Getting to like Obama
Andrew Ferguson reviews Barack Obama’s two books. The first is a memoir of a very young man, faced often with disillusionment, but keeping an optimistic spirit. We join the narrative as Obama learns that his father’s tribe was less princely than he imagined as a boy:
“The Luo merited only a short paragraph,” he discovers. “The Luo raised cattle and lived in mud huts and ate corn meal and yams and something called millet. Their traditional costume was a leather thong across the crotch. I left the book open-faced on a table and walked out without thanking the librarian.”
When Barry is ten, his father returns to Hawaii to visit. He is tall, slender, and frail, bespectacled and limping–not a prince at all. The month he spends is to be their only time together–his father died in a car crash in Kenya a decade later–and it is made brittle and uncomfortable by resentments and betrayals among the adults.
Obama’s aching account of the visit ends, as is his wont, with an epiphany, but most of Obama’s epiphanies are moments not just of clarity but also of disillusion. As he grows up one source of consolation after another runs dry. Many of these disappointments involve race, of course, and the degree of sympathy one can muster for the president of the Harvard Law Review in his various tales of woe will vary from reader to reader. But Obama is the shrewdest of memoirists. He won’t let himself, or his reader, off easy. As a teenager he befriends Ray, another African-American boy who vents his authentic black rage between classes at their prep school, as the ocean breezes stir the towering palms overhead. This black rage was “the thing that Ray and I never could seem to agree on . . .
Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure. Sometimes . . . I would question his judgment, if not his sincerity. We weren’t living in the Jim Crow South, I would remind him. We weren’t consigned to some heatless housing project in Harlem or the Bronx. We were in goddamned Hawaii. We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the proverbial bus. None of our white friends treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. Shit, seemed like half of ‘em wanted to be black themselves–or at least Dr. J.
Well, that’s true, Ray would admit. Maybe we could afford to give the bad-assed nigger pose a rest. Save it for when we really needed it.
The full truth about Obama’s father turns out to be much sadder and more pathetic than he could have imagined. It’s revealed at the end of the book, when our memoirist, now in his early twenties and having proudly reclaimed his given name Barack, travels to Kenya to meet his paternal grandmother and cousins, as well as his half-brothers and half-sisters whom his father has scattered around Kenya. By now Barack has shed his dependence on the myth of his old man, yet he still fumbles for some other consolation to steady himself and locate his place in the world.
The promises of religion ring false to him. Drugs and drink don’t help for long. He’s unlucky in love. Succumbing briefly to the pre-packaged racial alienation of the post-civil rights generation, he gives it up in the end, when he sees how the rage, genuine or not, destroys other black friends, including kids even more privileged than he. Marcus, for example, his best friend at Occidental and, for a while, an ambitious student until “he took to wearing African prints to class and started lobbying the administration for an all-black dormitory. Later, he grew uncommunicative. He began to skip classes, hitting the reefer more heavily. He let his beard grow out, let his hair work its way into dreadlocks.” Marcus slips away. If black rage ever seemed a plausible approach to him, Obama’s last glimpse of his friend, playing the bongos at a street fair in Compton, seems to foreclose the possibility: “Through the haze of smoke that surrounded him, his face was expressionless; his eyes were narrow, as if he were trying to shut out the sun. For almost an hour I watched him play without rhythm or nuance, just pounding the hell out of those drums, beating back untold memories.”
Too bad there’s more money and fame in politics than in writing.