Outside Reading- Dreams from My Father (part one)

Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1995.

For my outside reading, I am reading Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. It is the story of his struggles to find himself as a kid, being torn between the life of his father and ancestors in Kenya and his life in the states.

A brief background for those of you want to more about the man who will be our next president, Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr. was from Kenya. He met Barak's mother in the states, and they were married. When Barack Jr. was 2, his parents divorced. His father went back to Kenya, and his mother moved the family to Indonesia, because she had found a job there. He returned to Hawaii for his high school year, where he admitted that he used drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. He described this as "his greatest moral failure" at the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency. Obama later attended Harvard Law School, where he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He then moved to Chicago, where he was the director of the Developing Communities Project of south side Chicago. He ran and was elected senator of Illinois in 1996, and is now the next president of the United States.

This story begins with Barack living in New York, a few months after his twenty first birthday. He is a solitary person. He isn't sad about it, he just likes his privacy. He says "If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown comfortable in my solitude, it was the safest place I know" (4). This allows us to infer a little about his past. The "safest place" bit tells us that he might have had some bad experiences with people in a past life, and now he stays solitary because he doesn't really feel safe reaching out to people any more because of these experiences. He will talk to people, and be polite and friendly, but he isnt putting any of himself into the conversation, he's just agreeing and saying things that dont give the other people any idea who he really is. It is at this point that his mother calls and tells him his father has died in a car crash. He doesn't really feel sad about it, because at this point he hasnt seen his father in about 15 years, and when he did see him he never go to know him as a father. Right after his aunt gives him the news, he says " The line cut off, and I sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure up my loss (5)" He doesn't have any idea how he sohuld be feeling at that moment, because his father was never really his father to him. It would be like if some man you'd never seen, only heard of, came you your door and told you he was your father, and then many many years later, you learn he died in a car crash. You would probably not be wailing and crying, because you never really thought of that man as your father, anyways.