Book Summary & Excerpts

Brief summary

Barack Obama once said that his diverse extended family is “like a little mini-United Nations. I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.” In Dreams from My Father, Obama introduces us to that family—his mother and grandparents from Kansas, his father and half-siblings in Kenya—and takes us along on his personal journey to form his own identity and find his place in the world.

Long summary

Part family memoir and part coming of age story, Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama is a compelling account of one man’s life and his personal journey to form his own identity and find his place in the world. Written prior to the now president’s election to public office, the book traces his early years, education, community organizing work in Chicago, and first trip to Kenya to meet his paternal relatives.

Born in Hawaii to a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya, Obama grew up as part of a diverse and far-flung extended family. In Dreams from My Father, Obama introduces us to that family and the places where they lived. We meet his maternal grandparents, transplanted Kansans living in Hawaii who have retained and pass on to their grandson their Midwestern practicality and simple values. His mother’s second marriage takes them to Jakarta, where Obama immerses himself in the earthy and fatalistic culture of Indonesia and acquires a half-Indonesian half-sister.

After his return to Honolulu, Obama is enrolled in an exclusive and mostly white private school. He writes candidly about his struggles with his racial identity and finding a sense of belonging. “I learned,” he says, “to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” This struggle manifested itself during Obama’s teenage years in the use of alcohol and marijuana, habits he left behind after college.

Obama met his stern and demanding father for the first and only time at age ten. Despite his father’s physical absence, the man is a strong presence in his son’s life. Obama comes to know him, though only partially, through stories shared by his mother and grandparents and the letters his father writes to him. It is only when Obama travels to Kenya to meet his paternal relatives, after his father’s death in an automobile accident, that he learns the full story of his father’s life in Kenya and is finally able to reconcile his incomplete and contradictory feelings into a coherent whole.

Excerpts

“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.”

Dreams from My Father, pp. 25-26

“I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people.”

Dreams from My Father, p. 429