Barack Obama: Hoping against hope
This Week’s Winner
Gabriel Hidalgo Bordado is now serving his second term as vice mayor of Naga City in Bicol. “With the world of Philippine politics getting weirder every day, I am compelled to write to maintain my sanity.” His pet projects include “Books for the Future,” which is aimed at promoting reading as a tool for self-improvement, and a feeding program for elementary schoolchildren.
If surveys can really capture the moods and nuances of the changing seasons, then, for the past couple of years, the majority of American people may have been teetering on the verge of desperation. According to an Associated Press report, “the can-do, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that’s chipping away at America’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.” Against this backdrop, a first-term US Senator named Barack Obama started preaching the audacity of hope. And the American political landscape would never be the same again.
Late last year, people still got stumped when confronted by the question, “Do you know Barack Obama?” They would invariably blurt out, “Obama who?” But as the bitterly fought Democratic Primary race trudged on, Obama’s perfectly pitched speeches (described by some in the media as “soaring rhetoric”) eventually found resonance in the hearts and minds not only of party delegates, but also in a vast number of Americans and even around the world. And Obama did what was months earlier virtually unthinkable: he upended the heavily favored Hillary Rodham Clinton (who was herself poised to rewrite US history) for the Democratic presidential nomination.
By all indications, Obama’s story is not exactly an ordinary one.
Defying the conventions of her time (for one thing, segregation of black and white people was still the order of the day in the American heartland), his mother Ann, a Caucasian lady from Wichita, Kansas, married a Harvard-educated black man, the son of a Kenyan goatherd. From this union would emerge the young Barack — a veritable product of two disparate worlds. Bowing to intense pressures from his Kenyan forebears, however, the older Obama would soon leave Barack and his fiercely independent mother.
How Barack finally came to terms with the absence of his father, unraveling in the process the circumstances that shaped and transformed him into what he is now (the first-ever black man to be nominated as candidate for US president) is the gist of his memoir, intriguingly titled Dreams From My Father.
The book chronicles, in a sweeping yet easy-to-comprehend fashion, the life and times of Senator Obama — from the idyllic islands of Hawaii to the blighted boroughs of Chicago, from the rustic rice fields of Indonesia to the scorching savannahs of Kenya. Obama adroitly crafts a compelling saga, seamlessly stitching tales of his childhood and struggling years with the riveting drama featuring the key personages in his life, including his mother, his maternal and paternal grandparents and, of course, his father — “a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man,” as the book’s blurb puts it.
Indeed, had the senator opted to pursue a writing career, he could have made a mark on the American literary scene. But this was not meant to be; he simply wanted to put on record his astonishing odyssey, as it were. “As mentioned in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some ways to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity — the leaps through time, the collision of cultures — that mark our modern life,” Obama wrote in the preface to the 2004 edition of the book.
For all intents and purposes, he succeeded in doing just that, prompting one critic to declare “fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us to the most serious questions of identity, class, and race. “
The book thus provides intimate insights into the strengths, weaknesses, potentials and even foibles of Obama while addressing squarely, without rancor and recriminations, the thorny issues bedeviling America since the declaration of independence more than two centuries ago.
In one section of the book, Obama relates how a pastor named Reverend Wright delivered a sermon he called “The Audacity of Hope,” which incidentally became the title of Obama’s second book. The pastor spoke about a battered harpist sitting on top of a hill overlooking her devastated village, who still dared to hope and “to make music and praise God on the one string she had left.”
Fast-forward to the present, when everything at the economic front appears to be turning upside down — literally ! (Think of the venerable Lehman Brothers.) Obama’s epistles of hope now seem to have a hollow ring. But emboldened by the harpist’s music, he is apparently unperturbed, holding fast to his father’s dreams, perhaps believing, just like Langston Hughes, that “if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
Whether or not Barack Obama can pull it off (that is, be the first black president of the world’s remaining superpower) will certainly prove to be the quintessential stuff dreams — and hopes — are made of.
Unless, of course, John McCain and Sarah Palin have other ideas.
