Though Barack Obama is interested in what it means to be part of a family more broadly, the memoir focuses specifically on the relationship between fathers and sons. Barack meets his father—whom he calls the Old Man—only once, when he’s 10 years old, and his father dies when Barack is 21. Due to his father’s absence from his life and the far-fetched stories of his father that he grows up with, Barack spends his entire life trying to come to terms with his father’s legacy. Barack makes the case that although idolizing one’s father is a natural tendency for a son, recognizing the flawed humanity of one’s father is a crucial step in a man’s maturation. Moreover, having an imperfect or absent father doesn’t necessarily mean a child can’t have a father at all—any man who’s willing to step in can act as a father figure and help lead young people to maturity.
The secondhand stories that others tell about Barack’s absent father, along with the letters that Barack receives from the Old Man himself, paint a picture of a man who is simultaneously overbearing and perfect. They cement the Old Man in Barack’s mind as an ideal, larger-than-life figure. The Old Man leaves two-year-old Barack in Hawaii with Barack’s mother, Ann, so that the Old Man can attend Harvard. As a result, Barack formulates an understanding of his father through stories and the intermittent letters the Old Man sends. To young Barack, the stories about his father are comforting because they center on him, the son, as he relates to the Old Man. They’re also funny and lighthearted from Barack’s perspective—due to never living with his father, Barack never has to confront what it must have been like to live with a man whom Ann describes as “a bit domineering. Instead, his understanding of the Old Man is of a man who fathered him and then, out of duty to his home country of Kenya, nobly pursued his education at Harvard and returned to Kenya to help bring the still-developing nation into the modern world. The Old Man’s letters to Barack encourage him to follow in his footsteps by doing well in school, something that isn’t difficult for Barack. As a young child, these stories are enough for Barack—but later, as he gets older and becomes more curious about his family history, he begins to wonder why his father never came back for him. As these questions arise, the Old Man suddenly begins to look more human—and possibly, like more of a cautionary tale than a role model to emulate.
Despite not having his biological father to guide him, Barack nevertheless grows up with his maternal grandfather, Gramps, and Ann’s second husband, Lolo, to guide him. Due to their constant presence, Barack is able to see clearly that these men are not perfect—but this doesn’t mean they can’t also offer constructive lessons about how to be a man and how the world works. Lolo, whom Ann marries when Barack is six years old, moves the family to his home country of Indonesia. And though Lolo never presses his relationship with Barack, he’s consistently willing to answer all of Barack’s questions about Indonesia and how to make oneself a strong, powerful man. Once Barack returns to Hawaii (were his grandparents still live) at age nine, Gramps takes over as the primary father figure. Gramps makes Barack feel welcomed and cared for as Barack embarks on his private school career—though he provides Barack more than his fair share of embarrassment by unwittingly humiliating his grandson on the first day of school. But Gramps also connects Barack to several of his elderly Black friends, who guide Barack (who’s biracial) toward a better understanding of what it means to be a Black man in America. This kind of guidance is something that Gramps, as a white man, cannot provide. From these men, then, Barack learns several important lessons: he begins to understand that no one, not even those men he admires, are perfect. Perhaps even more importantly, he begins to see that any man who’s willing to offer advice can step in to help raise boys into men—something that Barack later puts into practice as an adult by mentoring some of his colleagues’ fatherless sons.
Through all of this, it’s the Old Man’s absence and abandonment of his son that begins to impress on Barack that his father isn’t the god he grew up believing him to be. His few memories of the Old Man as imposing and unapproachable haunt him, and their intermittent written correspondence does nothing to sooth Barack’s worry. Later, in his twenties, Barack connects with his older half siblings, Auma and Roy, and he eventually travels to Kenya to meet the rest of his family. Through these newfound familial relationships, Barack is forced to reckon with the fact that his father was both cruel and generous, and that he lived far beyond his means in the last few years of his life. To preserve his reputation after the Kenyan government blacklisted him, the Old Man gave some people lavish gifts he couldn’t afford—while driving teenage Roy out of the house and making Auma feel alone, though she still lived with him. And through these stories and those of his grandfather, Barack begins to see his father as grappling with the same dilemmas that Barack is faced with as a young adult: how to be a man, find success, and interact with the next generation. In short, the Old Man finally becomes undeniably human in Barack’s eyes. With this, Barack proposes that his own coming of age is tied deeply to his final recognition of his father’s humanity—and indeed, a growing recognition of the humanity of all father figures. No fathers are perfect, the memoir suggests, but they all have something to teach and pass on to the next generation.
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Fathers, Sons, and Manhood Quotes in Dreams from My Father
According to her, racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”
She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.
At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.
Except now I was hearing the same thing from black people I respected, people with more excuses for bitterness than I might ever claim for myself. Who told you that being honest was a white thing? they asked me. Who sold you this bill of goods, that your situation exempted you from being thoughtful or diligent or kind, or that morality had a color?
That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.
And it was this realization, I think, that finally allowed me to share more of myself with the people I was working with [...]
All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.
I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders.
“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.”
That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?—that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.
I let my eyes wander over the scene—the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men.
“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”
Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; [...] It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along.
Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” She said, looking at me. “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”
“Let me tell you, your father, he was a very great man. I was closer to him than to my own father. If I was in trouble, it was my Uncle Barack that I went to first. And, Roy, you would also go to my father, I believe.”
“The men in our family were very good to other people’s children,” Roy said quietly. “With their own, they didn’t want to look weak.”
“But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also he is writing Kenya’s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn’t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he’d grown up with.”
I knew that, as I had been listening to the story of our grandfather’s youth, I, too, had felt betrayed. My image of Onyango, faint as it was, had always been of an autocratic man—a cruel man, perhaps. But I had also imagined him an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule. [...] What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.
I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.
