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Barack ObamaDreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Race and American Identity
As a term, "African American" generally refers to American people of African descent, many of whom are the descendants of slaves and survivors of a system of Jim Crow laws that granted African Americans only second-class citizenship decades after their emancipation from slavery. A sense of shared history and suffering are foundational to this particular cultural and social identity. "Black," a more general term, is frequently used to encompass the shared experiences and cultures of people of African descent all over the world, including in America.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama spends much of the time recounted in the book attempting to come to terms with what it means to be black in America and to claim an African-American identity. Obama's struggle to claim a racial identity as an African American is complicated by his multiracial, multicultural origins and his status as the son of a recent immigrant from Kenya. Obama's efforts to claim that identity only meet with success once he becomes grounded in a physical and social community of African Americans.
Although Obama has publicly identified as an African American, his origins as a black person who spent time abroad in Indonesia and who spent his formative years in Hawaii, a multiethnic place that does not adhere to the simple black-white racial mix of many parts of the U.S., complicate his efforts to identify as African American. Obama recounts in detail how he eventually feels at home during the years he spent in Indonesia as a child and struggles as an adolescent and a teenager in his native Hawaii to become African American when he had few in-person contacts with African Americans.
Obama's racial background—parents who include a white mother and an absent, black, and Kenyan father—also poses some challenges to his efforts to claim an African-American identity. As a child, Obama only becomes aware of the importance of black racial identity when he reads a news story on skin bleaching creams as he waits for his mother in the American embassy in Djakarta. Ann Dunham insists on teaching Obama about the American civil rights movement and blackness as a certain kind of cool as antidotes to what she sees as corruption in Indonesia, but without the context of black community to which he can connect this history, Obama fails to see the relevance of it to him.
As a schoolboy in Hawaii, Obama rejects the possibility of being associated with the only other black student (a girl) and functions as a social outsider as a result of his racial and cultural differences from the other students. Obama creates fabulous stories about being the son of a Kenyan king, choosing to identify as a lost African prince as opposed to an African American with a more pedestrian history.
As a teenager, Obama begins to consolidate some sense of himself as AfricanAmerican as a result of his consumption of popular culture, playing basketball, personal relationships with Ray and Frank, and his reading of nonfiction by African-American authors. Obama watches television shows such as Soul Trainand blaxploitation movies, listens to popular black music, and copies comedian Richard Pryor in an effort to "cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style" (78) that would allow him to feel more authentically African American. While Obama's interactions with popular culture are relatively facile ones, playing basketball offers him social contacts and black male mentoring that had been sorely lacking up until this period in his life.
The personal relationship with Ray, an African American from Los Angeles and a peer in terms of age, is a double-edged sword that gives Obama insight into mainland African-American perspectives on race and racism. On the other hand, the relationship also makes him feel inauthentic since Ray frequently reminds Obama that his decision to identity as African American is a choice Obama makes rather than an identity that is socially constructed by the society around him.
Obama's relationship with Frank, by contrast, is relatively slight and generally mediated by Gramps. Frank's role in the development of Obama's racial identity is to help him confirm that white privilege operates even in the safe space of his grandparents' home. Frank also makes the argument that attending college is a necessary but costly toll required in order to function in a racist world.
The angst over race as an overwhelming social construct is underscored by Obama's reading of African-American writers such as W.E.B. DuBois. The culmination of Obama's experiences during these teen years is his belief in a "nightmare vision"(86) of race that leaves him feeling trapped, hopeless, and under the erroneous impression that to be African American is to be defined by black suffering or black anger.The seeds of the resolution of this vision are also in Obama's reading, however; Obama zeroes in on the importance of "self-creation" (86) in Malcolm X's writing as an important means of crafting an affirmative African-American identity.
Obama's earliest efforts at self-creation occur after he leaves Hawaii. Obama only manages to escape his negative perception of African-American identity after making crucial friendships during his years in college—especially the friendship with Regina—and as a result of becoming grounded in an African-American community during his years as the executive director of a community organizing organization in Chicago. Obama's immersion in a physical community, his service to that community, and his engagement with important sites of African-American culture—including the black church—eventually allow Obama to claim with few self-doubts an African American racial identity.
Geography, Travel, and Identity
Dreams from My Father is a memoir, but it also incorporates important aspects of African-American travel narratives. African American travel narratives and the genre of travel narrative in general tend to include rich descriptions of the cultures and habits of particular regional identities. African-American travel narrative in particular tends to focus on travel to places associated with the cultures of people of African descent, particularly Africa.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama represents himself as a cosmopolitan African American whose unusual background enables him to engage in comparative descriptions of the places and people he encounters. While such description frequently casts the writer as an outsider looking in, Obama writes both as an outsider and a person interested in becoming an insider by consolidating aspects of his identity into a coherent, African-American whole.
Obama spends time in Djakarta, Hawaii, the suburbs of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Europe, and Kenya. Obama carefully describes the physical or geographic features, people, important cultural values, and myths associated with each place. Obama describes the impact of armed revolution on the people of Indonesia and the statue of the Monkey God he sees on his way to Lolo Soetoro's home, for example, and he also includes a detailed description of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya (complete with his own reactions to the beautiful sights). He includes Auma's voice during the Kenya chapters in order to highlight how tribe, gender, and global capitalism shape the lives of Kenyans and tourists to Kenya.
Obama's perspective in some of these sites is that of an outsider looking in. This sense of alienation is at its peak when Obama describes the three-week trip to Europe, where Obama eventually concludes that the trip to Europe was "a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass" (301). Alienation in response to European travel is a frequent theme in African-American travel narrative.
Obama writes himself into a longstanding African-American tradition of going to Africa in order to discover his ancestors in the last third of the book, which is devoted to his travel to Kenya in the weeks before he begins law school. Although Obama's African ancestry is much more recent in time than that of many African Americans, Obama's narrative in the Kenya chapters includes conventions of African-American travel narrative, including his sense of relief at the lack of hypervisibility in a majority black country, reconnection with distant family, painful acknowledgement of the impact of colonialism and global capitalism on contemporary Africa, guilt over one's relative prosperity and mobility as an African American, and a sense of grief and loss as the traveler considers the damage wrought by alienation from one's African roots.
Although Obama includes many conventions of African-American travel narrative in his book, the truth is that he is the son of a recent and short-term African immigrant to America. Because of his more recent connection to Africa, Obama has access to experiences that are not typical for African-American travelers abroad. Obama has close blood relatives who serve as guides in Kenya, is able to lay hands on the physical traces of his history—Hussein Onyango's wage book, for example—and gains access to his genealogy and the history in which it is embedded when Granny tells the story of the Obama family near the end of the memoir.
Obama weaves the insights he gains as the returning son of an immigrant into his experiences as a black American by making connections to what he experiences in Africa and what he has experienced in Chicago. He connects the desperation in Abo's eyes to "the same element of guardedness, perhaps, and calculation"(384) that he has seen in the eyes of African American men in Chicago, for example. This connection and others all help Obama to understand that the struggle of people of African descent are similar regardless of place and that a balance between giving of oneself and caring for oneself is crucial if he hopes to be an effective contributor to his community. Having learned that during his travel to Kenya, Obama is able to return to America more confident in the path he has forged as a force for good in the African-American community.
Fathers and Sons
According to Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama spends the first few years of his life and a few months when he is ten in the company of his father. Despite the small amount of time Obama spends with his father, Obama's identity is deeply shaped by his father.
Although Obama spends very little of his life with his father, his father's image and Obama's brief encounters with his father leave indelible marks on the man Obama becomes. Obama's initial understanding of who his father is emerges from the stories that the Dunhams tell of his father. These stories present Obama Sr. as a larger-than-life figure who goes from a small Kenyan village to Harvard, an upright African man who contributes to Kenya's entrance into the developed world, and a model of black and African excellence. Toot, Gramps, and Ann Dunham in particular tell these mythologizing stories to the young Barack Obama in an effort to address the reality that the boy is growing up without his father and to create a bridge to Obama's African ancestry.
Obama's brief encounter with his father during the visit to Hawaii confirms some aspects of the myth or what Obama calls "dreams" in the title of the memoir and throughout the narrative. Obama notices right away that his father's presence transforms the people around him: Obama's father has charisma. This "strange power" (66) even works on nonfamily members, as Obama discovers when he watches his father mesmerize his classmates and teachers during a talk at Punahou Academy.
Even during the brief visit to Hawaii, however, Obama begins to understand that there is a deeply flawed man behind this myth. The argument between the Dunhams and Obama Sr. over how much television the young Obama watches shows a more rigid and angry side of Obama Sr. The process of stripping away the myth accelerates once Obama begins to establish adult relationships with his half-siblings. Obama discovers that his father frequently failed to meet his responsibilities as a father, was given to boastfulness and arrogance, and failed to maintain the respect of his peers because he lacked the ability to moderate his ideals by facing reality head-on.
Despite Obama's sadness over how Obama Sr.'s decisions negatively shaped the lives of the Obama family, Obama also comes to a more measured understanding of the context for his father's character flaws. Granny's oral narration of the family's history and Obama's encounters with his Kenyan family reveal that Hussein Onyango Obama, Obama Sr.'s father, also failed his son in many ways, and that over the generations, orphanage, death, and the historical context of colonization all conspired to fracture the relationships between fathers and sons.
Obama's growing understanding of who his father really was leads to some soul-searching about his own strengths and weaknesses. Like his father, Obama is idealistic, has charisma that sways people (as evidenced both by his speech at Occidental but also by the many speeches with which most readers may be familiar), and has high expectations for himself and others. Obama makes some intentional choices in order to avoid the failures of his father, especially as a result of his experiences at Occidental College and in Chicago. Obama, for example, tempers his idealism as he learns to navigate the world of Chicago politics and learns the importance of celebrating success rather than pointing out failure in his dealings with his staff in Chicago.
Although the memoir was published well in advance of Obama's successful run for the American presidency, his political success implies that these different choices allowed him to escape some of the pitfalls that destroyed his father.
Dreams Versus Reality
Dreams serve as important motif that Obama uses to talk about the difference between ideals and practical reality. Tension between dreams and reality function in the lives of Obama Sr., Gramps, and Obama himself. The success of these figures professionally and as men is based on how well (or poorly) they are in resolving this tension and coming to some accommodation with reality.
Obama Sr. is virtually destroyed because he is a person who dreams of achieving great things as a member of the Kenyan government after decolonization but is unable to turn these dreams into reality because of his rigidity and arrogance. Obama Sr.'s pattern of not meeting his potential because of his refusal to acknowledge reality is established when Obama Sr. is a young man who relies on his intellect rather than hard work while a student. This pattern becomes entrenched when Obama Sr. returns from studying abroad in the U.S. and assumes that this education will allow him to be successful in Kenya. The reality of his situation is that the Kenyan bureaucracy is one that is built on personal relationships and tribal affiliations. Obama Sr.'s refusal to accept that reality, coupled with his tendency to drink and to ridicule others, earns him the enmity of Jomo Kenyatta, the most powerful man in Kenya. Obama Sr.'s period of struggle and poverty is the consequence of his failure to assume a more practical stance with regards to his life and career.
Stanley "Gramps" Dunham also struggles to realize his potential as a result of his focus on dreams to the exclusion of the reality around him. Gramps's restlessness and pursuit of dreams lead him to move his family around until they land in Hawaii, which Gramps sees as a utopia that embodies his ideas about a color-blind society. In Gramps's case, his focus on dreams leads to a willful self-deception about his motivations for moving around so much and a revisionist history that fails to acknowledge his own role in his failure to be a success in life. While his focus on dreams over reality cause much pain in his life, his idealism is nevertheless one of the reasons why he (and Toot) are able to accept Obama Sr. and their grandson into their lives during a time when the reality was that American society was a racist one that rigidly enforced racial boundaries. In this case, dreams are aspirations that allow Gramps and the entire Dunham family to overcome ugly aspects of American history.
Barack Obama's identity reflects the legacy of the tension between dreams and reality on the lives of the Dunhams and the Obamas. Obama's identity as a political figure, discernable even during this early stage of his political career, is one that is rooted both in hope (dreams) and reality (the hard work of implementing change through politics and community-level organizing).The fine balance between dreams and reality is also an important part of Obama's racial identity and is a result of his understanding of African-American history as one propelled by "the audacity of hope," a phrase taken from a sermon by Jeremiah Wright. Obama, who goes on to become president, represents the resolution of that tension in the lives of his family and, for his two terms as president, for the country.
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