Barack Obama is one of those people who think by writing--or, to put it another way, who write to think. His 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, is proof of that. He acknowledges from the start that the book he ended up writing is nothing at all like the one he sat down to produce. It was going to be an essay on race, and instead it ended up an account of his attempts to find his bearings in a country that thinks in terms of black and white, and to understand the legacy of his African father.
Obama caught the crest of the wave of the modern memoir; it's a literary weaving of the "remembered self," as Thomas Larson, who has written extensively about the craft of memoir, puts it, and of the "remembering self." The reader follows Obama through an investigation that's in both past and present tenses.
He comes across as someone who throughout his youth weighs various possible identities--the son of an African, the kid who's been living abroad in Indonesia, the preppy Ivy Leaguer, the grandson of hardworking and complicated Kansans, the black nationalist, the earnest liberal--and considers the arguments in favor of each. He reflects and drills down. He lets doubt lead to insight, as Larson says, and he shows that he can live with indecision.
And yet there's no lack of control. "He's a very conscious guy," says Darryl Pinckney, a poet and writer in residence at Skidmore College, where he teaches a course on black autobiography as American history. "He's not improvising himself from moment to moment. He writes from self-knowledge. There's nothing inadvertent."
Pinckney points out that Obama keeps a firm grip on what he decides to write about--and what he decides not to. Dreams From My Father says very little about Obama's years in New York City and virtually nothing about Harvard Law School. The book serves, in Pinckney's view, to establish Obama ultimately as a Chicagoan, and in that sense, it's a natural precursor of the more typical political memoir that followed in 1996, The Audacity of Hope.
Pinckney sees something very deliberate and thoughtful in the way Obama identifies with Illinois's most famous politician, Abraham Lincoln, rather than with, say, the state's well-educated and intellectually nimble former governor, Adlai Stevenson. Lincoln broke the boundaries of what was possible, Pinckney says, but only after he was convinced that he had no alternatives, and that's a quality that Obama much admires.
"Reflective" doesn't have to mean "dillydallying," and that could be as true for Obama as it was for Lincoln, says Harold Holzer, a vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and an indefatigable biographer of the 16th president. Lincoln was comfortable with indecision until the time was ripe to act, Holzer says. He liked to hear out his Cabinet as its members argued over policy; it helped him reach his own conclusions, and it helped him gauge when the moment had arrived to move on a decision.
Obama hasn't been shy about invoking Lincoln. He announced his candidacy in February 2007 on the steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Ill., across the street from the storefront where Lincoln wrote his first Inaugural Address, and he mentioned Lincoln's name several times.
Lincoln never wrote the way a modern memoirist does, but, Holzer says, the energy with which he attacked a document shows how his mind was shifting into gear. Like Obama, he wrote to think. He clearly used pen and paper--and glue and scissors--to sharpen his thinking. An early draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was cut-and-pasted, and the second Inaugural Address is a mass of glued-together snippets.
Lincoln, of course, never sought to explore his own inner life in writing; in the world of 19th-century politics, that wasn't done. In fact, his first attempt at autobiography, a two-and-a-half-page effort he wrote for a newspaperman in 1859, includes a note that says, "Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested. There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me. If anything be made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond the material.... Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself."
No political memoir of today--not Obama's and not anyone else's--would display that sensibility. Holzer, though, calls it "aw-shucks" modesty. Lincoln had enormous self-regard--a trait that's been ascribed to Obama by more than a few people. When Charles Sumner, one of the lions of the Senate, met Lincoln for the first time, he was expecting a backwoodsman but came away instead remarking that he "had never met anyone with such an air of intellectual superiority." Lincoln, says Holzer, loved to be idolized.
Obama, too--maybe. But he, of course, must maneuver in a world that is fundamentally different from Lincoln's. In Dreams From My Father, Pinckney says, Obama "is putting together right before our eyes a black identity." (Surely he is the first future presidential candidate to whom anyone ever said, "You ain't my bitch, nigger"; it had to do with sharing french fries one day when he was in high school.) With what may have been the assurance of youth--he was just 33 when he wrote Dreams--he reflects on what he saw as the bitterness that came to define black writers such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, and, in a way, James Baldwin. He aims to avoid that, and admires Malcolm X for the insight that he could overhaul his image and escape the boxes that society had ready for him. With Obama, says Pinckney, "blackness has broken out of the corner."
Obama, by his own reckoning, comes from a background of dissonance. He has fashioned an African-American identity, but his roots are in colonial East Africa and in the recent, and not the centuries-old, West African diaspora. His mother's parents began in Kansas and kept restlessly moving west until they finally arrived in Hawaii. They were not an obvious match--she, upright and Methodist; he, a wildcatter who looked, in her father's estimation, like a "wop." Obama's mother married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian. His father, born when Kenya was a British colony, fell out of favor with the regime of Jomo Kenyatta and never fulfilled what he believed was his potential. And his father, Obama's grandfather, had prickly relations with the rest of his family; he wore Western clothes, and, to Obama's mild horror and fascination, could in some lights have been considered a collaborator with the British. Or, as he puts it, an Uncle Tom.
"The Negro is America's metaphor," said Richard Wright. One way of explaining that, perhaps, is to say that African-Americans as a group embody the larger complexity of American history and culture--including those parts that most white Americans would rather not think about or admit to. Obama's outsider status (and his boyhood years in Indonesia would be no small part of this vantage point) may have given him a keener eye for the fullness of American experience and promise.
Obama gets a frightening glimpse of the "suffocating" map of the world that some black Americans draw for themselves: "We were always playing on the white man's court ... by the white man's rules.... The only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage." An elderly neighbor, a black man, tells Obama that his white grandmother is right to be scared of black men. "She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is."
Of his white grandfather, a none-too-successful insurance salesman, he writes, "His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment."
This is a good place to note that Obama has been talking about bitter people for a long time; it didn't start with Pennsylvania gun owners. In 1994, on NPR, he said, "After watching their income stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, real or perceived, that minorities may enjoy."
"In an environment of scarcity, where the cost of living is rising," he wrote in Dreams, "folks begin to get angry and bitter and look for scapegoats."
Obama understands this, and at the same time also understands how life in America contrasts so starkly with life in much of the rest of the world. He writes evocatively about Indonesia, for instance, where he lived between the ages of 6 and 10--about the smoke of cooking fires, and families crammed on motor scooters, about an old woman shooing flies off a basket of ripening fruit, and the killing of a chicken. He contrasts the "discernible order" of poverty-stricken Jakarta with the lack of such coherence in the projects of Chicago. In Kenya one day, a man was complaining to Obama about Kenyans' refusal to think in terms of the public good. Obama suggested that things aren't so different in the United States. "But you see," the man replied, "a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid."
Obama brings a different and sharper perspective to American politics. But there's more to it than that. "You do not know where you're going with a memoir," Larson says. "We're getting in a dinghy and going out to sea." It takes a certain amount of intellectual courage to do that--or at least audacity. "And imagine," says Larson, "what he's going to write, whether he wins or loses, after all this."
This article appeared in the Saturday, August 23, 2008 edition of National Journal.
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