Dreams from my father - Barack Obama

“…if one is a fish, one does not try to fly – one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I were young today, I would not have accepted those things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings and falling in love. But that’s not the world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn’t make my heart heavy.”
Granny to Auma, p.406

Reading these words in Barack Obama's first book sent my mind into a 'what the hell am I doing here' spin. My 'here' is Bangladesh, and my 'I' is that of a western white girl from Australia. This exchange was between a grandmother Granny to her fiesty grandchild Auma, angry with arranged marriages and polygamy and the dominance of men over women and husbands over wives she sees still existing in Kenya in the eighties.



Of course Granny did what those before her, and around her, had done. And momentarily I even thought, 'you know, that's ok.' But then I remembered what I see in Bangladesh, or more to the point, what I don't see, which is women, and I got to thinking, 'Go Auma, go on. Be angry. Be agitated. Ask why not, go on!' because I want women to have heavy hearts with the things they do see. The market places empty of women. The streets full of men in singlet tops and lungis all ribs and limbs. The maternity wards empty while women deliver babies on dirt floors. Workplaces where management is a men's only club. The social pressure which alienates, marginalises, silences, and stigmatises that is backed up by an inaccessible justice system.

*steps off soap box momentarily*

Yeah, so that's kind of like what reading Obama's first memoir was like. You can feel in his prose the community organiser coming out. He wants you to be engaged in the ideas he was grappling with as a young man - it's how he operates. Come on, get involved, move, join in. This from a man who also said:

“Everybody was welcome in the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism” p.94

Even better - he knows what it's like to be disaffected. He knows what it's like to not know. Hell, he even knows what it's like to be high on blow. Stopping short of the 'H' bomb (that's heroin, not the other one) was an important line in the sand for the guy who will go on to become America's first 'coloured' President, complete with a funny Muslim name.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked this book up, spur of the moment, in Kolkata just before heading to the counter to buy something else. I wasn't expecting to find it so engaging, so confessional about a briefly misspent youth, or so thought provoking. Which feels a bit like how the whole American Presidential election went anyway - with a lot of people who found themselves on unfamiliar voting ground.

Ok, wait, stop. I can't be making comparisons between me reading a book and the election of the President of the US of A. That'd be foolhardy. Egotistical. Someone, tell her she's dreaming, will you?