The Other Barack Read Online Free Page B

questions,” George shrugs. “I’d like to know who my brothers are and I’d like to know who my father was. I’m proud of him. I think.”
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    A YEAR AFTER HIS FATHER’S DEATH , Obama met him one night in his sleep, “in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams,” he wrote in his memoir. He found his father locked in the cell alone, dressed only in a cloth
wrapped around his waist, his face ashen and thin. The elder Obama appraised his son and told him how much he loved him. But when the son tried to depart with his father and insisted that they leave the cell together, Obama the father refused. Obama awoke weeping at the loss of his father but realized also that “even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint.” 17 Obama resolved then and there to search for his father, to somehow come to know him.
    While still in his twenties, in the course of a search for his own identity that he chronicled in his memoir, Obama Jr. spent years inquiring about the father he met only once in his life. In talking with family members in Kenya, he made the painful discovery that his father had not been the towering success that he had been led to believe as a child. Although he gained a radically new perception of his father, Obama acknowledged in the end that “I still didn’t know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his ambitions?” 18 Like many of his half-siblings on his father’s side, ultimately Obama was unable to comprehend the forces that created and shaped the Old Man.
    The person in the world best positioned to uncover the story of the first Barack Hussein Obama is, of course, the president of the United States. With infinite resources and manpower at his disposal, he could presumably assign a team of investigators to the task and have a comprehensive profile for his eyes only in short order. Family members who have presented sanitized narratives to the media or even refused to talk at all would likely be more inclined to share their blunter perceptions with one of their own. But, apparently, he has not done so. Despite the research he completed as he prepared to write Dreams , his old man remains a thinly understood character in his book, a brooding specter. Obama seems ambivalent about just how far he wants to go in probing his father’s soul. There are many places he has not gone.
    What he discovered on his Kenya sojourn was that Barack Senior was a man fundamentally flawed by his own inner demons and undone by his own fears, much like his own father, Hussein Onyango, before him. If he had been so inclined, the younger Obama might have gone one step further and discovered a curious reflection of himself, another “foggy mirror.” After all, the two men have much in common. Both Baracks grew to
be men of keen intellect and analytic ability. A boldness of ambition enabled each of them to imagine a life for themselves far beyond the proscribed circumstances of their birth. Each man exhibited hubris, some would call it arrogance, that enabled them to dream large—and they did so despite the fact that they had each been orphaned by a parent, left to explain that empty space as best they could. As it happened, the two of them came of age at a time when the currents of change revealed before them a life once thought impossible.
    And each of them walked toward that opportunity without hesitation.
    Barack Obama Sr. believed he had failed in his life, but the full scope of his existence was unknown to him. Had he been aware of the events to come a generation later, he might have appraised himself somewhat differently. For what greater success could a man aspire to than to have produced a child who would become the first black president of the United States, the person who stands at the helm of the world? One wonders what he might he