused his wives and children and drank away his intellectual promise and his career, then crippled himself in a car accident that left him with iron legs, and finally wrapped his car around a tree in a second accident that luckily proved fatal to no one other than himself. Dreams is a book about Obama coming to terms with this troubling monster and creating a workable self out of the ruins of his father’s life.
The African American autobiographical canon has included its fair share of dysfunctional families. In other words, however severe his shortcomings, Barack Obama Sr. has literary company. The most misguided patriarch of all may be James Baldwin’s bitter and self-righteous stepfather, immortalized in several Baldwin essays, and most notably in “Notes of a Native Son.” David Baldwin is a failed and sanctimonious minister, employed by a succession of smaller and smaller churches. He calls his son James ugly. He expects his unworthy family to dread him—in the name of the word of God. The zealotry amplifies his unloving and abusive characteristics.
When God speaks, mere mortals must listen, but some mortals—usually the creative types—argue back. Baldwin’s essays give an unremitting account of an adolescence spent in conflict with his stepfather. David Baldwin is a preacher, so the thirteen-year-old Baldwin must become a preacher, and then later, as an adolescent, a sinner. The pieces of fatherly wisdom and concern he gleans from his stepfather always come in the aftermath of violent quarrels. Baldwin painstakingly describes David Baldwin’s death in a hospital, where he was connected to medical wires and tubes. “Notes of a Native Son” is an exposé of how this tyrant of a man—in dying—is overthrown. Not coincidentally, Baldwin’s growth as a writer accompanies David Baldwin’s diminishment. But Baldwin needs to bring the man down in order to love him. Obama’s version of filial love has been to raise up a father figure.
Dreams from My Father reveals the double significance of its title when the naive Obama prepares for his trip to Kenya. And there his childhood fantasy meets a quagmire. Guess what? Barack Obama Sr. turns out to have been a mere mortal after all. The Kenyan section of Dreams from My Father occupies more than a hundred pages. It is full of names, places, and relatives, and it is circuitously told, blurring stories as if the writer preferred to take an amble around his multiple discoveries. Or is it that he is in no hurry to deconstruct his idol? The section presents Barack Obama Sr.’s story piecemeal. Obama takes his time spelling it out—in fact, he never quite does, yet he provides enough information for readers to ascertain the following: Barack Obama Sr.’s life ended in failure. He was a government employee living in a country in which connections mattered. His career advancement was derailed by his lack of skill or of luck in backroom politics. He continually made the wrong friends and the right enemies. Many people who knew him well put the onus of the blame on his personal arrogance and his bouts with alcoholism.
Barack Obama Sr. left three wives and several destitute and emotionally scarred children in his wake. He never adequately supported any of his families. He was also a bigamist. He never divorced his first wife Kezia, whom he married in Kenya before meeting Ann Dunham. He eventually became—when his circumstance descended to its nadir—what today we call a habitual drunk driver. His first car crash resulted in the loss of an innocent life; his second major crash took his own.
Was this man a Kenyan version of David Baldwin? A weak man who presumptuously chided the young Obama to learn to apply himself? A hypercritical drunkard, another figure of pathos bordering on farce?
Not according to Dreams from My Father. If David Samuels emphasizes one side of the man’s ruin, his myth cannot be reduced to a grand self-delusion. The nobler moments warrant acknowledgement as well. This, for example: To reach Hawaii in the first place, defying the general poverty and odds against career advancement in Kenya, the ambitious Barack Obama Sr. took correspondence classes in America and wrote countless letters to American universities until he won a scholarship from the University of Hawaii. He subsequently went to Harvard. In one of those fascinating instances of generational cross-correspondences (which Obama oddly doesn’t make much of in Dreams from My Father) both father and son received graduate degrees from Harvard. Obama Sr.’s perceived arrogance was likely that of a Harvard man, but all of Barack Obama Sr.’s detractors still conceded his brilliance.
A few of the members of the Obama clan explain the patriarch’s downward spiral into drunkenness and semi-unemployment as a matter of hubris. His psychology was characterized by a kind of perverse pride that led him to attend more to benevolent acts that would sustain others than to his responsibilities at home. The stories are complex and contradictory—and, therefore, human. Myths should be humanized. There was the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly for the son to glean from the father.
David Samuel’s major aggravation with Dreams from My Father stems from his feeling that Obama has openly criticized his white family and their peccadilloes but has privileged his blackness by extending to his two-faced Kenyan father too many benefits of the doubt. Samuels might have a point, but in making it, he reveals that he isn’t much of a student of human nature. Who among us isn’t quicker to point to flaws in the people nearest to us? In the people we know and love?
To round out Dreams from My Father, Obama will accept nothing less than a hopeful conclusion. Because he will accept nothing less, his experience in Kenya is spiritually uplifting. He recasts his father into the image of a man who was “heroically” confused. He writes:
Oh Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. . . . The silence killed your faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire.
The lamentation, while stricken with pain, represents a maturation of his personal perspective, Obama implies, balancing the realization of his father’s pockmarks and the rewards of a broader perspective on other cultures and how culture and circumstances shape lives. His romance of his father is never completely demolished; in fact—like a change that follows a cathartic experience—his belief in the integrity of romance in a complex world leads to the charismatic and multicultural vision that characterizes his second book, The Audacity of Hope, and his subsequent Senate and presidential campaigns. In hindsight, Dreams from My Father seems to tell the story of how the future politician put away childish things so that he could become a public man.
The decades to come will bring new and third-person accounts of Obama, revisionary narratives that scrutinize his upbringing, his family lore, and his intense identification with Barack Obama Sr.
And the spotlight will be particularly intense given Obama’s place in history. Still, the process is not unfamiliar. The early slave narratives were often subjected to detailed point-by-point analysis to corroborate their objective veracity. Frederick Douglass was subjected to lengthy interviews before the publication of Narrative. Ralph Ellison always accused Richard Wright of tending to exaggerate his personal sufferings in Jim Crow Mississippi. Who, finally, can say? Wright’s account may well have been colored by his zeal for a greater purpose. History has confirmed that the writers mentioned herein had truth and justice on their side, yet truth and justice, particularly as literary representations, remain subjective concepts. It is with this subjectivity in mind that we should approach Barack Obama’s autobiographical writings and the father figure in whom he invested so much of the story of his development.
Whatever his failings, Barack Obama Sr. first served as his son’s childhood paragon, then later, when Obama visited Kenya, as a kind of representative to help the young man see the ugly truths both at home and abroad. The figure of Obama’s father stood as the gateway to the aspiring young man’s own calling in the world. Between Dreams from My Father (his personal memoir) and The Audacity of Hope (his campaign book), Obama worked through his troubled and conflicted point of view to a vision that is streamlined and clear. After his Kenyan sojourn, the muddled language of racial politics receded from his lexicon. He would no longer play the tragic mulatto—not that he ever wholeheartedly did. He decided to unlock the key to social commitment. He embraced fully his identity as an American, understanding that he would ask for a mass mobilization of a diverse population of patriotic Americans. And his biracial heritage forthwith symbolizes the ties that bind us as Americans, despite racial, ethic, religious, or class differences. To put it cynically, he discovered his campaign theme. To put it positively, he at last understood his heritage.
And not too surprisingly, after he fully embraces his public role, Obama becomes a somewhat less engaging writer. An interesting writer is grasping for what to say; if he has his message on point, he’s writing advertising copy. Many readers of both of Obama’s books have observed that, in terms of overall quality, Dreams from My Father puts Audacity of Hope to shame. This is true. It’s also true, however, that the Barack Obama of Dreams from My Father was not a rigorously analytical scribe. This is not to insult that book’s merits. It reads like an emotive outpouring brought about by a set of tensions, which the author is happier moving beyond instead of rehashing in sequels to the original memoir.
Even in Dreams, Obama was always less inclined to apply the severe gaze of a social critic than he was suited to adopting the more forgiving vision of a leader. A critic by inclination searches relentlessly for the truth, bares all ruses, distrusts every assumption, and parses every piece of conventional wisdom. A critically oriented Obama probably would not have swallowed Barack Obama Sr.’s myth so readily and heartily. A leader is driven by a vision of the greatest good for the greatest number. A leader is inclined toward unshakeable beliefs. Every leader should have certain qualities of a critic, and a critic should see that obsessive analysis can stupefy—but between them they privilege either intellectualization or action.
The distinction is visible early in Dreams when the teenage Obama is left feeling let down after reading the major African American autobiographies. Disappointed by several of the greatest minds of the canon? Too much cogitation, Obama implies. The remarkable exception is Malcolm X’s Autobiography. Because “all the other stuff, the talk of blue eyed devils and the apocalypse, was incidental to the program.” Malcolm traveled to Mecca and returned with an agenda, while “Dubois’ learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force.”
The quality that most distinguishes Obama’s writing is its clarity. It sparkles like sugar crystals. His writing feels balanced and just. Although not meticulously systematic, it proceeds with the lucidity that characterizes a legal mind. His thinking is marked by a bright, positive, and outward-looking unselfconsciousness. Dreams from My Father lacks the penetrative depths of Souls of Black Folk, or the Dostoyevskian complexities of Black Boy and Invisible Man. The writer is guided less by logic, finally, than by vision. As an immature adult, Obama envisioned the father he needed. As a politician, he envisions the world he believes in. His vision, so far, has carried him a long way. •
