does this count -
10-28-2004, 04:04 PM
Barrack Obama: The Man Who Could Be President
PETER KIMANI reviews the autobiography of the son of a Kenyan father and American mother who is set to become the only black representative in the 100-member US Senate. Next week, The EastAfrican begins serialising Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama is on the threshold of a historic feat if voted to the US Senate in next weeks elections. He will become the sole black Senator in the 100-member Senate and the third black senator in 125 years.
Obama's rising political fortunes are underpinned by a remarkable personal life, which he succinctly recounts in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father.
"Let's face it," Obama said in his keynote speech at the Democratic Party's national convention in Boston in June, where his performance had analysts predicting a great political future for him. "My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely..."
He was alluding to his origins, or what one Washington Times journalist called his "lower-class background with Ivy-League gentility."
The son of a Kenyan father, also named Barack Obama, and a white American mother who was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama has spent a large part of his adult life piecing together the story of his life, haunted by the ghost of an absent father and gnawed by the pain of helplessly watching his mother waste away with cancer.
Dreams from My Father is clearly conceived in the tradition of Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family in which another African-American returns to the continent to trace his family roots in the Gambia but reads more like Camara Laye's African Child.
In the latter, the author's life is celebrated within a broader social, cultural and political context, and the historical discoveries that Obama's personal odyssey yields, only serve to reinforce that frame.
In a sense, Obama's book is an attempt to understand himself and his place in history, driven by a strong yearning to belong, and a lifelong turmoil that's ultimately settled by the discovery of his father's extended family and his African heritage.
"For a long time, I sat between the two graves and wept," Obama writes about visiting the graves of his father and grandfather, Hussein Onyango, in Siaya, some 400 kilometres west of Nairobi. "When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close."
That final closure only marks the beginning of a longer and more enduring relationship with Obama's extended family in Kenya, to whom he would turn constantly consciously or unconsciously for a reaffirmation of his belonging and life mission.
If the seed that grew into his involvement in public service, that has now catapulted him into US national politics, was sown in the silence and privacy of his home, and the emptiness and coldness of boardrooms of corporate New York, Obama hints that his sporadic contact with his extended family in Kenya cannot be divorced from the overall judgements that saw him make the big switch in his career.
For instance, Obama says the final push to quit his job and embark on civil activism was influenced by his stepsister Auma's call notifying him of her brother David's death in Kenya.
"For hours, I wandered the streets of Manhattan, the sound of Auma's voice playing over and over in my mind. A continent away, a woman cries... Who were these people, I asked myself, these strangers who carried my blood?... Who was I, who shed no tears at the loss of his own?"
The thread that connects Obama's fast-paced life in America, with its Ivy-League education and experimentation with drugs, and the rural folk in a sleepy village in Kenya, appears in the form of his absent father, who also bears the name of Barack Obama.
Obama senior left his son when he was only two, then came visiting when the lad was barely in his teens, and died in a road accident when the son was a 21-year-old college student.
The sons quest to understand his father's influence on him reveals a rich tapestry connecting continents and cultures, providing a gripping tale of race and inheritance and the eternal issues of identity and belonging.
Obama's journey is neither romantic nor sentimental; it is tempered with self-questioning and occasional grief, but the emptiness that fills his otherwise successful life urges him on, searching for the father he knew not in a bid to find himself.
The myth of the larger-than-life character of the senior Obama built up by Barack's maternal grandparents and his own mother, is shattered when he arrives in flesh and blood. He even reveals a certain frailty as he is recovering from a motor accident.
"He was much thinner than I had expected, the bones of his knees cutting the legs of his trousers in sharp angles... There was a fragility about his frame, I thought, a caution when he lit a cigarette or reached for his beer."
Two weeks later, he was gone as suddenly as he had come. "After a week of my father in the flesh, I had decided that I preferred his more distant image, an image that I could alter on a whim or ignore when convenient. If my father hadn't exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening.
Then, one bleak November morning, Obama receives news of his father's death.
"I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise."
The year is 1982, and it will be a while before Obama can make the trip to his father's land and make peace with his past.
In between, Obama excels in academia, and earns a place at Harvard, where he scores a first when he's elected to edit the Harvard Law Review the first black student to edit the famous journal.
In tandem with his growing stature, so does the curiosity about Obama's life story intensify, climaxing with a publisher's commission to write a book.
The journey commences in a small town in Kansas, from where Obama traces the migration of his family to Hawaii, then to Kenya, his father's land.
In Kenya, he rides in matatus (commuter taxis), shares cigarettes with strangers at the airport and learns first-hand the story of his father from a grandmother in Siaya.
But before that, Obama gets a rough introduction to Nairobi where he and his half-sister Auma have to leave a 5-star hotel to protest open discrimination. He also has to deal with half-brothers who feel no attachment to their traditional heritage, preferring instead to embrace burgeoning Western influences.
Obama's book is a sober narrative about a life odyssey, neither judgmental nor pretentious. If Richard Wright's Black Boy is the quintessence of life in the Jim Crow South, and James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain, an eloquent evocation of the urban crucible of Harlem, Obama's novel is a definitive study of life in the middle of the road: neither black nor white, neither sad nor sanguine.
Journeying through life in such a state means there is no end to searching and questioning; discoveries that provide the answer to old riddles themselves throw up fresh questions to perplex the questing mind.
But one shortcoming in this genre of writing is that it is difficult to judge harshly close members of the family, and Obama steers clear of that, even when he must have felt sorely tempted to express his disappointment with either parent.
Perhaps this reflects a maturity in his approach to life, and writing, accepting what life brings his way as shauri ya Mungu.
Again, the novel is reliant on the oral history of his family and families have an uncanny ability to selectively retrieve what is edifying to remember. His father's fall from grace, for instance, is blamed on vague infighting in the Kenyatta government, ostensibly due to shifting tribal allegiances, but this is not independently corroborated.
The few hints of Obama senior's descent into alcoholism are left to readers to follow through and conclude for themselves if it has anything to do with his downfall and eventual death in a road accident.
Dreams has enjoyed a rebirth since its publication nine years ago, thanks to Obama's growing stature in American politics and his predicted victory in Illinois. There are those who view him, and his book, as a vindication of America as a beacon of hope for immigrants. Yet there are sceptics who wonder how a single individual can redeem generations of dehumanisation through segregation, poverty, ill-health and under-funded public schools.
Nonetheless, what the book achieves, and what must be celebrated, is the courageous manner in which Obama opens family vaults looking for clues to his own past, and how that influences his present.
But the present offers its own challenges, and by laying to rest the demons of his past, Obama now has to deal with fresh challenges that seek to redefine him within the American cultural and political landscape.
Maybe a sequel to Dreams From My Father is in order, regardless of the outcome of the November 2 elections.
Next week: The first instalment of our serialisation of Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father
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