Dream From My Father

Dreams From my Father
By: Hiral Madhani

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by United States President Barack Obama. It was first published in July 1995 as he was preparing to launch his political career, five years after being elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. In this book, Obama has a difficult time discovering who he is and his identity. He has a white mother and a black father. He barely knew his father. The book starts off by Obama sitting in his New York apartment getting a call. He doesn’t usually get visitors or guests so he is surprised. It’s a stranger who calls him to tell him that his father has gotten into a car accident and has died. He talks about how he didn’t know how to react. His father was more of a myth to him than a man. Obama's parents had separated when he was two years old and divorced in 1964. Obama's father went to Harvard to pursue his Ph. D, but he didn't have the money to take his family with him. After that, he returned to Africa to fulfill his promise to the continent. Obama formed an image of his absent father from stories told by his mother and her parents. His father was someone who got mad easily, but also forgave easily. He was also a man to learn confidence from. One time he signed up to sing at an International Music Festival. When he got there he realized that everyone who sung there were professional singers, but he still didn’t back down. He still sang and he got as much of an applause as anyone else.
His grandfather said to him, “Now there’s something you can learn from your dad, Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.” All that Obama knew about his father was that he was an African from Kenya from the tribe of Luo. He lived in a poor village of Alega, but his father’s father was a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, and a medicine man. Obama’s father was a scholar in school and was granted admission to a university in the States. In 1959, he arrived at the University of Hawaii to study econometrics. He fell in love with a white girl who had lived in Kansas but went to University of Hawaii also. There was a problem of miscegenation, but the Supreme Court of US got around to telling the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriage went against the Constitution. The girl’s parents were okay with him marrying Obama Sr.
The book then flashbacks and talks about the history of Obama’s maternal family.
His grandparents were Cherokee blood who lived twenty miles from each other. His grandmother, Toot, was from Augusta and his grandfather, Gramps, was from El Dorado. Toot’s family was a respectable family. Her father held a steady job all through the depression managing an oil lease for Standard Oil and her mother taught at a normal school. His grandfather’s side was the opposite, being raised by their grandparents. Gramps turned out to be a bit wild. Some say because he found his mother’s body after she committed suicide. By the age of 15, he had been thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose. He met a girl and fell in love with her. Toot brought him home one day for her parents to meet him. They somewhat liked him, but didn’t care. Gramps and Toot eloped just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Obama’s grandfather enlisted. Obama’s mother is born at the army base where gramps was stationed. When gramps returned they headed to California where he enrolled in Berkeley under the GI Bill. But he was restless and they moved again first back to Kansas then to small towns of Texas. Then to Seattle where they stayed long enough for their daughter, Obama’s mother, to go to high school. Gramps worked as a furniture salesman. Bought a house. Their daughter was bright and got accepted to University of Chicago, but Gramps wouldn’t let her go. When the manager of the store he worked in told him that a new store opened in Honolulu, he went home and they moved yet again to Honolulu, Hawaii. Always starting for a new start. Running away from the familiar. Their daughter came home one day and mentioned a friend she had met in college, and African student named Barack. They invited him over for dinner. “The poor kids probably hungry, so far away from home.” “Better take a look at him” toot said. They both thought the young man was delightful and intelligent. They had a simple court marriage and had a baby boy named Obama. Obama’s father however, leaves them and Obama is left with an empty feeling. He’s young so he doesn’t understand much, but still feels confused. He said, “There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had let paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents said to me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.” He now was confused about his own identity, “I would not have known at the time, for I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race.”
His mother married again to an Indonesian man named Lolo. He was short, brown, handsome, had good manners and got along with people. Lolo proposes to Stanley, Obama’s mother, and when she accepts he leaves Hawaii and Obama and his mother are packing and preparing to move to Indonesia. When they reached Djakarta, Lolo greeted them and took them to the new house. Lolo gave them a tour and he had small zoo in the backyard: chickens, ducks, big yellow dog, 2 birds of paradise, a white cockatoo, and 2 baby crocodiles. Obama thought of Indonesia as one long adventure. He wrote to his grandparents about everything. But left out some things like a man coming to the door with a hole where his nose was supposed to be begging for money or when his friend tricked him about his baby sister dying in a tragic death. But he also thought of Indonesia as violent, unpredictable and cruel. He didn’t tell his grandparents this as to not worry them about unimportant things. Lolo told them not to give poor people on streets money because if you gave every beggar money, you would become a beggar yourself. When Lolo was in America, Obama’s mother taught him five days a week at 4 am. She teaches him values like: Honesty, Fairness, Straight talk, and Independent judgment.
Obama’s mother sends him back to America and tells him that they will be there soon. When he gets there, he notices that his grandparents have changed. They don’t talk much anymore and Gramps had left the furniture business to become a life insurance agent. Randomly one time, his father came to America to visit them. This changed Obama’s outlook on his father as a whole.