Obama will never write this kind of book after becoming the President of United States.
His politically-incorrect view on black nationalism, black-white relationship, and poverty in the inner city, will certainly raise a lot of fierce criticisms from mainstream America, if he had wrote the book after becoming the President of the United States.
Yet, since he was still in a limelight while authoring this book, he could express his view truthfully, without any embellishment, on the taboo subject of race in America, and touched the sentiment of other visible minorities, including myself.
The main theme is about Obama’s search for his own identity. He was an African-born boy, his mother was a white liberal, his father a tribal member in Kenya, who were married at a time when segregation had just began to diminish in United States. After his parent divorced, he was then raised in the jungles of rural Indonesia, instilled with ‘macho-manhood’ values from his step-father. Then after another divorce, his mother, sister along with himself moved into Hawaii, a state with sparse black population, to settle with his grand-parents.
Yet throughout his much traveled youth, he always maintained his deep connection to his roots of being African. Many times he described how he felt offended when people made even the most subtle derogatory against blacks, and along the way made several politically incorrect statements; how blacks were treated as second class citizens by whites; that he was one of the few minorities when working in a wall street firm, with most other minorities working at the low-end jobs; why Blacks will continue to struggle in the inner city, regardless of education, because of their treatment by whites.
After graduating from University, Obama described extensively his experiences of community organization in Chicago’s housing projects in Altgeld. He worked at street level and community hall level, dealt with various people with different agendas in their mind. Perhaps he experienced more set-backs than triumphs during his tenure there, but those are precious experiences that I believe help shaped and strengthened him, (and he probably learned about the dark side of political skills along the way.)
From his organizing experience, we observed how his insecurity of his skin color fueled his passion for helping those who struggled in the inner city, and laid the foundation for Obama’s sense of social justice, and probably his future aspiration to run as the Senator, then the President.
The latter section of the book finally came to a full circle as he searched for his root in Kenya, where Obama attempts to find his sense of belonging from a trip to his ancestors. He learned more about his father and great-father. His father was the first man in his tribe to travel abroad and study in Harvard. He had success when he returned to Kenya but struggled towards the latter part of his life, while still felt obligated to use his dwindling wealth to help his tribe people At the end, after learning more about his father and grand-father, he made this reflection to echo the memoir’s title ‘All my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost.’
Obama is also a lyrical writer. In an example describing how he recounted his memories;
‘But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images of a past I had never known… They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month … A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.’
I can only plagiarize such poetic descriptions, I don’t have the imagination and literary skills to write something as elegant the above. That’s why he’s a Harvard-graduated lawyer, Senator, and then the President, while I’m just a regular guy.
P.S. Readers might be surprised to realized he’s a chain smoker and even smoked pot before. Instilling bad influence to teenagers by the President of United States; this is yet another reason why Obama would never be able to write this book again.
