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Barack Obama with his father
Barack Obama and his father Photograph: AP
Barack Obama and his father Photograph: AP

The invention of Barack Obama

This article is more than 13 years old
Dreams from My Father was a notable contribution to African-American memoir long before it became a campaign sensation. In an exclusive extract from his biography of the American president, David Remnick explores the ultimate act of self-creation

With Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama was working in the oldest, and arguably the richest, genre of African-American writing: the memoir. This tradition begins with the first slave narratives. "Deprived of access to literacy, the tools of citizenship, denied the rights of selfhood by law, philosophy, and pseudo-science," wrote the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, "and denied as well the possibility, even, of possessing a collective history as a people, black Americans published their individual histories in astonishing numbers, in a larger attempt to narrate the collective history of 'the race'."

As a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Malcolm X. He has also mentioned texts by Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany and a range of novelists – in particular, Toni Morrison. In fact, reading as a way of becoming is a feature of African-American autobiography, as it is of so many outsider-memoirists of any ethnicity: Malcolm X, for one, provides an extended account of his self-education.

One way in which Obama joins this tradition is that usually, in European literature, a writer writes his or her novels, plays and poems, and then, towards the end, writes a memoir; it is more common among African-American writers to begin their writing lives by asserting themselves with an autobiography. While it is safe to assume that by the time Obama published he was thinking about public office, even he could not have envisioned that Dreams from My Father, just 13 years later, would provide a trove of material for voters, journalists, speechwriters and media consultants during a presidential campaign.

After his emergence as a national politician, it was difficult to read the book solely in the spirit in which it was written; it became a sourcebook of stories endlessly called on for use in politics. It is important precisely because it was written when Obama was young and unguarded. "Barack is who he says he is," Michelle Obama said. "There is no mystery there. His life is an open book. He wrote it and you can read it. And unlike any candidate he has really exposed himself, pre-political ambition, so it's a book that is kind of free from intent. It is the story of who he is."

Many journalists eager to write or film profiles of Obama when he became a candidate read Dreams from My Father and expressed dismay that he had not written his book according to the precise standards of scholarly or journalistic veracity. In fact, Obama signals his awareness of "the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer". He appropriates some of the tools of fiction. While the book is based on his journals and conversations with family members, "the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me". Moreover, some of the characters are composites; the names (with the exception of family members or well-known people) are altered; and chronology, he admits, has been changed to help move the story along. What's exceptional about this is not that Obama allows himself these freedoms, but rather that he cops to them right away. Du Bois set a standard for forthrightness about the genre of memoir, writing: "Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair."

African-American autobiographies often follow a structure that the literary scholar Robert Stepto calls a "narrative of ascent". The narrator begins in a state of incarceration or severe deprivation. He breaks those bonds so that he may go out, discover himself and make his imprint on the world. In the case of many authors, including Douglass, Hughes and Malcolm X, part of that struggle for identity includes wrestling with the fact of a white parent or grandparent. The narrator begins to find his place in a community of African-Americans. He discovers his mission and sets out to fulfil it.

Obama's reading of black memoirists when he was still living in Hawaii was the "homework" of a young man trying "to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth". And yet, in all the books he reads, he keeps finding authors filled with a depressing self-contempt; they flee or withdraw to varying corners of the world and, to Obama, they are "all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels".

The great exception, however, is Malcolm X. His is a narrative of mixed races, a missing father and self-invention. "His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me," Obama writes. But he was disturbed by one line: "He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged." Obama, who has been raised by a loving white mother and white grandparents, writes that even as a teenager, he knew that the presence of white family, white blood, could never become an abstraction: "If Malcolm's discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation, that hope appeared in a distant future, in a far-off land. In the meantime, I looked to see where the people would come from who were willing to work toward this future and populate this new world."

After he became president, Obama told me: "I find the sort of policy prescriptions, the analysis, the theology of Malcolm full of holes . . . I did even when I was young. I was never taken with some of his theorising. I think that what Malcolm X did, though, was to tap into a long-running tradition within the African-American community, which is that at certain moments it's important for African-Americans to assert their manhood, their worth. At times, they can overcompensate, and popular culture can take it into caricature – blaxploitation films being the classic example of it. But if you think about a time, in the early 1960s, when a black PhD might be a Pullman porter and have to spend much of his day obsequious and kow-towing to people, that affirmation that I am a man, I am worth something, was important."

In the original Simon & Schuster publishing contract, dated 28 November 1990, Dreams from My Father had been tentatively titled "Journeys in Black and White". As Obama writes, the book is a "boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American". Obama told me that he was quite conscious of the great tradition of African-American memoir and knew that he had a more modest story to tell. "I mean, at that point I'm 33 and what have I done?" he said. "The only justification for anybody wanting to read it was to be able to use my experiences as a lens to examine what's happened to issues of race in America, what's happened to issues of class in America, but also to give people a sense of how it's possible for a young person to pull strands of himself together into a coherent whole."

The most limited way to read the book is to comb it for its direct referents to reality. Some of the real people made news during the campaign when they protested at some aspect of their portrayals. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, who was dying of cancer, read drafts of her son's book and, although she admired it, even she had quibbles. She told her friend Alice Dewey that she was really not quite so naive about race as her son made her out to be.

Obama's story contains many of the familiar features of African-American autobiography: a search for a missing parent; a search for a racial identity; a search for a community and a mission; a physical journey that echoes all his other searches. Obama, however, is in many ways more privileged than his literary predecessors. He is middle class. He has benefited from the passage of time and from many laws. He enters institutions of privilege often denied his precursors. And, as both a person and a storyteller, this poses a problem for him. The lawns and quadrangles of Columbia and Harvard Law School are not ordinarily the landscapes of epic struggle.

Moreover, Obama has grown up, sometimes to his frustration, after the civil rights movement. His is hardly a world free of racism, but it is one in which the popular culture around him is rich with African-American stars, from the musicians he watched on television as a child in Hawaii to the enormously influential figures of his adulthood. What's more, his white friends have listened to those records, watched those shows, idolised those same stars. Knowingly or not, they have come to accept Ellison's idea that what we understand to be American is, in countless visible and invisible ways, impossible without African-Americans.

Narratives of ascent, by their nature, must begin with deprivation, oppression and existential dread. Obama seems to sense this problem and, at the very start of his book, darkens his canvas as well as he can. He is 21 and living in New York. He places himself in "that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan", knowing that the mere mention of Harlem, to some white non-New Yorkers, will resonate in a minor key. The block is "uninviting", "treeless", shadowy; the buzzer is broken; the sounds of gunfire echo in the night; a "black doberman the size of a wolf" prowls nearby. And, to flavour the menacing picture with a dash of class resentment, Obama reports that white people from the better neighbourhoods walk their dogs on his street "to let the animals shit on our curbs".

He heightens the facts of his spare and lonely life. His "kindred spirit" is a silent neighbour who lives alone, and eventually dies alone, a crumpled heap on the third-floor landing. A paragraph later we realise the literary effect for which Obama is striving: the death of the old man with his "untold history" foreshadows by a month the death of the Old Man, Obama's father, who, of course, is himself the great untold story that Obama will set out to explore and tell. As he is cooking his eggs "on a cold, dreary November morning", Obama gets the news on a scratchy line from Nairobi.

His book is a multicultural picaresque, a search both worldly and internal that will take him to Honolulu, Jakarta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Nairobi and his ancestral village of Kogelo. Along the way he accumulates knowledge and peels back layer after layer of secrets until he becomes his mature, reconciled self. When Obama writes a new preface for the 2004 edition, he is the Democratic party nominee for US senator for Illinois, and he insists that "what was a more interior, intimate" quest has now "converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come". His quest is not just his own; it becomes emblematic of a national political quest. Writers rarely insist so boldly on the importance of their own books.

At the end of each of the memoir's three long sections ("Origins", "Chicago" and "Kenya"), the narrator is in tears and experiences an epiphany: first, he weeps when he sees his father in a dream and resolves to search for him; then he cries in Jeremiah Wright's church when he sees that he has found both a community and a faith; and, finally, he collapses in tears at his father's grave, when he realises that after discovering so much about his father – his intelligence, his failures, his tragic end – he is reconciled to his family and his past.

It is not difficult to understand why politically sympathetic readers were prepared to make extravagant, extra-literary claims for Obama's book during his presidential campaign. They were reading him not as the civil rights lawyer and law professor he was when the book was published, but as a candidate who hoped to succeed George W Bush, a president who was insistently anti- intellectual, an executive who resisted introspection as a suspect indulgence.

Race is at the core of Obama's story and, like any good storyteller, he heightens whatever opportunity arises to get at his main theme. But his novelistic contrivances can sometimes feel strained. In Chapter 2, he recalls a day when he is nine years old and living with his family in Indonesia. He is sitting in the library of the American embassy, in Jakarta, where his mother teaches English, and finds a collection of Life magazines. He thumbs through the ads: "Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV ('Why not the best?') and Campbell's Soup ('Mm-mm good!')." Then he comes across a photograph of a black man who has used a chemical treatment to whiten his complexion. "There were thousands of people like him," he learns, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person." Reading this, Obama recalls, "I felt my face and neck get hot." The article is like an "ambush" on his sensibilities and innocence. "I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," he writes.

During the presidential campaign, a journalist from the Chicago Tribune searched for the article. No such article ran. Obama responded feebly, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?" Archivists at Ebony could not find anything, either. It might have been that Obama was thinking of John Howard Griffin's book Black Like Me. Obviously, Obama was after an emotional truth here, and there certainly were articles published over time about black men and women who used whitening creams. The scene cannot help but echo that famous moment in Malcolm X's autobiography when he gets his first "self-defacing" conk, allowing a barber to take the kink out of his hair with a stinging lye-and-potato mixture called congolene.

Obama is not always easy on his mother. That is part of the drama of his book: his obvious love for a woman who is intelligent, idealistic, brave and engaged with the world but also, at times, maddeningly naive and frequently thousands of miles away. He is proud of her broadmindedness, her insistence that her family avoid behaving abroad like "ugly Americans". This clearly had an enormous influence on Obama, as a person and as a politician. And yet, early in the book, he is suspicious of his mother. He is the adolescent whose vanity resides in the way in which he "sees through" his parent. He could hardly bear her self-conscious admiration for black culture. When she brings him Mahalia Jackson records and recordings of the speeches of Martin Luther King, he rolls his eyes.

Poignantly, Obama "ceased to advertise" his mother's race "when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites". But, at the same time, he is well aware that he is no Richard Wright, who made the classic migration from Mississippi to the South Side; nor is he Malcolm Little, whose father, a Baptist minister and Garveyite organiser, was killed in Lansing. "We were in goddamned Hawaii," Obama writes. "We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the proverbial bus. None of our white friends, guys like Jeff or Scott from the basketball team, treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. Shit, seemed like half of 'em wanted to be black themselves – or at least Doctor J."

Nevertheless, Obama is lost, almost completely without African-American adults around to help him figure himself out. For an adolescent black kid in an almost wholly white world, Hawaii was a vexed and confusing paradise. "As it was, I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere."

He emphasises two aspects of his life at Occidental College in California, nearly to the exclusion of everything else: he rehearses different kinds of African-American voices and describes his increasing politicisation. The audiobook version of Dreams from My Father is arguably of greater interest than the print edition, and one of the reasons is that Obama, who admits that he has become a master of shifting his own voice and syntax to fit the situation, expertly mimics his black Occidental friends. He does not mock them; but there is a comic affection in those voices, a rich texture to the performance.

Obama is on the move in his book, but he moves not to escape the onerous bonds known to the early memoirists – the bonds of slavery, Jim Crow, prison or an oppressive home. He is on the move to satisfy an inner search, to answer the questions of his divided self. In Chicago, he enters a realm of political work where an essential part of his job coincides with his internal search: he essentially canvases the South Side. And, as he asks about the problems of one pastor, priest and community activist after another, he adds to his store of knowledge about the way people live. Every possible form of black politics and political thinking – liberal integrationism, black nationalism, Afrocentrism, apathy, activism, even the tendency to conspiracy thinking – is heard and, in the memoir, given voice.

Chicago was also a place where Obama was trying to divine how race figured into his life as a man. How does tribe, especially when tribe is so complicated and mixed, figure into the question of whom to love, whom to marry? Obama dates both black and white women, and he is not reluctant to make that experience, too, a part of his narrative. In New York, he tells us, he loved a white woman: "She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime." They dated for a year. At one point, she invites him to her family's country house. It is autumn. They go canoeing across an icy lake. The family knows the land, "the names of the earliest white settlers – their ancestors – and before that, the names of the Indians who'd once hunted the land." The house is a family inheritance, and so, it seems, is the country itself. The library is filled with the pictures of dignitaries whom the grandfather had known.

And Obama, who needs not remind us that his own inheritance is a more elusive thing, sees the gulf between him and this woman. "I realised that our two worlds . . . were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany," he writes. "And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider."

The connection is fraught. After leaving a theatre where they have seen a bitterly funny play about race, Obama's girlfriend is confused. She asks why black people are so "angry all the time". They argue. It is a familiar moment of romantic culture-clash; he is like one of Jhumpa Lahiri's young Bengali-Americans in the town house of his wealthy Wasp girlfriend. But Obama, as ever, refuses to describe their breakup as evidence of a hopeless gap. "Maybe even if she'd been black it still wouldn't have worked out," he writes. "I mean, there are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good."

Obama ends the Chicago section by discovering Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. As he sits in the pews early one Sunday morning, he hears in the music and in the minister's voice the convergence of "all the notes" of the many life stories he has been listening to for the past three years. Then, as in so many (far greater) memoirs, from Augustine to Malcolm X, he dramatises his spiritual shift, his own leap of faith. His tears this time are not tears of despair, as they were at the end of "Origins". They are tears of release, the joy of having gained something profound: the comfort of community, the immensity of faith.

Obama begins the section on his journey to Kenya, which he made in the summer of 1988, with a series of portentous gestures. He spends three weeks in Europe before going to Africa and he reports gloomy disappointment with Paris, London and Madrid. He is a "westerner not entirely at home in the west, an African on his way to a land full of strangers".

On his first day in Kenya, he experiences the shock of recognition: everyone looks like him! "Here the world was black, and so you were just you." But his naivety and his eagerness to be transformed recede as he starts listening to his storytelling relatives. Obama's sister Auma had spent time with him in the States. During that first encounter, she not only relayed the basic facts of their father's life in Nairobi – his work for an American oil company and various ministries; the political intrigues; his sad deterioration – but was prepared to separate myth from reality. The Old Man, she reports, was a miserable husband and a worse father. Drunk and raging, he would stagger into Auma's room late at night, wake her and rail at her about how he had been betrayed. The revelations are utterly at odds with Obama's long-held myth of his father's grandeur, a myth propagated by his well-meaning mother. "I felt as if my world had been turned on its head," he writes. And in that discovery there is a dawning sense of wisdom, even liberation: "The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live."

The story ends as traditional comedies do – with a wedding. When Michelle Robinson appears in the story, everything falls into place. Surrounded by his American and African family, by friends from organising and from law school, from Punahou, Occidental and Columbia, Obama and Michelle are married by Wright. "To a happy ending," Obama says as a toast and, in the African tradition, dribbles a little of his drink on the floor for the elders buried in the earth. Everything is reconciled. As befits the form of so many narratives of ascent, Obama has found himself and he has found a wife, a family, a community, a city, a faith and a cause. At the same time, he has avoided his father's mistakes and grown out of his own. His wedding unites black and white, America and Kenya. And, since nearly all of the millions of people who have read the book read it in the light of an even greater quest, the hero and his story are elevated to mythic levels.

The book first appeared in the summer of 1995 and was reviewed positively in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, but it received scant publicity. Obama was interviewed in Los Angeles for the cable TV show Connie Martinson Talks Books. At the end, Martinson turned to him and said: "You know, I've never said this to anyone, but you would have a terrific career in politics." As part of a modest tour, Obama gave readings for small crowds at bookstores. The publisher, Times Books, shipped about 12,000 copies of Dreams from My Father and sold 9,000. For less than $10,000, Times Books licensed the paperback to Kodansha, a Japanese house which was specialising in multicultural books for a US audience.

Obama is hardly the first president to exhibit a literary bent before running for office. The most prolific of the literary presidents was Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote 38 books in all. Dreams from My Father ought not to be overvalued as a purely literary text; other writer-politicians such as Václav Havel and André Malraux wrote immensely greater and more mature work before holding office. But few American politicians of consequence before Obama have ventured to describe themselves personally with anything like the force and emotional openness of Dreams from My Father. It was not intended as a campaign biography, but it ended up acting as one. For a politician who was making the personal political and placing his own story and background at the centre of his candidacy, writing Dreams from My Father was the ultimate act of self-creation. Its stories are at the centre of Obama's thinking, his self-regard, his public rhetoric.

In the closing weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign, as it seemed more and more evident that only a miracle could rescue John McCain from defeat, a little-known conservative writer, magazine editor and former talk-radio host named Jack Cashill advanced a theory popular on various rightwing websites, including American Thinker and World Net Daily, that Obama was not the author of Dreams from My Father. This was a charge that, if ever proved true, or believed to be true by enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy. Obama himself admitted that many people had got involved in his campaign "because they feel they know me through my books". This accusation of fraud possessed a diabolical potency for those who wished him ill. It suggested that the man poised to become the first African-American president, one celebrated for his language and his eloquence, could not possibly be such a good writer.

The true author of Obama's book, Cashill suggested, was likely Bill Ayers, best known as the co-founder of the Weather Underground and the "terrorist" referred to in speeches by Sarah Palin. Cashill wrote that he had carefully studied books by Ayers, who had written a memoir and books about education, and through a process that he called "deconstruction" this latter-day Derrida charged that these volumes contained too much in common to skirt suspicion. For instance, they were both obsessed with eyes: "Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of 'sparkling' eyes, 'shining' eyes, 'laughing' eyes, 'twinkling' eyes, eyes 'like ice'. . . Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of 'sparkling' eyes, 'shining' eyes, 'laughing' eyes, 'twinkling' eyes . . . Obama also used the highly distinctive phrase 'like ice'." And so on.

Cashill's assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the web's farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency. A writer for the National Review's popular blog The Corner declared Cashill's scholarly readings "thorough, thoughtful and alarming". And Rush Limbaugh, during his nationwide radio broadcast on 10 October 2008, digressed from a mocking segment about Dreams from My Father to take up the Ayers-as-author theory: "There's no evidence that Obama has ever written anything prior to this except a poem, and the poem was as dumb as 'A River, Rock, and Tree' that Maya Angelou did at the Slickster's inauguration back in 1993 . . . We haven't seen anything he wrote at Harvard Law, or when he was at Columbia, or any tests that he's written. But if you read his books, if you listen to his audio reading of the book here, you don't hear this when Obama goes out and speaks. I would like for him to be given a test on his own book. You know how Charles Barkley once said he was misquoted in his own book? I would like for Obama to actually be given a test on his own book."

This may not have been Limbaugh's most racist insinuation of the campaign. His delighted airing of the song "Barack, the Magic Negro", sung to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon", probably reached a wider audience, and his description of Obama as a "Halfrican American" was, perhaps, more immediately pernicious. Still, Cashill's and Limbaugh's libel about Obama's memoir – the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship – had a particularly ugly pedigree. Writing elevated a slave from non-being, from commodity, to human status. In Douglass's narrative, his master, Mr Auld, says, "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world . . . If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him." And yet writers such as Douglass had to call on white men to authenticate their texts, the better to disprove the antebellum Jack Cashills and Rush Limbaughs ready to declare fraud. For the wary white readership, the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips provided prefaces for Douglass's book.

A century and a half later, thinking a degree of racial progress had been achieved, Barack Obama and his publisher had not thought to collect such endorsements.

This is an edited extract from The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick, published by Picador on 7 May (£20).

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