By Anselm AnyohaFour years ago I was unwavering in my intention to write about President Barack Obama. To show how his height, color, skills, emotions and so forth are a result of his mixed race: white mother and black father.
Find out about him first, my procrastinating brain advised. I agreed and read his book, Dreams From my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, written in 2003. Three months ago I went over it again.
The book begins with how, at age twenty-one, Obama received a call from an aunt he had never met who told him about the death of his father in Kenya. This was during his college years at Columbia University in New York.
Before the dreadful news, Obama, like all of us at age twenty-one, thought he had a script to the journey of life and was going to live it on his terms. The anguish ripped up his script and compelled him to confront his biracial heritage.
In 1959, while attending the University of Hawaii, his mother Ann, then 18 years old, fell in love and married his father, Barack Obama, senior. The marriage occurred in the heat of the American segregation era, when miscegenation was a crime in some parts of the country. White girls were ostracized for playing with black boys, and black boys were lynched for dating white females.
How could a marriage which defied so many odds dissolve so precipitously? One can feel the agony in the tone of the book as Obama ponders the break-up. He was a toddler when his parents divorced. Another seven or eight years would pass before father and son would meet again.
A cut in Indonesia
A lot happened during that time. Ann married Lolo and moved with Obama to Indonesia, where he lived between ages six and nine. His stay in Indonesia was adventurous, a source of envy to any child of his age. An incident occurred when a strand of barbed wire cut his forearm while he played at a muddy farm with a friend. Twenty stitches were what he earned for that adventure.
The book is silent on which arm received the injury. People often fend off potential injuries with their dominant hands. Being a left-hander, I think he would sustain the cut on the left side. But again, the cut could be on his right hand since people tend to be clumsy on their less dominant side, exposing them to danger.
Not long after that laceration incident in Indonesia, Ann sent Obama back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents while she remained in Indonesia with husband Lolo and Maya, Obama's half-sister.
Obama's encounter with Father
It wasn't until a year or so later that Ann returned from Indonesia, a homecoming which coincided with Obama senior's visit from Kenya. The stage was set in Hawaii for a reunion between father and son.
In one of the father and son encounters, the book captures the typical omniscient indignation with which all African parents rule over their kids.
"'Barry [referring to the future president], you have watched enough television tonight,' my father said. 'Go in your room and study now, while the adults [referring to grandparents, mother and Obama senior] talk... I tell you, Barry; you do not work as hard as you should. Go now before I get angry.'"
Unlike the grandparents who cared yet tiptoed around the issue of his race, Obama senior identified with him wholeheartedly and with no reservation, both in his letters and during his rare visits. This intuitive perception, I think, helped young Obama when it came to choosing a race.
Ann would later return to Indonesia for profession-related field work, leaving Barack to resume living with his ageing and laidback grandparents. This is a paraphrase of how President Obama thought of himself during this period, about age fifteen: 'Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America... '
Years went by, and Barack finished college. After college he spent years working as a community organizer in Chicago. But no matter how busy he got in Chicago, his African roots continued to draw him home like a magnet.
Nobody ever completes a journey until they came home. Recently, the father he hardly knew had begun to mean so much. To understand his father's foibles he needed to encounter his challenges.
A visit to Kenya
One particular day he boarded a plane to Kenya. Very impressive was the ease with which Obama embraced his Kenyan brothers and sisters and other relatives, and equally warm was the ease with which they embraced him. He had always been there, mystically---in the person of his father.
Guided by sister Auma, Barack relished the local dishes and went to the local market with his Kenyan grandmother. Old men and women smothered him in embraces. He walked the street, rode the local buses, and before his return to the United States retrieved his inheritance: a bunch of letters written by his father when he corresponded with colleges in the United States.
Summary
Had I analyzed the President without reading this book, my theory would have been wrong. No other channel leads into a man's heart better than his written words. In this book Obama readily reveals himself through his discussion of the circumstances of his birth, clearly expressing his feelings for his parents, his grandparents, his siblings and the people around him.
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I am a pediatrician who likes to write and who also likes to help seniors in my
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