Books: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

In the early 1990’s Barack Obama was basking in the media attention of his being elected the first Black President of the Harvard Law Review, and was asked to write a book on race-relations. The book soon became more of a personal journey and turned into a lengthy memoir. Some might say beginning to write an autobiography while still in your early thirties is a tad precocious, but Obama led a rather unique life. Born in Hawaii to a tall, lean, Kenyan father and a pretty, white girl from Kansas his early life really was a far cry from that of the disenfranchised and underprivileged blacks descended from West African slaves that he comes to live with, then write about so well.

I myself have serious qualms with this media obsession of referring to the President Elect solely as ‘African-American’. This racial tag completely ignores his white mother and her line. My very own Grandma is in such a position to be able to condemn such proclamations too, as she herself is the white mother of a clutch of mixed race children. She’d feel betrayed if my mum, or one of her siblings, were only described in terms of her Black husband and his roots. Through his descriptions of his adolescent self and peers, and later, his experience with his paternal relations in Kenya, it is clear that Obama has a clear ‘black’ identity. It is only the very young Obama who feels in some way different from all of the other children in Hawaii and Indonesia (his mother remarried an Indonesian and Obama spent a few happy years living in Djakarta) and there is one especially poignant moment when he describes seeing a picture in Life magazine of a man who had tried to peel his skin off because he was so ashamed of being black.

There’s no denying it, this is a hefty tome and is far too indulgent. Obama sets out to describe his heritage, which he does well (one can’t help wondering whether there was a ghost) with just about the right portions of action, issue and retrospective insight, but once we get to the second section ‘Chicago’ this sense of pathos is lost, only to turn into some kind of Urban American Dream fiction. The final section ‘Kenya’, with its romantic descriptions of the country and it’s heritage is again too indulgent for what was initially supposed to be an educational book but Obama fans far and wide will find it an insightful read.