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Mekela K. Martin
Prof. Vale
English 1102
24 April 2007
Barak Obama: Dreams from My Father
The United States is a nation of immigrants and migrants who re-invent themselves in their adopted home; and the children of immigrants who seek authenticity in forgotten ethnic traditions. In Dreams from my Father, Barak Obama goes searching for community and family, finds both, and found them to be different than he expected. Barack Obama grew up in a mixed and roaming family. His mother's family had migrated to Hawaii from Kansas. His father was an African exchange student at the University of Hawaii. When Obama was two, his father left for Harvard, and returned only once for a brief visit eight years later. Upon this visit, Obama Junior was seemingly indifferent about meeting his father; there were so many visions that he had of his father that made him uneasy about meeting him. Growing up, Obama spent several years in Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo; then was raised by his grandparents while his mother did graduate research overseas. While growing with his grandparents, many strong willed traits we instilled within him. Feeling out of place in high school, Obama gravitates toward the black kids and works to embrace an African-American culture that matches others' expectations of his appearance, but is different from his upbringing and background. Obama admits and honestly critiques his own confusion about ethnic authenticity. At prep school, he teases a friend from Los Angeles about taking on a "bad-assed nigger pose" and the friend gave the snappy response "a pose? speak for yourself". In college Obama intentionally hangs out with the campus radical group to emphasize his racial credentials (his words). In 1983 Obama decided to become a community advisor, even though he didn’t know anyone making a living that way. Obama's search for community in Chicago is linked to a personal search for family...