Dreams from My Father

by

Barack Obama

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Dreams from My Father: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Barack spends his first night in Manhattan in an alley. The plan was to take over the apartment of a friend of a friend—but no one answered the door. Barack reads over a short letter from his father, the first he’s received in years. The letter is an invitation to visit so Barack can “know [his] people,” although he wonders if it really is that simple. He knows that he doesn’t want to go back to Hawaii, but he doesn’t believe he can waltz off to Africa and call it home. Deciding he needs community, Barack signs up for a transfer program with Columbia University. There’s little keeping him in L.A., as Regina and Hasan have graduated and Marcus dropped out.
Barack seems to infer from this letter that his father knows exactly who they both are, which calls attention to Barack’s own tenuous sense of identity. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the letter, being so short and cursory, doesn’t offer much information—so Barack might be wrong to suspect that his father has everything figured out. Barack is figuring things out all on as his own as he recognizes that Hawaii can’t be home—and probably, neither can Africa.
Themes
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Fathers, Sons, and Manhood Theme Icon
Race and Identity Theme Icon
The next morning, Barack calls his friend Sadik and takes a cab to Sadik’s apartment. Barack introduces himself to Sadik’s current girlfriend using the name “Barack” (not “Barry”), and Sadik listens to Barack’s idealistic reasons for coming to New York. Sadik reminds Barack to look out for himself and shows him around the city. Eventually, they move in together. Around this time, Barack gives up drugs, starts running, and starts a journal. He applies himself to his studies and refuses invitations to go out. Barack chooses this straight and narrow path in part because the city so easily corrupts people and he’s afraid that he’s weak. Barack also begins to see America’s race and class problems up close. He sees the Black community collapsing there and notices that while he’s doing well, other Black people hold only low-paying jobs.
Beginning to go by “Barack” instead of “Barry” is another step in Barack’s development, since the name makes his heritage more obvious. It’s also telling that at this time, Barack cleans up his act. In this sense, he’s starting to take Ann’s advice and warnings to heart—while it’s possible to argue that he was corrupted as a teen by drugs, alcohol, and anger, as an adult Barack wants to make sure to avoid all of that. In New York, Barack also gets a look at a historically Black community and doesn’t like what he sees; he realizes that he doesn’t suffer in the same way that many Black New Yorkers do.
Themes
Family and Community Theme Icon
Race and Identity Theme Icon
Barack attempts to live in Harlem, but the brownstones are too expensive and the tenements are uninhabitable. He’s offended, but others insist this is just how New York is. Barack senses that at some point, he’ll end up where he doesn’t want to be: avoiding subways at night, living somewhere with a doorman, and sending his kids to private school. Ann and Maya visit during his first summer. Barack works while Ann and Maya traverse the city, and at night Barack lectures them. One night, Ann takes them to a showing of the movie Black Orpheus. It was the first foreign film she saw when she was 16 and working in Chicago. Barack is disgusted, and embarrassed when he sees how much Ann loves the film. He realizes that people will always look for missing parts of themselves in people of different races.
Barack’s vision of what he doesn’t want for himself implies that he doesn’t want to live a life that reads as white and wealthy—he’d rather be comfortable around Black people, particularly Black people of a lower class. Ann and Maya’s visit and this film outing in particular are uncomfortable for Barack, as he has to confront that Ann may not truly understand what it means to be Black. The film presents childlike, idealized Black characters—and Barack suspects that that’s how Ann views Black people, and that she might see him in this way too.
Themes
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Several days later, Barack asks Ann for an international stamp so he can mail a letter to his father. With prompting, he mentions that they’re discussing a visit. Ann says that right after they married, Barack’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango, wrote Gramps a nasty letter saying he didn’t want a white woman to sully the Obama blood. Onyango continued to write nasty letters and Toot became hysterical. Barack’s father insisted on going to Harvard—the best school—instead of the New School, which would’ve paid for Ann and Barack to follow. She recounts the story of their first date, which Barack’s father was late for. Barack sees that Ann was a child then, but she also begins to see her as a person separate from him. He realizes how genuinely Ann loved Barack’s father and he thinks of this conversation months later, when he calls to say that his father died.
As Barack starts to see Ann as her own person, separate from him, who has undertaken her own journey of growing up, he can finally develop perspective on his childhood and his parents’ marriage. Learning more about the circumstances surrounding his parents’ marriage also helps him piece together who his family members are. And next to Onyango, Gramps looks far more progressive than he did in earlier chapters, if only because he never vocalized any racist thoughts about Barack’s father. In Barack’s mind, this begins to situate Onyango as a very traditional African man who disapproves of white people at large—but it’s important to recognize that, at this point, this is all Barack knows of his grandfather.
Themes
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Fathers, Sons, and Manhood Theme Icon
Race and Identity Theme Icon
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After Barack’s father dies, Barack calls his uncle Omar in the U.S. to tell him the news. He doesn’t go to the funeral, but he writes a letter to the family in Nairobi. Barack puts his plans to visit on hold and feels no pain—just the sense that he lost an opportunity. A year later, Barack dreams that he meets his father in a jail cell, and then he wakes up crying and digs out his father’s old letters. He realizes how much of a presence his father was in his life, even just as a story or an image. Barack decides he needs to search for his father.
Now that Barack’s father is dead, stories are all Barack has left. As he works to figure out who this man was, he’ll have to rely on recollections and accounts from others—recollections that are, by their very nature, biased and likely don’t tell the whole, unvarnished truth. And with this, the memoir introduces the idea that, as Barack searches for his father through stories, he’ll have to connect with his family—the people who can tell those stories.
Themes
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Storytelling and Truth Theme Icon