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Filiation in Barack Obama’s, Dreams from My Father
G. Thomas Couser
Hofstra University
Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father was written in the wake of his election in 1990
as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review: the publicity attendant on that event led
to his being offered a contract for a book on contemporary race relations, which morphed in draft
into a memoir subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance. Although it was conceived, written, and
published (in 1995) before his career in electoral politics got underway, Dreams owes its genesis
to Obama’s historic election to one presidency; more than a decade later, it served ipso facto as a
campaign autobiography during his historic candidacy for another, far more important
presidency: it is thus a kind of proto-Presidential memoir. It interests me primarily, however, as
an example of an emerging type of American life writing, which I call patriography: life writing
about fathers by their sons or daughters. Like its companion subgenre, matriography,
patriography is inherently relational and intersubjective life writing; it grows out of and attempts
to represent an intimate human relationship. It is also, of course, intergenerational: it attempts to
negotiate or understand a family legacy as passed on from father to son, an act I call filiation.
Obama’s book takes its title, and its conception, from a father who was unavailable to
him by virtue of early abandonment (when the son was only two) and geographical distance.
This is an extreme example of a factor that typically stimulates patriography: the absence of the
father. An even more extreme scenario shaped the life of his Democratic predecessor; Bill
Clinton never met his biological father, who died before Bill was born. Nevertheless--or perhaps
therefore--Clinton devoted the entire first chapter of his post-Presidential memoir, My Life, to
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forging a posthumous relationship with his inaccessible father--out of scraps of others’ memories
and testimony. Clinton’s memoir thus illustrates the power of father-hunger, the extent to which
children will go to write filial memoir in the absence of any actual memory of the father.
Unlike Clinton, Obama did meet his father, but he can hardly claim to have known him.
(He knew his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo, his mother’s second husband, much better.) As is quite
well known, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a Kenyan, met and married Ann Dunham, a Caucasian
Kansasian, in Honolulu, where both were students at the University of Hawai’i. The two
separated, however, when their son was only two years old. Thereafter, father and son met only
once before the senior Obama was killed in a car accident in 1982, when his son was just 21.
Because Obama père had been married and had children in Africa before marrying Ann
Dunham, and went on to marry again and have more children back in Africa after they divorced,
and because Ann Dunham also remarried and had more children, Obama fils eventually became
part of an extended tri-continental family--a kind of mini-Rainbow Coalition: multi-racial, multiethnic, and multi-faith.
Still, young Obama spent most of his youth in a single-parent household headed by his
white mother, with help from her parents, who relocated to Hawai’i to be with her. So it is all the
more significant that Obama names and orients his memoir as he does, as though his father had
been a major presence in his life, rather than a conspicuous absence. In his case, the choice has
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unmistakable racial, as well as gender, implications. Like anyone of such biracial parentage,
Obama was destined to be perceived and identified as black, rather than white or racially mixed.
In the conception of his memoir, however, Obama did not merely accept but highlighted his
identity as an African American, making a virtue of necessity. This was an act of conscious
affiliation with an attenuated African heritage. At the same time, not incidentally, it identified
Obama fils as African American who is not a descendant of slaves in the U.S. When it came to
his campaign for the national Presidency, however, this was less helpful than it might have been:
consider the opposition’s attempts to deny his claim to American birth and thus his political
legitimacy.
In his preface to the 2004 reissue of Dreams, Obama acknowledged the irony of his
aligning himself with his father rather than his mother, but not in racial terms. Apologetically
and poignantly, in a gesture that is a common feature of patriography, he took the occasion of
writing a peritext to honor his mother, who had died of ovarian cancer not long after the book’s
initial publication:
I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might
have written a different book--less a meditation on the absent parent, more a
celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. (xii)
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But if patriographies have a common sub-text, it is that fathers need not be present to be
influential in their children’s lives. Thus, in the introduction to the original volume, Obama
discusses how the book shifted from its initial topic, “the current state of race relations” (xiii), to
“a record of a personal, interior journey--a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a
workable meaning for his life as a black American” (xvi). Evidently, then, the mixed-race
Obama felt that, despite the very slight involvement of his African father in his life, it was that
father’s legacy that required expression and examination in a memoir of a “black American.” It
is one of the ways in which the biracial Obama identifies with his minority heritage.
What ensues, however, is a narrative in which his father is present only quite briefly and
sporadically. Only a small fraction of the book’s 400-plus pages directly concern him, and only
in the last of its three sections, “Kenya,” does he come to the fore in a sustained way. Even then,
the vast majority of the pages devoted to him convey second-hand accounts of his life supplied
by African relatives after Obama fils has reached adulthood, either when they visit the U.S. or
when he visits Kenya. Nevertheless, Obama père is the titular father, and he matters even when
he is not literally present on the page.
The narrative proper opens in medias res with an abrupt announcement of his father’s
death in an automobile accident. The story of the son’s life thus begins with his learning that his
father’s life had ended; the knowledge that they would never meet again sets in motion the quest
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for the missing father. A few pages later, the son acknowledges that his knowledge of his father
had been not only largely vicarious but heavily and selectively mediated:
At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less
than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so
that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and
grandparents told. They all had their favorites, each one seamless, burnished
smooth from repeated use. (5)
Obama then assembles these nuggets into a brief narrative of his father’s trajectory from his
youth in Africa through his marriage to Ann Dunham in the U.S. and back to Africa in order to
put his education to work (9-10).
Contrary to my earlier claim that Obama didn’t know his father, especially in childhood,
here he claims a kind of knowledge, that provided by oral family tradition. This is a significant
gesture, because even as he acknowledges having no personal memory of his father, he insists
that he had some acquaintance with him. Granted, his father was more a myth than a man, and
granted, the stories were carefully constructed and cherished heirlooms. But it is significant that
Obama cites oral tradition here as a medium of access to his father when he was still alive;
because oral tradition is so important in African culture, these early stories seem to honor,
transmit, and perpetuate his father’s cultural heritage as well as to recount specific episodes in
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his life. Moreover, they anticipate and prepare for the stories he will later be told by his father’s
African relatives. For the Dunham oral narratives are complemented at the end of the narrative
by their Obama equivalents; thus, the son’s self-written life is bracketed by oral narratives of the
father’s life from two distinct cultural perspectives. At the same time, this section helps establish
his desire to get behind the myth to the man, if possible.
By Obama’s own account, the Dunham stories about his father were
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 narrowmindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would
instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.(25)
They were less about Obama senior as an individual than about Hawai’i as a kind racial and
ethnic melting pot and thus a zone where it seemed possible to escape or transcend insidious
racial boundaries and demarcations. Obama junior regards this as a useful fiction. But he also
acknowledges that he needed more of, and from, his father’s story than such feel-good morals:
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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. . . . 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 nevertheless.(26)
A subsequent passage hints at the meaning of his title (which refers not to dreams of, but
from, his father):
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. (27)
Thus it is not just that Obama fils inherits, and affirms, the dreams of racial harmony and
progress that united his parents in Hawai’i; rather, he is literally the embodiment of the dreams. If
they are dreams from his father more than from his mother, it is perhaps because she was present
to her son in reality, while his father’s absence created a vacuum that only myths and dreams
could fill--perhaps because, identified and identifying as black, young Obama privileged his
African father’s contribution to what was, after all, a joint legacy. The fate of Obama fils, then-his patrimony, in a sense--is to try to live his father’s dream of transcending the limits of race.
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This was also, not incidentally, the dream of another absent mythic father figure, Martin Luther
King, Jr.
Contrary to the right-wing insinuations that Obama was somehow indoctrinated in Islam
while in Indonesia (where he spent two years in a Muslim school, then two in a Catholic one
[154]), his account of these years suggests that living there reinforced, rather than diluted, his
American heritage. As his mother became disillusioned with authoritarian, corrupt Indonesian
culture (and her new husband’s ethical temporizing), she sought to counter that influence on her
son with her own secular humanism and liberalism. Significantly, however, she also invoked his
biological father’s example in this endeavor:
She had only one ally, and that was the distant authority of my father.
Increasingly, she would remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a
poor country, in a poor continent; how his life had been hard, as hard as anything
that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners, though, or played all the
angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life
according to principles that demanded a different kind of toughness, principles
that promised a higher form of power. I would follow his example, my mother
decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes. (50)
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In her resistance to Indonesian values she conveniently conflated the values of Obama père with
those of the American civil rights movement (51)--thus in a way naturalizing her departed
husband. At the same time, her son’s spectacular political trajectory was probably possible in
part because he is African-American in something other than the usual sense of the term: his
patrilineage eclipses the history of American enslavement and oppression of blacks. (On the
other hand, it inscribed his father’s Muslim heritage literally in his name.)
Eventually, Barack, his mother, and his stepsister Maya, Lolo’s daughter, moved to back
to Hawai’i, without Lolo, rejoining her parents. Shortly after their move, Obama père came to
visit for a month. Ironically, rather than savoring his father in the flesh, young Barack found
himself at times longing for the hero in the myth: “I decided that I preferred his more distant
image, an image I could alter on a whim--or ignore when convenient” (63). In any case, after
making a memorable appearance before his son’s class at school, Obama père returned to Africa.
Although he was an imposing, sometimes charismatic, presence, his son found that even while
present “he remain[ed] opaque . . . a present mass” as though the two lacked shared codes and
modes of being (70).
After college, the images of the Civil Rights movement “became a form of prayer” for
Obama and inspired his career as a community organizer, which he characterizes in part as the
attempt of a mixed-race American to place himself in a larger minority community, in which
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membership would have to be actively earned, rather than passively inherited (135). At first
Obama felt that, rather than providing him with entrée to the world of inner-city Chicago, his
exotic racial heritage and life narrative might alienate the locals. But as he progressively
disclosed his background, he found them receptive. In any case, the “race and inheritance” of his
subtitle are far from essentialist; indeed, they are not even constructionist in the academic sense
of that term. Rather, they are performative, forged in struggle and communication. The son
needed to create his own significant community, rather than derive it from his genes or his
upbringing.
During his time in Chicago (after his father’s death), he was visited by one of his African
sisters. She provided a detailed account of his father’s complex marital and paternal history (after
returning to Africa, he married a white American he had met at Harvard and had two children
with her, but continued to “visit” his first wife, and may have fathered another of her children)
and career (because of his status as a member of an ethnic minority, the Luos, his prospects
dwindled and his income dried up). In the end he became alcoholic and abusive toward his third
wife, taking comfort in occasional letters from his second wife, Ann. This news is disappointing
and disillusioning but also may have obviated any Oedipal father-son rivalry:
To think that all my life I’d been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a
moment I felt giddy; . . . The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is
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pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well
please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise.
Whatever I do, it seems I won’t do much worse than he did. (220-21)
There’s loss here too, of course: “The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair.
Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live” (221). His father’s legacy
seems far less clear, less useful, less inspirational, as a result of this deluge of information from
an intimate inside source.
It is only in the last third of the book, “Kenya,” that the narrative confronts his father’s
legacy in any direct way, and as it happens, it is a difficult one for Obama to embrace. Reaching
Africa, the apparent destination of the narrative, is a mixed blessing for the young community
organizer seeking his roots. On the one hand, in a place where his patronym is not merely
recognized but venerated and where his skin does not mark him out for attention--where he does
not have to be constantly concerned about being taken as a confirmation of, or an exception to, a
racial stereotype--he has a strong and welcome sense of belonging. On the other, his father
proves to have been a complex man whose life turned out unhappily for him and his children: the
children and wives he left behind are hardly one big happy family.
In addition to exploring lateral branches, Obama traces the trunk of the family tree: at a
climactic point he is introduced to his father’s mother, Granny, who provides a linear
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chronological narrative of his father’s descent and history. This is conveyed, implausibly, as one
long speech--almost thirty printed pages (or approximately 8,000 words)--with only short
interjections or interruptions. Obama may have tape-recorded the original story and edited it into
its seamless shape, but no account is given of the process by which it moves from oral narrative
to the printed page. Whatever its genesis and manner of mediation, it is unique in my experience
of patriography as a narrative of the father in question. More typically, hidden or obscure back
stories are researched by the author and presented piecemeal; here a single-sourced story is
inserted whole into the larger narrative as if simultaneously heard, memorized, and accepted as
authoritative.
In the manner of folk genealogy the narrative begins with much begetting:
First there was Miwiru. It’s not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma,
Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired
Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo. (394)
In sharp contrast to the female-headed household in which the American Obama was raised, the
African lineage traced here is explicitly and exclusively patriarchal: “The women who bore
them, their names are forgotten, for that was the way of our people” (394). Obama’s ancestors
were migratory herders, and some were polygamists: one of his namesakes had four wives (395)
and his father had three, with two of whom he cohabited simultaneously.
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The family saga is in other ways not what Obama had imagined or hoped for: he is
disappointed to learn that, far from being anti-colonialist, his grandfather Onyango was the first
in his family to adopt European customs and attire, as a result of which he was ostracized (498).
Similarly disillusioning is the narrative of his father’s life after his return from America. Either
oblivious or resistant to Kenya’s clannishness, Obama senior failed to recognize that his personal
merit and impressive credentials did not guarantee his success. And many of his descendants and
dependents still resented his failure to cultivate those in power; his children embraced the values
of the system that marginalized their Old Man, whose nonconformity cost him his livelihood and
eventually his self-respect. Ironically, then, Obama fils discovers in Kenya that his father had not
provided for his numerous African relatives any more than he had for his single American son.
As an African patriarch he was an utter failure. If anything, his mythic legacy was of more use,
as inspiration, to his abandoned American son than his presence was to his African family
members, who relied on him for patronage that he could not provide and who fought bitterly
over his estate after his death.
On the one hand, then, the real man, the object of his son’s quest, proves a
disappointment as characterized by those who knew him best; on the other, his American son had
at least been insulated from the corrosive effect of witnessing his father’s decline into
alcoholism. More to the point, he is forced to recognize that his patrimony no longer consists, if
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it ever did, in his father’s personal example (or that of his grandfather, Onyango) but rather in the
fact that his paternity embeds him in a family that transcends national and racial boundaries.
Through that legacy, he is given access to a rare and valuable African perspective on AfricanAmerican life. The narrative climax of the book comes with Obama’s empathetic--and
emotionally cathartic--visions of his father and his grandfather at their gravesite. Obama senses
that his legacy lies not in the traditional wisdom of his African father and paternal grandfather,
but rather in the knowledge that each of these forefathers had to invent himself in radically new
circumstances. That neither was completely successful is beside the point (427-28).
The other element that he isolates from the complex multigenerational saga of his African
forebears is perhaps the ultimate reward of this quest--a sense of being part of a global family,
for better or worse:
I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of
abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago-all of it was connected with this small plot of earth [ancestral land] an ocean
away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The
pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their
struggle, my birthright. (430)
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Exactly what Obama makes of his paternal legacy in this characteristically eloquent passage--and
indeed throughout the book--is not entirely clear; perhaps some ambiguity is not surprising in a
man who eventually became a professional politician. Indeed, it is possible now to see and say
that what we witness in this narrative is the construction of what would eventually--and
improbably--become a usable past for a man who aspired to the American Presidency. The
epilogue bears this out with its allusions to self-evident truths: “the spirit of Douglass and
Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded
marchers . . . [interned] Japanese families, . . . Russian Jews, dust-bowl farmers,” and so on
(438-39). The implication is that his father’s history holds some answers to his perpetual
questions: “What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our
freedom? How far do our obligations reach?” (438). What does seem clear and instructive is
that, unlike the filial quest of Bill Clinton, which seems driven by an emotional hunger and a
quest for personal validation--all the more remarkable in a post-Presidential memoir--Obama’s
seems driven more by an intellectual curiosity as to who his father was and what his life meant.
He does not, like Clinton, seek emotional comfort as compensation for being deprived of his
“real” father and having grown up without a proximate father figure. Rather, he seems to want to
understand, and learn from, the reality of his father’s complicated history. From it, he draws not
emotional sustenance, much less reassurance, but rather a sense of global connectedness,
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personal responsibility, and (not incidentally) a sense of independence from a father he realizes
could not serve as a model for his own life. And while he alludes to “Martin and Malcolm,” he
does not adopt either as a father surrogate. The obvious connection to Malcolm, Islam, would be
dangerous to emphasize as a legacy; with Martin, the connection to Civil Rights might seem
forced for someone of Obama’s generation and background. So rather than situating himself
squarely in the African American struggle, Obama looks beyond the shores of the U.S. to create
an identity that is, if not post-racial, multi-racial and multi-ethnic, and to fashion out of his
father’s African legacy a more global and forward-looking heritage.
References
Clinton, Bill. My Life. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Random
House, 1995.
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