Twelve days ago during our local monthly book club's exchange of views about books each of us had read or begun reading since our last meeting I related that I had just started reading Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father. One of the women, who apparently has been a member for quite a while but who I had not met until that day, is also an American married to a Canadian and living in this small town in northern Ontario. I am from Indiana. She is from the Deep South. To protect her privacy I won't use her name, but will call her D*.
Many people I've met here are familiar with American politics and know a bit about Barack Obama's quest for the presidency, so I anticipated some interest in his autobiographical bestseller written in 1995. D was the most interested, although she mainly projected concern; she said that she had received an email about Obama and statements he had made in his books that worried her and she would like to get my opinion of what she had received. I gave her my email address so that she could forward the email to me. The next day she sent me this:
Fw: The last excerpt is truly frightening!
Subject: Fw: The last excerpt is truly frightening! He is scary!!
-----In his own words...............this is scary.............
This guy wants to be our President and control our
government. Pay close attention to the last comment!!
Below are a few lines from Obama's books ' his words:
From Dreams of My Father: 'I ceased to advertise my
mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to
suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to
whites.'
From Dreams of My Father : 'I found a solace in
nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity
against my mothers race.'
From Dreams of My Father: 'There was something about
him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself,
maybe. And white.'
From Dreams of My Father: ; 'It remained necessary to
prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to
the black masses, to strike out and name names.'
From Dreams of My Father: 'I never emulate white men
and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It
was into my father's image, the black man, son of
Africa , that I'd packed all the attributes I sought
in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm,
DuBois and Mandela.'
From Audacity of Hope: 'I will stand with the Muslims
should the political winds shift in an ugly
direction.'
Publication history for 'From Dreams of My Father'
* New York : Times Books; 1st edition (July 18, 1995); Hardcover: 403 pages; ISBN 0-8129-2343-X
o This printing is now very rare. Only a few signed copies are known, and are estimated to be worth up to $5,000 (depending on condition).
* New York : Kodansha International (August 1996); Paperback: 403 pages; ISBN 1-5683-6162-9
* New York : Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition (August 10, 2004); Paperback: 480 pages; ISBN 1-4000-8277-3
* New York: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (May 3, 2005); Audio CD; ISBN 0-7393-2100-5; Includes the senator's speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
* New York : Random House Large Print; 1st Large print edition (April 4, 2006); Hardcover: 720 pages; ISBN 0-7393-2576-0
* New York : Crown Publishers (January 9, 2007); Hardcover: 464 pages; ISBN 0-3073-8341-5
* New York : Random House (January 9, 2007); Format: eBook; ISBN 0-3073-9412-3
Sigh. I mean, you can smell the malicious stink of hate and fearmongering in the subject line. But to be fair to my new friend and fellow American I read the contents of the email carefully, pondered how to respond, struggled with the wording of my reply to her and came up with this:
Hi D*
I'll look for these five excerpts as I read Dreams From My Father. I don't have Audacity of Hope to check out that last excerpt but I'll see if I can find it...I paged through the introduction to Dreams From My Father and found the first excerpt, which was indeed taken out of context. It's on page xv. He's writing about people having a hard time taking him at face value. He writes:
"When people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose--the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife's six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it's on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down..." (his wife's cousin's white classmates refused to play with him because of his skin color)
I'll get back to Obama's Dreams From My Father and look for the rest of the excerpts as they fit within their context. Obama has certainly been vilified by many Clinton supporters and many right-wingers, so I don't tend to believe at face value any bad things I read about him, especially things sent in emails. An awful lot of it is hate mail. I don't forward it. Often I reply to it, correcting falsehoods, and am careful to send my reply to all who received the hate mail along with me.
Hope you are enjoying this long weekend, cool and damp as it is. I'm spending it with my nose in a book. :)
D replied with:
Ginger, thank you so much for the thoughtful reply. I know that things are so often taken out of context.
I am not a supporter of Obama or Clinton...I don't care for the liberal (Democratic) party. If I had to make a choice out of the two I would go for Obama but I would be scared only because he is known in the senate as the most liberal senator.
Whoever happens to win, I pray that they are good, Christian, moral people.
During the past week I have spent many hours reading Dreams From My Father, most often at night in the quiet of my bedroom where I can concentrate better, free of the distractions of a talkative husband, the radio, and the movements and utterances of seven cats and a dog. My follow-up email to D today sums up how I feel about the Barack Obama and the American presidency, based upon what I read in Dreams From My Father and my perception of the American government in general and the current administration in particular:
Hi D*
I finished Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father this morning. I normally read much faster but this is a book that needs to be read slowly and thoughtfully to fully appreciate the soul searching and relationships revealed, especially in light of Obama's political status now. I was also trying to look for the other statements allegedly taken from the book and used to create the critical email you forwarded to me. The book was so deep and fascinating to me that I lost track of this secondary goal of looking for the statements, although I recall seeing a couple of them and could probably locate them in the book without too much difficulty now. I'm not sure that I will do that, though, because there is no need. If you read this book carefully and respectfully, seeking to understand his reason for writing it and all that he reveals, often with painful honesty, about himself--his intellect, his conflicts, his family relationships, his regrets, his celebrations and his integrity--I think that you will find that he is a conscientious leader, a man to be admired, not feared.
The big worry I have about Obama as President is the same worry I have for any President--the integrity, honesty and intelligence of those who will advise him. Just look at the current administration and the way his greedy, unscrupulous warmongering advisors have manipulated George W. Bush into making many horrible decisions with far-reaching impacts, including embroiling the US in the Iraq war with all its disastrous consequences. We have to look at who the President trusts to provide him or her with the information (*intelligence*) that will be used to make critical decisions affecting not only the United States but the world.
After finishing Obama's book I found this information about the emailed quotations allegedly taken from it and his Audacity of Hope. Take a look and see what you think. As I see it, that email is hate mail, maliciously designed to promote fear and turn people against Obama in order to satisfy the sender's own political agenda. It's sad that people stoop to such tactics.
There was much more that I could have written to D about Barack Obama and what he shared with the world in Dreams From My Father. There were inspirational passages and candid observations that I would like to have quoted; feelings of fascination and foreboding that arose when he began to write about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, knowing what I do now of this man's recent impact on Obama's presidential campaign; and my struggle to look at race through Obama's eyes, limited by my own race, gender, age, background and experiences. So much to digest and process and reflect upon. Too much to try to impart to a new friend from the Deep South with Christian convictions who doesn't "care for the liberal (Democratic) party".
I really want to read Audacity of Hope, which our local library supposedly has requested for me via interlibrary loan. That's the problem with living in a small town with a rudimentary library and being too poor to afford to buy new books--access to books I want to read is extremely limited. If it weren't for a friend who lives over an hour's drive from me I wouldn't have been able to read Dreams From My Father, as our library doesn't have it, either. Sad to say, when I put in the request for Audacity of Hope the long-time library staff member asked me to spell "Obama"--she had never heard of him. One could pass this lack of knowledge and resources off to the fact that Obama is an American rather than a Canadian author, yet I can assure you that that is not the case. There is much more to it than that, as books by other American authors can be found on the shelves and important Canadian writers are either poorly represented or not at all, but that is a topic for another post.
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