Inspired Pen — A Literary Life

-Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance- 

Barack Obama, the new sworn in U.S. president, is also a writer. But first, congratulations to President Obama. God bless him. God bless the United States of America.     

This post has nothing to do with his presidency, or his being the most powerful man of the most powerful country in the world. It is about Barack Hussein Obama, the brilliant writer.  President Obama is a published author, a memoirist, before he even began his political career.  

I’m talking about the bestselling memoir that President Obama published in 1995, Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  For those who are not familiar with this book, go get yourself a copy. It became a U.S. bestseller and was reissued in 2004 by Random House Publishing.

This moving memoir is a picture of a young black American, Barack Obama, in search of his identity, a belonging, in a white American community. As he journeys, he painlessly takes his readers with him to find what he is searching for. 

Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is clearly significant and apt in its telling: first, as a growing young black American having to confront the challenge of defining himself in white America; second, his work as a black American leader in Chicago community; third, his pursuit of a father he never knew; and ultimately, a reconciling with his own discovery of who his father and grandfather really are.   Born in 1961 to a black Kenyan student who came to study in the U.S. and a white mid-western American woman, Obama was raised in Hawaii by his mother and her parents as his father left them to pursue further studies back in Africa. Although not lonely, as a youth, Barack Obama went through that racial awareness and school tensions, including his lessons in black literature taught in a white community.

The recounting of this emotional yet unsentimental odyssey of Obama’s search for identity begins in New York when he learns that his father, who he never knew as a man but more of a myth, has been killed in a car accident in Kenya. This unfortunate event motivated him to pursue an emotional journey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, to his childhood home in Indonesia, and finally, to Kenya where he meets the side of his father’s family. There, he finds out the harsh realities of his father’s life. Finding his identity, he reconciles himself to his divided loyalties, heritage and culture, and defines himself.   

The memoir is heartwarming and compelling, brilliantly written by a man who, just few hours ago, has become the 44th president of the United States of America, and the first African-American to hold that office.    

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