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PA2
Monday, November
1, 2004
Barack Obama:
Creation of Tales
We begin the serialisation
of BARACK OBAMA's Dreams from My Father, published by Three Rivers Press,
New York, with his childhood in Hawaii, when the story of his absent, mythologised
Kenyan father had the quality of a creation tale underpinning the secure
universe created by his white American mother and grandparents
PART ONE
At the point where my own
memories begin, my mother had already begun a courtship with the man who
would become her second husband, and I sensed without explanation why the
photographs had to be stored away. But once in a while, sitting on the
floor with my mother, the smell of dust and mothballs rising from the crumbling
album, I would stare at my father’s likeness – the dark laughing face,
the prominent forehead and thick glasses that made him appear older than
his years – and listen as the events of his life tumbled into a single
narrative.
He was an African, I would
learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in
a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father – my other grandfather,
Hussein Onyango Obama – had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe,
a medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father’s
goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration,
where he showed great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study
in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he was selected
by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United
States, joining the first large wave of Africans to be sent forth to master
Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa.
In 1959, at the age of 23,
he arrived at the University of Hawaii – the first African student there.
He studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration, and graduated
in three years at the top of his class. His friends were legion, and he
helped organise the International Students Association, of which he became
the first president. In a Russian language course, he met an awkward, shy
American girl, only 18, and they fell in love. The girl’s parents, wary
at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young couple married,
and she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name. He won another
scholarship – this time to pursue his Ph.D. at Harvard – but not the money
to take his new family with him. A separation occurred, and he returned
to Africa to fulfil his promise to the continent. The mother and child
stayed behind, but the bond of love survived the distances...
There the album would close,
and I would wander off content, swaddled in a tale that placed me in the
centre of a vast and orderly universe. Even in the abridged version that
my mother and grandparents offered, there were many things I didn’t understand.
But I rarely asked for the details that might resolve the meaning of "Ph.D".
or "colonialism," or locate Alego on a map. Instead, the path of my father’s
life occupied the same terrain as a book my mother once bought for me,
a book called Origins, a collection of creation tales from around
the world, stories of Genesis and the tree where man was born, Prometheus
and the gift of fire, the tortoise of Hindu legend that floated in space,
supporting the weight of the world on its back. Later, when I became more
familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television
and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions. What supported the tortoise?
Why did an omnipotent God let a snake cause such grief? Why didn’t my father
return? But at the age of five or six, I was satisfied to leave these distant
mysteries intact, each story self-contained and as true as the next, to
be carried off into peaceful dreams.
That my father looked nothing
like the people around me – that he was black as pitch, my mother white
as milk – barely registered in my mind. In fact, I can recall only one
story that dealt explicitly with the subject of race; as I got older, it
would be repeated more often, as if it captured the essence of the morality
tale that my father’s life had become. According to the story, after long
hours of study, my father had joined Gramps [Obama's maternal grandfather,
Stanley Dunham] and several other friends at a local Waikiki bar. Everyone
was in a festive mood, eating and drinking to the sounds of a slack-key
guitar, when a white man abruptly announced to the bartender, loudly enough
for everyone to hear, that he shouldn’t have to drink good liquor "next
to a nigger." The room fell quiet and people turned to my father, expecting
a fight. Instead, my father stood up, walked over to the man, smiled, and
proceeded to lecture him about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the
American dream, and the universal rights of man. "This fella felt so bad
when Barack was finished," Gramps would say, "that he reached into his
pocket and gave Barack a hundred dollars on the spot. Paid for all our
drinks and puu-puus for the rest of the night – and your dad’s rent for
the rest of the month."
By the time I was a teenager,
I’d grown sceptical of this story’s veracity and had set it aside with
the rest. Until I received a phone call, many years later, from a Japanese-American
man who said he had been my father’s classmate in Hawaii and now taught
at a Midwestern university. He was very gracious, a bit embarrassed by
his own impulsiveness; he explained that he had seen an interview of me
in his local paper and that the sight of my father’s name had brought back
a rush of memories. Then, during the course of our conversation, he repeated
the same story that my grandfather had told, about the white man who had
tried to purchase my father’s forgiveness. "I’ll never forget that," the
man said to me over the phone; and in his voice I heard the same note that
I’d heard from Gramps so many years before, that note of disbelief–and
hope.
"I don’t entirely dismiss"
Gramps’s recollection of events [of his family’s history of defying racism]
as a convenient bit of puffery, another act of white revisionism. I can’t,
precisely because I know how strongly Gramps believed in his fictions,
how badly he wanted them to be true, even if he didn’t always know how
to make them so. After Texas, I suspect that black people became a part
of these fictions of his, the narrative that worked its way through his
dreams. The condition of the black race, their pain their wounds, would
in Gramps's mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the
hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children,
the realisation that he was no fair-haired boy – that he looked like a
wop. Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention
and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that
had kept him on the outside looking in. [The black-haired Stanley Dunham
grew up in a small town in Kansas; he had a "philandering" father and his
mother committed suicide when he was eight years old]
Those instincts count for
something, I think; for many white people of my grandparents’ generation
and background, the instincts ran in an opposite direction, the direction
of the mob. And although Gramps’s relationship with my mother was already
strained by the time they reached Hawaii – she would never quite forgive
his instability and often-violent temper and would grow ashamed of his
crude, ham-fisted manners – it was this desire of his to obliterate the
past, this confidence in the possibility of remaking the world from whole
cloth, that proved to be his most lasting patrimony. Whether Gramps realised
it or not, the sight of his daughter with a black man offered at some deep
unexplored level a window into his own heart.
Not that such self-knowledge,
even if accessible, would have made my mother’s engagement any easier for
him to swallow. In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit
murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore.
There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the
bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people
back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice
of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard.
And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be, a trial that
would pass, just a matter of time, so long as they maintained a stiff upper
lip and didn’t do anything drastic.
If so, they miscalculated
not only my mother’s quiet determination but also the sway of their own
emotions. First the baby arrived, eight pounds, two ounces, with 10 toes
and 10 fingers and hungry for food. What in the heck were they supposed
to do?
Then time and place began
to conspire, transforming potential misfortune into something tolerable,
even a source of pride. Sharing a few beers with my father, Gramps might
listen to his new son-in-law sound off about politics or the economy, about
far-off places like Whitehall or the Kremlin, and imagine himself seeing
into the future. He would begin to read the newspapers more carefully,
finding early reports of America’s newfound integrationist creed, and decide
in his mind that the world was shrinking, sympathies changing; that the
family from Wichita had in fact moved to the forefront of Kennedy’s New
Frontier and Dr King’s magnificent dream. How could America send men into
space and still keep its black citizens in bondage? One of my earliest
memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders as the astronauts
from one of the Apollo missions arrived at Hickam Air Force Base after
a successful splashdown. I remember the astronauts, in aviator glasses,
as being far away, barely visible through the portal of an isolation chamber.
But Gramps would always swear that one of the astronauts waved just at
me and that I waved back. It was part of the story he told himself. With
his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space
age.
"In the end, I suppose" that’s
what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about
the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people
around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes
had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation
for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of
the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism
and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or
culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction,
one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does
some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.
There was only one problem:
my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother
or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their
stories didn’t tell me why he had left. They couldn’t describe what it
might have been like had he stayed– So my father became a prop in someone
else’s narrative. An attractive prop – the alien figure with the heart
of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl –
but a prop nonetheless. I don’t really blame my mother or grandparents
for this. My father may have preferred the image they created for him –
indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published
in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin upon his graduation, he appears guarded
and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent. He mildly
scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and
forcing them to attend programmes designed to promote cultural understanding
– a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although
he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation
and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups
and expresses wry amusement at the fact that "Caucasians" in Hawaii are
occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is
relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing
other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races
to work together toward common development, something he has found whites
elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
I discovered this article,
folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when
I was in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No
mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the
omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long
departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated
by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision,
not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too,
whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.
I would not have known at
the time, for I was too young to realise that I was supposed to have a
live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race. For
an improbably short span, it seems that my father fell under the same spell
as my mother and her parents; and for the first six years of my life, even
as that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind
reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.
"Gramps accompanied me" on
my first day of school at Punahou Academy. He had insisted we arrive early,
and Castle Hall, the building for the fifth and sixth graders, was not
yet opened. A handful of children had already arrived, busy catching up
on the summer’s news. We sat beside a slender Chinese boy who had a large
dental retainer strapped around his neck.
"Hi there," Gramps said to
the boy. "This here’s Barry. I’m Barry’s grandfather. You can call me Gramps."
He shook hands with the boy, whose name was Frederick. "Barry’s new."
"Me too," Frederick said,
and the two of them launched into a lively conversation. I sat, embarrassed,
until the doors finally opened and we went up the stairs to our classroom.
At the door, Gramps slapped both of us on the back.
"Don’t do anything I would
do," he said with a grin.
"Your grandfather’s funny,"
Frederick said as we watched Gramps introduce himself to Miss Hefty, our
homeroom teacher.
"Yeah. He is."
We sat at a table with four
other children, and Miss Hefty, an energetic middle-aged woman with short
grey hair, took attendance. When she read my full name, I heard titters
break across the room. Frederick leaned over to me.
"I thought your name was
Barry.
"Would you prefer if we called
you Barry?" Miss Hefty asked. "Barack is such a beautiful name. Your grandfather
tells me your father is Kenyan. I used to live in Kenya, you know. Teaching
children just your age. It’s such a magnificent country. Do you know what
tribe your father is from?"
Her question brought on more
giggles, and I remained speechless for a moment. When I finally said, "Luo,"
a sandy-haired boy behind me repeated the word in a loud hoot, like the
sound of a monkey. The children could no longer contain themselves, and
it took a stern reprimand from Miss Hefty before the class would settle
down and we could mercifully move on to the next person on the list. I
spent the rest of the day in a daze. A redheaded girl asked to touch my
hair and seemed hurt when I refused. A ruddy-faced boy asked me if my father
ate people. When I got home, Gramps was in the middle of preparing dinner.
"So how was it? Isn’t it
terrific that Miss Hefty used to live in Kenya? Makes the first day a little
easier, I’ll bet."
I went into my room and closed
the door.
"Your father’s coming" to
see you, my grandmother Toot said. "Next month. Two weeks after your mother
gets here. They’ll both stay through New Year’s." She carefully folded
the telegram and slipped it into a drawer in the kitchen. Both she and
Gramps fell silent, the way I imagine people react when the doctor tells
them they have a serious, but curable, illness. For a moment, the air was
sucked out of the room, and we stood suspended, alone with our thoughts.
"Well, Toot said finally,
"I suppose we better start looking for a place where he can stay."
Gramps took off his glasses
and rubbed his eyes. "Should be one hell of a Christmas."
Next week:
Father meets son; Obama's
first visit to Kenya
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