Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dreams from My Father, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Community
Fathers, Sons, and Manhood
Race and Identity
Storytelling and Truth
Summary
Analysis
Barack rushes into the airport and studies the photograph in his hand. When he looks up, he sees Auma, the photo’s subject, in real life. Barack knows immediately that he loves her. In the car, she tells him about how much she dislikes Germany. It purports to be progressive, but people there are still racist. It makes her think of what their father, the Old Man, must have felt when he left home. When Barack tries to convince Auma to nap, she accuses him of being stubborn like the Old Man. Barack takes her on a tour of the city and then to his office, where Auma, Angela, Shirley, and Mona cackle and talk about him. Barack tells her later that he’s an organizer for people like them and for himself, but Auma says she dislikes politics—people end up disappointed.
Finally meeting Auma in the flesh connects Barack more to his father—especially since Auma seems to regularly bring up their father and what his experience must have been like. Even more importantly, though, it’s telling that Auma suggests that she and Barack are probably going through the same kind of struggles that their father did so many years ago. This suggests that Barack, Auma, and their other siblings will inevitably have to retrace aspects of their parents’ paths as they find their ways in the world.
Themes
Back at Barack’s apartment, there’s a letter waiting for Auma from a German law student that she’s been seeing. She sighs and says that after watching the Old Man, marriage disturbs her—and she’d have to live in Germany if she married this guy. Barack says he understands. In New York, he dated a white woman. Their relationship was comfortable when it was just the two of them in each other’s apartments, but when she took him to her family’s grand house, he knew he’d have to give up his life to be with her. He took her to a Black playwright’s play. She insisted she couldn’t be Black and they broke up.
This conversation reaffirms what Barack mentioned when describing his revelations in college that “exotics” can only integrate into white culture, not the other way around. Both Barack and Auma recognize that marrying white Americans or Europeans would inevitably mean giving up on some of their Kenyan culture, and at least at this point, Auma and Barack aren’t willing to do that.
Themes
The next day, Barack takes Auma around the city and they look through old photos. They don’t talk much about their father until night. Auma thinks that no one really knew him since his life was so scattered, and she was afraid of him. She was little when the Old Man returned from America with Ruth and took her and Roy to Nairobi. The Old Man was doing well working for an American oil company. To show off, he’d go back to Auma’s mother, Kezia. Their four brothers were born around this time: Abo and Bernard to Kezia, and David and Mark to Ruth. Abo and Bernard never came to Nairobi. Ruth was nice enough until David and Mark were born and the Old Man started working for the government. The Old Man couldn’t live with tribal divisions in Kenya’s government and spoke out—so the president blacklisted him.
During Auma’s retelling of the Old Man’s story, she makes the case that it’s impossible to know exactly who he was because he lived his life in so many places and with so many different people—and each of those people had a different experience with him. And as Barack listens, it’s important that he recognize that Auma’s story may express facts, but it also tells him a lot about her experience. She focuses, for instance, on the fact that she was afraid of her father, and that Ruth was nice to her until her own sons were born. This passage is about the Old Man, but it’s also about how Auma experienced his downfall.
Themes
The Old Man finally found a small job with the Water Department thanks to a sympathetic friend. He began drinking and his friends cut him out for their own political survival. Auma says she didn’t understand this until she was older; at the time, she just put up with the Old Man’s shouting at her and at Ruth. Ruth began to treat Auma and Roy differently and insisted they weren’t her children. Ruth left when Auma was about 12 and the Old Man was in a car accident that put him in the hospital for a year. It was after this that he visited Barack and Ann in Hawaii. The Old Man lost his job and the family became homeless. His temper got worse and the Old Man refused to admit that anything was wrong. Roy eventually left, leaving Auma alone with their father.
Auma makes it very clear that her understanding of what happened to the Old Man has changed over the years, as she learned more about Kenya and about the other people in the Old Man’s life. As a child, she associated the Old Man with fear and verbal abuse; as she got older, she became able to put this in a broader context of alcohol abuse, financial difficulties, and marital struggles. The Old Man’s unwillingness to admit that anything was the matter suggests that he wanted to tell himself a more hopeful story and failed.
Themes
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Auma survived thanks to boarding school. When the Old Man could no longer pay her school fees, a headmistress gave her a scholarship. The Old Man’s situation improved in Auma’s last two years of school, after President Kenyatta died. But Auma says their father never got over what happened and couldn’t deal with his peers passing him by in rank. He lived in a hotel, saw different women, and when Auma got a scholarship to study in Germany, she left without saying goodbye out of fear that he’d force her to stay. While in Germany, she and the Old Man began to piece their relationship back together. She remembers telling him that he can’t undo the damage he caused with her and with Roy, but he can be there for his newest son, George.
Compared to the story of his father that Barack grew up with, Auma’s account expresses something very different. She tells Barack that their father wasn’t just overbearing, as Ann said; their father couldn’t deal with his own powerlessness and, in response, worsened his relationships with his own children. However, it’s also telling that Auma escaped thanks to school—just like the Old Man survived and made a name for himself in the first place thanks to his American education. Some things still remain the same throughout the generations.
Themes
Auma sobs that the Old Man died not long after, just after she started to get to know him. She straightens up and says that Barack and Ann’s letters used to comfort him. He’d read them out loud when things were bad, insisting that Ann cared about him. Barack prepares the sofa bed for Auma and sits up late, thinking that his image of his father as a scholar, a friend, and a leader is gone. He’s noticed weaknesses in Lolo and Gramps, but he figured that their examples didn’t matter as much—they weren’t Black, after all. Now, he has to wonder who his father actually was. Barack feels both liberated and awful, and he now knows the consequences of never talking openly with his father. Ten days later, as Auma and Barack sit at the airport, Auma says they need to go home, to Alego, and see their father.
It’s telling that Barack comes to the conclusion that the real issue here is that his father never spoke openly with anyone, especially his children. Openness, he seems to suggest, is how people can form robust, caring family structures and community, something the Old Man could have really used when he fell on hard times. As Barack looks back on his relationships with Lolo and Gramps, he also begins to reaffirm that any man can step in as a father and help lead children toward adulthood. Their skin color matters less than the fact that they were present.
Themes
