Identities: A Context of Multiplicity

Abstract

In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama tells the story of his search for identity: a social, cultural, linguistic journey of discovery. When visiting his father’s family in Kenya, he and his half-sister Auma leave a restaurant where they are ignored while the black waiter serves white patrons. Obama (2004) reflects upon the life that has generated the waiter’s actions, wondering if the waiter realizes he is “serving the interests of neocolonialism,” or if he “straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance” (p. 315). Obama links the man’s confusion to that of his father and grandfather, to his own confusion. Later, standing at their graves, he is able to understand how they had to reinvent themselves, how they, too, were confused. His father, for example, traveling to the United States,

[w]ith the degree, the ascot, the American wife, the words, the figures, the wallet, the proper proportion of tonic to gin, the polish, the panache, the entire thing seamless and natural… He had almost succeeded, in a way his father could never have hoped for. And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped at all. (p. 428)