A few weeks ago, I was talking about a class I took right before graduating college. It was called “The American Autobiography” and, for some reason, the name of one of the texts had slipped my mind. Franklin’s autobiography, a slave narrative, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and what? The text I had forgotten was Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. It was probably because I didn’t finish it. I remember getting up to his college years and losing some of my interest, but other things in my life distracted me and I graduated, returning the borrowed copy to a friend. Now, this really has nothing to do with Barack Obama, but the point when I lost some interest remains important to me. I started to care a little bit less when he got to college because, suddenly, the book wasn’t about me anymore.
Assuming a myriad of perspectives on that last comment, I could guess that it could be interpreted by one person as a comment on literature: that we always relate ourselves most strongly to the child or adolescent character. The twentieth-century canon supports that observation with success of The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. Someone else might claim that to relate your own childhood to the childhood account of a US president is the most arrogant reading you could ever unconsciously produce. That may or may not be true. I can’t imagine it would be a compelling book if readers were unable to relate to Obama’s childhood to their own.
The narrative of his childhood and adolescence has a particular resonance for people who lived away from their "home country" as kids. At the heart of his narrated self is an individual who is pervasively aware of otherness. Thinking about that, I realized that a large part of why I like him is because he understands more about difference and commonality than most people. When the generalized public is referred to as "folks" in just about every clip of presidential speechifying, I feel betrayed because the sensitivity to otherness appears to be contradicted by a unifying rhetorical move that reeks of purely political motives. However, if I give politics the benefit of the doubt for a moment, talking about the “folk” doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The unifying power of that rhetoric doesn't necessitate a homogeneous society, nor does it have to deny the rich diversity that Obama has celebrated.
I don’t really have a final point, but I’m wondering if maybe individualism and collectivism are not separable ideas. That sounds very collectivist doesn’t it?
boy has childhood abroad, boy comes back to USA, boy goes to college, becomes a man, and man gets to be president of USA.
ReplyDeletemight make him feel 'other', doncha think?