“Endure – and make music that wasn’t there before.” - Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father

TV broke the news of Barack Obama’s historic nomination as Democratic candidate for the U.S presidency, and the Internet allowed a savoring of the video clip and full text of his soaring victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Internet also hosted the wildfire spread of his call for change in a deeply troubled country, and all the answering movements of the heart that brought an unprecedented phenomenon – individual cash contributions of $200 or less that totaled $101 million, a whopping 25 per cent of campaign funds for Obama’s primary race.

Time now to look closer into the more classic medium that served as kindling for this new populist fire in America –Dreams From My Fatherand The Audacity of Hope, two books authored by Barack Obama without the shadow of a ghostwriter.

Written in his mid-twenties, with disarming candor that reveals how a career in politics had not yet occurred to him, Dreams just acquired an impressive backdrop – the first strong black candidacy for the White House 146 years since President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ending black slavery in the midst of a racist Civil War.

Genius may be timing, but many have already remarked on the Web that other forces beyond Obama’s will seem to be operating in his rapid political ascent. He himself calls it “spooky” good fortune.

Those eager to know more will find some answers in “Dreams From My Father,” as Obama travels back to his early childhood in Hawaii and boyhood in Indonesia, his adolescent struggle to come to terms with skin color lingering as a dividing line in America, his young adult efforts to chip away at ingrained black defeatism in a Chicago slum on his first job as community organizer, ending with his first visit to Kenya. There the fractured world of his birth could finally begin its integration – dancing, drinking, walking, talking and singing with blood kin, and finally bending over the graves of the grandfather he never saw, and the father he never really knew, tears falling.

Young Obama first conceived Dreams as a treatise on race relations, but touching his black roots proved more compelling. Fresh from the warm embrace of three generations of Obamas of the Luo tribe in Kenya – “where the world is black, and you were just you …in the freedom of believing that your hair grows the way it’s supposed to grow, and your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway…” – the memoir that emerged reads like a finely crafted novel by a born writer.

And a poet and story-teller begins with a fresh eye, with his white grandparents recalling life before he was born, back to when two brilliant young people – Stanley Ann Dunham, born in Kansas, and Barack Obama, born in Kenya – met and married in Hawaii, the most racially tolerant state of the union. There Barack Jr. was born in 1961, as a decade of sea change in consciousness began a gradual worldwide sweep of colonized and colonizing countries.

Two years later, Barack Sr., the first African scholar at the University of Hawaii, had earned his Masters degree in econometrics and chose to move on to Harvard for a Ph.D. There was not enough scholarship money to bring his wife and infant son, but he said he needed to go for the sake of his country. It was the beginning of a permanent separation, though not the end of love that transforms. With such choices did destiny begin for a son whose genes would have the White House within his sights 44 years later.

Like life, good writing is its own reason for being. But magic emerges when their inner impulses meet and speak larger truths with the real lives of this unique mother and her only son.

Barack was six when his mother flew with him from Hawaii to Jakarta to join her new husband, an Indonesian geologist, Lolo Soetero. There a novel rite of passage waits to surprise the boy. Tagging along one day with his mom to the American embassy, he discovers a photo in an old Life magazine at the library – a man with “crinkly hair, heavy lips, broad flat nose (and) uneven, ghostly hue”:

“He must be terribly sickly, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino… when I read the article that went with the pictures, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment to lighten his complexion…

He expressed some regret that he had tried to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible.” …”

The man had tried to peel off his black skin. For the first time, a horrified Barack would learn: “There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.

“I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss – why was he so calm, reading his reports in his office down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance …”

Soon a young half-breed would begin to notice: the black man “never got the girl on I Spy, the black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground… there was no one like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalogue…Santa was a white man.”

Living with his white mother and grandparents, knowing of his invisible and mysterious black father only from the stories they told him, an innocent’s vision had arrived at polarization – black and white. It brought a hunger for wholeness that would become the most powerful constant in Barack Obama’s life.

But among black friends shooting hoops through school in Hawaii and Los Angeles, young Barry was too bright, too thoughtful not to recognize the real peril that lay in wait for them in a dominant, often heedless white American culture:

“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could because he had the power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires were already his.

“Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self – the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap.

Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge and your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.”

That was Barack Obama in his teens. His story has become too vital to the world not to continue this next Sunday. For now it must be said: if wisdom forged in a psychic furnace centuries old is what we’re talking about, what his political rivals call “inexperience” could not be wider off the mark.

Call it old soul with new jive.

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