![]() And the man was not alone in chasing, in vain, white happiness. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.” The accompanying article would reveal that the man, a Black who wanted to be white, was the victim of a chemical treatment. “They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. On the next page, he noticed something unusual in the close-up of the man’s hands. In one of the most poignant passages in Dreams, the boy would be transfixed by a photograph in Life magazine of a man walking down the road. One such moment came in Indonesia, the country of his stepfather, when he was waiting for his mother in the library of the American embassy. There were painful revelations along the way. It wouldn’t be long before inheritance became the meaning of his journeys. “That my father looked nothing like the people around me-that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk-barely registered in my mind.” Father grew within him as a story, a myth, a photograph. He “sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure my loss.” His father left him when he was a two-year-old in Hawaii. He was 21 and a loner by choice in New York when his aunt called from Nairobi to tell him that his father, a Kenyan, was dead. Dreams from My Father was a quest, both physical and internal, for an absence that overwhelmed his life as a young man shaped by many worlds, many colours. The first journey was recorded 25 years ago, when he published his memoirs at the age of 34. It was always there: biography as a reminder and responsibility, and in his case the exoticism of it constantly set him apart in his journeys. What he doesn’t say is that a political life born in rejection and otherness will become an American catharsis. “I had become a politician-and not a very good one at that.” It just dawned on him that in running for a House seat “I had been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not.” He had become what he had resisted all along as a young idealist. On that flight, he, almost 40 and broke and his marriage already strained, realised that perhaps the whole thing was an existential error. ![]() ![]() Next day he left for home as Al Gore was accepting the nomination. He was denied access to the convention floor his friend couldn’t even get him into a party that night. When he landed at the airport, he couldn’t rent a car because he had crossed the credit limit of his Amex card. And that name-is he even Black?” At the Convention, it was further humiliation. The accusation by the rival campaign still resonated in his head: “Obama’s an outsider he’s backed by white folks he’s a Harvard elitist. Barack Obama went there with a friend who thought that the trip would cheer him up after his disastrous performance in the contest for Congress. The epiphany came during that flight back home from the 2000 Democratic National Convention in L.A. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |