《奥巴马自传：我父亲的梦想》英文版：Dreams from My Father

Dreams from My Father.txt

Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father

"For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers."

PREFACE TO THE 2004 EDITION

A LMOST A DECADE HAS passed since this book was first published. As I mention in

the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in

law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of

the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an

publication-hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair

that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in

between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the

readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few

months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an

author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my

dignity more or less intact.

I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter

registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice,

and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife

can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences

of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying,

mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results-an

expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send

innocent men to death row-within a meaningful time frame. And too, because

within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the

face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean

farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers-all

jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories.

A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator

Dreams from My Father.txt

followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review. Mainstream

commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a

broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a

sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration

that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the

passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility

(and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I

might be the sole African American-and only the third since Reconstruction-to

serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the

attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media

reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived.

that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by

cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine-that I

would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if

certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for

pundit commentary and opposition research.

What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which

the book might now be read. I began writing against a backdrop of Silicon Valley

and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela-in slow,

sturdy steps-emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace

accords in Oslo. Domestically, our cultural debates-around guns and abortion and

rap lyrics-seemed so fierce precisely because Bill Clinton’s Third Way, a

battles for market share.

And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.

It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would

follow-the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the

slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered

figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to

understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives

their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s

heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents

Dreams from My Father.txt

roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a

consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from

overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying

struggle-between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the

ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity,

while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who

would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and

simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us-is the struggle

set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.

I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it

twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the

of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware-is

fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this

struggle and to find my place in it, has 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.

The policy implications of all this are a topic for another book. Let me end

instead on a more personal note. Most of the characters in this book remain a

part of my life, albeit in varying degrees-a function of work, children,

geography, and turns of fate.

sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in

the world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks,

stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh

for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please

the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of

grandchildren.

We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this

book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood,

careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or

defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character. She managed her

Dreams from My Father.txt

have written a different book-less a meditation on the absent parent, more a

celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I

see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how

deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous

spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

INTRODUCTION

I ORIGINALLY INTENDED A VERY different book. The opportunity to write it first

arose while I was still in law school, after my election as the first black

president of the Harvard Law Review, a legal periodical largely unknown outside

the profession. A burst of publicity followed that election, including several

race relations, agreed to take off a year after graduation and put my thoughts

In that last year of law school, I began to organize in my mind, with a

frightening confidence, just how the book would proceed. There would be an essay

on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality,

thoughts on the meaning of community and the restoration of public life through

grassroots organizing, musings on affirmative action and Afrocentrism-the list

of topics filled an entire page. I’d include personal anecdotes, to be sure, and

analyze the sources of certain recurring emotions. But all in all it was an

intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and

restpoints and a strict itinerary: the first section completed by March, the

second submitted for revision in August….

my awkward steps toward manhood. I listened to my grandmother, sitting under a

mango tree as she braided my sister’s hair, describing the father I had never

truly known.

Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered theories seemed

insubstantial and premature. Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up

my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.

Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks

to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that-on the surface,

at least-contradict the world I now occupy. After all, I’m thirty-three now; I

work as a lawyer active in the social and political life of Chicago, a town that

Dreams from My Father.txt

running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the

measures of childhood. My wife’s cousin, only six years old, has already lost

such innocence: A few weeks ago he reported to his parents that some of his

first grade classmates had refused to play with him because of his dark,

unblemished skin. Obviously his parents, born and raised in Chicago and Gary,

lost their own innocence long ago, and although they aren’t bitter-the two of

them being as strong and proud and resourceful as any parents I know-one hears

the pain in their voices as they begin to have second thoughts about having

moved out of the city into a mostly white suburb, a move they made to protect

their son from the possibility of being caught in a gang shooting and the

certainty of attending an underfunded school.

thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to

my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they

guess at my troubled heart, I suppose-the mixed blood, the divided soul, the

ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to

explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is

yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours,

children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and

his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles

me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at

least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down…well, I suspect that

I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle

their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like

accurately, it was only then that I understood that I had spent much of my life

trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative,

accommodating unwelcome details, projecting individual choices against the blind

sweep of history, all in the hope of extracting some granite slab of truth upon

which my unborn children can firmly stand.

At some point, then, in spite of a stubborn desire to protect myself from

scrutiny, in spite of the periodic impulse to abandon the entire project, what

has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey-a

boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his

life as a black American. The result is autobiographical, although whenever