An Explanation of a Complicated Man

An Explanation of a Complicated Man

By Joe Barbosa

I have read Barack Obama’s Dreams of my Father (1995) and The Audaciy of Hope (2006) which constitute a basis for understanding a phenomenon called Barack Hussein Obama. In a faultless interesting narrative Obama offers, to those of us who are interested, an intimate look into his very magnificent mind. If one believes, as I do, that every person creates rules and regulations to interpret and understand one’s reality, then those two books give us at least a glimpse of the created comprehensive reality that impels him to push for human collaboration in the face of powerful and obstinate opposition.

At the end of the first bestseller he states that his father and granfather did not grasp the fact that one cannot re-create oneself alone. He had gone to Kenya to understand his absent father’s erratic behavior. As he establishes relations with his African relatives, one can appreciate the willingness to accommodate his new knowledge to the American experiences of this birthritght. Although he must have suspected it, there was nothing in his experience that prepares him for the constant humiliation that his grand-father had to endure to survive. Never-the-less, he was prepared to learn about the rise and fall of his own father. His middle name, Hussein, that has been used by demagogues to attack him in politics rises to the surface of his imagination when his paternal grandmother shows him a few old papers that describe his proud grandfather’s humilation while serving English masters. It also makes him cognizant of the world that his white relatives made accessible to him as a completely different world to which he shall eventually return. However, the discovery that the Obamas were leaders in and out of their neighborhoods fills him with a conviction of selfconficence that later was expressed in the American refrain “Yes we can!”.

The familiar camaraderie that arises naturally with his blood brothers and sisters makes him pause and reflect on why he needed a completed identity. One that became more American by contrast with his African heritage while at the same time, enhancing his selfconfidence by acknowledging desirable human traits abundant in the bucolic and backward setting where some of his relatives still live. Throughout the narrative, the leadership qualities of the Obamas in Africa seem to be an inheritence he has received from his African side that in America we call “Charisma”. His sister, Auma, has succeeded in making a future for hersel in Germany while his brother, Roy, did the same in the USA. They are aware that they shall return to, for a lack of a better term, the “Western World” to which they belong. In a way, the reader apprehends a sense of finality from each of their lives that cries out for a look at the future once having acknowledged the past.

In the Audacity of Hope the reader is treated to a selfconfident Obama who wants to bridge “the politics we have and the politics we need.” (p.22). Since he is conscious of the fact that “a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we live everyday.” (p.23). Obama, the politician, has found the camaraderie he admired in Africa, in Michell’s solid accomplished family. He is integrated into an American black family that possesses the middle class values of his white side. In that black family he finds the nurturing and supporting ambience to allow for actions toward his categorical imperative of change toward politics. A change needed by his country to form a “more perfect union”.

He does not mention the following golden prayer but seems to be acting it out God grant us serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Amen! To admirers of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, Obama’s first two books must resonate and make one wonder what would have happened if JFK had not been assassinated. However, President Kennedy’s murder ironically triggered the legal changes that produced the conditions that propitiated the rise of intellectual black Americans such as Barack and Michelle.

Getting back to the two books that were written before Obama was elected president, the reader cannot escape the feeling that everything he relates establishes the platform for a crusading president who is confronting decided opposition to the changes that he sees as unavoidable to maintain the USA morally and economically at the top of the Human Experience. It also makes the reader aware of the multicultural background that produces such a phomenon.

It is Obama’s multicultural experience that ignites the conviction of us Statehooders, that the “more perfect union” he is striving for, assures Puerto Rico its proper place in the United States of America. More than eight (8) million American citizens must be enfranchised, or as Dr. Rosselló would say empowered. I recommend the reading to all those that love America and the American Dream.

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