President Obama’s new publication

The first of a proposed two volume series of President Barack Obama’s political memoirs was published on November 17, 2020, and is available in hardback, paperback, digital and audio format with the author doing the reading. This first volume – 768 pages – is titled ‘A Promised Land’ and has already been translated to 24 languages. Prophesied to be the year’s top seller, it has received rave notices. (Interestingly, a phone call to Vijita Yapa Bookshop on Thurston Road, had the manager telling me they had had two runs of the book – all sold out at Rs 9,000 and 6,000 plus and further orders are expected. Good; we seem to keep up with the times!!)

Obama has authored ‘Dreams from my Father’ 1995, his early autobiography, which I possess and read voraciously; ‘The Audacity of Hope’ 2006; ‘In his own words’ 2007 (speeches etc); ‘Change we can believe in’ 2008; and ‘Of thee I sing: a letter to my daughters’ 2008. Thus he is a writer and extremely readable. While other Presidents of the US who leave office usually embark on speech making with Jimmy Carter inaugurating his human rights Carter Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, and travelling worldwide on charity house-building with Habitat, Obama, and Michelle Obama too, are into publishing their writing. He definitely has a flair with words and wrote his speeches, some outstandingly memorable, himself.

I’ve read a considerable number of articles and reviews of Obama’s latest publication but I mean to quote Michiko Kakutani’s Dec. 8, 2020, review. Kakutani is to me the greatest literary critic of contemporary books and was chief book critic for the New York Times. I remember pouncing on her articles; excellent as they were, in the International Herald Tribune. She writes:

“Barack Obama’s new memoir ‘A Promised Land’ is unlike any other presidential autobiography from the past – or, likely, future. Yes, it provides a historical account of his time in office and explicates the policy objectives of his administration, from health care to economic recovery to climate change. But the volume is also an introspective self-portrait, set down in the same fluent, fleet-footed prose that made his 1995 book ‘Dreams From My Father’ such a haunting family memoir. And much like the way that earlier book turned the story of its author’s coming-of-age into an expansive meditation on race and identity, so ‘A Promised Land’ uses his improbable journey – from outsider to the White House and the first two years of his presidency – as a prism by which to explore some of the dynamics of change and renewal that have informed two and a half centuries of American history. It attests to Mr. Obama’s own storytelling powers and to his belief that, in these divided times, ‘storytelling and literature are more important than ever,’ adding that ‘we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going.’

The reader and writer

In a phone call with Kakutani, Obama had discussed authors he’s admired and learned from in the process of finding his own voice as a writer, and the role that storytelling can play as a tool of radical empathy to remind people of what they have in common – the shared dreams, frustrations and losses of daily life that exist beneath political divisions. While in Chicago as a community organizer, Mr. Obama had begun writing short stories – melancholy, reflective tales inspired by some of the people he met. Those stories and the journals he sporadically kept would nurture the literary qualities of ‘A Promised Land’. He says he tried to prove himself worthy to the father who abandoned him and his mother, who had starry-eyed expectations of her son of a black father. The reading Mr. Obama did in his 20s and 30s, combined with his love of Shakespeare and the Bible and his ardent study of Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr, would shape his long view of history. By looking back at history – at the great sin of slavery and its continuing effect, he could learn much.

Obama seems to have been a great reader –fiction, politics, autobiographies and biographies. When in Columbia University he gave up the attempts he made to be a Black Man in America, fraught as he was with identity problems inherited from a Kenyan father and white American mother. However the greater influence was his maternal grandparents. He gave up his desultory habits of youth – sports, parties and hanging out. He tried to become a serious person and turned rather reclusive and introspective. He read most of the American authors, more specially the coloured like Malcolm X. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and others. He says Baldwin influenced him most with style of writing and also nature that emerged: humane, generous in spirit.

“Like Lincoln’s, Mr. Obama’s voice – in person and on the page – is an elastic one, by turns colloquial and eloquent, humorous and pensive, and accommodating both common-sense arguments and melancholy meditations (Niagara Falls made Lincoln think of the transience of all life; a drawing in an Egyptian pyramid makes Obama think how time eventually turns all human endeavors to dust).

“The two presidents, both trained lawyers with poetic sensibilities, forged their identities and their careers in what Mr. Kaplan calls ‘the crucible of language.’ When Mr. Obama was growing up, he remembers, ‘the very strangeness’ of his heritage and the worlds he straddled could make him feel like ‘a platypus or some imaginary beast,’ unsure of where he belonged. But the process of writing, he says, helped him to ‘integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole’ and eventually gave him a pretty good sense of who he was – a self-awareness that projected an air of calmness and composure, and would enable him to emerge from the pressure cooker of the White House very much the same nuanced, self-critical writer he was when he wrote ‘Dreams From My Father’ in his early 30s.”Further parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Mr. Obama, are that they both shared a mastery of language and a first class temperament for a president: “stoic, flexible, willing to listen to different points of view.”

As with his speeches, his first draft even of books is handwritten on a notepad using a particular ball point pen which he is fastidious about. Then he computer processes what he has handwritten while editing. His best time for writing is between 10.00 pm and 2.00 am. When writing seriously, he shuns too much reading as he fears it may distract him from the writing at hand. He did not keep a regular diary while at the White House; memory and notes and documented facts have helped him. He advices: “You just have to get started. You just put something down. Because nothing is more terrifying than the blank page.”

Hope – Obama’s wish for youth

Obama is first and last a humanist; I firmly believe this. Added to which is his intellect and wideness and clarity of thinking. I heard him on a recent BBC programme where he is intent on guiding the youth of today, starting with American, to have hope in the future. “To try to live your life, it’s useful to be able to seek out that joy where you can find it and operate on the basis of hope rather than despair. We all have different ways of coping, but I think that the sense of optimism that I have relied on is generally the result of appreciating other people, first and foremost, my own children and my family and my friends. But also the voices that I hear through books and that you hear through song and that tell you you’re not alone.”

I strongly feel those are superb ideas to keep in mind and pass on, specially to our younger generation as they seem rather rootless and lost. Read and read; appreciate others’ imagination and creativity; listen to stories and build up your own. And of course as Obama insists, have hope, optimism and appreciation of others.