Luz M.

Costa
Professor Bartkowski
Memoirs/ Autobiography
12.2.08

Where Were the Fathers?:

Obama’s Struggle with Authenticity, Place, and Family

Dreams from My Father is Barack Obama’s exploration of what it means to be

black in America. He explores this by narrating his own lifelong search for his identity.
Without a black male role model to guide him, Obama must uncover for himself what it
means to be a black man in America. His search for his father is therefore a search for a
sense of self. Since identity is built from a sense of authenticity, belonging, and family, it
is these things that Obama struggles to locate. Without his father’s guidance, he lacks
these three essential elements. For this reason, questions, images, and certain language in
chapter nineteen are echoes from chapter six. What results is a narrative and emotional
arc that begins in America with Obama and ends in Kenya with his father.
What chapter six asks, chapter nineteen answers. Obama poses two main
questions in chapter six: the first is “Where did I belong?” (115). The section that
immediately follows this chapter answers this. Titled “Chicago,” it is there that Obama
finds a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I
shared…. A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments” (115).
However, Chicago is an incomplete answer. The church provides for him a community
and therefore place, but his continued fragmentation is clearly demonstrated by his
decision to go to Kenya. At the beginning of “Kenya,” he states, “Stripped of language,
stripped of work and routine—stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become
so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation—I had
been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there” (301-2).
So, though Chicago gives him a community, Kenya gives him family. It also completes
the arc by offering Obama authenticity and place. ¶ Kenya is itself a return to the origins
the first section references in its title.
The second important question of chapter six is “[w]here were the fathers, the
uncles and grandfathers, who could help explain this gash in our hearts?” Obama asserts
that “[t]hey were gone, vanished, swallowed up by time. Only their cloudy images
remained, and their once-a-year dime store advice…” (118). However, this assertion is
disproven when Obama weeps over his father’s grave.

It is not only questions that echo into chapter nineteen. The recurrence of images
and language from chapter six in chapter nineteen creates a narrative arc that signals for
the reader the development of a more complete though still painfully troubled identity.
Obama states in chapter six, “I began to weep, and felt ashamed, but could not stop
myself” (129). The image of him weeping occurs again in chapter nineteen and the
feelings of shame and his inability to stop weeping are resolved. He states, “When my
tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I
realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or
obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America … was
connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away. The pain I felt was my father’s
pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright (429-30).
When Obama first cries, he expresses shame and confusion. However, after several years
and several miles journey, Obama feels complete: “I felt the circle finally close.” In
Kenya, he discovers what it is to be a black man in America. He saw that his “life in
America … was connected” to his father and to Kenya by inheritance.

…Both statements address identity.

Though Obama has his mother and grandparents to serve as family, race relations makes
this insufficient.

Despite the narrative’s arc, some of the issues Obama faces in chapter six are left
unresolved in the book.
Comparing the closing chapters of “Origins” to the final chapter of the book, I
discovered themes that run through my own life: Obama’s search for authenticity,
identity, and place. These chapters addressed these issues indirectly by addressing
inheritance and shame.
Having moved around every few months as a child, I never had a sense of what
home was. Many people talk about home being about people, not place. However,
though I love and care about my family, I have never felt at home with them. A few
weeks ago, I moved in with my sister. She needed help with the rent and I needed a place
to stay. As I sat in her—our living room that first night, surrounded by bookcases and
books that didn’t belong to me, by smells and sights that had nothing to do with who I
am, I ached for a place that didn’t just belong to me, but that I belonged to. Having only
just a few weeks earlier left an apartment that had belonged to me more than my
boyfriend, that expressed my tastes and lifestyle at every turn, I was now alone, without
the things that gave me a sense of belonging. Nothing in this “home” I was paying for
was mine.

/ The images and emotions in chapters six and nineteen parallel one another: where
in chapter six, Obama poses questions to himself and searches for place, in the book’s
final chapter, Obama answers those questions and locates himself.

X Both chapters end a section of Obama’s life: he cries in both chapters. Poses
questions in both chapters.

/ Both chapters begin with him in transition, not yet at his destination. Obama cries
in mourning in both chapters,

X “…the important thing is that you know your people, and also that you know
where you belong” (114).

/ “I felt not pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost…” (128).
> “There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your
father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There
was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it
weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never
escape himself, or re-create himself alone.”

> “I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him—and for me, his jailor, his
judge, his son” (129).

>> “…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” (129).

I Place that you make into, place that feels home, more than place that actually is
home, place inherited. Page 355, his “home” is not where he comes from, but the place
that he’s made, Kenya.

I The partiality of Obama’s identity carried him to Kenya.

I Realizes that Kenya can only give him so much, that he has to fill
that in himself