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3.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams from my Father part deux?, March 1, 2011
This review is from: Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival (Hardcover)
This book is George Obama's story, one that runs parallel to a similar one told by his more famous older brother, our president, Barack. It is about how the missing father figure, Barack Hussein Obama senior (BHO1), impacted the younger of the two Obama's "manhood self-construction project."
We enter the story just as George's mom becomes pregnant out of wedlock with her second child (Marvin) by a white French AID worker, Christian. Life as a middle class Kenyan family goes quite "swimmingly" so long as Christian (who marries George's mom shortly after Marvin is born) remains part of the family. However a mystery pivotal to George's life (and one infinitely larger than a missing biological father could ever be), occurs when Christian abruptly abandons the family. The mystery however has two parts; one that George discusses; and the other than remains unaddressed in the very pregnant subtext? The story thus is not just about why Christian "ups and leaves" the family, but also about all of the un-ask (and probably unanswerable) questions of why George's mom was having sex with a white man (in the heart of black Africa) in the first place? Both parts of the question, at least in principle, implicates the mom at least as much as they do the stepfather? And equally important, a similar theme also runs through George's big brother's life psychology as well.
Although George's very emotional and financial existence does seem to have revolved around "having a white stepfather," even after confronting Christian seven years later, George still leaves us with no answer to this pivotal first part of the mystery? And what is especially curious is the fact that Christian continued to live right there in Nairobi working in an office building, in plain sight? Despite this, George nevertheless weaves an interesting but ultimately unconvincing narrative that it was Christian's abrupt departure that was the sole reason for the family's financial demise, and for George's own life choice to lead a life of crime on the margins of Nairobi's inner city ghetto that sent him into a tailspin that made him the "black sheep" of the Obama family, and that he is even now just recovering from.
In this sense, the author's narrative is yet another version of the now familiar social trope of "the missing black father figure" syndrome. Here, as elsewhere (including in Barack's own story "Dreams from my father), this story too is designed to reinforce and further convince us that it is the "missing black father" that is solely responsible for the descent of so many young black inner city boys into crime, low achievement and drugs?
But as is the case with so many other books based on this trope, I am not buying George's rationalization of (in his case) the "double missing father" trope either? I found his story unconvincing for the same reasons as all the others: It too fails to deal with the second part of the mystery, which is invariably present in most of these cases: The unanswerable and (perhaps even un-askable) questions about the Obama brothers' respective single mother's sexual virtue?
This second sub-theme IS the 800-pound Oedipal gorilla sitting in the back of the minds of all young boys who live with sexually active single moms, and who are at the same time themselves engaged in their own "manhood construction projects," where they are also modeling how they too will soon become suitors for some female's attention. It is this mixed-up matrix of feelings, hormones, insecurities and uncertainties that has to be sorted out and that runs along the periphery of the subtext of the Obama brothers stories that looms large. Arguably it is a much much larger problem than that of the "missing biological father (and stepfathers)" ever could be? Yet, in both stories, this very potent Freudian factor is either left out entirely, or remains untouched in the subtext of the narratives of the Obama brothers books?
It is not a small matter at all that both brothers arrived at the frontier of manhood with mothers of questionable virtuousness and who became pregnant out of wedlock by men of another race in cultures that at least were sensitive to, if not frowned upon such sexual encounters entirely? And yet both of the Obama brothers failed to mention the importance of this palpable and weighty fact to their respective life stories?
Thus to cut to the chase, both the Obama brothers had mothers who could be considered by the cultures of which they were a part, to be sexually adventurous (if not down right sexually promiscuous). And the best evidence of this is that both of their moms got pregnant and eventually married men AFTER their pregnancies. And it is Not just a coincidental fact that they did so with men who just happened to be from outside of their own race. The Freudians tell us that these are huge Oedipal matters in the minds of young boys who have nothing more important to think about than their mother's virtuousness. Plus, even in mostly Moslem Kenya where there is at least no institutional racism, marrying outside one's race is still almost as defining an event as it is in a profoundly racist country like America, especially during the 1960s when Barack's mother, Ann Stanley Dunham, dated and married Barack Hussein Obama senior.
And while both Obama brothers tried to minimize this pivotal Freudian event, (focussing more on why they had the common middle name Hussein), it does not take much analysis to understand how their "mothers' sexual virtue" became the much weightier mystery bearing down on their young psyches than the missing biological father figure: In these still developing young lives, the crowning mystery was not questions about the psychologically remote and symbolic "missing father BHO1," or about the common middle name of Hussein, but about the sexual virtue of their much more proximate, moms.
In fact, one could just as easily have argued that the missing father was little more than a straw man: a convenient psychological "cover:" both for the respective mothers, who used it as a distraction from all the palpably un-ask (and unanswerable) questions about her own sexual virtue. And in the case of the sons, as a way for them to avoid having to confront what it really said about their mother's sexual habits and virtue that both got pregnant before wedlock to men of other races?
This in a nutshell was the psychological dilemma central to the Obama brothers' respective "manhood construction projects."
They both dodged the dilemma in different ways. Barack's was somewhat more subtle in his facility for dodging than was George. Barack, arguably the more perceptive of the two brothers, turned it (and what obviously must have been perceived as a colossal betrayal by his mom when she sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents just as he arrived at the age of sexual inquisitiveness), into quiet rage that (like it did George) also sent him briefly off the rails while in Hawaii. After this betrayal, Barack, obviously and quietly, faced the facts and the demons rattling around in his brain about his mom's sexual virtue by simply jettisoning the unnecessary psychological baggage altogether: Ann Stanley Dunham and all. In short, his way of dealing with the issue was apparently to punish her by "distanced" himself from her altogether, in a cold never-ending "lifelong juvenile pout."
The best evidence of this is the fact that not only did he seldom mention her in his two books, but also because he didn't even attend her funereal? Thereafter (as was also the case with George), after his mom effectively abandoned him and moved to South Korea, Barack also went it alone.
The jettisoning of Ann Stanley Dunham's sexual past (along with her being as a whole), was young Barack's way of finally reaching the age of maturity. Without ceremony or rationalizations, Barack Hussein Obama II, simply cut the psychological umbilical cord that had weighted him down with so many unanswered (and un-askable) questions about his white mother, Ann Stanley Dunham's, sexual virtue and became his own man. His manhood construction project was complete. QED.
George, on the other hand, had his white stepfather "Christian's abandonment" as a global all-encompassing fallback rationalization to cover for all of his sins and failures -- as well as to shield him from the more fundamental truth haunting him about his mom's sexual virtue? He was thus able to "milk" the "Christian abandonment excuse" for all it was worth. [After all, his little brother, Marvin, Christian's own child, did not "crash and burn as a result of his father having left him?"] In short, by not facing up to what was "really" bothering him, George's unresolved dilemma turned more and more inwards until he effectively imploded and committed psychological suicide. This began his descent into his own self-made hell: living on the inner city streets, eating out of garbage cans, mugging innocent people, turning to a crime-ridden street gang, and into a four-man Nairobi crime wave until he was arrested on a trumped-up charge.
But arguably, all this self-destructive "acting out" was more about the unresolved issue of his mom's virtue than about having a missing white stepfather or a long-lost biological father? It was the inner lie that he (and Barack) lived about their respective mom's virtue, that propelled him to crash and burn, not the abandonment by Christian. It was the lie he had to tell himself each day about his mom's virtue and why she first had sex with and then made Christian leave that turned him into "the Mumba," not the pain and hurt of Christian's departure, per se.
From where us Freudians sit, it seems all but self-evident, that neither case of the Obama brothers problems...
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